bots farming instant-respawn nodes, out of hand

Omniphonic · May 2014

they didn't make a dent in the bot population and by now the damage has been done. I found this game unsuitable for purpose, unusable, and fraudulent in being sold as a finished product. Until developer's learn how to protect their playerbase from rapacious activities of gold-farmers, this genre of games is dead in my opinion. I've already uninstalled and since they refused my refund illegally for an arbitrary reason I contacted my credit card company to secure a refund for an unfinished, incomplete, and unusable product.

Westcoast14_ESO · May 2014

heh, ok what I was seeing in game makes much more sense. I noticed a dramatic fall off in bot activity because areas that used to have no nodes suddenly had nodes again. My initial thought was, oh, maybe a lot of bots were banned. It seems they just moved to more fertile ground.

Seriously though, as one earlier poster mentioned, something like this could be turned into a completely deadly honey trap for bots and exploiters. I just find it extremely unlikely any MMO provider would set anything like that up.

gladen5rwb17_ESO · May 2014

On top of this problem we now have active player bots. They have the same mixed letter names but they behave as if a person is at the keyboard. None of them ever, ever loot a chest, they are in the bare bones newbie outfits with shackles on. However, they are in ever run mode. They just run from node to node on a path mapped out for them. They all have a weapon, fight mobs now, harvest all day and all night.
Some do teleport still, but most do not. So what does this mean? If they are just in ever run mode, harvesting, they are not breaking the TOS. I have no doubt they belong to a bot guild and simply place all items in the bank, as they do use the bank, then head back out to ever run.
So, how does ESO deal with these types of bots?

UrQuan · May 2014

Funny thing is, the other day it seemed like every jute node in Stonefalls had bots there, but just now I was running around in Stonefalls and didn't see a single one. Maybe they banned a whole load of bot accounts?

Rantog · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

If I were ZOS, here's what I would do:
Set up some obvious "honey pot" exploits like these jute nodes,spread some "ZOMG check out these l33t exploitz on youtube/facebook/twitter" counter intelligence on the interwebs, then set up logging at these specific locations and ban EVERYONE they find exploiting it.

Except the Damage done by these mats flooding the game is Real - whether the ability for them to do this is a Trap or not doesn't undo the harm.

Allowing it to continue to Catch them at some later tine is like letting a group of arsonists go around burning people's homes to the ground so they can arrest them later... the homes still get burned down, regardless of the plan to do something about it at some future point.

Rantog · May 2014

Anyone wishing to SEE this activity --

One of those days you're only on to chat with friends / guildmates? Park on a node - open it and Hold it open the entire time you're on, preventing a bot use of it.

This v is not why we pay to play a Multiplayer game.

http://youtu.be/60Vb05CcAzQ

And players shouldn't be so frustrated with the Bots that this v is a huge source of entertainment.

http://youtu.be/Gg3kmBVams0

Rantog · May 2014

Just found a really great, Legitimate Player just Honestly Farming jute..

He is invisible except for his name on pointing at him (and has a name in violation of terms)
He is harvesting an instant-spawn node.
When I use a netch to gas him to death - revives Instantly! No ghost time at all.

http://youtu.be/WCKWIII7hQE
^ notice that after dying, they are able to be alive taking damage again in less than 1 second.

AlliN · May 2014

So bleeding what ? Is people having more legendary crafting mats then you really such a big deal ? Seriously... I'd love to know if it's anything more then people just being jealouse and crying over the fact that someone else has more toys then they do...

Are you serious? Maybe let's just type cheat codes in to get GM set, all legendaries, insta-kill sword and invincibility...
Do you realise, that one of the main purposes of mmo is to play to upgrade your character, not to buy end game gear cheap, becasue botters made it *** inexpensive?

This is no different then people "actively" sitting in dungeons "not" actualy playing the game to "find" botters to report...

I can't even reply to the stupidity of that magnitude with an answer that would not be a bannable offense.

Rantog · May 2014

Gamemaster Kickingbots just took out a whole slew of them at the hot-spot in Stonefalls.

Awesome!

