The REAL problem with botting/gold spam.

Phinix1

So imagine the company was to suddenly get serious about this problem instead of handling the exploiters and the legit community with kid gloves. Say they did the following:

* Perma-ban all bot ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.
* Perma-ban all gold sellers/spammers ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.
* Perma-ban all gold buyers ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.

Issue NO REFUNDS. You lose the account, you lose the money you paid for the game, you lose any money you spent on remaining game time. Period.

Here is the problem you would face:

Less than 50% of your subscribers would remain. That's right. The majority of people that pay for this game either bot, exploit, are fake botting/farming accounts, or buy from the same. The percent of players that do NOT buy illicit products and do NOT bot or exploit are less than the number that do.

EDIT: Now, before the inevitable "they could never detect the super clever script kiddie botters, the gold sellers are just to smart" BS, let me direct you to every other major MMO in existence.

It is a simple enough matter to write a pattern recognition engine that looks for robotic movement and behavior, repeat harvesting of nodes within a certain area, and other obvious exploit tactics, as it is also a simple matter to track the movement of any resources gained through these efforts to wherever they end up.

Attack the facts or shut it. These are the simple established facts.

They could easily "coin lock" those resources were such flags to be tripped, preventing them being mailed, banked, traded, or put up for auction. The fact of the matter is, THEY DON'T.

I put forward that this is the reason why, which is why I've unsubscribed. I can no longer take their promises of doing something about it some day seriously, not when it is so easy to implement industry standard safeguards which would prevent 90% of this problem RIGHT NOW.

There is an obvious profit motive here, and it really irks me to see the Elder Scrolls fall prey to it. But there it is.

Sakiri

You realize right that bot accounts are bought with stolen cards yes?

You MUST refund purchases made on stolen cards if theyre disputed by the bank.

Psychotius

I agree that patter recognition needs to be improved, or added if they didn't do so already (not sure why any MMO would roll out with at least the framework). I've seen MMO's be able to finely tune their systems so well that they can detect any pattern within 5 uses of a particular script.

That being said, the amateur bot programmer deserves a lot more credit than some would think. A lot of bot creators are downright genius with their ability to detect the tools that GMs might use to catch them, even more impressive is their ability to construct a code that is so random from instance to instance that it might as well be human.

To the point of banning gold sellers and buyers, that might be a task. Yes, it should be easy to detect sudden gold/item exchanges that have to reciprocation. The issue that I can see is that among friends, you would often find large loans/donations that would appear to the game systems to be a IRL money exchange for game goods. The implications are pretty severe when you have to worry that you might ban someone without mercy that was actually innocent.

In short, I'm not so sure that this is so much of a revenue protection issue for ZOS. There are so many factors that we can't see and the concern of wrongly banning any innocent gamer is most likely paramount with them.

Dita

I have no problem with ZOS trying to make money, every company would want to make a profit. My problem with them - they should have told us right before we purchased the product: " WE going to allow bots and hackers in our game, gold selling is acceptable and we gonna have no customer service in game or outside of it" - would I still purchased ESBO - heck no! But at least they would have had a customer base, which couldn't complain and they non existent customer service could have ignore a lot less complains from the player-base, cause they would have known, what they sign up for.

starkerealm

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

So imagine the company was to suddenly get serious about this problem instead of handling the exploiters and the legit community with kid gloves. Say they did the following:

* Perma-ban all bot ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.
* Perma-ban all gold sellers/spammers ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.
* Perma-ban all gold buyers ACCOUNTS, no exception, no mercy.

Issue NO REFUNDS. You lose the account, you lose the money you paid for the game, you lose any money you spent on remaining game time. Period.

Which wouldn't help them much with the accounts that were purchased using stolen cards... which is all of the goldseller related ones.

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Here is the problem you would face:

Less than 50% of your subscribers would remain. That's right. The majority of people that pay for this game either bot, exploit, are fake botting/farming accounts, or buy from the same. The percent of players that do NOT buy illicit products and do NOT bot or exploit are less than the number that do.

