[Suggestion] New ideas to help break bots and more. Details inside.

DragonMother

I am merely listing some ideas that might help with hindering the botting and goldspam a lot of the players have been seeing and receiving. I couldn't figure out which thread this was supposed to go in and since we don't have a general discussion board, this is the next best thing. Do feel free to toss in ideas that the developers might wish to try out.

• New characters and accounts are not allowed to mail out, join guilds/create guilds, whisper, or use any channel until level 15 (Upon clearing the first zone.)
• Accounts logged in for more than ten hours consecutively in a day should receive a bot-test, either a code, or a puzzle test to prove that they are human and at the keyboard. Failing such test more than three times should issue an automatic ban to the account. I would recommend a typing code, or possibly a number code that does not use greens or reds or blues seeing as many players are colorblind and this could inhibit their gaming enjoyment if pushed to do these tests without being able to see the color differences.
• Game account purchases, and account time should be placed on a three day hold for verification of the CC, or codes to ensure they are not hacked, stolen, or cracked codes/credit cards. This will help cut down on the stolen credit cards use, and allow ZOS to double check the purchases with the banks to verify the cards user.
• Characters reported by other players more than four times for the same issues (Aka, Botting, Fly-hacking, speed-hacking, and so forth, these things can be keyworded for the ticket services.) should receive an account ban, and an IP track to find and lock that range from access to the servers. I hate to say it, but I feel that much of the botters and hackers in the game are from countries with very lax laws about hacking for profit, and will not take action to prevent players from doing such.
• Accounts with gibberish names should be disallowed, fix the hex code of the naming filters to prevent curse words, and offensive labels from being used, and prevent names that get reported from being used again in that filtering system. This will help cut back the bad name report numbers, and allow a little wiggle room for CS to not have to juggle so much work on these accounts. If an account has numerous gibberish names, or offensive names, they should be issued a ban. No tolerance. Period.
• Transparency with ZOS; We only ask that you give us updates before maintenance, and give us a time schedule of when you need to patch, or conduct maintenance so we are not left in the dark. A lot of time is wasted that we spent good money on, because of the downtime, issues with launcher, patching breaking the game, and game breaking bugs that ZOS has yet to deal with, and we simply want to know when, and how long these downtime will occur for repairs and fixes for these issues. We are your customers, and leaving us in the dark is bad for business. Even other games that we left had this down to professional timing. Let's not beat about the bush, the past month has been hell for the players, and the developers/csr's both, and we love and want to play this game. Giving us this, will help us have that ensured security that you are working on this and trying to put in the love for the game, as much as we are in playing it. Show us that we are not being ignored. That is all we ask.
• Tighten up the developer replies/CSR replies to bug reports in the ticketing system. There are a lot of players that are getting tickets closed without so much as a reply to fix the problem, or notification that developers are working on it! Give us some sort of confirmation that our bug reports have been heard and are being investigated. The wording in some of these ticket replies make me think that you guys don't even have working people at the ticket desks to handle these, that you have some kind of bot replying to them with what keyworded replies seem to fit the cases. Let's face it, human interaction is far far better and more personal to each case than dealing with bot written replies. Think you guys can work on that one?

DragonMother

Reserved, just in case more will be added.

Aett_Thorn

A few responses, case by case:

1) No. New players have questions. They need to be able to ask those questions, or join guilds to help them out.

2) Bots can figure out most of these various "are you human" puzzles. So I doubt this would really hurt them long-term.

3) So if someone tries to buy the game today, they can't play for three days? I doubt that would go over well with new players.

4) How would you handle a guild just being nasty and reporting every player they came across? Automatic bans for legitimate players doesn't win you any fans.

5) How do you determine if a name is gibberish or just role-play, especially with Khajiit or Argonians which might have some weird names?

6) and 7) Don't seem like they're to actually do anything with bots, so leaving them out of this right now.


There are ways to deal with bots that don't harm normal players. None of your suggestions would really do that.

