Taking Action Against Cheaters in ESO

colemanmarkd

All dungeons should be instanced and once all enemies are defeated and associated quests for the instance completed, all players in group should be force exited. It may not fully stop the dungeon farming bots, but it sure would slow them down quite a bit.

Also, I understand that it's important that players be able to name their character/guild whatever they want with in reason. But a player named something like "ggatm-com easy gold" with a guild called "ggatm-com easy gold" ?!? really? How did that not send up any red flags at creation? There needs to be some kind of filter at creation to at least put a flag up with something like that.

It's kinda insulting that they're so bold with it. As many reports as I've filed, it's disheartening.

Darzil

deheartb14_ESO wrote: »

Don't worry, you're not being hacked.
It happens to me occasionally, it probably just means that your Internet Service Provider changes your IP address every once in a while. I think its called Dynamic IP address or something like that. If you reboot your modem you will probably get a new Ip assigned to you out of a pool of 5-10 different ones. Or it automaticly changes regularly or something.

Yes, I get a new one when I reboot my modem, and my ISP also sometimes does remote work on it too without notifying me, after which it normally reboots and I get a new one too. (And yes, I have checked the logs and where the remote access comes from to make sure it was them!)

KerinKor

ZOS, so far you have, to the best of my knowledge, failed to say that you're banning BUYERS, you offered no insight in the thread discussing buyers.

Care to come clean and say yes or no, and if no explain why?

At the end of the day RMT only exists due to low-life players that BUY gold, rid the game of those and RMT have no customers.

Sunrock

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom That does not help at all. If you ban 1% of all botters and gold sellers no one will notice. On the EU servers the Glenubran and Stormhaven are full with AFK botters with name like wghg, werf, yjhgh, and so on halting the quest progression of some quests even.

PS: I have played almost every western MMORPG that have come out the last 15 years and in no other game I have seen this many afk bots and what not. Not even when I played Aion on a China server before the game was released in EU/NA

You really need to do better here. Allot better. Every one else can do this better then you guys.

PointMaid

I'm seeing a lot of mail on a daily basis from gold farmers, but there is no easy way to put them on my ignore list from the mail window.

Suggestion: An option to report spam and ignore (copying the mail to your anti-gold spamming department), or the ability to ignore by clicking the sender's name in mail.

sahib

So good to see your methods are working, Zenimax!



These bots are just the ones camping the boss spawn point. There are around 20 more running along a predefined path in the dungeon.

Have I reported them?

Yes.

Did anything happen?

No.

Nefar

Same here Sahib, made a new character this morning. When I hit the first public dungeon I'm met by over 20 bots. They own the entire dungeon it's pathetic and game breaking.

sahib

Yeah, it's somewhat depressing when you realize over 90% of people in public dungeons are not actually real people at all.

Mujuro

Anything being done about the item duping?

Nefar

Haven't heard anything about item duping. I haven't seen duping since UO, would be a damn shame if it's true, nothing ruins an economy faster.

Mujuro

Nefar wrote: »

Haven't heard anything about item duping. I haven't seen duping since UO, would be a damn shame if it's true, nothing ruins an economy faster.

Yeah, I remember those UO days. It's actually worse here, from what I've seen. There are entire guilds running around with all legendary stuff because they were able to dupe materials/supplies, etc., and craft everything. There was a thread about it yesterday in the CS forum, but I believe it got deleted because the author gave away some hints about how the dupe is done.

Mujuro

KerinKor wrote: »

ZOS, so far you have, to the best of my knowledge, failed to say that you're banning BUYERS, you offered no insight in the thread discussing buyers.

Care to come clean and say yes or no, and if no explain why?

At the end of the day RMT only exists due to low-life players that BUY gold, rid the game of those and RMT have no customers.

I guess ESO is a reflection of RL; indeed, going by this premise, ZOS won't bust buyers. Think of it like prostitution ... you don't bust the "Johns" ... only the sellers.

