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4/22 - ESO NA now overrun with bots
rekittenub17_ESO
Soul Shriven
Listen, anyone who's played an MMO (or any online game) has seen bots come and go, and I frankly doubt you can ever make a game completely foolproof to botting in some form. But what's going on in ESO right now (at least on NA server) is nothing short of wholesale, in-the-open harvesting of the game. Groups of bots camping bosses. More groups of bots patrolling quest areas, killing anything in their path. I also have to assume there are bots harvesting resources, as I saw 1 (ONE!) resource in 3 hours of gameplay in Shadowfen tonight -- and I have keen eye skills for runes and wood. Unbelievable.
I understand these things take time to fix on the back end, but in the meantime all one has to do (talking to you, Zenimax) is simply stroll around in-game for 5 minutes and it will be blatantly obvious which accounts need banning. These are not sophisticated tricks, guys, these are roving bots with names like"afbnsjs" in the lead and "afbnsjt" following them (along with 4 more) camping a boss or running a pre-defined route around an area. Everybody sees them. Everybody knows what's going on. The fact that noone is minding the store means it doesn't have to be any more complex than that, and that's the real travesty here.
I understand these things take time to fix on the back end, but in the meantime all one has to do (talking to you, Zenimax) is simply stroll around in-game for 5 minutes and it will be blatantly obvious which accounts need banning. These are not sophisticated tricks, guys, these are roving bots with names like"afbnsjs" in the lead and "afbnsjt" following them (along with 4 more) camping a boss or running a pre-defined route around an area. Everybody sees them. Everybody knows what's going on. The fact that noone is minding the store means it doesn't have to be any more complex than that, and that's the real travesty here.
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Yes! My 2 friends and i were questing in Dashaan together tonight and 2 groups of 5 bots rolled into the area and rapidly killed the mobs we needed for quest drops. They stayed there and kept killing the same mobs over and over making questing very difficult.
So, now it's not only dungeons but quest zones. Maybe this isn't the case for others, but it is making the game very unenjoyable for my friends and I and our discussions have begun to turn toward questioning whether this is the kind of thing we want to have to deal with in our gaming.1 -
I have had trouble with boss camping but our friend was able to pull the boss away with his ability every time to get us through. It is an issue for sure.
I was in Deshaan tonight and had no trouble maxing my inv on mats. I have seen teleporting toons and random vanishing nodes before though.2 -
JoxerHD✭Spend over 30 minutes trying to kill a dungeon boss so I could complete... 30... minutes of the boss being instagibbed
ridiculous.
They should just ban these bots on their IP with a msg "Get a real job."1 -
Dolenz✭✭✭rekittenub17_ESO wrote: »I understand these things take time to fix on the back end, but in the meantime all one has to do (talking to you, Zenimax) is simply stroll around in-game for 5 minutes and it will be blatantly obvious which accounts need banning.
They know about the botting. They have said they have banned a bunch of accounts. But, as long as gold sellers are making money they simply will create more bot accounts.
And if you think they can handle it in 5 minutes then that is a little naive. Maybe 5 minutes per instance but how many of those do you have
2 Servers
3 factions
5 zones per faction
Multiple dungeons and overland bosses per zone.
Many instances of every zone and every dungeon.
For the sake of making my point lets say there are 5 dungeons per zone and 5 instances of each dungeon (although it may very well be more than that). That makes 25 instances to stroll around just in one zone.
Multiply that by 5 zones and we are up to 125
Multiply that by 3 factions and we are up to 375
Finally multiply that by 2 servers and we are up to a potential 750 instances to stroll around and find botters. At 5 minutes per instance that is 62.5 hours for them to complete a circuit. By the time one or two people did this the first zones they tackled would already have another batch of botters.
Edited by Dolenz on April 23, 2014 4:49AM2 -
Saerydoth✭✭✭✭15 years ago, IP bans might have worked. But today...it is SO trivial to use a tunnel to change your IP address, that it's ridiculous. It quite literally takes less than 30 seconds. IP bans are completely worthless on today's internet, sorry.
