And the Bots Get Braver

dreildragb14_ESO

I NEVER seen as many poorly programed and very obvious AFK grinding bots in a single MMO as this one. Names like "lfrjhfj", all in the same exact spots but somehow eludes the games GM's?

Now we got whole towns with multiple bot trains running threw them going to the same spots, waiting the same time, then moving to the next waypoint.

And the most surprising of all is their is a sub a month to play this, no open world auction house and the auction house from guilds is so terrible most people find it to hard or not worth the time to use.

I mean come on I understand reasonable doubt but this is turning into pure negligence to the PAYING community.

I'm not paying to waste my personal time reporting 10+ bots per public dungeon instance or 20+ bots in open world towns then get the blame later on "we don't know unless you tell us", yet when we (I) do they are still here a week later doing the same thing different place.

nerevarine1138

lyndsayporterb16_ESO wrote: »

Many of you love to whine and seem to forget the game was just released three weeks ago (officially anyway). Major bug fixes > people botting. Get your priorities checked.

This was the point that flew over most people's heads. They're already remarkably on the ball when it comes to botting, especially because they aren't even at a point where it can be a main focus yet.

Thesiren

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

This was the point that flew over most people's heads. They're already remarkably on the ball when it comes to botting, especially because they aren't even at a point where it can be a main focus yet.

Sorry, but Zenimax is FAR from "remarkable" concerning gold farmers/botters. Is your favorite song "1999?" Because here in 2014, MMOs have been around and organized criminal hackers have been in them (which is exactly what gold farmers are) for over 15 years now.

Not only "are they at a point where it can be a main focus," but it should have been focused on early on in ESO's development instead, and we wouldn't be having all these problems now.

This game's chat window most closely resembles that of a F2P Korean grind fest MMO, seriously! This completely lacks any sort of auction house; they expect you to sell over chat and outright force you to if you're not in a megaguild. It's also the type of massively multiplayer where you really need teammates for a lot of the boss fights. Leaving their chat the complete and total clusterfluff that it is 24/7 like this is completely unacceptable.

Currently I have /zone chat off on every character, I have gotten so sick to death of /reporting and then /ignoring every freaking gold spammer. If I was attentive about it, it would take up half my online gaming time in ESO.

Boy, is Zenimax in for a surprise come subscription renewal time. You watch-- they're going to lose a lot of people over this. It's that annoying, intrusive and negatively affecting core play like trading and teaming so badly.

Sarenia

Thesiren wrote: »

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

This was the point that flew over most people's heads. They're already remarkably on the ball when it comes to botting, especially because they aren't even at a point where it can be a main focus yet.

Sorry, but Zenimax is FAR from "remarkable" concerning gold farmers/botters. Is your favorite song "1999?" Because here in 2014, MMOs have been around and organized criminal hackers have been in them (which is exactly what gold farmers are) for over 15 years now.

Not only "are they at a point where it can be a main focus," but it should have been focused on early on in ESO's development instead, and we wouldn't be having all these problems now.

This game's chat window most closely resembles that of a F2P Korean grind fest MMO, seriously! And for a game that completely lacks any sort of auction house, where they expect you to sell over chat, not to mention that it's massively multiplayer and you really need teammates for a lot of the boss fights, leaving their chat the complete and total clusterfluff that it is 24/7 is completely unacceptable.

Currently I have /zone chat off on every character, I have gotten so sick to death of /reporting and then /ignoring every freaking gold spammer. If I was attentive about it, it would take up half my online gaming time in ESO.

Boy, is Zenimax in for a surprise come subscription renewal time. You watch-- they're going to lose a lot of people over this. It's that annoying, intrusive and negatively affecting core play like trading and teaming so badly.

Don't waste your energy.

He sits on here all day posting in every thread that has anything remotely non-jovial to say about anything Zenimax related. You won't educate him about anything or get any sort of useful input on the discussion.

The irony is that this was never a thread bashing ZOS. Anybody who bothered to read the original post would know that. They don't need any fanboy defense in here because the OP (me) is also a fan, and most of the replies aren't even remotely "whining".

lyndsayporterb16_ESO

Not everyone is a dude for one, and why the hell would anyone 'fanboy' over some random, faceless corporation? When people continuously post the same complaints over and over, essentially repeating one another, I see that as whining. Especially when said whining accomplishes nada. Pretty sure ZOS is aware of the botting issue. Also pretty sure (hopefully anyway) they have bigger priorities to deal with. The game is a bug riddled mess at the moment.