ZRage

My suggestions:

Completely shutdown spam bots (suggesting censure here on \/ slashes and every stupid possible marks, those aren't needed for players to communicate)

Fixing / addjusting pub dungeons item/gold drop amount

Fixing lower level and reducing lower level and low difficulty areas drop rates

Greatly decreasing drop rates and exp reward in groups (I know it sounds odd but it is highly exploitable in group in this game you can clear dungeons / progress trough game like 5-10 times faster than solo) drops should be per damage / healing done in group or randomly placed. I know that "everybody wins mode" is fine but only until the game economy runs out that's mine opinion.

Increasing usability of gold in general, gold sinks, and more consumption. More interesting stuff avaliable to purchase (some customization maybe?)

Increasing drop rates from high difficulty areas or random events like dark fissure

Only way to fix botting is make them non-efficient in farming compared to real player that's the only way there is.

Most of the things that OP wrote got like 10 workarounds each and more importantly can be exploited. Bans serve nothing, they use hacked accounts if they can cash out in time it doesn't matter the economy is already damaged. The only biggest problem there is is that this gold is produced by robots decreasing players input on the game economy. Banning random people that don't hurt economy is worse that can be done here and if it's handled badly this game economy will ruin beyond repair.

I'd like to add here that all this strange aproach on the matter made me paranoid in the game, I don't know if I can trade how I can trade, if it is ok to give soulgems to guildmate or help my friends out or it's not. This is completely ridicilous when I hear that random people are being banned for sending items to someone.

The only way you can fix this is add more economy time / effort needed for people to farm right now it's just badly designed that low level players can earn relatively a lot of gold from quest and public dungeons farming <<<- this is especially where bots are most efficient in farming static places.

Aett_Thorn

Anyone ever read Freakonomics? Where they show that arresting prostitutes instead of the Johns actually creates an incentive to other women to become prostitutes (i.e., lack of supply creates rising prices because demand is the same, so it becomes more profitable if you become a supplier).

Basically, shutting down bots and gold sellers is a good thing to do, but shutting down the DEMAND for them is actually a better goal. However, it's a few more difficult problem to fix if you want your game to have an economy.

Thesiren

Some of these ideas aren't bad, but punishing the player base by not allowing so many things until level 15 is something companies like NCSoft (that are apparently receiving payola to look the other way at the 2039847234 gold farmers they've got in every game) do, because they're never going to solve the gold farmer problem. And you know what? It does no good at all even there.

You can't speak in any chat whatsoever in Aion until your character fully ascends, and still there are fifty-car-pileups of gold farmers in all the major cities anyway.

The *real* answer is for Zenimax to get on the ball and get rid of these creeps. I haven't seen a single line of gold spam (or gotten a botter in-game mail) in Everquest 2 in years. Sony has gold spammer suppression down to a science. Zenimax needs to ask the pros how they do it and follow suit. This nonsense of dumping it onto the player base to manually report each gold farmer as they reroll toons every 2 minutes is ridiculous. And it just makes the hackers use more stolen credit cards to roll up more spammer and botter accounts even faster.

DragonMother

Thesiren wrote: »

Some of these ideas aren't bad, but punishing the player base by not allowing so many things until level 15 is something companies like NCSoft (that are apparently receiving payola to look the other way at the 2039847234 gold farmers they've got in every game) do, because they're never going to solve the gold farmer problem. And you know what? It does no good at all even there.

You can't speak in any chat whatsoever in Aion until your character fully ascends, and still there are fifty-car-pileups of gold farmers in all the major cities anyway.

The *real* answer is for Zenimax to get on the ball and get rid of these creeps. I haven't seen a single line of gold spam (or gotten a botter in-game mail) in Everquest 2 in years. Sony has gold spammer suppression down to a science. Zenimax needs to ask the pros how they do it and follow suit. This nonsense of dumping it onto the player base to manually report each gold farmer as they reroll toons every 2 minutes is ridiculous. And it just makes the hackers use more stolen credit cards to roll up more spammer and botter accounts even faster.

