Where are those Goldspammers and Bots everyone is talking about?

zgrssd · April 2014

Judging from what I have been reading here there should be a new goldspamer account popping up in chat every minute, hordes of teleporting bots should be stripmining the world and in public dungeons you cannot see the bosses behind the 40+ strong botswarms.

I could not in any way confirm those reports. I was wondering I might be to blind to see them or was just too fast at ignoring goldspammers. So I went actively looking for them.

It could just be that for some odd reason the bot and spammers have a giant aversion against the EU servers, but that seems unlikely. The german forums alone have 1/10 of the total posts of the English one and there are several other langauges in Europe. Among them a large english community on a group of islands just before the westcoast. And I prefer talking in english despite being native german, so we propably have a community as big as the NA servers. Not sending us the same amount of spammers and bots would be stupid from a comercial point of view, so we can likely asume that is not true.

It could also be that they are more agressive in very late game (where vet mats are needed and thus more valuable). I did not get beyond level 35 yet.

Here is what I found:
Goldspammers:
Shortly after 1.0.3 my ignore list had reached it's fulls state (100 entires). I took the entirety of 3 weeks (inlcuding the early access) to even get it that full. There were several trolls among those I ignored, so I guess about only 80-90 of those were actuall goldspammers. That makes on average 4 goldspammers per day.
Since I had cleaned that list, only 4 entires had been added. I cleaned it again and waited for any Goldpsam. After 2 hours in Auridon I got one lonely message. I also get about 2 Gold Spam Mails in 24 hours.
In short: I can not confirm any reports of massive goldpsamming. There was an expected amount of goldspamming in early access and the last weeks, but nothing out of the ordinary for any MMO.
I saw more goldspam on a slow day in SWTOR. And that one is f2p (no account cost) with ignore only working on character level (impossible to ignore entire account/might just delte and create a new charcter).

Teleporting botsswarms that stripmine:
When I walk around I just keep finding materials. I find that many that I am forced to skip nodes or take forver moving from A to B or I end up filling my inventory. I was in part forced to swap out mats to Crafting charcters or intentionally sell/use up materials as my bank was getting to full with more then 1 100 stack of refined mats.
At tops I have some loot conflicts with the ocasional other player. But even those are rare.
Short: I cannot confirm any reports of "teleporting bots stripmining the world". There is just nothing in that direction anywhere near me. The only thing not as abundant is hide/medium armor mats, since it has to taken from mobs. But there is at least one dungeon per dungeon level range that is a very good source for those.

Botswarms that make getting Public dungeon boss archviements impossible:
At every dungeon boss I see between 2 and 12 characters farming. For me that is a bunch of equal level guildmates/friend having teamed up to farm the boss for loot. It's easily possibly for me to get the one hit I need for the archievement in.
In fact as a healer I can just place my hot on some of them and thier attacks will be counted as my attacks for determining if I get loot. I am almost guaranteed not only the progress but also a bunch of loot as healer. Even if I do not attack the boss at all.
Short: There is some farming of the public dungeon bosses. It's obvious to choose that point because of the fast respawn and relative easiness of this boss. Nothing I would not expect or that is in any way hindering me from getting the Archievments or Quest for killing a boss done. It's helping me that I am almost guaranteed to find someone around.
As non healer I have a low chance of loot, but I tend to have a overflowing inventory anyway (I know that buffs affect nearby, nongrouped allies. I have to check if they also let their attacks count like mine for looting purposes like heals do).

If they were really such a common problem as people keep claiming, I would be unable to make a step without stumbling over one them.
But there is just nothing out of the ordinary anywhere on the EU servers.
The people complaing about goldspam are a worse annoyance for me then the actuall goldspam, but I might be just odd that way.