And you know this through your contact to the Beta Zerani Hive Mind... or... was there some, slightly more terrestrial source for this information.

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

EDIT: Now, before the inevitable "they could never detect the super clever script kiddie botters, the gold sellers are just to smart" BS, let me direct you to every other major MMO in existence.

The issue has never been detecting them, it's been about accidentally banning legitimate players who are too robotic. Now, sure, you can say, "well, screw 'em, they probably weren't real players anyway," but... thing is, they are, and they come on here and throw a snit fit.

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

It is a simple enough matter to write a pattern recognition engine that looks for robotic movement and behavior, repeat harvesting of nodes within a certain area, and other obvious exploit tactics, as it is also a simple matter to track the movement of any resources gained through these efforts to wherever they end up.

Attack the facts or shut it. These are the simple established facts.

No, they're opinions... again, unless you're drawing your "they outnumber is 527:1" from something other than divine inspiration. You're also setting flags that are incredibly low, and easily tripped by an unknowing player.

You are right, they would lose more than half their player base overnight if they did this, but it wouldn't be because all of them were closet botters, it would be because they were tripped up in a faulty line of netcode and banned from the game.

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

They could easily "coin lock" those resources were such flags to be tripped, preventing them being mailed, banked, traded, or put up for auction. The fact of the matter is, THEY DON'T.

Which would flat out kill crafting. Because you'd make it even more impossible to get crafting materials. Hell, provisioning has already been dealt a body blow, let's go ahead and just flat out make it unplayable. That'll show those botters (and unimportant real players) for speccing into it.

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

I put forward that this is the reason why, which is why I've unsubscribed. I can no longer take their promises of doing something about it some day seriously, not when it is so easy to implement industry standard safeguards which would prevent 90% of this problem RIGHT NOW.

There is an obvious profit motive here, and it really irks me to see the Elder Scrolls fall prey to it. But there it is.

Yeah, that I can agree with. I'm sick of these damn botters. But, you're not offering solutions. Sorry.

babylon

Is there no way to scan the game for the bot programs they know about? From my readings one of the bot programs uses its own LUA inside the game's own LUA...surely there's some way to detect this?

ausmack2014

I'm not convinced that a huge number of people buy gold. I can't back that up with figures but it's a difficult statistic to prove either way. The problem with bot farming of resources exists in many games, I'm told. I think ESO's problem is that they made it too open to exploitation. For example, the whole finding things in cupboards etc option. In Skyrim you could do that but you paid for it, you were a thief. In ESO your character doesn't get any negative reaction for doing it.

Me, I'd remove the whole container loot option from the game. I'd rather like to see an option similar to WoW's Sunsong Ranch. If you could create your own farming plot and grow your own provisioning materials, you wouldn't need so much to search for them. You could also grow clothing cloth and potion herbs. And no one could access that farm but you. So all materials of that sort could either be used or sold, and the only way farmers could access the resources it to make their own farms. Most gold farmers can't be bothered doing that sort of thing.

You could still go gather the clothing materials and herbs in the wild but the need for them would not be wholly centered on gathering.

As far as the other items that drop from cupboards, like motifs, have them given as occasional rewards for quests at the end of chains, the type of solo entry end quest that can't be botted.

Have ore nodes with a timer. Once you farm that node, it isn't available to you again for a set period of time, the same with enchanting mats. I don't think there is much you can do to stop the farming of critters for leather, except slap down on bot trains as they appear.

Stopping people from buying gold is pretty well impossible. Certainly if their banks show a sudden hit of a large single payment without anything being sold or done in exchange, that would be trackable. But gold sellers are clever and there are ways to get around it. The idea I believe is to reduce the pressure or need to buy gold. Reduce the wear costs on gear, reduce the cost of mounts, work on whatever other expenditures make people frustrated enough to risk their credit cards with a gold seller. You will always have lazy foolish people who deal with them anyway, but make it less necessary. And yes, let the populace know that if you are proven to have used a gold seller, your account will be closed. Not only that, but your characters will be deleted. Not many people would like to face having their toons wiped from the game.

Just my few cents worth.