Sarenia

lyndsayporterb16_ESO wrote: »

Not everyone is a dude for one

What does this have to do with anything? Some of us don't care what gender people are.

Stay on topic. At least before your negativity had something to do with the thread.

nerevarine1138

Well, when the OP resorts to ad hominem, we're pretty much done.

When you have a point to make that's grounded in reality instead of blind rage, feel free to post it.

Jadeviper1974

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

damaged wrote: »

They would not even have to pay for any GMs, all they have to do is offer some players free subs and create a controlled system for them to report and travel in game (with characters that are not the players characters, so they cannot take advantage of such powers), and I'll bet they'd get all kinds of volunteers, there's tons of people who'd work just for the sake of being able to say they are "Official Bot Seekers" or whatever, of course there would be a requirement of ID, and age verification (to avoid accusations of child labor abuse :P)

No.

Player enforcement does not work. It's like asking regular citizens to arrest muggers. Power corrupts, and real GMs would need to review every single player decision.

I disagree, I have seen it work in other games, especially if the consequence of misusing their authority is being banned themselves.

MercyKilling

Okay....the easiest solution is to have live GM's in the game whose SOLE function is to respond to bot/chat spam reports. These could even be player volunteers with specially modified TEMPORARY accounts to help take the load off actual Zenimax employees.

If you're thinking on the knee jerk reaction of "NO. PLAYERS DO NOT GET TO BAN." or "Power corrupts".....I point out Jess Folsom's post that states a great many forum admins and Zenimax employees play. Why aren't THEY corrupted by this "power"? Even if they don't, they've got the ears of people that DO, and they likely see them every day!!

No, I still say give me an account whereby I can simply wander from public dungeon to public dungeon and whack the bots with a banhammer for 48 hours while REAL staff work on determining whether or not my bans are valid, and if any of them aren't, why...not only do I get my volunteer ban account removed...BUT THE ONE I PAY FOR TOO. I love this game, and I'm not willing to risk losing playing it because of abuse of power.

Whatever happens, I still stand firm in my opinion that an actual presence is needed ingame by people with banning power to hammer out justice to these dregs of humanity. I think it's part of what my sub pays for, or at least SHOULD pay for.

thisisdustinsemail_ESO

Is it just me, or is the whole dungeon boss fix thing kinda... unfair? I'm not allowed to go farm a certain dungeon boss for a piece of loot I want, because the bots could also do that, so they revoked that privilege for everyone. I dunno, just seems kinda overkill.

It's similar to what recently happened at my workplace. A few people kept taking their lunches early and coming back late, so they shortened everyone's lunches, instead of just terminating the people who were abusing the system.

The people using bots aren't going to stop just because they get banned... They'll buy the game again, farm some gold, and make a few gold sales to make their money back before they get banned again. It's going to have to be something automatic that detects and bans instantly upon sensing a bot - no amount of Zenimax employees policing the streets of Tamriel will stop the bots.

kgallellab14_ESO

Personally, I think the priority should be the botters, then the gold-spammers. It is easy to /ignore spammers... but botters are impossible to ignore because they are actively disrupting gameplay.

Paralyse

The problem is that there are plenty of ways to fix these issues but many of the players find them intolerable and/or ZOS does not have the manpower or finances to implement them.

Bots ruining public dungeons? Solution: Remove public dungeons by making them phased instances just like the rest of the content, and then make the difficulty of the instance scale with the number of players that are grouped up to enter it, from solo to 50+. Solution 2: Phase bosses, so that once they are killed by a player, that player will never be able to loot that boss again.

Gold spammers bugging you? Solution: Players must be level 6-7+ to use chat features of any sort, and registering an account requires a valid credit card and two forms of authentication - voice and e-mail. Solution two: smarter filtering such as a "point system" :

- Player name has unlikely combinations of letters (wqz, xfv) etc 1 point
- Strings such as "www" and "g?ld" count 1 point each
- Player is level 1-5: 1 point
- Account created within the last week: 1 point
- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point
- Player has been reported: 5 points

So on and so forth -- chat messages from players who achieve a point total higher than X are likely to be spam, and that player should be muted automatically.

There are answers and solutions, but no one has the will to get them done.

thisisdustinsemail_ESO

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point

Lol I giggled at this.

I'm not dissing your idea or anything, I just found this line funny.

- Account owner is of race with strong history of gold selling: 1 point?

Paralyse

thisisdustinsemail_ESO wrote: »

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point

Lol I giggled at this.

I'm not dissing your idea or anything, I just found this line funny.

- Account owner is of race with strong history of gold selling: 1 point?