I just can't find them so I have to say:
Keep up the Good work Zenimax. You are doing well at stopping those minor annoyances.
Every second report about bot invasions or unbearable goldspamming are propably exagerated worse then Fox News. Or very, very limited to late game/NA server.
Downtimes and bugs are way below what I expected for a MMO at launch.
Some areas (like guildshop search) need some work, but I am able to work with what you provided and am optimistic it is on the list.
Communication before and during patch could be slightly better and you might want to test out the patches a bit better before rolling them out/reopening the servers (to avoid extra downtimes like the 0.2 thing or the the second part of 0.3 patch), but I asume every downtime has a very good reason.

Turelus · April 2014

The forums aren't that exaggerated.

The bots I have seen are mostly on the starter islands or camping dungeons bosses, zone spammers are normally in the starting city zones (post-coldharber) and mail/guild invites I still get daily.

ZOS will be fighting a never ending war but that's the case in most MMOs, their most useful weapon will be streamlining the tools we use to report them (report gold seller as direct choices and no forms to fill out).

deheartb14_ESO · April 2014

Every time i'm in a public dungeon I see at least one group there that are obviously bots farming a boss.

And in one starting area all the mat nodes for crafting were constantly being farmed by teleporting and underground bots. As in, you see a node you walk up to it and the mat vanishes with you hearing the mining sound but no character there. Rinse and repeat.

Almay · April 2014

I'm level 42 and I haven't seen any good spam since I was in stonefalls. I think they tend to stay in the low level areas

Drakonklenok · April 2014

Oh i forgot who this was, I was confused till i read the OP's name. now it makes sense, pretty elaborate attempt to troll, +1 for effort.

Etchesketch · April 2014

spammers and bots are low level mostly. You won't see the ones farming high level nodes because they mostly are single players farming for themselves or to sell off to the gold sellers.

badmojo · April 2014

If you're looking for a bot hot spot, check the lowest level dungeon boss spawn.

Be sure to report them all(the bots, not campers/farmers) while you're there.

deheartb14_ESO · April 2014

Drakonklenok wrote: »

Oh i forgot who this was, I was confused till i read the OP's name. now it makes sense, pretty elaborate attempt to troll, +1 for effort.

Good catch, I totally missed that.

zgrssd · April 2014

Drakonklenok wrote: »

Oh i forgot who this was, I was confused till i read the OP's name. now it makes sense, pretty elaborate attempt to troll, +1 for effort.

No, it was not. Trolling is for people with low self-esteem. I am not one of those.
Besides my arguments make way to much sense and contain way to little attempts at hiding some obvious logical flaw to be trolling.

I now know why I was not seeing them: They were doing thier dirty work at 4 A.M. in the morning. Wich means they got wise enough to not annoy people anymore, because that get's them reported.
Since they are not making themself my problem, lazyness took over and I just let them be.

And I still can just get the archievement by just hitting the boss with an aoe (or them with a aoe heal) in time. Considering that I play across the ocean and thus should have high lag it worked well.

Plus apparently they have trouble dealing with bossgroups consisting of Boss+Normal foe Add. As in:
They ignore the add, but since it counts as part of the group even just hitting/killing the add wil get you the archievement.

Now I see they are there. At a time nobody is really inconvenienced by them. And I am albe to just work around them with less effort then trying to report them would be.
I can see how you could be annoyed on it by principle, but if they just don't annoy me they are somebody elses problem.

deheartb14_ESO wrote: »

Every time i'm in a public dungeon I see at least one group there that are obviously bots farming a boss.

And in one starting area all the mat nodes for crafting were constantly being farmed by teleporting and underground bots. As in, you see a node you walk up to it and the mat vanishes with you hearing the mining sound but no character there. Rinse and repeat.

I did notice nodes vanishing when trying to collect them, but just considered it a bug in updating the node state properly. A minor race condition in rare cases top, with the interaction first re-reading the state from the server (wich result in it vanishing).
And now that you mention it, there is ocassional ghost-mining sound. Just asumed it was one of those pesky sound bugs. Or maybe an NPC hacking away in an idle animation.