As long as we have control over the computers we play on, bots will happen.Edited by Saerydoth on April 23, 2014 4:54AM0 -
Osi✭✭✭I honestly haven't seen alot of bots... the early dungeons yes but not since. Boss campers but none I could distinctly identify as bots; definitely not a name typical of them. I'm currently about a quarter of the way through Malabar Tor, the second to last zone in AD.0 -
Anoteros✭✭✭✭Pro tip: cancel sub, come back when f2p or just move on entirely. This is not the Elder Scrolls game you're looking for.2
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rekittenub17_ESOSoul ShrivenWith regard to the math: agree if you need "passive" coverage of all areas, but surely they are receiving numerous player reports that would show "hotspots" of bot activity that could be quickly and easily verified. In Shadowfen tonight, for example, all of the (numerous) bot gangs I ran across had very similar name patterns - likely all related. Others have said that the areas they're playing in have little or no bot activity. If we as players are currently able to determine these things and easily report them in realtime, an appropriate action taken in a reasonable timeframe shouldn't be unrealistic.
The impression one is left with is that this is being handled in a top-down, tech-centric way with detection tools, heuristics, etc. - important things, to be sure. But other MMOs figured out 15 years ago that you also need a certain number of virtual boots on the ground to receive, observe and take action, i.e.: GMs.1 -
Nebthet78✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭I have to agree. The bots are getting really bad. I was in Merhune's Spite in Auridon and there were 10 of them hitting the boss over and over again. It took me seven tries to get enough of a hit in to be able to get the loot and complete that dungeon. I decided to take several screenshots, noting all the names of the bot characters and then sent an email in. Hopefully it will give them a start.
These bots did move though, but you could tell they were not right, because they went back to the exact same start position as soon as the boss was dead as they waited for a respawn. After noticing they were returning to the exact same spot, not even an inch out, I realized they were not players. It's a pain in the butt.Far too many characters to list any more.0 -
SeñorCinco✭✭✭✭
There is no difference in an automated farmer and a player farmer, as far as I'm concerned. They both camp the boss to reap the rewards, be it XP and/or loot, and do this over and again.After noticing they were returning to the exact same spot, not even an inch out, I realized they were not players. It's a pain in the butt.
One is just as disruptive to the experience as the other and I have nothing but discontent for either.
Words contained in posts, at which point I stop reading and will not respond...
Toon / Mana / WoW or any acronym following "In ___" /
Pets (when referring to summoned Daedra) / Any verbiage to express slang (ie, ending in uz,az,..) / Soul Stone
... to be continued.
Now, get off my lawn.0 -
It's not only on the NA server. The EU server has a lot of bots as well. I've been dungeon exploring yesterday. Every dungeon I went to there were bots standing on the enemy boss respawn place all doing a thunder strike attack when the enemy respawns. Makes it really difficult for us real players to kill the enemy boss and even more difficult to get loot from it.0 -
Its ok to farm item. Every MMO require time and effort to acquire good gear. However, bots DOES NOT require any human effort at all, they do not need to rest or eat or sleep which give them unfair advantage over human. It is an insult to the genuine human player if ESO continue to allow botting.1
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xaade✭✭✭this is what I liked so much about GW.
Everything was instanced, except when in safe zones. That way, you could join a group if you wanted, but other than that, your group was the only players visible.1 -
Sakiri✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭No more gold spam that I saw in Stonefalls tonight. Instead I saw a teleport jute/iron harvest bot. Managed to report him before he ported away but still.1 -
steveb16_ESO46✭✭✭✭✭this is what I liked so much about GW.
Everything was instanced, except when in safe zones. That way, you could join a group if you wanted, but other than that, your group was the only players visible.
All the boss encounters should have been instanced from the start. doing it the way they chose to do it was always going to be an open goal.
Games like lotro put all the dungeon action in instances with long timers. I don't see that public dungeons offer anything at all. make them all instanced and scale to group size up to 4.
Or just disable all gold transfers between characters. If there is no way to receive the gold you buy off sites then the demand will dry up overnight.
Edited by steveb16_ESO46 on April 23, 2014 7:16AM0 -
jamesharv2005ub17_ESO✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭Mods can we please get a lock on these duplicate threads? Do we really need a new thread everytime someone wants to complain about bots? We get it there are bots. Takes time to fix this stuff.1 -
jamesharv2005ub17_ESO✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭✭steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »this is what I liked so much about GW.
