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Elder Scrolls Online Overrun By Bots?

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Are any of you guys big Elder Scrolls Online players? Is the issue of bots as bad as this article makes it sound?

An Elder Scrolls Online player who asked to remain anonymous sent Kotaku three videos of his in-game footage showing how bots coalesce around NPCs to keep collecting completion rewards or even clog up dungeon passages to such an extent that human players have trouble passing through them.
Click to expand...
 
>facepalms

This makes you just fucking wonder, ya know?

Gee, lets pay one guy minimum wage, or slightly more than, to just jump from server to server and look for bots

He doesn't have to answer GM questions etc, all he does is bot hunt

How fucking hard is this for MMO companies to figure out? Why is this fucking rocket science to them?

I keep seeing them say "We're doing everything we can about the bots!" OTHER than spending coin and paying somebody where his soul job is to hunt bots

Why is it every time I hear a problem with bots, I can figure this out in less than 5 seconds, but MMO companies even YEARS later never do it?
 
ShamisOMally said:
>facepalms

This makes you just fucking wonder, ya know?

Gee, lets pay one guy minimum wage, or slightly more than, to just jump from server to server and look for bots

He doesn't have to answer GM questions etc, all he does is bot hunt

How fucking hard is this for MMO companies to figure out? Why is this fucking rocket science to them?

I keep seeing them say "We're doing everything we can about the bots!" OTHER than spending coin and paying somebody where his soul job is to hunt bots

Why is it every time I hear a problem with bots, I can figure this out in less than 5 seconds, but MMO companies even YEARS later never do it?
Click to expand...

They do actually send out global messages about IM-ing specific people that are there specifically to kill bots.

I also report bots when I see them. They are usually gone within a couple minutes of being reported.
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5q9NbAm6Ms4

Those are the same bots that I just got tired of reporting. When I played there were literally close to 100 in a single dungeon killing the same boss over and over. At the 15 second mark in the video he shows the underground farming bots that I have seen taking all the resources on the server. Every time that I ran into one of the underground groups of bots I would start lagging really hard and that made the game unplayable. It's like the server is chugging trying to keep up for the demands that the bot programs are sending to it. It feels like the server is under a DDOS from the bot script writers.

It is great that they have delayed the game on the consoles. I don't think they would enjoy playing with the bugs and bots as rampant as they are in the game today. I would like to know the month 2 subscriber numbers in comparison to the launch numbers.
 
Haven't seen bots in dungeons or in the world in a couple weeks. They used to have GM's that would come on and send out world messages looking for bots. Since they started doing that I haven't seen any dungeon bots or harvesting bots. Not sure how the starter levels are but since 40 on I haven't been bothered by them.

Still get an occasional spam mail, maybe once every couple days but no where near as bad as it was when it first released.
 
ShamisOMally said:
>facepalms

This makes you just fucking wonder, ya know?

Gee, lets pay one guy minimum wage, or slightly more than, to just jump from server to server and look for bots
Click to expand...


Easier than that, write your software to report any other software that attempts to interact with it, only allow approved addons or approved mods.
 
Easiest way to fix the problem :

1.Block all IPs from third-world countries like China.
2.Test for open proxies and block them from connecting.
 
k1pp3r said:
Easier than that, write your software to report any other software that attempts to interact with it, only allow approved addons or approved mods.
Click to expand...

That is significantly more difficult than hiring someone.
 
k1pp3r said:
Easier than that, write your software to report any other software that attempts to interact with it, only allow approved addons or approved mods.
Click to expand...

No way to tell, as most if not almost all of these bot programs work by emulating keyboard and mouse input, not directly accessing the game, along with accessing the directx video output the same way capture programs do and look for specific text etc

From there its all just timers. For example, it takes 22.7 seconds to walk from the cave to an enemy, then killing the enemy can take between 5 and 9 seconds. So after 9 seconds, it goes to the next enemy which takes 13 seconds, etc etc etc repeat repeat
 
ShamisOMally, but that is exactly the point, most of these bot programs are right on schedule, exactly on schedule, all those mouse and keyboard inputs are on a perfect inhuman schedule that makes them easy to detect. Once detected and classified as a possible it should be flagged for GM intervention where a human queries the user directly and looks for a human response. If you don't get back what you expect and you beleave the player is a bot I have a novel solution of my own.....