I noticed that when I played Aion, and in EQ2. I'm not really sure how Sony handles their spammers, but yeah I hear ya there. The whole three day wait thing is literally a solid verification pattern for most credit companies for unusual purchases, figured it would be something the company might want to consider. Player can play, but the account itself would not have some features enabled, such as mail, or guilds until they get past 15 or the credit card is verified by the owner's bank/credit company.

I get that some of these ideas are severe sounding, but honestly Zenimax does need to get to cracking down on this before they are left with nothing but chittering goldspammers trying to advertise to one another and no one else actually playing the game.

ZRage

I'd also suggest anti-virus scan demand on every login :> This would solve few things with *** using same passwords and

Aett_Thorn wrote: »

Anyone ever read Freakonomics? Where they show that arresting prostitutes instead of the Johns actually creates an incentive to other women to become prostitutes (i.e., lack of supply creates rising prices because demand is the same, so it becomes more profitable if you become a supplier).

Basically, shutting down bots and gold sellers is a good thing to do, but shutting down the DEMAND for them is actually a better goal. However, it's a few more difficult problem to fix if you want your game to have an economy.

Lol how do you fix demand for prostitution ... I'm just curious ?

The problem isn't demand the problem is that the farming doesn't take any effort no difficulty, no thinking is included and consumption is too low so basically there is always more supply than demand because it is simply too easy to farm this items. What's worse static, easy and non - random places like pub dungeons give better reward ratio per hour than everything else. That is why there is a big boom of botters, it is easy, too easy to farm, normal people are bored by repeating the same action over and over again so it crates even more demand and makes it easier for botters to make profit. Only way to stop this is to make bots and automation unefficient, period.

DragonMother

Aett_Thorn wrote: »

Anyone ever read Freakonomics? Where they show that arresting prostitutes instead of the Johns actually creates an incentive to other women to become prostitutes (i.e., lack of supply creates rising prices because demand is the same, so it becomes more profitable if you become a supplier).

Basically, shutting down bots and gold sellers is a good thing to do, but shutting down the DEMAND for them is actually a better goal. However, it's a few more difficult problem to fix if you want your game to have an economy.

I agree with you on this. However, the difficulty of that task is something that Zenimax really should pour some heavy focus on. Player made economy is great! But the buyers need to be caught and stopped. Gold sales will not be worth it if the buying pool is terminated from the equation.

As for the earlier reply from @zrage
Breaking the algorithm for the bots is going to be the hard part. Right now, they are designed to advertise in almost every channel allowable, even using guild names and guild MOTD's just to get their URL out there. Breaking the url won't work because most of them half-butt it by using breaks in the url mention rather than odd symbol reversal. The only way I can think of that might break them from that, is putting them to task that prevents them from chatting, or submitting streams of invites/whispers/broadcasts by locking them down to finish the puzzle, or receive a boot from the server. After so many boots, they simply can't log in anymore and it'll be up to the hacked accounts owner to restore access, if they can do so at all. Perhaps a double authentication system to verify a players ownership if there's something odd, or a change in the players log-in patterns. IP's can be mimicked, yes but that doesn't mean something wouldn't give away that it might not be the real player behind the screen.
Adding: Actually, now that I think about it, perhaps invitation timers? Like if someone was sending out nothing but invites at random, they would have to wait a day after they invited up to 25 or something? *shakes head, and shrugs shoulders at a loss.*

Shimond

Aett_Thorn wrote: »

Basically, shutting down bots and gold sellers is a good thing to do, but shutting down the DEMAND for them is actually a better goal. However, it's a few more difficult problem to fix if you want your game to have an economy.

Agreed but it's just not an approach these companies take. They never go after the buyers. Mostly because the buyers aren't harassing people in chat channels and via mails.

The OP wants to help clearly but most of those ideas only punish legitimate players or open us to exploits. Like having 4 people report someone for botting just cause they don't like that person or they 'stole' a node, boom instant ban - horrifying idea.

DragonMother

Shimond wrote: »

Aett_Thorn wrote: »

Basically, shutting down bots and gold sellers is a good thing to do, but shutting down the DEMAND for them is actually a better goal. However, it's a few more difficult problem to fix if you want your game to have an economy.

