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For the love of gaming, please create a group of player volunteer spam catchers
merk
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The spam is bad enough, but now i have to fight lines of bots in order to kill an npc - there were easily a half dozen of them standing in line insta-killing some mob and 3 or 4 more showed up while i was reporting them.
You're efforts to fight the bots/spammers are wasted if they are on long enough to accumulate enough gold (and enough stupid people to buy from them).
Create a volunteer group of players who can flag a player as being a spam bot or gold farm bot and temporarily lock them out of the game. Give them some title or something so that anyone can recognize them so that if they message someone to confirm if they are a bot, you'll know you should respond to them.
If a person gets reported by them, they should temporarily be locked out of the game (say 24 hours) while someone from support can review their account and determine if they should be perma banned or allowed back in the game (and it shouldn't take more then 24 hours for someone from support to review these things).
If someone mistakenly bans someone and has a pattern of doing that, remove them from the group. If they purposely ban someone who shouldn't be banned, remove them from the group and maybe lock them out of their account for a week or something.
Create some guidelines as to how to spot bots
1. repeating the same action over and over again
2. not responding to whispers
3. non-sense or sequential naming
Give them the ability to see how long someone has been logged in during the current session, as well as seeing past sessions. Otherwise bots will just log out every X minutes and log back in - so need to see the total logins/session play time. Would also be good to see the IP address that way they can't just log out from one account and log into another account, since the IP will most likely remain the same between accounts.
That's what I've thought up so far.
I would REALLY like to see the bots eliminated from the game and I'm willing to spend some of my gaming time - time I pay for - doing this.
So - does anyone in zenimax actually care? Will anyone respond to this or better yet, actually implement this? I'm sure there are other players who would love to help nuke the bots. Let us help.
You're efforts to fight the bots/spammers are wasted if they are on long enough to accumulate enough gold (and enough stupid people to buy from them).
Create a volunteer group of players who can flag a player as being a spam bot or gold farm bot and temporarily lock them out of the game. Give them some title or something so that anyone can recognize them so that if they message someone to confirm if they are a bot, you'll know you should respond to them.
If a person gets reported by them, they should temporarily be locked out of the game (say 24 hours) while someone from support can review their account and determine if they should be perma banned or allowed back in the game (and it shouldn't take more then 24 hours for someone from support to review these things).
If someone mistakenly bans someone and has a pattern of doing that, remove them from the group. If they purposely ban someone who shouldn't be banned, remove them from the group and maybe lock them out of their account for a week or something.
Create some guidelines as to how to spot bots
1. repeating the same action over and over again
2. not responding to whispers
3. non-sense or sequential naming
Give them the ability to see how long someone has been logged in during the current session, as well as seeing past sessions. Otherwise bots will just log out every X minutes and log back in - so need to see the total logins/session play time. Would also be good to see the IP address that way they can't just log out from one account and log into another account, since the IP will most likely remain the same between accounts.
That's what I've thought up so far.
I would REALLY like to see the bots eliminated from the game and I'm willing to spend some of my gaming time - time I pay for - doing this.
So - does anyone in zenimax actually care? Will anyone respond to this or better yet, actually implement this? I'm sure there are other players who would love to help nuke the bots. Let us help.
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Jade1986✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭They rather respond to people getting stuck in the ground that don't know about typing /stuck, than reply to actual issues like game progression, bots, gold sellers, moving the EU servers to the EU, etc. Ridiculous.1 -
HandofBane✭✭✭✭Remembering the days of volunteer counselors/assistant GMs and such in UO, EQ, and other games - this is not a good idea. While the potential for abuse by such players exists, the real issue varies by state law where the volunteer lives, and that is whether they count as employees/contractors or not, and thus require pay/compensation/benefits/etc. This is what killed the programs in those other games, along with a handful of such volunteers losing their patience and cutting loose with abuse of their powers.
Yes ZOS needs more staff, but they should be actual employees held responsible for their actions, not volunteers from the playerbase.5 -
MylielSoul ShrivenI for one have been a "Guide" (Assistant GM) and GM on EQ and it worked quite well.
Zenimax NEEDS to do something against those bots plaguing the game, every dungeon is full of them, most of the time I see between 5-12 of them per boss spawn.0 -
merk✭✭I'm not going to comment on worker laws - let the lawyers handle that. But right now the players are the best spam filter available. So they either need to let some players ban bots, or they need to have enough support staff on hand to respond to reports within a few minutes - enough time so that players dont have to sit around for hours fighting a bot for a kill and so that the bots don't accumulate enough gold to make it worth the time and money to set them up.
