Are you prepared for war? If Cryptic bans accounts of botters: (1) Expect more DDoS attacks (2) Expect AH price increase of rank 4/5 enchantments and peridots.
theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
Whereas I have 4 teal adjacent artifacts and three legendary artifact equipments, and have only ever spent 10 dollars on the game!
Really, the failure of NWO's model is that it's not P2W-y enough. The amount of cash you need to put into the game to get even marginal benefits out of it is absurd. The price of zen in terms of cash should be halved.
Why do you guys think they care about fighting bots? They could care less about bots. All they care about is people buying Zen.
None of their changes stopped anything the bots were doing. Do you think a Bot cares if they do leadership all day or loot nodes all day or do a dungeon all day?
The only way they can have an impact on bots is to remove the AH and have everything bound.
They don't want to do that, all they are trying to do is cut your in game salary so harshly that you are forced to take out your wallet.
What they failed to realize is that many folks were stuck in a holding pattern, only playing the game for brief periods hoping fun content gets added back and using leadership to at least keep up with things. Thus, leadership was the only reason many folks were still here at all putting up with this poor excuse of a Mod.
Now that they have taken away leadership, those folks are gone for good and the server peak numbers are lower than they have ever been and still falling daily. I suspect many of the remaining folks are just logging in to collect their VIP rewards.
Bottom line, they don't care about bots and they don't have a clue as to how their game works.
As an fyi, if I were a developer and was forced by management to remove leadership I would have removed ALL AD sinks that were added due to leadership (i.e. all wards, GMOPS, boons that require AD, etc. etc.). Had they done this, perhaps this would have been better received.
Right now we are looking at a 3rd world country with stores trying to sell luxury cars for 100K a pop. Only an idiot would think there is a market for it.
I like the romantic views you have on the relationship between bots and Cryptic, but that's not how it works. Bots aren't going to DDoS a server because it forces them to leave. Why would they? Do you think Cryptic will reverse the changes if they keep DDoSsing the server? You think they do this with the thought "If I can't make money, your players won't play"? Hardly. Bots stand to gain absolutely nothing from attacking the server. Quite the reverse, bots suffer as much from it as we do.
If Cryptic adopts a zero-tolerance policy for bots, then for-profit botters will have nothing to lose by destroying this game. Destroying Neverwinter means players will leave this mmo and go to another mmo with tolerates botters. This is how mafia operate. They destroy (or seize) businesses which resist and protect businesses which comply.
Only if Cryptic tolerates some botting will bot owners have something to lose by destroying Neverwinter. It's obvious to me that Cryptic has been ignoring these botters for a long time. They knew about botting on the gateway. For sure, they know about botting in-game.
As a reminder, the recent DDoS attacks affected Cryptic's other mmo's too. A war with botters may not be in Cryptic's best interest.
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,429Arc User
edited September 2015
I am not even sure if the guy who DDoS NWO is a botters or a commercial botters. Based on his tweet messages, he was doing that for fun. He also did that to ESO ... for fun.
*** The game can read your mind. If you want it, you won't get it. If you don't expect to get it, you will. ***
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
Are you prepared for war? If Cryptic bans accounts of botters: (1) Expect more DDoS attacks (2) Expect AH price increase of rank 4/5 enchantments and peridots.
1) Most bots dedicate their resources to making money, not taking revenge.
2) Yep. But if Cryptic effectively combats bots, they can in unison increase the drop rates, so that prices stay in a reasonable range.
Are you prepared for war? If Cryptic bans accounts of botters: (1) Expect more DDoS attacks (2) Expect AH price increase of rank 4/5 enchantments and peridots.
Botters aren't the ones DDOSing, it was a couple of script kiddies who were extremely uptight about the changes.
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
There is no ground to stand on beneath maps. I've had my fair share of map glitching.
True only for some maps. People were cheating in Valindra by getting below the map to attack her (fortunately, that one was quickly patched). On other maps, you die if you stand on the plane at the bottom of the map. That happened to me plenty of times testing my own foundries.
The one thing i would do is remove he login on the launcher force everyone to login on the client and add a captcha with the log in.
but i do find it strange though One of the few games i have came across that doesn't do anything about the bots.
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." "Great men are almost always bad men." “If God is all-powerful He cannot be good, if God is good He cannot be all-powerful!”
I proposed this many times over the years - Cryptic has to care about the quality of the game and, more importantly, whether players enjoy their games in order to implement this sort of feature. They don't seem to care about either... it's a great idea though.
actually all they need to do is ban all accounts that have more than 2-3 stacks of 99 enchants on the AH and then make enchants from skill nodes BOP
Change that BOP to B2A. Forget how many stacks they have on the AH, if the RP was B2 account then they couldn't post it on AH, and still have the flexabilty for a LEGIT player to trade them between their toons, getting the most efficient refines without the hamper of BOP.
The red herring "bots" is used for a lot of game flaws by NW. But the actual strength of a bot is automation of a repetitive task that a humans don't want to do. The bots vs. RP is bot(S) (multiples) doing the task(s) to get the reward to funnel all to 1 account to pile up to stacks and sell for that toons AD stockpile.