Rhime · April 2014

zgrssd wrote: »

Judging from what I have been reading here there should be a new goldspamer account popping up in chat every minute, hordes of teleporting bots should be stripmining the world and in public dungeons you cannot see the bosses behind the 40+ strong botswarms.

I could not in any way confirm those reports. I was wondering I might be to blind to see them or was just too fast at ignoring goldspammers. So I went actively looking for them.

It could just be that for some odd reason the bot and spammers have a giant aversion against the EU servers, but that seems unlikely. The german forums alone have 1/10 of the total posts of the English one and there are several other langauges in Europe. Among them a large english community on a group of islands just before the westcoast. And I prefer talking in english despite being native german, so we propably have a community as big as the NA servers. Not sending us the same amount of spammers and bots would be stupid from a comercial point of view, so we can likely asume that is not true.

It could also be that they are more agressive in very late game (where vet mats are needed and thus more valuable). I did not get beyond level 35 yet.

Here is what I found:
Goldspammers:
Shortly after 1.0.3 my ignore list had reached it's fulls state (100 entires). I took the entirety of 3 weeks (inlcuding the early access) to even get it that full. There were several trolls among those I ignored, so I guess about only 80-90 of those were actuall goldspammers. That makes on average 4 goldspammers per day.
Since I had cleaned that list, only 4 entires had been added. I cleaned it again and waited for any Goldpsam. After 2 hours in Auridon I got one lonely message. I also get about 2 Gold Spam Mails in 24 hours.
In short: I can not confirm any reports of massive goldpsamming. There was an expected amount of goldspamming in early access and the last weeks, but nothing out of the ordinary for any MMO.
I saw more goldspam on a slow day in SWTOR. And that one is f2p (no account cost) with ignore only working on character level (impossible to ignore entire account/might just delte and create a new charcter).

Teleporting botsswarms that stripmine:
When I walk around I just keep finding materials. I find that many that I am forced to skip nodes or take forver moving from A to B or I end up filling my inventory. I was in part forced to swap out mats to Crafting charcters or intentionally sell/use up materials as my bank was getting to full with more then 1 100 stack of refined mats.
At tops I have some loot conflicts with the ocasional other player. But even those are rare.
Short: I cannot confirm any reports of "teleporting bots stripmining the world". There is just nothing in that direction anywhere near me. The only thing not as abundant is hide/medium armor mats, since it has to taken from mobs. But there is at least one dungeon per dungeon level range that is a very good source for those.

Botswarms that make getting Public dungeon boss archviements impossible:
At every dungeon boss I see between 2 and 12 characters farming. For me that is a bunch of equal level guildmates/friend having teamed up to farm the boss for loot. It's easily possibly for me to get the one hit I need for the archievement in.
In fact as a healer I can just place my hot on some of them and thier attacks will be counted as my attacks for determining if I get loot. I am almost guaranteed not only the progress but also a bunch of loot as healer. Even if I do not attack the boss at all.
Short: There is some farming of the public dungeon bosses. It's obvious to choose that point because of the fast respawn and relative easiness of this boss. Nothing I would not expect or that is in any way hindering me from getting the Archievments or Quest for killing a boss done. It's helping me that I am almost guaranteed to find someone around.
As non healer I have a low chance of loot, but I tend to have a overflowing inventory anyway (I know that buffs affect nearby, nongrouped allies. I have to check if they also let their attacks count like mine for looting purposes like heals do).

If they were really such a common problem as people keep claiming, I would be unable to make a step without stumbling over one them.
But there is just nothing out of the ordinary anywhere on the EU servers.
The people complaing about goldspam are a worse annoyance for me then the actuall goldspam, but I might be just odd that way.