Ozzy420Shadar

Yeah, don't forget that people that have had their accounts banned legitimately will often go on to forums to try and ruin everyone else's fun by making them paranoid about reporting the cheaters/spammers, take it all with a grain of salt, Zenimax has access to ALL the information that is linked to an account, while possible this person or that person might have innocently got picked off it is HIGHLY unlikely. if someone didn't care about playing the game without cheating i doubt that they would have any qualms about trying to revenge "pull heartstrings" in forums. If you had a legit issue with innocently getting picked off I feel for you but its almost impossible to keep a decent zone chat dialogue going with the super-aggressive gold selling spam, please keep banning those obnoxious spammers!

williamcurrier_ESO

I am sure this is so far down the thread it will not been seen by a Dev, However I will say it here and I will say it in as many places as I can find until its fixed.
I do more than my share of reporting. You should see my gmail inbox over a hundred of automated responses this is the first two lines.

"Helping you is our passion!

We will assume your issue has been resolved if we do not hear from you within 168 hours (7 days). "

Do not assume my issue has been resolved! In the mail it does not say even how to contact you in those 7 days. Fix the issue I was reporting I.E Botting, Gold Sellers. Then still don't assume its been resolved. Follow up, send me an email asking if I am still seeing bots and gold spammers everywhere. Take pride in your customer service and we in turn will take pride in you and your game.
Here are the 3 main issues I see that is hindering a quality fun gaming experience.

Gold Seller Spam now this is not limited to chat only. We get gold seller spam in our in-game email, also we get gold seller guild invite spammed with no easy way to report any of them. Especially the guild invite ones. I should not have to use a drop-down to select spam and then type in a comment that says Gold Seller every time.

Botting and Camping dungeon Bosses. This is getting so bad its hard to even get credit for killing him, "what?" you say "you only have to get one hit!" "Yes exactly, the boss is dying so fast now it is sometimes hard to even get a hit on it."

Those two are obvious the third might seem insignificant in comparison.

Trade in the zone chat. Could we at least get a trade chat channel that way those of us that do not want to see it at a given time can turn it off or make one tab with it and one with out. Also while making a trade chat channel why not throw in a looking for group channel and a guild recruiting channel. I know not everyone will use the channels appropriately but maybe some/most will.

I thank you for your time and consideration. I am loving a lot of things about the game and would love to see it do well. These are just some of the basic things that will help it to do so and some of them need immediate and vehement action.

Dhuz_groWiggin

Agree 100% with williamcurrier_ESO above. My initial enthusiasm has worn off this game due to the time it takes to report bots and spammers. I just set my subscription billing period from 180 days to 30 days.

MrLuigi

I will be turning off my subscription if they do not acknowledge the dupe that is going on right now. And tell us that they are fixing it.

_FrostY_

Let the spammers hit the FLOOR!!!

stevar

Guys,

You do realize that banning a bot takes time, as you need to do at least one account verification?
If they ban a legit player, even more complains.

I see tons of complains, not a single hint on how to help.
Me too I have hundreds of email about bot, and yes all automated emails, so what, do you really plan to follow upon each one? To log back in that dungeon to go check if the bot you reported is still there?

Banning buyers, that would nor be neither good nor legal I think. Those buyers are paying customers who did nothing wrong but buy ingame gold with real money.
This is not illegal!
The way they farm gold to sell it is. (and think every single bot should have bought a game at 60$, so they need to farm 300.000 ingame gold to have a return on investment (for those who sell 10k gold for 2$).

Now lets say Zenimax decide to kill the market by opening the cash shop, allowing you to buy 10k gold for 2 $ in their cash shop. It would just instant kill the bots problem... and open another one, P2P Vs F2P discussion.

Honestly, should I be zenimax, I might attempt it, open a 1 month gold cash shop to give me time to fight botting. Limit the amount of gold you can buy per account (let's say once per char, so 8 times per account max, that is only 80k gold per player.) But maybe the risk is simply to high to do that.