Last thing I want is some overzealous fool banhammering me for some perceived racism.

If 90% of all your gold spammers have IPs from Country X, wouldn't it make sense that a player from Country X has a higher probability of being a spammer vs. the median?

thisisdustinsemail_ESO

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

thisisdustinsemail_ESO wrote: »

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point

Lol I giggled at this.

I'm not dissing your idea or anything, I just found this line funny.

- Account owner is of race with strong history of gold selling: 1 point?

Last thing I want is some overzealous fool banhammering me for some perceived racism.

If 90% of all your gold spammers have IPs from Country X, wouldn't it make sense that a player from Country X has a higher probability of being a spammer vs. the median?

Sure, if the statistic was really that high. I doubt it is, but I'd really like to see some of that data.

ShiBu

thisisdustinsemail_ESO wrote: »

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point

Lol I giggled at this.

I'm not dissing your idea or anything, I just found this line funny.

- Account owner is of race with strong history of gold selling: 1 point?

hehe...

i still dont know why ppl thinking banning bots will stop them at all.
Serious.. no f**** clue.
You know what they would stop ? A different gamemechanic.. you know who would suffer too ?
Guess who would find a workarround ? Yes... guess who would still suffer ? Yeap !

The only and realy only way to stop them.. would be... if no1 would buy gold.
We can dream about it.. but its the sad truth.. aslong there is so much money involved it wont stop at all.

The other workarround would be.. make gold untradeable ( ohh yeah well lol )
and make a tradesystem where you can sell/buy stuff ... when you see 100k gold for 1 piece of armor.. you know you have to check it.. check.. failed = ban.
But ppl would hate it even more as the bots.

Misanthropy

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hi @Sarenia - We hear you and we're just as frustrated if not more by the botting and gold seller combo that's hitting ESO right now. We play the game too (many every day/night) and see exactly what you're seeing. It's safe to say this issue is our number one priority right now for all teams who aid in botting, hacking, and gold seller problems. We're actively doing what we can, and working toward increasing efforts to do more every day.

That was the most human response I've seen yet. :-) Many people forget that the devs are people too like you and me despite the dehumanization from some towards the devs.

SirAndy

Sarenia wrote: »

the Bots Get Braver

Saw two of them 'sdafasdfds' bots at the bank in Davon's Watch tonight.

I have a screenshot of one of them (lvl 2, prison rags) right in front of me while at the same time spamming the zone chat with ads for a gold selling website.

They are indeed getting more cocky by the day ...

kgallellab14_ESO

I think it would be kind of amusing (instead of banning) if they could somehow make it impossible for the reported players to communicate with others in any way and impossible for them to interact with anything like loot or npcs.

Misanthropy

Better yet, for fun, make an in-game prison. Send them there. They can't use any form of chat. Nothing. Just sitting in a jail cell for all their characters. (When you mention the prison rags it made me think of this)

Having the gold spammers and bots all thrown together in the same cell would be pretty amusing. Cut off from the rest of the world left to attempt to spam each other in the "prison".

thisisdustinsemail_ESO

Misanthropy wrote: »

Better yet, for fun, make an in-game prison. Send them there. They can't use any form of chat. Nothing. Just sitting in a jail cell for all their characters. (When you mention the prison rags it made me think of this)

Having the gold spammers and bots all thrown together in the same cell would be pretty amusing. Cut off from the rest of the world left to attempt to spam each other in the "prison".

Make them farm something while in prison. Something worthless.

Altheina

ZOS_JessicaFolsom wrote: »

Hi @Sarenia - We hear you and we're just as frustrated if not more by the botting and gold seller combo that's hitting ESO right now. We play the game too (many every day/night) and see exactly what you're seeing. It's safe to say this issue is our number one priority right now for all teams who aid in botting, hacking, and gold seller problems. We're actively doing what we can, and working toward increasing efforts to do more every day.

Hi Jessica, I am glad that Zenimax takes whatever it takes to ensure that the game is fun for players. Would it be possible for you and other Zenimax staffs that play the game to act as GM too?

Thanks

Sarenia

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

thisisdustinsemail_ESO wrote: »

paralysecub18_ESO wrote: »

- IP address is from country with strong history of gold selling: 1 point

Lol I giggled at this.

I'm not dissing your idea or anything, I just found this line funny.

- Account owner is of race with strong history of gold selling: 1 point?

Last thing I want is some overzealous fool banhammering me for some perceived racism.

If 90% of all your gold spammers have IPs from Country X, wouldn't it make sense that a player from Country X has a higher probability of being a spammer vs. the median?