We can already report bots, so I'm not really sure how banning a bot suddenly would make me an employee of the company. But if that's the case, then just make it so that if X number of players all report the same person in a certain time frame as a bot, they get temporarily banned until someone can review it.
Personally, i think volunteers would be the best bet of getting rid of the bots. It would be the fastest way to ban them and thus make it less profitable for them to run bots.
It seems pretty clear whatever methods they might have implemented recently haven't really been effective, otherwise I wouldn't have seen a crowd of bots camping a spawn point.0 -
Oogaci✭✭✭All they need is an employee actually in the chat for Stonefalls, Glenumbra and Auridon insta-banning any gold spammers. It doesn't have to be all day, four hours a day would do a HUGE dent in the gold spammers,
They just make more work for themselves by trying to go through thousands of tickets and then having to pull logs to verify. Cut out the middle-man (the real customers' support tickets) and 'git 'er done'!
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Neferath✭✭✭HandofBane wrote: »Remembering the days of volunteer counselors/assistant GMs and such in UO, EQ, and other games - this is not a good idea. While the potential for abuse by such players exists, the real issue varies by state law where the volunteer lives, and that is whether they count as employees/contractors or not, and thus require pay/compensation/benefits/etc. This is what killed the programs in those other games, along with a handful of such volunteers losing their patience and cutting loose with abuse of their powers.
Yes ZOS needs more staff, but they should be actual employees held responsible for their actions, not volunteers from the playerbase.
+1 sad but true
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HandofBane✭✭✭✭While, yes, something does need to be done about the bots and spammers - it should be along the lines of something more streamlined to focus that information to a CSR to deal with (there should be several people who work solely on this kind of thing, at least for the first few months). Reporting spammers should be a one-click option off the right click menu, without needing all the extra steps of filling out a ticket, and those reports should be funneled directly to said employees' inbox.
Bots should have a similar function off the F-interact menu. There should NOT, however, be any kind of auto-ban in place by players, as it will be abused. How do you even set a threshold for it? Because I can guarantee it wouldn't take much for a coordinated guild effort to grief people they don't like with account locks/temp bans simply because some guild got enough people to report a single person as a bot with no human review before that ban kicks into effect.
They need to get their *** together and hire more people - and train them properly on dealing with customers beyond the massive copy/paste crap we have been getting. Until that happens, though, we are going to be stuck with subpar solutions to all these problems.1 -
merk✭✭I'm sure there might be abuse by a volunteer system or even X player reports ban's someone. But that's why you also have some punishment in place for that. Some sort of ban - 1 week, 1 months, perm whatever for someone who abuses it.
Yeah - hiring more people to deal with it would also be good.
I don't care which way they do it - as long as they do something that's effective.0 -
HandofBane✭✭✭✭I'm sure there might be abuse by a volunteer system or even X player reports ban's someone. But that's why you also have some punishment in place for that. Some sort of ban - 1 week, 1 months, perm whatever for someone who abuses it.
The problem with just "having a punishment in place" is that, even though in theory the players abusing the system get dealt with later, that ties up the real customer service people even more between dishing out such punishments, *and* cleaning up the mess for the player hit with the unjust ban/reports/whatever, assuming that player even bothers trying to recover their account rather than simply unsubbing in disgust and frustration. Why make more work in the long run just for a short term solution?0 -
Slash8915✭✭✭✭✭How about this... We all pay $15/Mo, and once the main bugs are taken care of, ZOS needs to focus on the bots/gold spammers, or we stop paying. Yes, i agree something needs to be done about them. But a volunteer system is a horrible idea. It WILL be abused at some point, and it seems very amateur for a big company to do. Also, i don't like the idea of some player having the power to ban or disconnect me if i say something they don't like.2 -
Sakiri✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭EQ2 still has guides. Not as many powers as gms though.
And when you join a volunteer position you sign a waiver stating you will not be paid.
EQ2 guides were given their sub fee, basically. As long as you were active and past apprentice rank SOE flagged your account as paid for your service.
I also remember being gifted House of Thule cd key(EQ1).0 -
merk✭✭As others have mentioned, it's worked in other games. And it seems clear that whatever they might be doing now isn't working.
We already have instances of paid support personal (or their automated system or whatever) banning the wrong people. No system is perfect. But i think it's worth a try.
I REALLY hate these spammer/bots. I just want them gone and it's just completely stupid that so many of us can spot them and do nothing about it since reporting them appears to be borderline useless.
I'd rather take my chances with a rouge volunteer if it means we can basically kill off all the bots.0 -
Jirki88✭✭✭It's just a matter of finding the people with experience of similar volunteer work that would be happy to do it and then not abuse it because they have principles.Veritas et aequitas, et usque ad mortem.0 -
Yes... lets put all the resources in catching bots... pull everyone away from the "fixing bugs" team and put them in team "Catch Bots"...