So they choose to make the boss harder, now the bots do not target bosses. I was in a boss room, ondil I think, the bots were not moving between 2 mobs respawn site leaving the boss alone, and only players were camping the boss. I could complete the quest pretty quickly. In fact I only reported 3 out of at least 6 bots because i only had time to do theses 3 reports waiting for the boss to arrive and then I was done with the quest.

It is a good temporary fix. when they fix botting issue they might revert the boss spanning fix who knows.

Maejohl

Well these bans do not appear to be working.

I received 10+ gold spam emails yesterday, along with 6 invites to guilds whose names were just gold-selling details.

I would like to see an option to auto-reject guild invites ingame so that I don't receive these immersion-breaking invites.

I would also like not to see the same names sending me gold spams more than 24 hours after I have reported the previous spam.

Deamar

Lords and Ladies,

The game has been released to early. I'm glad they brought it out, on which my anxious anticipation ended but on the other hand there are still a lot of issue's because of it.

We all like to see them fixed asap. But, as I started, they released the game to early and so there are a lot of bugfixes nescessary. It takes time. I like to see a permanent fix instead of a fix on a fix on a fix on which the code is so screwed they can't fix it at all (Star Wars The Old Republic)

I see a lot of complaints and a few solutions. Do keep in mind that your "perfect" solution may not hold the answer to another player who might have a different approach due to his/hers goals and playstyle. Personally, I also see many solutions offered, that wouldn't work for me either. So what is the "perfect" solution? 1.000 players means 1.000 different solutions are offered.

And do keep in mind, Elder Scrolls is coming from a single player game. They might have an idea what other mmo's are doing but they sure aren't used to the mmo-pack-of-wolves flooding their servers atm. hehehe
You are not a member of the pack? Yes, you are, you are posting here. Complaining.

Give 'm time to adjust, every mmo had a bumpy start but in the end there are many we played for years. Just report what is going wrong or is just plain annoying, don't whine.
And if you took the time to think about a solution and offering it, Good for you. At least you are trying to help the game improve. Just don't do it with the expectation of it being implemented. 1.000 players hold 1.000 different solutions each catered to their own needs.

jpp

Duplication bug fixed?

AstroCat

What are you doing to rectify the damage done by the duplication cheat? Now that your in-game economy is ruined, how will you fix this for legitimate paying subscribers?

Saint_JiubB14_ESO

Just for the record many problems (bank, duping, gold spam, bots, account hijacking) were never in the betas. so you really can't argue that it needed to be kept in beta because of these non-existent bugs. quest bugs, sure. but the big ones would likely never have shown up, that's why bugs happen at launch, even with polished games.

zeuseason

These bots are still rampant and now well into openly farming the open world.

Mufasa

AstroCat wrote: »

What are you doing to rectify the damage done by the duplication cheat? Now that your in-game economy is ruined, how will you fix this for legitimate paying subscribers?

You have already paid a subscription fee? Interesting since that doesnt happen for another week or two.

Jim_McMasterub17_ESO

stevar wrote: »

Guys,

You do realize that banning a bot takes time, as you need to do at least one account verification?
If they ban a legit player, even more complains.

I see tons of complains, not a single hint on how to help.
Me too I have hundreds of email about bot, and yes all automated emails, so what, do you really plan to follow upon each one? To log back in that dungeon to go check if the bot you reported is still there?

Banning buyers, that would nor be neither good nor legal I think. Those buyers are paying customers who did nothing wrong but buy ingame gold with real money.
This is not illegal!
The way they farm gold to sell it is. (and think every single bot should have bought a game at 60$, so they need to farm 300.000 ingame gold to have a return on investment (for those who sell 10k gold for 2$).

Now lets say Zenimax decide to kill the market by opening the cash shop, allowing you to buy 10k gold for 2 $ in their cash shop. It would just instant kill the bots problem... and open another one, P2P Vs F2P discussion.

Honestly, should I be zenimax, I might attempt it, open a 1 month gold cash shop to give me time to fight botting. Limit the amount of gold you can buy per account (let's say once per char, so 8 times per account max, that is only 80k gold per player.) But maybe the risk is simply to high to do that.