Glad I had chat turned on for once - or I would have missed his request for us to whisper of any Bot activity...

zeuseason · May 2014

Report report report and report some more.

Rantog · May 2014

zeuseason wrote: »

Report report report and report some more.

Honestly, I don't even bother most of the time any longer.
The service queue is so long that by the time they do get around to your report, the odds are that bot / farmer/ exploit account is already banned (by a GM IN-Game) and replaced.. leaving nothing to investigate.

As example, I can Still go to Bal Foyen and find the same ghosting-tele hack harvesting bots that I reported just after launch. The same ones.. same names, same user ID, same tutorial clothing... doing the Same automated harvest path.

That is the result of repeatedly reporting them on several different characters over the course of Weeks.

Compared to..
Tonight.. The videos above - and over 20 Bots all harvesting within visual range of one location.. more Under the ground than over, some using Instant-Rez hacks, some warping to other nodes if you pull a netch to the one they are on.. just a blatant "we won't be bothered" exploit fest.

But a GM comes on and asks for bots... shows up and asks us to step aside.
90 seconds later, over 20 banned bot accounts.

For the next half hour, a couple of us roam around the outlying areas chatting and pointing out some bots, and the GM seems to show up as we find them and *poof* no more bot.

Just before server-down, the original area had recovered about 6 or 7 bots, and the GM came back to wipe them out just before maintenance.

If All of those bots are replaced, their owners just had to shell out over $1000 in replacement accounts.
Not only is that $1k a major disincentive to those bots Returning - it is a $$$ bonus to Zenimax for trying.

ONE GM spending about an hour in the game - and he kept coming back because no one could find any bots to report.

One GM.

So imagine what the effect would be of having One Full-Time GM in the game.

People have tried to argue "a GM can't be everywhere, the bots have hundreds of places... blah blah" but they are ignoring the result of a GM showing up.

Banned bots = fewer bots to find.
Fewer bots to find = easier for the GM to get around to any given one(or group)
As fewer are in the game to find, the ones remaining are Repeat-Banned more often, making their individual Costs to keep returning, Too expensive to continue.

gladen5rwb17_ESO · May 2014

Rantog wrote: »

zeuseason wrote: »

Report report report and report some more.

Honestly, I don't even bother most of the time any longer.
The service queue is so long that by the time they do get around to your report, the odds are that bot / farmer/ exploit account is already banned (by a GM IN-Game) and replaced.. leaving nothing to investigate.

As example, I can Still go to Bal Foyen and find the same ghosting-tele hack harvesting bots that I reported just after launch. The same ones.. same names, same user ID, same tutorial clothing... doing the Same automated harvest path.

That is the result of repeatedly reporting them on several different characters over the course of Weeks.

Compared to..
Tonight.. The videos above - and over 20 Bots all harvesting within visual range of one location.. more Under the ground than over, some using Instant-Rez hacks, some warping to other nodes if you pull a netch to the one they are on.. just a blatant "we won't be bothered" exploit fest.

But a GM comes on and asks for bots... shows up and asks us to step aside.
90 seconds later, over 20 banned bot accounts.

For the next half hour, a couple of us roam around the outlying areas chatting and pointing out some bots, and the GM seems to show up as we find them and *poof* no more bot.

Just before server-down, the original area had recovered about 6 or 7 bots, and the GM came back to wipe them out just before maintenance.

If All of those bots are replaced, their owners just had to shell out over $1000 in replacement accounts.
Not only is that $1k a major disincentive to those bots Returning - it is a $$$ bonus to Zenimax for trying.

ONE GM spending about an hour in the game - and he kept coming back because no one could find any bots to report.

One GM.

So imagine what the effect would be of having One Full-Time GM in the game.

People have tried to argue "a GM can't be everywhere, the bots have hundreds of places... blah blah" but they are ignoring the result of a GM showing up.

Banned bots = fewer bots to find.
Fewer bots to find = easier for the GM to get around to any given one(or group)
As fewer are in the game to find, the ones remaining are Repeat-Banned more often, making their individual Costs to keep returning, Too expensive to continue.