Ethical repercussions of this aside, most blackhats use _at least_ one VPN to mask their true origin. Tracking somebody through VPN(s) is tricky work, and makes any regional banning ineffectual.

Just clarifying since you're not the first person to suggest something like this.

Vagrant0

nerevarine1138 wrote: »

No.

Players do not have the tools or understanding to determine who is and isn't botting, and players cannot be trusted with banning power. Period.

Let's be entirely clear on this matter.

First off, tools can be provided to those player GMs which are part of this program to give them limited moderation powers. Usually with games like this it is not a very difficult matter to do this since various levels of what tools are available are usually already present within the GM hierarchy.

Second, we are not talking about suggesting giving this power to everyone, and anyone. What would make the most sense would be to have about 10-15 people per mega server who are part of this program. A smaller staff means that it is easier for them to be held accountable, be properly trained, and be able to communicate with eachother when a case is uncertain. This sort of position would also probably require at a number of minimum criteria to keep the total number of applicants low, within the realm of people who are capable of handling things professionally, and would essentially be treated as an internship including logged time, filing reports, and interview process.

If each ban is tied with several seconds of recorded game video or more than one player GM signing off on it, each ban can be rather easily audited if objections are made. As bot behavior is automated, a good number of ways can be put into practice to test how that automation works simply because it will always work exactly the same each time. Bots also, generally, do not respond dynamically to messages sent to them while players usually do (especially when they see it coming from someone in authority). You have handfuls of players already out there doing these sorts of things when they report the bots they see or encounter a new variety of bot so that game staff is aware of how these bots can be detected and separated from normal players.


None of this is new, many MMOs before have used this sort of program quite effectively with relatively few instances of anyone abusing any given power. These people would not be set to deal with moderating chat, personal disputes, guild drama, or any of the usual stuff that often ends up being more subjective. They would be a taskforce for the express purpose of limiting the damage caused by bots or exploits until those things can be resolved through patching.

tafoya77n

I understand gold sellers being a bother and annoying, that I certainly get. But why oh why does farming bosses bother anyone?

You see people doing something they want to do in an MMO that is not a bad thing, just because you don't want to farm does not mean that they are doing some horrible unforgivable thing.

Farmers and botters doing this are not stopping you from enjoying the heart of the game and people need to let it go. ZOS has development and minor bug fixes to worry about not a few farmers.

Sarenia

tafoya77n wrote: »

I understand gold sellers being a bother and annoying, that I certainly get. But why oh why does farming bosses bother anyone?

Farming bosses doesn't bother anybody.

Not being able to get loot from a boss because bots kill it before you can do enough damage bothers people.

Doing a half dozen dungeons and getting no loot from any of them bothers people.

You need to understand there's a difference between a player manually farming a boss, and a blackhat automatically monopolozing a boss in 5 separate instances with 35 accounts, so that nobody else can get any loot.

Vagrant0

tafoya77n wrote: »

I understand gold sellers being a bother and annoying, that I certainly get. But why oh why does farming bosses bother anyone?

Simply...

Dungeon bosses are meant to be fun and challenging. Both of these things completely go away when you have a cluster of characters all standing around the same spot zerging the boss the moment it spawns, often preventing you from doing enough damage to get credit.

The fact that this sort of thing also ends up being what allows all the spam and similar to continue (gold for the gold sellers means they can sell more gold and buy more accounts) just adds insult to injury.

What makes an MMO is player interaction. Bots are just soulless shells repeating actions by script, depriving players from the experience of harvesting, camping, or just conversing with eachother. Gone are the glory days of MMOs when, sure, someone could have run up and stolen your kill, but atleast you could rest comfortably knowing that it was a person who made that decision to be a jerk.


The first bot I saw, right after the game went public... One doing a blind and constant arrow attack on a boss spawn, with a few dozen corpses littered around... made my heart sink simply because I have seen just how bots can effectively kill the experience of playing a MMO and KNEW that it was just the start of worse things to come. As this is something which has happened to pretty much EVERY MMO made within the last 20 years, it baffles me as to why none of this is accounted for.

Edda

I agree that fixing this will require game moderators logging in the game, bring their BAN-hammer, and just start suspending and banishing offenders right then and there. Stonefalls is littered with them. I bet they could ban 100 gold spammer accounts just by standing there, watching chat, for a couple of hours. And if things happen to quiet down for a minute, just start checking the dungeons for bots.

Jessabella

SirAndy wrote: »

Saw two of them 'sdafasdfds' bots at the bank in Davon's Watch tonight.