Priorities guysThe statement "if you put enough monkeys behind enough typewriters... sooner or later one will produce the works of Shakespeare" has sadly been proven utterly wrong by the internet...0 -
Etchesketch✭✭✭✭It won't happen in a major MMO anymore.. Gamers themselves fd this up for everyone long ago.
While they (the company) could certainly try to work around the legal issues, no big corp. is going to take the monetary risk involved with using "volunteers" ever again.
The number one rule of online gaming is now and has always been, Never play on Patch Day.0 -
merk✭✭stefaan.de.wasch1b16_ESO wrote: »Yes... lets put all the resources in catching bots... pull everyone away from the "fixing bugs" team and put them in team "Catch Bots"...
Priorities guys
Developers aren't the ones catching bots, that's support personal. So this wouldn't have any impact on bug fixes. And secondly, a volunteer system is the exact opposite moving resources. If anything, it's using a new resources, players, and using to fix a problem.
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They can't use volenteers without a thourough background check, which is something they can't do. The police in our capitol tried using volenteers once and it ended up attracting a whole manor of criminals that just ended up reporting their competition to the cops... You really think there wouldn't be any goldsellers volenteering to help catch their competion ?The statement "if you put enough monkeys behind enough typewriters... sooner or later one will produce the works of Shakespeare" has sadly been proven utterly wrong by the internet...0
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AlexDougherty✭✭✭✭✭
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Agreed, power without some form of responsibility (real responsibility) is a bad idea. No matter how good the intentions, it nearly always ends badly.HandofBane wrote: »Remembering the days of volunteer counselors/assistant GMs and such in UO, EQ, and other games - this is not a good idea.
Yes ZOS needs more staff, but they should be actual employees held responsible for their actions, not volunteers from the playerbase.
People believe what they either want to be true or what they are afraid is true!
Wizard's first rule
Passion rules reason
Wizard's third rule
Mind what people Do, not what they say, for actions betray a lie.
Wizard's fifth rule
Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self
Wizard's tenth rule1 -
Kyosji✭✭✭So many posts about this, and it's always the same answer. No.
Players do not want other players with any power to control their own game. The thought of it would and HAS cause legal issues for parties involved.
Let Zeni handle their own game.2 -
Ecian✭I'd love to see a system like that. However, I could see an army of unscrupulous people working for a year to get enough people in the volunteer position to bring the game down to it's knees for laughs.0 -
OssesSoul ShrivenI personally would love to be a volunteer to kill the bots and stop the spams. I would so do this for free. If there was a way for people to contact an "assistant" to deal with them, Come to the problem area and lay waste to the bots, so be it. For us the bots just halt our progression of the quest, because they kill the npc before we have a chance to. Unless you are lucky enough to have some damage to it. Maybe have the assistant send 1: a whisper, 2: mail, 3: Say something in local. If none are answered then they have the power to kill the ***! All saved in a screen shot for proof for CS.1
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AlexDougherty✭✭✭✭✭
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The problem is sooner or later a volunteer would start banning people because they don't like them. Then the banned person complains, the company looks into it, says "What the <expletive>", and immediately replaces all the volunteers with a undersized number of employees. And the honest volunteers feel mistrusted, and leave the game.I personally would love to be a volunteer to kill the bots and stop the spams.
Lets avoid all that mistrust and let Zenimax figure out how to police it's game. There is nothing stopping you from reporting gold sellers, and suspected bots, and in fact doing so will probably clean them out quicker. (as much as they ever are cleared out)
People believe what they either want to be true or what they are afraid is true!
Wizard's first rule
Passion rules reason
Wizard's third rule
Mind what people Do, not what they say, for actions betray a lie.
Wizard's fifth rule
Willfully turning aside from the truth is treason to one's self
Wizard's tenth rule1 -
Kyosji✭✭✭I personally would love to be a volunteer to kill the bots and stop the spams. I would so do this for free. If there was a way for people to contact an "assistant" to deal with them, Come to the problem area and lay waste to the bots, so be it. For us the bots just halt our progression of the quest, because they kill the npc before we have a chance to. Unless you are lucky enough to have some damage to it. Maybe have the assistant send 1: a whisper, 2: mail, 3: Say something in local. If none are answered then they have the power to kill the ***! All saved in a screen shot for proof for CS.
And how long would you wait for a response? Most GMs wait about an hour or more. You also have to find other ways to communicate. This game uses add-ons. Most of these addons display information in the chat area. Because of this, most players (including myself) have zone and local disabled. It interferes with the data the game is throwing out for me, and also gold spam. Right now the only chats I have enabled are group, guild, and whispers. Only issue, though, if my screen is filled with data from the fights and world, most likely I won't see simple whispers unless I'm flooded with them.