Drum Roll please .......

Modify the user's account so that the Player becomes a mob, the player/mob continues to perform according to the bot programing but players will see and interact with it as if it is a mob and it will die, drop loot (from the player's inventory), and respawn as needed until the players gold and inventory are deleted at which point the player/mob is deleted and the account frozen out.

Make the botters give up all their hard farmed loot and give the players the satisfaction of farming the farmers.
 
It's got its fair share of gold spammers and bots, what MMO doesn't? But I don't see it overran with them by any means. And once you get out of the beginner zones, they disappear for the most part.

I might find and report 1-2 bots a week. Inbox spam and chat spam a lot more.
 
lcpiper said:
ShamisOMally, but that is exactly the point, most of these bot programs are right on schedule, exactly on schedule, all those mouse and keyboard inputs are on a perfect inhuman schedule that makes them easy to detect. Once detected and classified as a possible it should be flagged for GM intervention where a human queries the user directly and looks for a human response. If you don't get back what you expect and you beleave the player is a bot I have a novel solution of my own.....

Drum Roll please .......

Modify the user's account so that the Player becomes a mob, the player/mob continues to perform according to the bot programing but players will see and interact with it as if it is a mob and it will die, drop loot (from the player's inventory), and respawn as needed until the players gold and inventory are deleted at which point the player/mob is deleted and the account frozen out.

Make the botters give up all their hard farmed loot and give the players the satisfaction of farming the farmers.
Click to expand...

But then that's easy to pass over because you just change the scripts to have random timers

So back to my other example, instead of going at 9 seconds when its assured the mob is dead, it instead adds 1-5 seconds after every estimated encounter, thereby making it random, and then this anti-bot automated system can't detect the bots anymore
 
Reminds me of the auto-follow bot explosion in FFXI
 
These are most likely not bots...

They are Gold Farmers!

Big difference and they don't really do anything wrong which is why they dont get banned. :)

A bot is a computer program that plays the game for you and in most MMO's using 3rd-party programs to assist you is a ban-able offense.

A gold farmer is a person who's real time job is to collect ingame currency and then sell ingame currency for real money to a trader (the guys who shout ingame advertising the ingame money) Cant ban a gold farmer until they are caught for doing multiple trades to a trader and traders delete their characters often so they don't get banned. not easy to track and not so simple as to mass ban an IP range because you purchase a game then you have the right to play it.

They are annoying but usually dies down after a few weeks after a game release. then again so does every MMO gaming community.
 
damicatz said:
Easiest way to fix the problem :

1.Block all IPs from third-world countries like China.
Click to expand...

Yeah but that would also block more than half your money. :( MMO's are China's problem now.....Suckers!
 
ShamisOMally said:
>facepalms

This makes you just fucking wonder, ya know?

Gee, lets pay one guy minimum wage, or slightly more than, to just jump from server to server and look for bots

He doesn't have to answer GM questions etc, all he does is bot hunt

How fucking hard is this for MMO companies to figure out? Why is this fucking rocket science to them?

I keep seeing them say "We're doing everything we can about the bots!" OTHER than spending coin and paying somebody where his soul job is to hunt bots

Why is it every time I hear a problem with bots, I can figure this out in less than 5 seconds, but MMO companies even YEARS later never do it?
Click to expand...

damicatz said:
Easiest way to fix the problem :

1.Block all IPs from third-world countries like China.
2.Test for open proxies and block them from connecting.
Click to expand...

You guys and many others are missing something and the real reason why. You see, in most modern MMO's there isn't a "free trial" at least until the game is pretty well established. As such all "bot/gold farmer" account must be purchased. So every single bot represents a box sale and while that may or may not be a ton of profit, it is profit. So Modern Dev teams are faced with the reality of "Ban too many and they dig into very real sales numbers, Ban too few and they lose legitimate customers and if too many go so do the RMT. So it is really a balance of banning the right amount where the RMT are making money all while looking like they are "Attempting to Combat" the problem to the real customers keeping them mostly pacified. It's all numbers and the bean counters have long figured out just how many of those values can be done to maximize profit.