Sure with it B2A they can still funnel all those RP to one toon, but they can't sell them, the whole goal of bots. At some point they max out their own RP needs and there is no longer a point of the bots. A beneficial side effect is: since they can't sell them they can't get AD, but they will need the AD to buy the GMOPS etc. to upgrade their gear, so they will actually have to pay zen to use those RP the botted and funneled to their main toon.
About the OP original idea: If it's a flag and tag system for customer service to research deeper, and customer service ACTUALLY does so ,and FOLLOWS THROUGH with bans. That would work. But if it was a GM flag and ban, that wouldn't work, it's very rife for abuse (I've seen it in other games) and even if it was a concensus of GM, that too if a problem, all to many GM's and other players get chummy and a cliche (I have also seen that).
Once a ban is in place, a player has a uphill battle of somehow proving innocence rather than guilt instead of a presumption of innocence. How do you prove a negative? Once banned, how does a player access and "prove" they didn't do some activity deemed inappropriate? In a room full of people, prove or disprove who is a criminal. Given the power to punish that someone, the one in power will tend give their friends and associates the presumption of innocence and blame the outsider/stranger, how does the stranger prove otherwise?
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
Change that BOP to B2A. Forget how many stacks they have on the AH, if the RP was B2 account then they couldn't post it on AH, and still have the flexabilty for a LEGIT player to trade them between their toons, getting the most efficient refines without the hamper of BOP.
We may as well bind everything in the game to account, close the auction house, and forget about having a game economy. First it was the keys, then the gear drops, then the RP from Dragonhorde. If you fail to stop the actual exploiters, but rather "try to remove the incentive to exploit", the bots will just move on to the next resource that they can obtain through a script and sell for money.
look, they aren't interested in fighting bots, that is clear.
if they were interested in fighting bots they would limit ghost stories (or arcane res. earlier) # of instances, or # of instances created per hour, or moved/deleted the nodes, or made node RP BOP.. or.. or...or... any one of the dozens of ideas they could have easily done.
but, they didn't. move along nothing to see here......
look, they aren't interested in fighting bots, that is clear.
if they were interested in fighting bots they would limit ghost stories (or arcane res. earlier) # of instances, or # of instances created per hour, or moved/deleted the nodes, or made node RP BOP.. or.. or...or... any one of the dozens of ideas they could have easily done.
but, they didn't. move along nothing to see here......
if they limited a dungeon to N number of instances per hour you would see many more legit players complain. who do you think would fill up the available instances? they have endless patience for queuing... do you?
the BoA hurts them without hurting us so i think thats a much better idea.
gating instances per hour per char is a long established mechanism, no player legitimately needs to enter ghost stories 4 times an hour.
And they may even find a way to telport beneath the map and still farm those skill nodes without getting attacked by any guards/npcs around.
There is no ground to stand on beneath maps. I've had my fair share of map glitching.
Well, there is no ground under the Maps of WoW too, but some bots still managed to get there and even mine nodes from under the map, and i doubt that this is not also possible for them here...
It doesnt matter who are you but in real life ppl encounter or know each other. If you give power to a person to ban an account in game, they can use this power for themselves or their friend's to ban ppl.
As an example (ı am not giving a name). A player from one of the biggest pvp guilds in game got killed by me in Sh pvp , then started to talk ""You have to say I am sorry , i will go and kill you in 1v1"". Blah SH pvp is for G vs G and he want 1v1.
After that he switched his sneak accounts in other guilds and started to pm me more. Because he was rank 12 ench and i was mainly rank 8 and i killed him in pvp.....bla bla bla
If you give ppl such power they wll use this for their own. Case will be started aganist company due to this reason and game will suffer..... eventually will die .
Its much better if they investigate send messages to GM helps or customer service.
If you need examples go old mmo games. And ppl who are highest tier player in this game have friend's as GM.
If they analyze number of instances of some maps they will see that while Temple of Spider (epic) was having 5 instances (i didnt see more ...) , Ghost stories have at least 2000 created instances or even more.
Identify volunteer Game Masters, and empower them to ban bots. I'm sure the CM's can help identify honest, non-exploiting players to nominate as fair GMs.
If three Game Masters tag an account as a bot, issue an automatic 3 day ban. If ten Game Masters tag an account as a bot, issue an automatic permanent ban.
A few hours of volunteer GM's standing in PE and tagging
\/\/\/.I*am*A**Gold**$eller.com
and a few hours of standing outside hot spots like Ghost Stories and Blackdagger Ruins
would put quite the dent in the ability of bots to generate RP for sale, and to sell those ill-gotten goods. While bots have automation and numbers on their side, it takes far longer to level up enough to begin exploiting than to right-click, mark as bot.
Please, show us that you actually are interested in the bot problem.
I like the romantic views you have on the relationship between bots and Cryptic, but that's not how it works. Bots aren't going to DDoS a server because it forces them to leave. Why would they? Do you think Cryptic will reverse the changes if they keep DDoSsing the server? You think they do this with the thought "If I can't make money, your players won't play"? Hardly. Bots stand to gain absolutely nothing from attacking the server. Quite the reverse, bots suffer as much from it as we do.
