ZoS please tell me you are sending cease and desist letters to these bot websites.

zinoviy22b14_ESO · May 2014

Now I'm no lawyer but I do remember Square-Enix seeking legal action against gold farmers and botters back in '06 for FFXI, I also remember Blizzard seeking legal action against the guy that created that slider-glider, something like that, program in '10 - '11.

Bots are breaking your product. Just as Apple and Sony went crazy on people jailbreaking their stuff you guys have the right to try to seek legal options.

AlexDougherty · May 2014

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

Saerydoth · May 2014

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

It *can* also apply in countries that have an extradition treaty with the US, although prosecuting such things is still MUCH more difficult than things that are located in the US. The reason the "glider" bot was so easily prosecuted is because the author of it was based in the US.

The countries that you are avoiding naming though, do NOT have an extradition treaty with the US, so this means that US law does not apply to them in any way. They are quite literally outside the law and nothing can be done to them.

Phinix1 · May 2014

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

Simple fix: Deny accounts based in these countries from purchasing or accessing the game. Don't want to play by the rules of civil society? Then fluff off back to the dark age!

Also not naming any names (but my tongue is definitely bleeding.)

Diakos · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

Simple fix: Deny accounts based in these countries from purchasing or accessing the game. Don't want to play by the rules of civil society? Then fluff off back to the dark age!

Also not naming any names (but my tongue is definitely bleeding.)

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location.
So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Tarwin · May 2014

I wonder how well ESO would do if a server was set up in China? I'm imagining the shenanigans and people posting

我不能把它了！因此，许多真实的人打..禁止他们！

Google translate "I can't take it any more! So many real people playing .. ban them!!"

wrlifeboil · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

Simple fix: Deny accounts based in these countries from purchasing or accessing the game. Don't want to play by the rules of civil society? Then fluff off back to the dark age!

Also not naming any names (but my tongue is definitely bleeding.)

Gold farming in video games is legal in Australia. True story.

JunkyardWolf · May 2014

Goldah is based in China, good luck going after them. but here ya go

G4P LIMITED
LuGuZuoBiao F building,
No. 199 LuLong Road,YueLu District
ChangSha,HuNan
Changsha Xunyou Network Technology Co., Ltd.
Furong District,Changsha City, Hunan Province, China . No. 400,Room 508 Renmin Road, guo ji IT cheng

wrlifeboil · May 2014

JunkyardWolf wrote: »

Goldah is based in China, good luck going after them. but here ya go

G4P LIMITED
LuGuZuoBiao F building,
No. 199 LuLong Road,YueLu District
ChangSha,HuNan
Changsha Xunyou Network Technology Co., Ltd.
Furong District,Changsha City, Hunan Province, China . No. 400,Room 508 Renmin Road, guo ji IT cheng

Gold selling in video games is illegal in China but like @JunkyardWolf wrote, good luck with enforcement.

Phinix1 · May 2014

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

Niliu · May 2014

This player does not condone vigilante actions... Unless they get results. Which they will.

Niliu · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

So if I play in the same house as someone else who plays, I get banned?

Phinix1 · May 2014

Niliu wrote: »

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

So if I play in the same house as someone else who plays, I get banned?

Only if you set up a third party proxy or VPN to play the game through because you are deliberately trying to mask your IP address to avoid getting caught by exploit filters, AND YOU WOULD KNOW IF YOU DID.

Big companies need to step up. If backward countries want to go soft on piracy and copyright violations like this, then countries in civilized nations need to deny those countries access to their product. Period.

Perhaps the outcry of legitimate players in those types of countries missing out on great titles will cause the people to topple these draconian regimes?

Diakos · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Niliu wrote: »

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

So if I play in the same house as someone else who plays, I get banned?

Only if you set up a third party proxy or VPN to play the game through because you are deliberately trying to mask your IP address to avoid getting caught by exploit filters, AND YOU WOULD KNOW IF YOU DID.

Big companies need to step up. If backward countries want to go soft on piracy and copyright violations like this, then countries in civilized nations need to deny those countries access to their product. Period.

