Slaughterfish on Land, eats Bots and Campers! (Also - Bad Apples!)

jawhaleyb14_ESO · May 2014

After another embarrassing death from becoming fish food, I had an idea... what if they created a land-based version of the slaughterfish, that would "guard" resource nodes?

Let's say you've got some lovely iron ore sitting there, and your favorite bot Fxhsgdfd comes up and starts harvesting. Sixty seconds later, the fishies spawn and oops, dead bot.

This means even human players can't pick their favorite resource spot and sit and repeatedly harvest. You've got sixty seconds to get in there, get your stuff, and then haul butt out of the attack radius.

Granted, you would still have ways to automate around this, but it would mean at the least you would have to temporarily leave the vicinity of the node, making legitimate players more likely to get a shot at the goodies.

== Bad Apples

The other (somewhat related) idea is to have occasional drops of "cursed" resources. these would be clearly marked in the loot popup ("Cursed Iron Ore" or whatever, in uncommon or rare item color to be attention-getting). If you put one of these in your pack, it completely horks your collecting process.

Examples:

"Hungry" ore - every 2-3 minutes "eats" normal iron ore from your inventory. You have to go to a healer / shrine to get uncursed.

"Polarity Reversal" ore - (shout out to Trek and Who fans ) - Subsequent harvest attempts subtract from your inventory and add to the resource. Continues until uncursed. Has nice effect that non-cursed players hitting the node you are at get bonus resource as long as you are "kind" enough to keep donating ore to the node :-)

"Stack Smasher" ore - makes each subsequent collection take up a fresh bag slot. You can still get 100 ore, It'll just cost you 34 slots to do it...

"Curse of WASD" - after each harvest, you are teleported 500 yards in a random direction, and your directional keys are remapped...

Anyway, I'm sure there are other creative curses to be had, anyone else feel free to throw in your flavor...

Xithian · May 2014

The goal of preventing bots and whatnot is to make the normal player experience better...not worse.

trinta · May 2014

I agree with Xithian. I've been known to tab out at a resource node (to work or check email or whatnot), so the fishies would get me. And I have auto-loot on, which means I'd pick up the cursed items.

Except I would have add-ons to filter it out, just like the bots...

trinta · May 2014

(My above post isn't to say that your ideas are bad, or that putting out ideas is bad, simply that these ideas would hit the regular playerbase at a higher level than the bots.)

ChairGraveyard · May 2014

Xithian wrote: »

The goal of preventing bots and whatnot is to make the normal player experience better...not worse.

Seems to be a trend on these forums of players suggesting ways to make the game less fun, misguidedly thinking bots will be affected at all (hint to these people: they won't, we will, end of story).

rawne1980b16_ESO · May 2014

Here is how things have gone so far.

Dungeon bosses loot put on a timer .... bots found other ways, your average player has things a bit tougher.

Loot containers nerfed .... bots found other ways, your average player has things a bit tougher.

Pretty soon i'm sure harvest nodes will be nerfed .... bots will find other ways, your average player will have things tougher.

I'm also sure, with the increase in improvement mats being sold, they will be nerfed too .... bots will find other ways, your average player will have things tougher.

Nothing they have done has countered the bots, it's just moved them to other areas.

All they have managed to do with any degree of success is annoy some of the player base.

That's never a good thing.

ChairGraveyard · May 2014

rawne1980b16_ESO wrote: »

Loot containers nerfed .... bots found other ways, your average player has things a bit tougher.

Another thing to consider is that this nerf to provisioning/loot containers directly helped botters.

How? Because they already had lots of recipes and motifs.

Now those same recipes and motifs are super super rare and the botters are the only ones with any supply.

Ergo, ZOS directly drove demand for and the price of botters' services up via this change.

(An example in another thread was purple VR5 recipes - going for 300,000g in game, while botters are selling them for $3-4 real money because they have thousands.)

Anyway I agree entirely with your post - hampering gameplay of normal players does nothing at all to bots and serves only to tick off players.

Reymas · May 2014

Better yet, the cursed resource could just fear you away from the node, doing you no harm, but if you're a bot, messing up your macro.

As someone who is a regular bot-buster (I ain't afraid of no bots), I would much prefer to see neutral mobs who have knockback and AOE spawn near nodes. This would allow players to take the initiative and kite those mobs to the bots.

I do this in Stonefalls on my VR7 main pretty regularly. I'll hit a Betty Netch and kite her over. They have a charged knock-back. A couple of those in a row and the bot is nowhere near a resource.

The trick, however, is that many nodes are out of range from these mobs. So one mob (neutral) per node that is like a Betty Netch would be great.

AOEs are ok too, people often use Bull Netches and kill the bots over and over wasting their soulgems, but the knock-back is better IMO because because I believe there is some kind of alert that happens when the bot runs out of SGs. I've seen a dead bot phase out or get up after a while and run away manually controlled. Just moving them away from the nodes seems like a more effective disruption.

IDK there's a lot of ways to deal with it (and I recognize that it shouldn't be the players' responsibility to do so, even if it is a slot of fun).

Also, PSA: If you see a high level getting beat on by a low level mob and he's next to a node, please don't kill the mob. See here for more details: http://www.reddit.com/r/elderscrollsonline/comments/2523jv/psa_if_you_see_a_high_level_player_in_a_low_level/