I just can't find them so I have to say:
Keep up the Good work Zenimax. You are doing well at stopping those minor annoyances.
Every second report about bot invasions or unbearable goldspamming are propably exagerated worse then Fox News. Or very, very limited to late game/NA server.
Downtimes and bugs are way below what I expected for a MMO at launch.
Some areas (like guildshop search) need some work, but I am able to work with what you provided and am optimistic it is on the list.
Communication before and during patch could be slightly better and you might want to test out the patches a bit better before rolling them out/reopening the servers (to avoid extra downtimes like the 0.2 thing or the the second part of 0.3 patch), but I asume every downtime has a very good reason.

With a forum name like yours, I quickly stopped any reading and disregarded anything you had to say...head back to your cubicle. I know what I have seen and experienced ingame with cheaters and spammers...

magic_is_might · April 2014

Just took this screenshot a few minutes ago...

And it's been that way all night. Even switching instances and constantly ignoring them, they keep coming. They are there, believe me. Although once I get out of the starter zone, and in higher level areas, I'm sure the amount of spammers like this will decrease significantly.

Anoteros · April 2014

Yeah must be imagining the 50 bots huddled ontop of each other in every Public Dungeon i've been in or the endless gold spam in zone chat.

Nooblet · April 2014

There are WAY WAY WAY less gold seller spamming than in any other new MMO I've played.

Mempomaniac · April 2014

You know what would get rid of goldspam and bot-farming forever?

If people STOPPED BUYING GOLD.

I haven't any love for goldfarmers, believe me. They're scum of the earth. But the only reason they're here is because some small percentage of the player base enables them. If the market dried up, they'd move on.

Anoteros · April 2014

Nooblet wrote: »

There are WAY WAY WAY less gold seller spamming than in any other new MMO I've played.

Not sure if serious BUT this has been the worst i've ever seen in any mmorpg in over 15 years of playing them.

Complete failure on ZOS' part.

Agobi · April 2014

Just played for a little under an hour before maintenance...

7 more added to ignore list,2 mail inviting me to buy gold,and 2 goldseller guildinvites,all in that timeperiod.

I can confirm the spam is as bad as ever,and problem is still growing.

Jadeviper1974 · April 2014

This is an attempt by a gold spammer to try to troll the forums and push post complaining about them off of the front page, please do not respond to it further so it will drop off of the front page quickly.

Squishy · April 2014

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/78324/how-to-deal-with-the-infamous-bots#latest A few suggestions there for Zeni to deal with the harvesting part. If Zeni manages to break the way they make gold, it'll automatically stops the spam. If they can't make gold, well, they won't be advertising for it

.

Alphashado · April 2014

Because sooooooo many people keep assuming that everyone camping a boss is a Bot. They don't know the difference. Yes there are bots, Ive seen them myself. But 99% of the people you clowns see standing at the boss are other players just farming gear to decon or sell.

KeynesAlley · April 2014

I don't know if this is gold farming bots or not, but quite often I run up to something to harvest it, only to be told it's not available to harvest.

It's like there's invisible farmers in the area. I can see other players running through the area, but I can't see the ones I'm competing against for mats.

Any ideas?

Anoteros · April 2014

KeynesAlley wrote: »

I don't know if this is gold farming bots or not, but quite often I run up to something to harvest it, only to be told it's not available to harvest.

It's like there's invisible farmers in the area. I can see other players running through the area, but I can't see the ones I'm competing against for mats.

Any ideas?

They port beneath the map to harvest things.
Been happening since a few days after launch.

anthonyd986ub17_ESO · April 2014

what are your thoughts on the gbank dupe thats been out since day one and ruining the games economy

Anoteros · April 2014

anthonyd986ub17_ESO wrote: »

what are your thoughts on the gbank dupe thats been out since day one and ruining the games economy

What economy? Need an auction house for that to work and besides, this *** was in BETA and they did nothing to fix.