Perhaps the outcry of legitimate players in those types of countries missing out on great titles will cause the people to topple these draconian regimes?

Disgruntled second world gamers overthrowing grey businesses that generates an influx of hard foreign currency?

Considering human trafficking and police protection rackets are common.

Yeah, not gonna happen.

YourNameHere · May 2014

Gold selling and farming is legal in China. Their government backs it. Look it up.

Mablung · May 2014

I know of one site that actually has its offices listed as being in Canada. How would that work? Blocking such a large, legitimate gaming population from that country.

'Blocking' countries is not a solution.

Saerydoth · May 2014

wrlifeboil wrote: »

JunkyardWolf wrote: »

Goldah is based in China, good luck going after them. but here ya go

G4P LIMITED
LuGuZuoBiao F building,
No. 199 LuLong Road,YueLu District
ChangSha,HuNan
Changsha Xunyou Network Technology Co., Ltd.
Furong District,Changsha City, Hunan Province, China . No. 400,Room 508 Renmin Road, guo ji IT cheng

Gold selling in video games is illegal in China but like @JunkyardWolf wrote, good luck with enforcement.

No. Selling gold in video games *run in China* to Chinese citizens is illegal. They do not care what people do in "western" games to foreigners.

Arwyn · May 2014

YourNameHere wrote: »

Gold selling and farming is legal in China. Their government backs it. Look it up.

Of course they do, its a massive source of money to the country, saw that years ago.

The solutions to this are live GM's in game all the time, give the job to players who apply for it, those players can receive bounties in gold for their main or perhaps points towards certain items, but be tied to a ToS that says if they abuse it they get banned themselves.

The other solution is to publicly ban buyers, go after them in a biiiig way, no buyers, no farmers. Advertise everywhere that buyers are banned without refunds, post periodic ingame messages reinforcing that buying is against the ToS and that you are going after them!

Both of these solutions can work, the first is perhaps easier, the abuse is the biggest issue to overcome.

Volsh · May 2014

I'd drop a MASSIVE turd on the botters keyboard ( If i could find them ), can't stand them!!

felixgamingx1 · May 2014

As an "attorney at lol" I can assure you ZOS is bringing all these bots to Court including flying bots aka wasps.

Tarwin · May 2014

I'm sending an email to Morgan Spurlock to do a show about these Gold Farmers, would be interesting as he usually jumps in and tries to do the work of his investigated subjects

Akhratos · May 2014

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

Simple question: How do you differentiate a "proxy" from a non-proxy IP where two brothers are playing from their home?

DrywFiltiarn · May 2014

Problem is that it's tough to trace back who the people behind these schemes are, so where do you send the C&D letter to? And next to that, for every company they may bring down, multiple new ones will spawn. It would simply become an endless battle as there'll simply always be people doing this as long as there's demand from players for items/gold for real money.

And unfortunately there are too many people buying from these guys, which means it's still profitable for them to continue. Don't forget every single dollar spend on buying from them is pure profit for them. They don't have any investment into this as they will simply use stolen creditcards to buy the hardware to run the game and they'll do the same for buying the game/paying subscription.

The people behind this are very hard to catch, simply because they have all means to stay in hiding and they have the advantage of being in a country were US jurisdiction have no say and the country they're in have no interest in catching them.

Sharakor · May 2014

So you know people still jailbreak Iphones and other smartphones as easily as they did before right? What makes you think Zenimax is in any way better at tackling these problems than Apple and Sony? Logic = [snip]

AlexDougherty · May 2014

Archaon wrote: »

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

Simple question: How do you differentiate a "proxy" from a non-proxy IP where two brothers are playing from their home?

You can't, which along with dynamic IP addresses, is why Zos or any other MMO won't bother with IP bans.
IP bans are an old solution that no longer works, people stop suggesting them.

KerinKor · May 2014

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

I've never heard of a case brought by SE, but Blizzard's win against WOWGlider certainly was on copyright and not that writing bots is 'illegal' in any way.

