Do the Harvest Bots have a New Trick?

Catches_the_Sun

So I went back to Stonefalls today to do some harvesting and noticed a TON of bots. Every node that the bots were harvesting immediately respawned, and every node that wasn't "manned" by a bot took the normal time to respawn. Have they found a way to hack the client to make their nodes respawn immediately? This is out of control & much worse than teleporting in terms of how many resources they can harvest in a short amount of time. I reported all that I saw & held the nodes open until they left on a few of them, but I'm sure that'll make no difference in the big picture.

dakgardb14_ESO

Yup just noticed this. Reported until I got tired of reporting and went back to playing. Economy gonna take a big hit after this. Plus the gold farmers having a hay day.

SirAndy

Nodes respawn faster the more players (or bots) are nearby ...
;-)

AlliN

Jup, saw a bot today spawning and despawning together with a node, every 20 seconds or so, so much shorther than the actual respawn timer of a node.

Seems server side hacks are out.

Dunhilda

dakgardb14_ESO wrote: »

Yup just noticed this. Reported until I got tired of reporting and went back to playing. Economy gonna take a big hit after this. Plus the gold farmers having a hay day.

Another big hit on top of the dupe bugs still in the game?

Malediktus

No wonder full stacks of bars sell for barely more than vendor value

mark.coogan_ESO

Spotted this today myself in Stonefalls and reported about half a dozen of the bots before frankly I gave up because there was at least another 5 or so I saw after that. Pretty easy to see which side is winning Bots Wars 2014 between ZOS and the hackers.

Brakkar

This thing is as old as history of boting in mmo's.
It appears in every mmo with active crafting system.
I am surprised that developers still allow this to happen in every mmo I have played in past 10 years.

Ps. Bars value have nothing to do with bots.
They cost only this much because you get a lot of profit by just refining ore.
Bars are just leftovers of the initial refining process, main product are the upgrade reagents.

Jirki88

mark.coogan_ESO wrote: »

Spotted this today myself in Stonefalls and reported about half a dozen of the bots before frankly I gave up because there was at least another 5 or so I saw after that. Pretty easy to see which side is winning Bots Wars 2014 between ZOS and the hackers.

A war kinda implies two sides fighting. What we're seeing so far more resembles a prison shower....

Catches_the_Sun

SirAndy wrote: »

Nodes respawn faster the more players (or bots) are nearby ...
;-)

The ones that I saw had 1 bot around them...or are you saying that is the info that they're manipulating to cause the nodes to respawn immediately?

Natjur

Set harvest spots are linked in a chain (over a zone), and one of the spots in the chain set has to be always up.

If the bots work outs all the spots in a chain, they can park a bot at each spot in the chain and harvest endless as the next spot will pop while the other is getting harvested. Time this right over all spots and you have endless resources.

They are not server side hacking, they just worked out the 12 linked spots in the chain. Also they are doing this to get raw stacks, as refining the stacks can give yellow resources if you have the right skill points used. So they are using this to farm yellow resources, not the 'raw' resources.

Same reason you see bot farms killing mub crabs to farm leather.

They need to make ALL resources in a zone chained, not just a 12. But if they do this, you will might find half a zone with no resources and the other half full.

Or add a better way to detect bots and kill them all. The GM is a good start, but they need to work on this more.

ElliottXO

Malediktus wrote: »

No wonder full stacks of bars sell for barely more than vendor value

That's not the reason. Reason is that everyone had so many mats from breaking down that nobody needs to buy them.

CowNRB

Just saw this myself