This is not the solution. Until the public paying accounts are banned for life for buying from gold sellers this will never end. This is a massive multi-million dollar black market industry that has it's claws in any game that does not subscribe to illuminating the cause instead of the effect.

By doing random checks on accounts and looking for gold buyers then banning for life and using an in game warning in big bright yellow letters stating a number of accounts have been permanently banned for buying from gold sellers this farce will continue.

$1000 real dollars is not even pocket change to these industries. Feed the company and it thrives, kill the customer base and it dies. (In this game)

Rantog · May 2014

gladen5rwb17_ESO wrote: »

$1000 real dollars is not even pocket change to these industries. Feed the company and it thrives, kill the customer base and it dies. (In this game)

Ah, but $1000 in Costs when they aren't making Anywhere Near that from what they produce in that same time frame - Does work.

The moment the costs of buying replacement accounts exceeds the income of selling gold produced - the smarter bot owners will vanish instantly, the dimwits will only be around a little bit longer before they learn to add and subtract.

No game has ever eliminated Bots or gold farmers without Direct In-Game Action by game staff.. generally seen as/titled GMs.

And in every case where a game Did remove them, and later ceased use of GMs - they Returned.

So I don't see what would make you think that using GMs is not the right way to approach the problem.
---

Banned For Life - I don't know what you mean. The accounts they ban ARE banned for life, they are simply turned off, and no longer function at all.
They aren't likely to come along later and say "gee, you know.. maybe we need more Bots in the game. Let's un-ban those guys we banned a while back."

I think you are assuming that they can somehow prevent one of them from buying a New account to return on. That would require access to information they don't have.

The closest thing they have to detecting a Bot runner using a new account would be their IP -but it isn't exactly difficult for them to fake their IP address.
Credit Cards don't work any longer, since we can now buy disposable ones and charge them with just the $ needed, and throw them away.
And the machine Mac address isn't shared over the network.. and even if it were - it too can be faked.

There is just No Way for them to keep someone out of the game if that person is willing to keep forking over the $ to buy new accounts. There is nothing to indicate it is the same person.
---

by doing random checks...

So your solution is to Not try to stop the sellers, and go only after the buyers?

How does that make sense?
They already do both.
And it hasn't had any impact.

They tried Several rounds of mass bannings based on Buyer activity and Seller activity - and the number of bots and hacks, INCREASED.

Then - they gave us Visible, Actual, In-Game GMs who would ask us where the bots where, and come Ban them all. The bot population Immediately started to decline.

Westcoast14_ESO · May 2014

If they can get in the neighborhood of 60,000 resources a day, with perks on another character to do the extraction, that's probably 1000's of upgrade mats (from green to gold) and 10's of thousands in gold.

If the RMT prices I see (in the unsolicited daily in game e-mails I receive from the RMT providers) are correct, this probably means a bot is worth over 2000 USD per day. If that's the case, you would have to ban them in less than half hour of botting to make it economically unfeasible even if they have to repurchase the game with each ban.

If you fix the infinite spawn nodes so they have to teleport from node location to node location, even without infinite node spawn, it would still mean having to ban them within maybe an hour to make it not economically viable to bot resource nodes.

So it seems you need to either nerf extraction for everyone, which would be a shame, or change it so anything like upgrade materials and trait materials are handled differently from the basic ingot etc. extraction. For example delivering them via mail to the player as a special refined items chest after a delay of sufficient length to give GM's a chance to actually detect and ban the botters.

Catches_the_Sun · May 2014

BKTHNDR wrote: »

Why do you all think that ZOS has no interest in taking care of the bot situation? That's absurd. You can enter any public dungeon as of late and see that the bots there have been eliminated for the most part.

Read the patch notes and State of the Game posts. They are working on it! They can't just wave a Wabbajack and have the problem disappear! This is a complex issue that plagues many MMOs. If you see bots, report them. And trust that the team does care!

Because they take no action against the buyers. They come in-game now all flashy, asking for you to point out the bots, then they go destroy them in front of other players. It's a great way to give the impression that you're dealing with the bot problem, but until they start banning the buyers, I won't take them seriously.