Agreed but it's just not an approach these companies take. They never go after the buyers. Mostly because the buyers aren't harassing people in chat channels and via mails.

The OP wants to help clearly but most of those ideas only punish legitimate players or open us to exploits. Like having 4 people report someone for botting just cause they don't like that person or they 'stole' a node, boom instant ban - horrifying idea.

It may be more than that, it really depends on ZOS and the population scales of the megaservers to really put that up for serious thought. Understandable the beginning players may suffer, but given the situation at the moment with the amount of spammers and mail that even I get in-game from spambots? The lack of action from ZOS's part is what worries me most. It would be nice to see the accounts that have been hacked returned to their owners, but I have my doubts that it will ever happen.

DragonMother

Hells, even a flag spam feature in the right click of someones name would be helpful. No need to fill out extra reports, just right click, select and go!

Thesiren

DragonMother wrote: »

Hells, even a flag spam feature in the right click of someones name would be helpful. No need to fill out extra reports, just right click, select and go!

But you are acting like they aren't going to just whip up another character or account in 2 minutes again anyway. This is a flood tide. Manually flagging each one is way too slow all around: By the time Customer Service actually gets to your petition, it's days later. Even several hours later isn't going to help. The gold farmers have gone onto other accounts so they could carry on, business as usual, long before that.

DragonMother

True, @Thesiren‌. Maybe it's time ZOS starts hiring more staff to work on the petitions pending? If CS is really that slow, and QA is still not doing their jobs correctly, they really need to start bulking up their teams with people that actually do know what they are doing and have a steady pace with it all.

cthulhucometh

New characters and accounts are not allowed to mail out, join guilds/create guilds, whisper, or use any channel until level 15 (Upon clearing the first zone.) No to this. Sometimes you need a guild to help you out and to be able to talk to people. I suggest maybe have a limit on how many times you can mail till you have sent "x" amount of legit messages. Maybe make it to where one character on your account has reached level 5 before joining a guild, but level 15 is excessive.

Shimond

The only way to truly 'beat' it is to have CSRs actively monitoring channels and banning instantly because of text they see. No company I know of treats the problem in this method though. They are complaint-reactive only (with some attempts at trying to prevent it via technology to mixed success).

Koloki

Shimond wrote: »

The only way to truly 'beat' it is to have CSRs actively monitoring channels and banning instantly because of text they see. No company I know of treats the problem in this method though. They are complaint-reactive only (with some attempts at trying to prevent it via technology to mixed success).

I do agree that is the best possible solution, however the reason almost no company takes this route is because it is the most expensive way of dealing with the problem.

Resources, money and time are limited, paying people to do nothing but look at chat for all channel, for all regions, 24/7 is budget that could be use to improve the game systems, fix bugs and so on.

Hiring a bunch of people to watch chat scroll by is jut trying to suffocate the spammers with money instead of looking for a more elegant solution.

Melian

I strongly disagree with most of these.

New players should be able to get help from friends (or nice strangers like me). It's one of the benefits of an MMO and builds community. People already complain that they feel like they're playing a single player game.

Those "are you human" tests will get tons of false positives. I fail captcha tests all the time.

One man's carefully thought out, lore-appropriate name might be someone else's gibberish.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for four players to falsely report someone they have a grudge against.

What they should do is filter any version of the gold selling urls out of chat. I've only seen two or three, albeit with different punctuation between the letters and so on. Any chat message or mail containing those urls in any form should be blocked and automatically reported: that spares the rest of us the hassle.

loco

Ban asian IPs, problem solved.

If they want to play, give them their own server.

Shimond

Koloki wrote: »

Hiring a bunch of people to watch chat scroll by is jut trying to suffocate the spammers with money instead of looking for a more elegant solution.

Such as?

I mean, you're right my solution is expensive and basically the brute approach but it would work. I've seen nothing else truly beat the problem.

rawne1980b16_ESO

I just want them to give those farmed bosses a massive buff before the patch that changes them.

The hilarity as bots get squashed ..... and anyone else unlucky enough to be there.