@zinoviy22b14_ESO in order to do what you're saying ZOS need to find a legal basis and a jurisdiction in which to file .. if it were that easy don't you think these sites would have been shut down years ago?

RMT have infested MMOs for 15 years or more, and with the exception of one or two cases all attempts to shut them down have failed .. and very few have ever been launched due to lack of a legal basis or a jurisdiction able to take a case.

KerinKor · May 2014

Archaon wrote: »

AlienDiplomat wrote: »

Diakos wrote: »

Botters and farmers are already using VPN and proxies to mask their location. So only legitimate players and the most amateur of farmers would be affected.

Simple fix: Ban the IP of any proxy used by more than one account.

Simple question: How do you differentiate a "proxy" from a non-proxy IP where two brothers are playing from their home?

Simple answer: you can't.

To the 'other end' there is to my knowledge no discernible difference between a Proxy and a NAT router, which is why that guy's suggestion is a non-starter.

At best ZOS could block known public proxies but they're a drop in the ocean and it's trivially easy to set up a proxy and move it about subnets to defeat even that level of IP blocking.

It's been said the internet was designed to treat blocking as damage and route round it, and in that respect it works very, very well.

Squishy · May 2014

Well, ipbans could work, but they'd need to investigate things for a while.

Most botters are actual companies, so they would unlikely be using free vpn proxies that can do down any minute, as they need their bots up and running as much as physically possible, with little to no interactions. Since they'd be running off a network with multiple machines, they'd likely have to get multiple licenses/username, or get a professional connection, with the right amount of licenses for the amount of connection they'll need.

They'd have to pay for their services, and the ones not blocked in china, are but few.

Going thru the pay vpn/proxies working from china should not be very hard considering the few that would work there... then, simply block those.

https://www.google.fr/#q=vpn+working+from+china

So, block countries that have little to no player base, and a high bot concentration in Asia, then block the proxies, and see what happens.

I assume with the economic sanctions in Russia, money transfer will get harder and harder to be done to Russia, so the Russian bots are likely to die from being unable to receive funds

.

KerinKor · May 2014

Squishy wrote: »

Most botters are actual companies

Not true, a large number of the botters are freelance and sell their gold to the RMT outfits, who are of course large commercial organisations in a multi-billion dollar industry.

Yes, a lot of the botters (freelance or RMT directly) are in China so your idea is fine .. except that the moment you block Chinese IPs they simply proxy-hop to, say, the USA.

Sadly for your idea too is that MANY botters actually are in the US or other supported regions to begin with, Eastern Europe is now a growing area for this as Blizzard have found out, so your next idea is to IP block Europe.

As usual, this idea is superficially easy but in reality is nigh on impossible without treating large numbers of legit players as collateral damage.

babylon · May 2014

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Square-Enix won that lawsuit on a technicality, the bot broke copyright laws, they did not win on the basis that gold-selling is illegal.

Since then the Gold-sellers and bot-makers have moved to countries where Copyright is just a collection of letters. Sending Cease and desist letters would do no good, because they can't prosecute under the laws of those countries.

Please remember US law only applies to the USA, not these countries that I'm carefully avoiding naming.

Why is this stuff not illegal? Why don't games companies simply write a clause into the TOS that prevents people from commercially benefiting from the game or something? If the company is in such a country that magically exempts them them they shouldn't be allowed to play.

Can't we as gamers all get together and form some kind of group action lawsuit against the goldfarmer companies for griefing us during our gameplay? Surely there's something legal that can be brought down on these guys.

AlexDougherty · May 2014

babylon wrote: »

Why is this stuff not illegal? Why don't games companies simply write a clause into the TOS that prevents people from commercially benefiting from the game or something? If the company is in such a country that magically exempts them them they shouldn't be allowed to play.

It's not illegal because judges don't want to shut down mods completely, like the lightsaber mod in skyrim (loved that), and their is no legal difference between a mod and a bot.

As for including a clause in the TOS, well certain countries like Germany have ruled that TOS are unlawful and therefore not binding (why, don't ask, just don't).

Edit~ I have no problems with TOS btw