They'll continue to make subtle changes that hurt all of us, such as the loot from dungeon bosses or the chances to find rare motifs & recipes. Every time they make one of these changes, the bots adjust. They supposedly stopped them from teleporting to nodes, but they're still doing it. That is, until they have found a more efficient way to hack the nodes, which is what you're seeing now in the starter zones. You change the dungeon boss loot mechanics & now you have bots all over the overland areas. They're in beginning quest areas in full large groups of 24 at times. You ban 1k during peak time for show & they create 1k more characters in minutes. It doesn't slow down. For the love of the Hist, they're even in Coldharbour & some even achieved Veteran Rank. If a bot can go undetected long enough to do that, I have valid concerns.

My point is that no matter what actions you take against the bots/gold sellers, as long as they have a market to sell to, they will continue to find glitches, hacks & loopholes, and they will exploit the hell out of them. That's what they do. They have no skin in the game, they don't care if they're "banned". Start throwing that ban hammer at the gold buyers though & see how people react.

Rantog · May 2014

Catches_the_Sun wrote: »

Because they take no action against the buyers.

Except, they Do.
They ban gold Buyers as fast as Sellers. That was the bulk of the first big ban wave, and a good part of the Second one.

It is why people were claiming they were banned because their guild mates/friends loaned them money to buy a horse.. etc.

crush83 · May 2014

Rantog wrote: »

Catches_the_Sun wrote: »

Because they take no action against the buyers.

Except, they Do.
They ban gold Buyers as fast as Sellers. That was the bulk of the first big ban wave, and a good part of the Second one.

It is why people were claiming they were banned because their guild mates/friends loaned them money to buy a horse.. etc.

I haven't heard anything official that says they banned any gold buyers.

The first wave was supposedly bank dupers and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

Catches_the_Sun · May 2014

Rantog wrote: »

Catches_the_Sun wrote: »

Because they take no action against the buyers.

Except, they Do.
They ban gold Buyers as fast as Sellers. That was the bulk of the first big ban wave, and a good part of the Second one.

It is why people were claiming they were banned because their guild mates/friends loaned them money to buy a horse.. etc.

Wrong. And I think I know the exact story you're referring to...the one that was on Reddit that day. The lady was banned for sending her husband 50k to buy a horse. NOTHING happened to the husband, who was the recipient of the mail, which is what confused her in the first place. I have seen people on a Trade Guild channel laughing it up about buying gold. That was 3 weeks ago & they're still here.

Westcoast14_ESO · May 2014

Another possibility is to leverage the game's existing social mechanisms by trade locking certain classes of items (ex. the ones RMT seems to try and profit from) to guilds. Couple this with a trade reversion mechanism and a delay in activating guild trade and you could strongly disincentivize players going to RMT for items/gold.

By trade reversion I mean the following: if an item was received from an account later banned for providing RMT services, those items and any in game currency received are removed from the players account. If the items/gold are missing, the player gets a debit against their account for that item (or an equivalent) and any gold received are removed from the game. Until the debit is paid off, the player account is trade locked for a geometrically escalating amount of in game play time per offense.

To protect players, you could delay the activation of guild trade for maybe 4-8 in game hours after joining, so they can see what kind of guild they are in before potentially being subjected to any kind of accidental/incidental trade reversion or trade penalty.

An exception to this could be the new open trade guilds that are described as being subject to bidding for with in game currency. Presumably there would be a small number of these making monitoring of their activity much easier.

Jyntai_Bow · May 2014

Where are the GMs? This is nuts. They are EVERYWHERE.

Maotti · May 2014

Anyone in the AD areas on the EU server?

UrQuan · May 2014

Jyntai_Bow wrote: »

Where are the GMs? This is nuts. They are EVERYWHERE.