Also, mail is a horrible way, as my mailbox is always filled with guildies sending me junk to deconstruct, so I will never know you sent me a mail until the next time I visit a crafting station.
This is why the power should NEVER be in the players hands, because they always believe they have the resources to identify a bot, when in reality they don't.
Leave it to the GMs of Zeni.
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madangrypally✭✭✭✭I think the old guide system is out of date and be hard for a modern MMO to enforce. I like the idea though and would like to suggest something less.
Allow players to apply for in game moderators. Nothing tags them as such to other players and they have no direct power over any other player. They do have streamlined reports that are sent directly to an in game GM.
How it would work:
Step 1: I apply and get accepted.
Step 2: I log in and begin playing the game like I normally do. During this time my game is auto-recorded and I can not disable this feature.
Step 3: I find someone botting and send a report to the current GM assigned to whatever hidden group I was assigned to. I do spend time watching and going through pre-approved steps to verify the person is botting. No tells allowed though.
Step 4: GM can pull the video and confirm data before suspending player for 2 hours after confirming player is not at keyboard. Can have a pop up the GM does that forces player to respond. The account is suspended for 2 hours.
Step 5: After an account has been suspended multiple times from the above manner then customer service reviews the account and players logs and possible perm ban them.
The above would require there be actual GMs in game though.
Being wrongly accused and banned from the game sucks. I was a few days ago and it greatly affected my outlook of the game even after it was resolved. This process has to be done in such a way not to catch those who are innocent. Just because they farm crafting materials does not mean they are bots.Edited by madangrypally on April 21, 2014 2:18PM1 -
Kyosji✭✭✭madangrypally wrote: »I think the old guide system is out of date and be hard for a modern MMO to enforce. I like the idea though and would like to suggest something less.
Allow players to apply for in game moderators. Nothing tags them as such to other players and they have no direct power over any other player. They do have streamlined reports that are sent directly to an in game GM.
How it would work:
Step 1: I apply and get accepted.
Step 2: I log in and begin playing the game like I normally do. During this time my game is auto-recorded and I can not disable this feature.
Step 3: I find someone botting and send a report to the current GM assigned to whatever hidden group I was assigned to. I do spend time watching and going through pre-approved steps to verify the person is botting. No tells allowed though.
Step 4: GM can pull the video and confirm data before suspending player for 2 hours after confirming player is not at keyboard. Can have a pop up the GM does that forces player to respond. The account is suspended for 2 hours.
Step 5: After an account has been suspended multiple times from the above manner then customer service reviews the account and players logs and possible perm ban them.
The above would require there be actual GMs in game though.
Being wrongly accused and banned from the game sucks. I was a few days ago and it greatly affected my outlook of the game even after it was resolved. This process has to be done in such a way not to catch those who are innocent. Just because they farm crafting materials does not mean they are bots.
Besides the obvious resource issues with your suggestions about video recording, why do you think a simple video would be enough to prove someone being a bot? Unless you sit there and watch him for hours upon hours getting your 'recording' and actually sending whispers to the guy multiple times, your video doesn't men much of anything.
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merk✭✭I think the video is just meant to show that the person filling the report isn't lying. Although i don't think they need to record a video to do that. I'm sure they can log what someone is doing in game and just review that. That's a hell of a lot less resource intensive then a video recording.
I like the idea of having people who have a direct line to a GM. I don't really care if volunteers or whatever have any power or not - just as long as they have some way of getting rid of the bots faster.
Right now it really seems like zenimax really gave no thought at all to bots/spammers which is pretty disappointing considering it's not like this is something new at this point. Handling bots/spammers should be something that's considered from the beginning not something they scramble to fix after the fact.
Honestly, given the behavior of some of these bots, it doesn't really seem like it should be that hard to catch them. The bots are repeating the same action over and over - should be pretty easy to write some code that looks for a character doing the same thing over and over - even more so when it's a group of them doing the same thing over and over. I like madangrypally idea with a pop up window from a GM that the character has to respond to to avoid being banned. It could be some sort of CAPTCHA and if you don't respond within say 5 minutes (and you're still doing stuff) i think it's safe to assume it's a bot and can be banned.
stefaan.de.wasch1b16_ESO - and i think doing a background check is a little bit of overkill. We're talking about people who can mute people in a game - not someone who's going to be babysitting your kids
Again - all i really want is some way for us to more quickly block bots. if they don't have the resources or are unwilling to commit resources to block the bots in a meaningful time frame, then letting players help seems like the next best alternative.0