N_Hearthcroft

Here is a very old idea: get rid of gold in games altogether.
No gold means no gold farmers and no gold spamming.

Return to the barter system, like when folks traded eggs for milk, or traded cloth for beads. Except in ESO, it would be things like jute for clean water, or a dagger for boots, or something like that. The value of each barter would be fluid and up to the players.

Perhaps this could even be done on special "Farmer's Market" days & hours in each major city, at the marketplace, using local chat to avoid cluttering zone chat.

loco

N_Hearthcroft wrote: »

Here is a very old idea: get rid of gold in games altogether.
No gold means no gold farmers and no gold spamming.

Return to the barter system, like when folks traded eggs for milk, or traded cloth for beads. Except in ESO, it would be things like jute for clean water, or a dagger for boots, or something like that. The value of each barter would be fluid and up to the players.

Perhaps this could even be done on special "Farmer's Market" days & hours in each major city, at the marketplace, using local chat to avoid cluttering zone chat.

Then you would have barter bots, who sold items to barter with for real money. The problem isn't gold, there's obviously a demand for such things, get rid of the supply, I.e. Go after their real life financials and ban players who purchase gold.

Fina

loco wrote: »

Ban asian IPs, problem solved.

If they want to play, give them their own server.

I am from Asia. Please don't do that.

One solution: Hire some GMs and put them in the game. GMs can instantly ban bots / gold sellers as they find them.

It's really easy to find both.

Think about how many accounts one GM in each starting town would be able to ban a day?

Natjur

As its a mega server, they don't need that many GM who are online to instance ban gold sellers. Better still, add an arena where they are ported too and killed and banned where other player can go and watch. It will add FUN to other players and remove the bots at the same time.

alienbongs

Here's what I really don't understand - HOW can they be so prolific, if they are in fact getting banned? Do they really make so much money from gold selling that they can just buy countless new games/accounts? That seriously has to cost them a fortune, even if they do make good money powerleveling/selling gold.

Makkir

Here's a crazy idea...stop buying gold.

BmcD73

Sorry to say that none of these ideas are good ideas only because the unintended consequences will be far worse.

First, almost all of these accounts are from hacked computers and/or ESO accounts. So almost every measure you mention with most likely end up banning a person that you really don't want to be banned.

Second, these guys make a living at hacking accounts and selling virtual goods. Their pay depends on it. So they are good and figure out every single possible loophole in every game.

We have real life evidence of exactly how this backfires. Just look at all the DRM and copy protection on Blurays. It takes 1 click to circumvent it. There are ZERO pirates negatively affected by it. The only people it hurts are the honest paying customers. This is exactly what we would be doing with the listed measures.

The ONLY thing that can be done is to prevent accounts from being stolen. Security keys, IP logging, account guard, etc. prevent 90% of hacked accounts. Although none of that matters if they have your email login as well.

DragonMother

Eh, previous posts reflect each idea has been debated and discussed calmly. Please try not to jump on the boat of "Whoa, bad idea, let's beat it like a dead horse." If it's bad, it's bad, explain why and reflect on what might work instead. *shrugs* Really not that hard to discuss ideas.

ElliottXO

Lol at point 4. Then I could get you banned in an instant my friend. Just for the fun of it.

Paks_ESO

Frivolous reporting should result in the reporter being suspended and then banned if they repeat. If it's a guild, disband the guild and hold the guild name.

There is no one solution to deal with RMT. There has to be a multipronged approach that attacks sellers and buyers at the same time. I don't know the best approach but I would like to see an easier report system. One where you get multiple benefits from just right clicking the name and reporting.

So right clicking the name would bring up /report gold seller or report RMT along with the other choices. Click that and a screenshot and a snip of chat text would go to an RMT team in CS, PLUS the character account would automatically be ignored. So you take a 3 or 4 step process and turn it into a one step process and add more info for CS.

Reporting bots would be a little more involved. So type /report, then you'd select /report bot or exploit and add the name and relevant info. The return would send a screen, loc, local system text, and whatever other info that would help CS out that the devs can automate.