Well, GM Movori is wiping them out in Stonefalls right now on the NA server...

crush83 · May 2014

Damn, I was considering resubscribing because I hadn't seen many bot threads lately. Now this...

jkbennettb14a_ESO · May 2014

crush83 wrote: »

...and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

This was not considered an exploit by ZOS. Far as I know, no one was banned for it.

crush83 · May 2014

jkbennettb14a_ESO wrote: »

crush83 wrote: »

...and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

This was not considered an exploit by ZOS. Far as I know, no one was banned for it.

Can you point to where ZOS has stated that it's not an exploit? I had three friends of friends who apparently claimed to be banned for this action as an exploit during the first wave.

jkbennettb14a_ESO · May 2014

crush83 wrote: »

jkbennettb14a_ESO wrote: »

crush83 wrote: »

...and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

This was not considered an exploit by ZOS. Far as I know, no one was banned for it.

Can you point to where ZOS has stated that it's not an exploit? I had three friends of friends who apparently claimed to be banned for this action as an exploit during the first wave.

Here you go. Was confirmed by ZOS_JessicaFolsom

Rantog · May 2014

Westcoast14_ESO wrote: »

If they can get in the neighborhood of 60,000 resources a day, with perks on another character to do the extraction, that's probably 1000's of upgrade mats (from green to gold) and 10's of thousands in gold.

If the RMT prices I see (in the unsolicited daily in game e-mails I receive from the RMT providers) are correct, this probably means a bot is worth over 2000 USD per day. If that's the case, you would have to ban them in less than half hour of botting to make it economically unfeasible even if they have to repurchase the game with each ban.

Your math is.. quite a bit off I'm afraid.
Not to downplay the importance of the issue, but by your estimation, a single stack of 100 raw jute would be worth $3.33

If I take my BEST session of refining (with 3/3 unravel), and consider that to be the Normal rate...
Then based on the price lists we keep getting in In-Game mail selling the improvement mats and gold.. and assuming the actual Jute produced is sold as well..

I get something like $0.21 .. 21 cents per 100 raw jute, 600 times / day / bot.
About $120 US.

So any time a given bot user's bots are banned 3 times in one day - they have suffered a Loss for the day.

GreySix · May 2014

Rantog wrote: »

Compared to..
Tonight.. The videos above - and over 20 Bots all harvesting within visual range of one location.. more Under the ground than over, some using Instant-Rez hacks, some warping to other nodes if you pull a netch to the one they are on.. just a blatant "we won't be bothered" exploit fest.

But a GM comes on and asks for bots... shows up and asks us to step aside.
90 seconds later, over 20 banned bot accounts.

For the next half hour, a couple of us roam around the outlying areas chatting and pointing out some bots, and the GM seems to show up as we find them and *poof* no more bot. One GM.

Dang, think I'd pay to see that in live action.

Rantog · May 2014

crush83 wrote: »

I haven't heard anything official that says they banned any gold buyers.

The first wave was supposedly bank dupers and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

That was the Second wave - the First was gold buyers and sellers almost exclusively. They were all over the gaming community sites complaining that they were banned because someone Loaned them gold to buy a horse or a bank upgrade.

I don't doubt some were caught by that actual scenario - but since their Friend/Guildmate etc would have the same story.. easy to appeal.

Where as - a gold seller isn't likely to come to their rescue .. nor would the fact that they "Loaned" that quantity of gold to numerous different players work in their favor.

The Second wave was mostly the guild bank dupe, a number of gold buyers and sellers, and a long list of Mistaken bans.

Logging on/off to loot containers didn't result in any bans -they told us specifically that it wasn't an exploit but that they were going to make changes to make it less likely to be abused.

Rantog · May 2014

crush83 wrote: »

jkbennettb14a_ESO wrote: »

crush83 wrote: »

...and abusers of the logoff/logon container exploit last I heard.

This was not considered an exploit by ZOS. Far as I know, no one was banned for it.

Can you point to where ZOS has stated that it's not an exploit? I had three friends of friends who apparently claimed to be banned for this action as an exploit during the first wave.

Need Confirmation is Motif Farming a Bannable Offense
ZOS_JessicaFolsom Administrator, Moderator admin
April 24 Staff Post
This is not something we consider an exploit or bannable offense. Though it's working as designed, we do intend to make some improvements to the current design.