I have a screenshot of one of them (lvl 2, prison rags) right in front of me while at the same time spamming the zone chat with ads for a gold selling website.

I saw one of those 2 last night in Davon's watch. As soon as i ran past "it" and saw the name and lvl I turned on zone chat and sure enough they were spamming chat with gold selling spam. I also got a screen shot and reported them.

tophernub18_ESO1

TL:DR - let the players see behind the curtain a little - tell us your Zeno team strategies for managing and defeating bot farmers and RMT.

The fight against scripts and auto-key programs includes some fairly simple basic rules / strategies. Either you design and code to defeat or make botting difficult, or you employ an active detection strategy. Reading a few of the comments here, I have my own observations...

First, active anti-bot script measures are expensive in terms of labour/time/result ratios. But, as emergency measures, sometimes a company should do what it has to do in the face of an enraged player base.

So, on the point of being able to see all botters in an area at once - ie. the overall' picture across all instances: it would have been a colossal failure if the team didn't include code that enabled someone from the Dev side to engage in a no-clip 50 foot high 'see all instances' mode. They must have, and therefore they could employ a periodic simple rotation of observe and take action strategy at all dungeons in a zone. By my estimate, it would take someone about an hour to really look at things in any zone.

Second, the most basic bot script program is easily managing bosses because bosses (and resources) spawn in the same spot in predictable places every time. This is a balance problem, where designers need to make things fairly easy for 'real' players (like auto-loot functionality) while recognizing that some of these features/functions will make it easier for bot script farmers to do their thing. Consider for a moment that bots can't manage chests because they require a lock-pick and that would be some pretty tough (but not impossible) script programming to manage.

So here's the thing: the idea of going back through the game and moving each one is a long-term and pretty tough solution on the face of it so they opt to simply slow them down but reducing the spawn rates. But here's the problem: This strategy results in a virtual 'pile-up' where now even more legitimate players are stuck waiting, right along side the bots, for the spawn. This snowballs into an even higher DPS on the boss, thereby diminishing the chance of a real player from getting a swing on the boss in the shorter time before it drops.

No, in my mind, the better solution is to go back through the code and insert a kill-count 'check' for each player (similar code exists for other one-time events, like skyshards / achievements) and simply adopt a game design stance that named elites can only be killed 5 times a day. Period. Most real players can accept this as a compromise against the promise of using this to reduce botting. At the very least, it will dramatically reduce mass botting at the bottle-neck pressure point. Each account would have a max possibility of 5 kills per boss, on 8 seperate toons per account, and require farmers to add the extra step of auto-logging the toons in and out. My bet is that farmers prefer simpler script, less prone to breaking.

Some of the other solutions discussed have potential (the monitor key-stroke code is fairly straightforward, but can't rely on the client-side else be discovered and likely defeated: this is a server side problem and if you consider what this means in terms of incremental server load, I would also be reluctant). So - you need another server to monitor the game server - a security suite of scripts that watch for repeated behaviours on accounts and in the game environment. Transfer of items and gold (especially high volume/value items) and things like IP monitors to 'flag' other accounts using the same IP in cases where you track and kill the first botting account (where there's smoke, there is fire). Sending a polite "we killed your account because it was bot farming - we know you're likely also using other accounts from this IP address XX.XX.XX.XX, so we're watching" will definitely scare off casual farmers who live in their mom and dad's basement!

At any rate, some of this frustration and 'flames' come from inadequate and ineffective communication with players. Players will always be mad for one reason or another: but once the team make the decision that some aspect is a 'real problem' then a real communication strategy should be put in effect:

1) acknowledge the problem, and if possible inform the players about the various dimensions of the problem so they can see the complexity - this will let them know you have thought it through and quick fixes aren't possible.
2) show them some of the solutions you're contemplating - short, mid and long-term. This will at least help define the boundaries and stop repeated and sometimes really 'easy' but stupid solutions being suggested. These decidedly unhelpful solutions make other players believe the problem is easy to solve and that the company must be incompetent not to implement them
3) give results. Eve has some of the best counter-measure strategies that regularly fail in a complex game. Players appreciate that CCP gives feedback - How many accounts were banned? where were they predominantly from? any trends or statistics you can share? These things count.

Also: Someone should give some thought to the tools. I've sent literally hundreds of notices with screen shots - what I'm a bit irritated about is the mechanically complex steps necessary to notify Zeno - It could be a lot easier for the process to automatically include your location (note: it might be in the code, but the player doesn't see it - so reporting bot process that needs an "i saw them here" should include a 'report my location' feature.