(bots) Banning accounts isn't enough

buffbcub17_ESO · April 2014

Definitely seen these bots in public dungeons...names like ccrft and jdjdjdjd standing around where the boss spawns.

What I have found is that I need to stand there too, and try 3-4 times to get enough hits on the guy to get the dungeon credit..and hopefully a decent item from their loot. This is still happening in the 30s for me, but much more rarely than it was in lower level dungeons.

Personally I hack away until I get credit and something to loot, then move on.

Cameryn · April 2014

Mace wrote: »

Maybe if the unique/blue dropped every time off the boss.
I don't know many people want things handed to them like that though.

Rebalance those items into the world. Make those items random drops from NPCs scattered around the world. Someone would actually have to *play the game* to farm enough of those to make some gold.

Every game has raid lockouts. Even if you don't do one-time-only, make it a 24 hour lockout. Or something. Anything other than this bot craziness. I don't think Zenimax comprehends how much this is *ruining* the experience of its customers in this otherwise very likable and playable game.

mark.sinclair4rwb17_ESO · April 2014

rogerdb16_ESO wrote: »

Slash8915 wrote: »

I'm either lucky, or I leveled too fast to see them. I've been to MANY public dungeons, and I have yet to see any bots. I see players camping the boss, but I do that too when I need soulgems. The only place I've seen bots are in the city in Coldharbour. But they were just standing there in a pile. A Bunch of lvl 3-5 characters in Coldharbour, lol.

Weird, i have experienced the same, and i'm almost afraid to post about it.
I don't doubt for one second that all these bots reports are true, it's just...i haven't seen one.
I have 2 chars (lvl7 and lvl12) and i haven't seen a bot, not in dungeons and not on ressource nodes.
I have so much iron and rough maple that i don't even bother to pick it up anymore.

I got an addon to show me the Skyshards I had missed early on in the game, so I went back to collect them, ran about 12-14 solo dungeons in the space of a few hours, from start up to level 30, and there were bots in every single one of them, at least 5 and as many as 12, an it's really starting to **** me off, I read the new patch notes....nothing, I cannot understand why they cannot have a few GMs going around booting these sleaze bags.

pizzamanub17_ESO · April 2014

I don't get why they are having so many problems filtering out the gold sellers. It's like they've never used string matching or something and it's a constant race with them banning certain words and the spammers just finding new ways to space things out and replace letters with punctuation.

Here's some free advice on limiting spam from gold farmers and web sites:

1) Don't allow broadcast messages or guild invites from any toon under level 5, and limit them to one per minute for under level 10.
2) Limit message frequency for all players regardless of level if you aren't already.
3) Don't allow unusual sentence or word structure, including more than a certain number of non-letter characters per line (i.e. no legit message needs more punctuation or spaces than letters.)
4) Limit broadcast message length to 100 characters.
5) Filter any combination of letters and non-letters that contain the letters "goldah" in that order (applies to other sites too).

Combining all of these restriction together along with some common sense will eliminate the ability for spammers to effectively bypass the word filters you already have in place.

Aenra · April 2014

if i may lighten the mood in my own thread, i would dare say this all would have made Philip *** or William Gibson (goes to his knees and bows) pretty damn proud! They foresaw it, we are slooowly coming to actually experience it..

One should also note that there -has- been some major improvement already. Have not seen an invisible bot farming nodes for, two days now?
A good first step, and i at least am veeery very appreciative of it. So a big thanks for that, let us hope the dungeon issue gets to be resolved as quick.

my_accountsb14_ESO · April 2014

The following statement is not racist, I assure you. It is merely based on experience and facts. If you want to minimize the bots and gold farmers, if not stop them outright, create an Asia Megaserver, and then block all Asia IP traffic to the NA and EUR megaservers and restrict all Asia accounts to their own server. I guarantee this will immediately solve the problem.
Games are often treated as a full time paying jobs in Asian countries, where a "foreman" will set up multiple PC's, purchase multiple game accounts, and then have three shifts of low paid employees playing one account 24x7 for the sole purpose of farming gold and materials to sell for real money on a website. That's great for them and I'm happy for anyone having the chance at a source of income but it ruins our enjoyment of the game that we're all paying REAL money to play.
If you eliminate their ability to set up these systems on our servers the problem will solve itself.