Everything was instanced, except when in safe zones. That way, you could join a group if you wanted, but other than that, your group was the only players visible.
All the boss encounters should have been instanced from the start. doing it the way they chose to do it was always going to be an open goal.
Games like lotro put all the dungeon action in instances with long timers. I don't see that public dungeons offer anything at all. make them all instanced and scale to group size up to 4.
Or just disable all gold transfers between characters. If there is no way to receive the gold you buy off sites then the demand will dry up overnight.
You must not play LOTRO. They dont have locks anymore havent for years.
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Etchesketch✭✭✭✭Poor James.The number one rule of online gaming is now and has always been, Never play on Patch Day.0
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LotRO is moneymilking game. Locked traits, locked quest packs, limited chat and more. F2P, but if you wanna really play, you should buy tons of things or buy VIP status (hey, TESO shoud make VIP status too, with +100% to XP, loot, improved drop chances, exclusive dungeons etc!) monthly.
And in WoW simple dungeons are unlimited (actually only 5 per hour, but in all other ways they're unlimited) and heroics with improved loot are 1 time per day.
In C9 you can farm as much as you want.
Other games aren't argument.0 -
Sakiri✭✭✭✭✭
✭✭Do you even play wow? Random dungeon finder bypasses the 1/day rule on heroics. Has since Wrath, so 2008.
5/hour instance cap is still in though. More for technical limits than anything.0 -
Saerydoth✭✭✭✭Do you even play wow? Random dungeon finder bypasses the 1/day rule on heroics. Has since Wrath, so 2008.
5/hour instance cap is still in though. More for technical limits than anything.
The dungeon finder also bypasses the 5 instance/hour cap. It really sucks when you've been farming dungeons on an alt, then you go to your raid and can't get in. It didn't happen to me, but one time it happened to 3 of our 10-man raid, because they had been doing dungeons. Most of us quit WOW 6 months-1 year ago. But ironically, 2 of those 3 people are now playing ESO.Edited by Saerydoth on April 23, 2014 8:05AM0 -
steveb16_ESO46✭✭✭✭✭jamesharv2005ub17_ESO wrote: »steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »this is what I liked so much about GW.
Everything was instanced, except when in safe zones. That way, you could join a group if you wanted, but other than that, your group was the only players visible.
All the boss encounters should have been instanced from the start. doing it the way they chose to do it was always going to be an open goal.
Games like lotro put all the dungeon action in instances with long timers. I don't see that public dungeons offer anything at all. make them all instanced and scale to group size up to 4.
Or just disable all gold transfers between characters. If there is no way to receive the gold you buy off sites then the demand will dry up overnight.
You must not play LOTRO. They dont have locks anymore havent for years.
I played lotro up until November. not talking about locks on raids. Talking about story instances. In lotro there is no way you can go into an instance and stand there while a loot laden boss spawns and respawns for you to kill over and over again.
Besides - even if they no longer have raid locks the principle has not vanished from the world. ESO were stupid to design an open goal for gold spammers.
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Darzil✭✭✭It was indeed a pain. You don't need a GM in game though. Just need real time logging of current IP address, millisecond the attack was made on the boss, and attacker name/account. Even if that just forces the bots onto using variable delays on their attacks that'll give others more of a chance. I doubt they are using different proxies for each bot, as they are likely to be on the same computer. At present you would be getting a spam of attacks from the same IP, at the same millisecond, from attackers with garbage names. They would also presumably be funnelling their earnings through some central point in a way most players wouldn't.
If it's as obvious as it is in game, it has to be more obvious in the logs.0 -
knaveofengland✭✭✭ok can understand what you are saying seen a few things myself , but show replays we can all say this and that but show the evidence then we can all see and help stamp this out,0
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This is what is making me lean towards not subbing to this game.
Please people at ESO....do something about this...1 -
Syzmicke✭✭✭Make Gold bound to account problem solved.
I would sooner play self found/crafted anyway if i want to trade i can do that without the need for gold.
And don't say i can not sell things i bet %90 are trading items every day just to deconstruct to level up some craft's.
Find a really good guild you have 5 choices and trade with those.0