That is Reality...Because if they Truly wanted to eliminate RMT, they could Swiftly and without a problem.
 
I've seen some MMOs (not going to say) where the dev team have made it easier for bots because bots make them more money then humans.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
You guys and many others are missing something and the real reason why. You see, in most modern MMO's there isn't a "free trial" at least until the game is pretty well established. As such all "bot/gold farmer" account must be purchased. So every single bot represents a box sale and while that may or may not be a ton of profit, it is profit. So Modern Dev teams are faced with the reality of "Ban too many and they dig into very real sales numbers, Ban too few and they lose legitimate customers and if too many go so do the RMT. So it is really a balance of banning the right amount where the RMT are making money all while looking like they are "Attempting to Combat" the problem to the real customers keeping them mostly pacified. It's all numbers and the bean counters have long figured out just how many of those values can be done to maximize profit.

That is Reality...Because if they Truly wanted to eliminate RMT, they could Swiftly and without a problem.
Click to expand...

Gold farmers are almost always purchasing accounts with stolen credit cards or just stealing the accounts themselves. Chargebacks are not a particularly great source of profit.
 
Reminds me of the warp-harvesting bots in FFXI and FFXIV. In FFXIV, you see the bot warp from one resource point to another, faster than you can call out your mount and get there yourself. By the time you get there, the resource node is used up and the bot warps to the next point. I remember one video posted on Youtube where a Paladin followed a bot around just killing mobs, and another user getting banned off the Square-Enix forums for talking about bot problems and recording them.

For FFXI, I remember claim bots for HNM (hyper-notorious monsters) that would claim even in high lag. The old days of Dragon's Aery, for example. At its peak, it became a battle between the largest HNM Linkshells on my server on who had the fastest claim bot. You report them, and they rarely ever get banned because the GMs have to see it in action. Investigating it myself, these bots are usually sold upwards of $100 or more depending on how sophisticated they are, and I've e-mailed SE on these bot sites. A part of me was actually glad that during the Salvage duping exploit bans that a lot of those HNM botters disappeared on the server.

MMORPGs will never be 100% immune to bots and RMT, no matter how often you report it or complain about them. Lazy ass people will always find the easy way out rather than work for it-- buying in-game currency with real life money, or paying for bots and hacks for an MMO.

For me, I report them, then blacklist them, regardless if they are an in-game friend or guild/Linkshell member. I have zero tolerance to lazy ass cheaters, hackers, and botters in any game.
 
Good! Shut that junk down and get to work on making a bug-free single player RPG just like Sky-, no wait...just like Fallout: New- no that had bugs too, Fallout 3?...um...Oblivi...Morrow...Dagger...Are.. Oh nevermind. Forget I mentioned it. Just hire a fourth voice actor next time and it'll be the most amazing game ever made or something.
 
They fixed it a couple of patches ago to where boss mobs no longer drop good loot on consecutive kills, so the bots farming bosses have basically disappeared.
 
Do you know what stops botting? Never paying real money for in-game gold/items. Never do that and there is no reason to have bots. I'm actually quite surprised this is so rampant in TESO, I didn't think it was that popular.
 
Kryptorchid said:
The best way to combat bots will always be open PvP.
Click to expand...

Instead of Titanfall's idea of combating bots by isolating them to their own server, if the game or server found a way to detect bots and RMT, or if they were reported to a GM, have those players auto-flagged for free-for-all PVP even on a PVE-only server. They'll be flagged for 24 hours and announced server-wide. Once killed, players get access to their gear and money a la Diablo 2 multiplayer PVP looting. I'm up for this idea. :p

Make their lives horrible for cheating, hacking, and RMT-ing.
 
octoberasian said:
Instead of Titanfall's idea of combating bots by isolating them to their own server, if the game or server found a way to detect bots and RMT, or if they were reported to a GM, have those players auto-flagged for free-for-all PVP even on a PVE-only server. They'll be flagged for 24 hours and announced server-wide. Once killed, players get access to their gear and money a la Diablo 2 multiplayer PVP looting. I'm up for this idea. :p

Make their lives horrible for cheating, hacking, and RMT-ing.
Click to expand...

