Gold spammers and bots will always exist but you can make it harder for them.

FezzikVizzini

The fact of the matter is that there will ALWAYS be gold spammers and bots in mmos. You can never eliminate them entirely. What you can do is make their life a hell of a lot more difficult.

For spammers I really do not know why /zone chat cannot be disabled for characters less than say level 10. I have known other mmos to do something like that. I do not see this as being a great hardship for new players. The same thing could apply to mailing as well. It's not as if you can mail to your alts.

As for botters. Well, if an Indie game developer (Grinding Gear Games - Path of Exile) with a staff of about 12 can be extremely efficient in banning botters by analysis of their gameplay then surely ZOS can. I mean, what human plays for 24+ hours at a time ? It logs you out if you afk so no problem there. Surely there can be some sort of analysis from logs ? Just record a players position once per minute. Then at end of every day send a message to anyone who has not moved more than some determined distance. If no reply then boot them. If booted say 3 times then ban.

KerinKor

The fact ZOS failed to learn the lessons from 15+ years of RMT/cheaters infestation of MMOs is the real problem here, your mentioning of GGG is another.

Clearly ZOS built-in NO anti-hack mechanics nor anti-spam ones either. You're right, this vermin will never be eradicated but the game started with no vermin traps at all and it seems ZOS' developers are still learning how to make them.

Blackwidow

KerinKor wrote: »

The fact ZOS failed to learn the lessons from 15+ years of ....

ZOS has learned little about MMOs. It is sad how much information they did not learn from past MMOs.

I don't mean go clone them, but look at what works and what does not.

There are some things you just don't change. The big one is making the GUI user friendly with many options for players.

It's great they are trying new things like their combat system. However other things they tried, like the guild store and tiny tiny bank system sucks.

steveb16_ESO46

They don't exist in LOTRO but then, bad game as it is now, it wasn't designed to make life a bed of roses for botters like ESO is with its public, respawning, lootable infinitely bosses. Every public dungeon in Daggerfall this morning has no player lootable public dungeon bosses.

Stacks and stacks of bots. More than ever. So many you cannot even get their names.

This is beyond crazy - this is now well into the corporate self-harm zone.

Get GM's in there. Get them everywhere and start closing accounts. Start yesterday.

While you still have a game to sell and people willing to buy.

KerinKor

LOL ZOS, have you got shares in GOLDAH? 'Cos I just logged in and found 5 spam mails from them!

You have clearly made NO ATTEMPT to implement a spam filter, the messages are 100% the same and have no obfuscation whatsoever, so clearly the spammers know there are no filters they need to avoid.

If you're not going to even try then I'm damned if I'm going to carry on with the horrible 'report' system and in the absence of a user-friendly 1 button 'Report, ignore and delete' button I'll simply delete them.

Bluejay

GM's won't solve this problem. You can't solve problems caused by automated systems (bots) with manual intervention. It's the 'holes in the dike' situation.

You need an automated solution or crowd sourced solution that attacks the behavior of the bots, not the accounts.

There is a discussion starting about this here: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/85512/solution-to-the-dungeon-boss-botting-problem