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Don't ban the bots!
Don't ban the bots! that's a waste of time. It takes them seconds to create a new one to replace it.
Instead:
Ban all the people buying raw materials from the bots to fund their RMT business.
Ban all the people buying gold from the RMT business.
and
Ban the accounts they use to store the gold for the RMT business (will have thousands of transactions going to them a day).
Do this and the bots will leave.
Instead:
Ban all the people buying raw materials from the bots to fund their RMT business.
Ban all the people buying gold from the RMT business.
and
Ban the accounts they use to store the gold for the RMT business (will have thousands of transactions going to them a day).
Do this and the bots will leave.
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Blackwolfe5✭✭✭How about...
Doing both. Also, RMT traders are clever, if they sell raw materials they do it so that it seems legit. They use clever ways to get the gold to the goldbuyers so that it is not as easily detected/traced. They don't keep all the gold in one place (most likely).0 -
Sariias✭✭✭The bots are a lot easier to find than their customers.
If Zenimax is sorting through and tracking all in game transactions, they can and will find those customers. I'm assuming Zenimax can see everyone's account and everyone's inventory whenever they want. I'm assuming they can use such data to hunt through and find goldfarmer stock mules- but there are millions of accounts to look through, and probably hundreds of ways goldfarmers can use their armies of accounts to launder and trade gold making everything even more troublesome.
But the bots don't care about their customers, and they don't care about the game. The goldfarmer's purpose is money and they don't care about the welfare of anyone else. They won't quit just because their customers get banned. They'll keep spamming for more customers.1 -
Natjur✭✭✭✭✭
✭No one buys directly from a bot, they have 'middle toons' to clean up the trans. Most people buying raw resources will have no way to tell if its a bot or not.
Yes its a good idea to ban gold buyers, but its very hard to prove or enforce.0 -
Except there may be people that buy from characters that are bots but they do not know it. So they should be punished for buying from a source that may or may not have gained those resources illegitimately?
They need to figure out how to break the bots before banning players like you want.0 -
The bots are a lot easier to find than their customers.
If Zenimax is sorting through and tracking all in game transactions, they can and will find those customers. I'm assuming Zenimax can see everyone's account and everyone's inventory whenever they want. I'm assuming they can use such data to hunt through and find goldfarmer stock mules- but there are millions of accounts to look through, and probably hundreds of ways goldfarmers can use their armies of accounts to launder and trade gold making everything even more troublesome.
But the bots don't care about their customers, and they don't care about the game. The goldfarmer's purpose is money and they don't care about the welfare of anyone else. They won't quit just because their customers get banned. They'll keep spamming for more customers.
As for the tracking side of this, Zenimax has said they can trace all transactions on a given account through their database logs. So while it may be a large effort they can trace all transactions to and from accounts.0 -
Blackwolfe5 wrote: »How about...
Doing both. Also, RMT traders are clever, if they sell raw materials they do it so that it seems legit. They use clever ways to get the gold to the goldbuyers so that it is not as easily detected/traced. They don't keep all the gold in one place (most likely).
I've been reporting people selling mass amounts of upgrade items. Most of them say they purchased thousands of raw materials from one person to refine for the mats they are selling. While they can be clever the simple truth is they don't have to be since they're not being targeted at the moment.0 -
NombreDeLaBeast wrote: »Except there may be people that buy from characters that are bots but they do not know it. So they should be punished for buying from a source that may or may not have gained those resources illegitimately?
They need to figure out how to break the bots before banning players like you want.
If someone purchases 50 stacks of raw jute and doesn't think twice about it there's a real problem... (yes that is a real example, one of the people I reported for trying to sell 750 Dreugh wax said he bought 50 stacks of raw jute from a person and didn't see anything wrong with it).
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class101✭✭✭It takes also seconds to banned people to recreate a new account so your argument has no value0 -
Sariias✭✭✭It takes also seconds to banned people to recreate a new account so your argument has no value
For the goldselling companies, yeah, since they probably have a heap of stolen or fake credit card numbers and are use to making accounts on the fly, but not so for the players who bought gold and items from goldsellers.
When they get banned, they usually don't come back, and they can't use that credit card again with the company anyway. At least, I'm assuming Zenimax is banning credit card numbers based on who they ban in game- I hope they are.0 -
Dekkameron✭✭✭✭✭BenjaminKacher_ESO wrote: »said he bought 50 stacks of raw jute from a person and didn't see anything wrong with it).
What on earth was he going to do with that much jute?
- Veteran Combat Librarian -0 -
Cry_Wolfe✭✭✭eve.stratics.com/thursday-interview-ccp-stillman/
trying to find a link to an industry forum where Stillman was a guest speaker, the page had alot of graphical representations of RMT operation visibility and how to detect it.
The long story short:
players are messy. interaction between players tends to have a random factor.
Bot's aren't messy, Bots and their handlers have highly regular interactions, and little to do with any one else.
Knowing this, it is a fairly straightforward to streamline automated detection processes.
To some degree RMT is also easy to detect, but can be disguised. I wish i could find that link : /... it graphically depicted the detection models
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Dekkameron wrote: »BenjaminKacher_ESO wrote: »said he bought 50 stacks of raw jute from a person and didn't see anything wrong with it).
What on earth was he going to do with that much jute?
Refine it and sell off the Tempers for a massive profit... or get banned... one of the two.
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Strontium✭✭✭HarryWolfe wrote: »eve.stratics.com/thursday-interview-ccp-stillman/
trying to find a link to an industry forum where Stillman was a guest speaker, the page had alot of graphical representations of RMT operation visibility and how to detect it.
The long story short:
players are messy. interaction between players tends to have a random factor.
Bot's aren't messy, Bots and their handlers have highly regular interactions, and little to do with any one else.
Knowing this, it is a fairly straightforward to streamline automated detection processes.
To some degree RMT is also easy to detect, but can be disguised. I wish i could find that link : /... it graphically depicted the detection models
And we see how well their automated banning process has worked. How many thousands of accounts were banned by mistake? I'm sorry, but there will always need to be human (read: not some person in some foreign country a la customer service) interaction.2 -
ciannait✭✭✭A guy asked in zone chat the other day what the best company was to buy gold from. I reported him and sincerely hope they permaban his azz.2 -
Brakkar✭✭✭Zeni, please write script that would mark all characters with incomprehensible names like ktkdjrkt etc viable targets for open world PvP?
I am sure we could work something out, after all it is a win - win solution.
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If a bot is reported by x amount of people they could get flagged for ffa pvp. Hell why not flag the BOTs that are found to be bots as ffa pvp and let us loot them.1 -
joshank13Soul ShrivenWell the fastest way to remove Boter's and gold farmers is to have ESO introduce a purchase page on the website for real cash making gold and items accessible to all players who are willing to spend money almost instantly killing the farming/Boting market.0
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Well the fastest way to remove Boter's and gold farmers is to have ESO introduce a purchase page on the website for real cash making gold and items accessible to all players who are willing to spend money almost instantly killing the farming/Boting market.
This also would cause the game to become "pay2win" which would probably lose them more subscriptions than the bots are. EvE Online has had the best answer to the gold farming bots (although gold farmers do still exist) by introducing an in game method of selling time codes for ISK (gold). This allows someone to get gold for their real money while not actually adding anything to the economy. On top of that it's a great business move for the company as they then have thousands of un-redeemed time codes in a virtual world. However I do not believe this game company is mature enough to take on such a massive undertaking to back a system like that.
Over all I'm against the "pay2win" market even if it does kill off the majority of the gold bots.
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