Or just make the entire game that way so people don't spawn grief (like what is also happening in ESOTERIC with werewolf/vampire stuff).
 
Quix said:
Do you know what stops botting? Never paying real money for in-game gold/items. Never do that and there is no reason to have bots. I'm actually quite surprised this is so rampant in TESO, I didn't think it was that popular.
Click to expand...

In every MMO, there will always be that group of players who are willing to P2W any way they can. Or I guess some people are just lazy and they want all the good stuff in the quickest way possible.
 
I have been playing ESO since release and can tell you that while there are a lot of bots, there is nothing going on we have not seen at EVERY new MMO launch.

ESO is getting targeted by reviewers for a lot of things that other MMOs experienced as well and yet the reviewers did not make this kind of fuss.

The issue with these bots and gold sellers however is no t the sellers but rather the buyers. The people that think if they cheat to get to end game faster they somehow win. Killing off the bots and gold sellers would be helpful but it would be easier I think to find the buyers and then slap them with the ban hammer. If no one is buying the sellers will leave.
 
Guild Wars 2 had an ongoing issue with bots for most of the first year. People hated them, but they were mostly farm and harvest bots (farming nodes in GW2 can be harvested by anyone, not just once)

What they were actually doing was keeping prices for crafting material way way down. Once they did a good job of removing them, prices on many items began to steadily inflate.

The recent heartbleed vulnerability seems to have cost a lot of people their account - there has been a steady influx of goldseller spambots and many of them seemed to be coming from player accounts with significant achievement.

Protect your account and don't re-use passwords...
 
Shah double tap. Don't let others know that every other mmo has had bot problems. It will ruin the haters hard ons for ESO.
 
ShamisOMally said:
Why is it every time I hear a problem with bots, I can figure this out in less than 5 seconds, but MMO companies even YEARS later never do it?
Click to expand...

In subscription MMOs bots pay subscriptions too, so it's not in the interest of the publisher to ban bots.
 
So back to my other example, instead of going at 9 seconds when its assured the mob is dead, it instead adds 1-5 seconds after every estimated encounter, thereby making it random, and then this anti-bot automated system can't detect the bots anymore
Click to expand...
Yea, does the bot reply to some dudes odd message in zone? Does it stop run over to a clear area once in a while so it can get a drink from the fridge and take a piss? As long as the bot program is written in order to perform a basic set of functions it can be identified to a level of candidacy so that an actual GM can be directed to make a determination.
 
What is simple is coding the game so that there is no mechanism for trade.
 
lcpiper said:
ShamisOMally, but that is exactly the point, most of these bot programs are right on schedule, exactly on schedule, all those mouse and keyboard inputs are on a perfect inhuman schedule that makes them easy to detect. Once detected and classified as a possible it should be flagged for GM intervention where a human queries the user directly and looks for a human response. If you don't get back what you expect and you beleave the player is a bot I have a novel solution of my own.....

Drum Roll please .......

Modify the user's account so that the Player becomes a mob, the player/mob continues to perform according to the bot programing but players will see and interact with it as if it is a mob and it will die, drop loot (from the player's inventory), and respawn as needed until the players gold and inventory are deleted at which point the player/mob is deleted and the account frozen out.

Make the botters give up all their hard farmed loot and give the players the satisfaction of farming the farmers.
Click to expand...


Please if you dont know how bot works dont try to post "solutions"
Plenty of bots have randomized delay between action to look more human like
beside tha facts differnt in ping makes action evne mroe random delayd from the server end.

if you do the scanning on client end to make it more precise and negate ping time effect. that you protection is running in user end space and its removable/hackable.

also chahging people to a mob would be working liek 1 day then bots will now detect that feature and work again..

you solutions is maybe worth 1-3 days then its useless again.
no drumroll
 
DoubleTap said:
The recent heartbleed vulnerability seems to have cost a lot of people their account - there has been a steady influx of goldseller spambots and many of them seemed to be coming from player accounts with significant achievement.

Protect your account and don't re-use passwords...
Click to expand...

Huh, I haven't played GW2 in awhile but it sounds like I need to check my account. :eek:
 
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