Squishy · April 2014

anthonyd986ub17_ESO wrote: »

what are your thoughts on the gbank dupe thats been out since day one and ruining the games economy

Well, that might solve the dungeon boss botting and harvesting problem, since it's actually faster to make gold and rare items that way, the bots might spend their time spamming their own guild store instead of public content

Jadeviper1974 · April 2014

@Gina_Bruno Can you please close this thread as it is hugely off topic and no longer viable.

zgrssd · April 2014

Rhime wrote: »

With a forum name like yours, I quickly stopped any reading and disregarded anything you had to say...head back to your cubicle. I know what I have seen and experienced ingame with cheaters and spammers...

I checked the dungeons at 1 A.M. german time. All I found was the odd couple of non-bots farming the bossspawns. That is a pretty late time for a Friday, way past my usual sleeping.

When I checked back at 3 A.M., I actually found botmob's like the ones you have been talking about and showing in screenshoots and in just about every dungeon. They even stayed till shortly before the maintenance. But I highly doubt they came back in main gaming time.
So if you had mentioned "they don't come out before way after midnight" I would have know how to wait a bit longer. Of course saying "they come only out after 95% of the people have gone to bed" does kinda ruin the whole "they ruin the game" argument that has been the core of every single "there are bots in the game" thread.

But now it does make sesne why I never saw them. An account is an investment and they would squander it if they actually walked in during the main hours. They would just get banned isntantly. Somebody might even call an admin via chat, having the whole group banned.

All trolling is based on a faulty point and doing lots of works to distract from it. My post lacks any faulty points and any attempts at distraction. Your points however have been all about distracting me from the realisation that they don't spawn during main hours. So any claim of major game impairtment is faulty.
I do enjoy it when the trolls actually challenge my mind to find the faulty point. It means that overcomming your arguments has improoved my ability to resist further manipulation.

And serously, the name thing and claiming I was the troll was old trolling attempts 5 Forums ago. If you wanna affect me, at least try to find something innovative.

BulbousMeathead · April 2014

Alphashado wrote: »

Because sooooooo many people keep assuming that everyone camping a boss is a Bot. They don't know the difference. Yes there are bots, Ive seen them myself. But 99% of the people you clowns see standing at the boss are other players just farming gear to decon or sell.

So true - there are bots out there for sure, but most of the time it's just normal human players doing the camping.
-

Darzil · April 2014

It may vary by EU and NA. It certainly varies by realm. I see a lot more gold spam on DA than EP on the NA server. The only really badly impacted dungeon I've seen was Ondil, where I read in a thread there are several non-bosses that can drop boss loot. There I saw at least 2 stacks of farmer bots running around, along with another few characters running into walls outside where they'd been left behind by accident. My wife certainly had issues in another dungeon on a day I wasn't around, and just gave up playing that night and came back later.

Lox · April 2014

zgrssd wrote: »

My post lacks any faulty points and any attempts at distraction. Your points however have been all about distracting me from the realisation that they don't spawn during main hours. So any claim of major game impairtment is faulty.

Other than the clear fault point of ... just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't happening.

They do spawn during main hours. I only have time to play around peak times and in on Auridon I have seen groups of characters, clearly botting, in every single public dungeon on every occasion I have entered them.

Getting a hit on that camped boss can be difficult, again just because you don't find it hard as you have AoEs and HoTs doesn't mean others players find it as easy. My main is a melee tank, very little AoE (the one I have takes about 1-2 seconds to complete). When the boss dies within 1 second of spawning (I have seen this many times when a group camps/bots) the time it take for my toon to complete 1 hit animation is too slow.

Having said that, for me these are relatively minor annoyances, I don't consider them to be a major game impairment but they should be dealt with by the Devs.

ElliottXO · April 2014

Yep I'm seeing things that are not there. This here must be totally legit players, no mates, playing together to get loot for deconstruction.

The Elder Scrolls Online F***ing Bots [ESO]:

http://youtu.be/jrm7i1pEz_Q

felixgamingx1 · April 2014

Agreed after tele from Eastmarch to stone falls I noticed the spam stayed in that region.