yea I saw a message last night that said a GM was logging in and going bot hunting. the server message said who to whisper if they found bots. very nice.

Not sure I see this as a positive.

If you cant kill the boss yourself then whats the point? I thought the complaint was so many bots you couldnt kill the boss. if a dungeon doesnt have a skyshard to use as a marker for credit then what?

So if they do this anyway then why worry about bots killing bosses?Dupes already destroyed what little bit of economy the game might have had.

But I guess it does show theyre doing SOMETHING. but if that is all they can do to combat bots then its pretty bad.

wiz12268b14_ESO wrote: »

Dupes already destroyed what little bit of economy the game might have had.

I love comments like this!

That is totally in your head my friend, and it has been proven in many other MMOs that have had duping bugs (pretty much every MMO at some stage or another). The economies in those game are still intact, and they were far more susceptible to the effects (being a single, server wide economy) that the individual / fractured economies that exist in ESO.

Bots need to be removed permanently. If this task is too great for ZoS then the game has a very bad future.Myself and others can bear spam in chat, but a human circle jerk in every other dungeon is just sad face.

I would like to see banned bots be put in shackles in towns with baskets of throw able rotten tomatoes for us to use.

Would be a lot more enjoyable than frog racing.

Blu3d0gd3m0cr8ts wrote: »

The bots are back.

Just ignore this guy he is a chronic complainer...

But to speak to the topic it was nice to see ZOS in there doing something. All night I must have gone to 12 different dungeons while sky shard hunting and the only bots I saw were the ones dropping dead.

I was able to get completion and had 0 problems...it was great..

So thanks again ZOS for keeping your word and starting to do something about the bots.

They are raking in tons of cash from the thousands of bot accounts...so you are right by saying they are doing something. If they started to warn people about account and personal info safety when buying gold, then I might take it seriously

I would love to see them flag these bots for pvp in public dungeons and let us do the dirty work for them.

Turelus wrote: »

I hate to be negative in a thread with awesome news but...

You can't hurt a boss or be damaged by it? Their current solution is to not let anyone kill the boss?

i will guess it was one way to make sure who was bots or not a non-bot would quickly realise something wrong when they cant damage a boss

LadyChaos wrote: »

I posted this in the complaint thread but I like this thread a lot more. So for the guys who don't read like every forum like a junky:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/87451/the-gms-are-hunting-bots#latest

---

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/86793/so-the-legends-are-true#latest

Seriously thank you for posting this...it is awesome!

Unleash hell, ZoS!

Oogaci wrote: »

The bots/farmers have already begun working around this by scripting a path for the bots to run around in the open world .

Yup, been watching one for the last couple of hours in Stormhaven, reported twice, still there hoovering up every ore, wood and plant node they find and also seem to be immune from aggro it's running right past level 20 wolves and at level 4 it' not gettig attacked.

It's great to see ZOS has begun to take visible action but sadly it also shows how much they lost control before they did. A long way t ogo, hopefully they've got ideas how to deal with it in the long-run, GMs policing dungeons isn't the answer.

Of course, since ZOS are refusing to ban the BUYERS then the RMT have no motivation to leave.

Vuldan_Ironhand wrote: »

Really? You want praise for posting you observed ZoS doing something very few others have seen, and so far I have no evidence to support your statement or claim. Interesting. It's sad that you are seeking affirmation for something they should have had under control before release, as EVERY game manufacturer knows your going to get bots and gold sellers and it is possible to put controls in place to stop them. Nice that you saw this, but so far in the last 2 days, I have seen bots all over the landscape, both standing and so perfectly timed on resources, and in dungeons. Reported them, so we shall see.

The screen captures and videos make it easy enough to verify that something is happening. If you want to see it happen, you do need to hang out in a dungeon near the boss spawns.

They knew they were going to have bots in the game before game launch. To assume that this is a problem that can be solved prior to the release of the game is incorrect. The bot software writers will adapt to the game, and any subsequent changes to the game, in a matter of hours. When the bot writers have complete control of the client machine and all of the client software, including the game client, it will always be possible to find a gap in the armor that a bot writer can exploit. The measures to make those gaps as small as possible and hard to exploit have costs in terms of performance and expense.

The public displays by the "Gamemaster" characters are not really an effective means to combat bots and the people camping the boss spawn sites, and I think most people know this. However, they serve two purposes. First, it shows that they are doing something, and doing something that has often been requested, so they get a PR boost from it. Except for a few holdouts, the tone in the forum related to bots has changed considerably in the last couple days.

They also allow the Zenimax employees who are working behind the scenes on this the opportunity to blow off some steam and have some fun. Detecting and dealing with gold spammers is relatively simple compared to detecting and dealing with botting software, and that will certainly contribute to employee stress.

Ultimately, the bot mitigation will be entirely behind the scenes. Hopefully, each iteration in this war will raise the effort bar on the part of the bot writers. They cannot afford to eliminate the problem entirely, but as Zenimax adapts to the adaptations by the bot writers, we will see some reduction.

Please note that I am not specifically mentioning the boss camping. Boss camping is popularly called botting in the forums here, but it is clear that Zenimax is trying to walk a fine line here between attended and unattended campers. They appear to be not messing with the people who move out of the way and allow them to move back into position afterwards. Camping is the result of an intentional design point in the game that does not require any special software to take advantage of. Until they address that, you will see active players, who may be stacks of Level 3 Templars with funny names all moving in concert, farming bosses and getting out of the way when the GM comes around.

KerinKor wrote: »

Oogaci wrote: »

The bots/farmers have already begun working around this by scripting a path for the bots to run around in the open world .

Yup, been watching one for the last couple of hours in Stormhaven, reported twice, still there.

They are a organization to make money, of course they will try to adapt.

The point is ZOS put GMs in game to (meta)physically counter them. It's a huge step I couldn't be more pleased as a start of active GMs.

That's why subs > F2P IMO. Subs pay for in-game CS, not just content. This is why I was HAPPY that ESO was going sub. I'm happy to pay for services. Glad to see it's starting to pay off. Hope to see it continue.