So they choose to make the boss harder, now the bots do not target bosses. I was in a boss room, ondil I think, the bots were not moving between 2 mobs respawn site leaving the boss alone, and only players were camping the boss. I could complete the quest pretty quickly. In fact I only reported 3 out of at least 6 bots because i only had time to do theses 3 reports waiting for the boss to arrive and then I was done with the quest.

It is a good temporary fix. when they fix botting issue they might revert the boss spanning fix who knows.

Banning a bot takes time...Hmmm. I guess I can't argue that point. & I suppose 14.99 times half a million or so doesn't add up to enough money to make it worthwhile.

Rantog

Bhakura wrote: »

Why bother with lowlevel to farm gold? Well this is why:
1 minor soul gem (always filled) = 9 gold
13 bots looting 9 gold of 5 mobs every minute.
585 gold / minute
35100 / hour
842400 / day
5896800 / week

As I've mentioned in other threads - this assumes they are only looting gold and soul gems.. and that bag space limits them.

You're forgetting the Mail system allows Items, and can be done from Anywhere.

They aren't just looting the gold and soul gems, they're looting everything - have no doubt...and mailing it all to another bot -- parked in town, selling it all to an NPC.

rcrandall85

After having rained a *** of complaints about server downtime on ZOS today: @ZOS_JessicaFolsom‌ - my hat is OFF to you good folks and my head bowed. Thank you.

Nefar

@ Jim_McMasterub17_ESO : Banning a bot does not take much time. We are not talking about bots that are complicated and designed to mimic human behavior very well, where an employee would have to spend investigating the account activity and behavior.

These are poorly designed bots that and completely obvious to anyone that lays their eyes upon them. Yesterday, I found an entire dungeon being scripted, not just the boss, but group of bots pathing the entire dungeon. Unacceptable.

As for people putting forth advice on how to address the the problem, it's not their job. It's the job of the programmers to come up with a solution. This industry has been around a long time and ESO has some staff that have been in the industry over a decade. It's not a 'new' problem that they would not be familiar with. We as consumers are paying for a service and if that service has issues that hinder what you're paying for people have every right to complain and should.

As for banning gold buyers being illegal, It's not. Eve Online has been doing it for years and they will not only ban the account you purchased currency or items on, but track every other account you own and permanently ban those as well. The have NO tolerance for RMT from buyers or sellers. So it has nothing to do with legality, it has to do with the companies choice on how they want to enforce their Terms of service.

Dbetz007

Percipience wrote: »

chimera2005 wrote: »

In a recent event, the other day my account had an unauthorized access attempt, and Zenimax sent me and email, with a 8 character code so I could re-access my account. In the email, it said they locked it, because someone on another IP address tried to access it.

I do believe it would a good idea, and in the best interest of you as a company, and for your loyal customers to give your security measures an extra step.

By use of a remote security password. The password would change automatically every few seconds.
http://oi58.tinypic.com/357is15.jpg

or one via Android or iSO app that works the exact same way as the physical remotes as pictured above.

Square-Enix already has both measures in place.


Thank you for taking the time to read this.
@chimera2005‌

I am glad to see action being taken against gold sellers but reading the above gave me pause.... twice now i've had to use a code sent to my email because it said my IP address wasn't recognized - even though I was playing from the only computer I have ever played from - does this mean someone was trying to hack my account? If so, is it possible that some of the ingame mails are from accounts that were hacked (seeing as how half our login information is available to everyone) - in the first several days, the gold spammers all had names that didn't spell anything - just a string of letters - now I'm getting ingame mail selling gold with names that do sound like legitimate names and I wonder if their account was hacked and will now be banned because someone used it for gold selling. I'm really concerned this might happen because passwords seem to be easy for hackers to get (wasn't there recently a Heartbleed bug that supposedly exposed a ton of information?) - I'd be fine with using an authorization code like Chimera mentions - the extra step would sure make me feel more secure.

I have similar concerns and have had this issue happen twice to me. I would be okay with getting a phone app that sent me a login key to authenticate who I am much like many other games have done recently.