If Cryptic adopts a zero-tolerance policy for bots, then for-profit botters will have nothing to lose by destroying this game. Destroying Neverwinter means players will leave this mmo and go to another mmo with tolerates botters. This is how mafia operate. They destroy (or seize) businesses which resist and protect businesses which comply.
Only if Cryptic tolerates some botting will bot owners have something to lose by destroying Neverwinter. It's obvious to me that Cryptic has been ignoring these botters for a long time. They knew about botting on the gateway. For sure, they know about botting in-game.
As a reminder, the recent DDoS attacks affected Cryptic's other mmo's too. A war with botters may not be in Cryptic's best interest.
Botters have no interest in destroying a game. They'd just move onto another game.
Also, the DDoS attacks affected all of PWE's games.
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wyckedstudiosMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 36Arc User
actually all they need to do is ban all accounts that have more than 2-3 stacks of 99 enchants on the AH and then make enchants from skill nodes BOP
I've seen this suggested a number of times, but that doesn't make it a good(or well thought out) suggestion. Its not that hard for a player with more than a half-dozen toons to get several stacks of darn near everything at the white and green levels, if they consolidate a few days worth of prayer/leadership/drops stuff into the bank.
actually all they need to do is ban all accounts that have more than 2-3 stacks of 99 enchants on the AH and then make enchants from skill nodes BOP
I've seen this suggested a number of times, but that doesn't make it a good(or well thought out) suggestion. Its not that hard for a player with more than a half-dozen toons to get several stacks of darn near everything at the white and green levels, if they consolidate a few days worth of prayer/leadership/drops stuff into the bank.
heck i had 6+ stacks of r5's farmed from iwd & sh he's. 1 for complete, 1-2 from kills, 2-3 min each. x several chars x a month of farming.
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wyckedstudiosMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 36Arc User
if they limited a dungeon to N number of instances per hour you would see many more legit players complain. who do you think would fill up the available instances? they have endless patience for queuing... do you?
the BoA hurts them without hurting us so i think thats a much better idea.
I disagree....I think far more people (myself included) would be annoyed by yet another item becoming Bound. I'm freaking sick of Bound. I really like being able to sell my loots.
Comments
If Cryptic bans accounts of botters:
(1) Expect more DDoS attacks
(2) Expect AH price increase of rank 4/5 enchantments and peridots.
Really, the failure of NWO's model is that it's not P2W-y enough. The amount of cash you need to put into the game to get even marginal benefits out of it is absurd. The price of zen in terms of cash should be halved.
None of their changes stopped anything the bots were doing. Do you think a Bot cares if they do leadership all day or loot nodes all day or do a dungeon all day?
The only way they can have an impact on bots is to remove the AH and have everything bound.
They don't want to do that, all they are trying to do is cut your in game salary so harshly that you are forced to take out your wallet.
What they failed to realize is that many folks were stuck in a holding pattern, only playing the game for brief periods hoping fun content gets added back and using leadership to at least keep up with things. Thus, leadership was the only reason many folks were still here at all putting up with this poor excuse of a Mod.
Now that they have taken away leadership, those folks are gone for good and the server peak numbers are lower than they have ever been and still falling daily. I suspect many of the remaining folks are just logging in to collect their VIP rewards.
Bottom line, they don't care about bots and they don't have a clue as to how their game works.
As an fyi, if I were a developer and was forced by management to remove leadership I would have removed ALL AD sinks that were added due to leadership (i.e. all wards, GMOPS, boons that require AD, etc. etc.). Had they done this, perhaps this would have been better received.
Right now we are looking at a 3rd world country with stores trying to sell luxury cars for 100K a pop. Only an idiot would think there is a market for it.
This is how mafia operate. They destroy (or seize) businesses which resist and protect businesses which comply.
Only if Cryptic tolerates some botting will bot owners have something to lose by destroying Neverwinter.
It's obvious to me that Cryptic has been ignoring these botters for a long time.
They knew about botting on the gateway. For sure, they know about botting in-game.
As a reminder, the recent DDoS attacks affected Cryptic's other mmo's too.
A war with botters may not be in Cryptic's best interest.
2) Yep. But if Cryptic effectively combats bots, they can in unison increase the drop rates, so that prices stay in a reasonable range.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
force everyone to login on the client and add a captcha with the
log in.
but i do find it strange though One of the few games i
have came across that doesn't do anything about the bots.
"Great men are almost always bad men."
“If God is all-powerful He cannot be good, if God is good He cannot be all-powerful!”
The red herring "bots" is used for a lot of game flaws by NW. But the actual strength of a bot is automation of a repetitive task that a humans don't want to do. The bots vs. RP is bot(S) (multiples) doing the task(s) to get the reward to funnel all to 1 account to pile up to stacks and sell for that toons AD stockpile.
Sure with it B2A they can still funnel all those RP to one toon, but they can't sell them, the whole goal of bots. At some point they max out their own RP needs and there is no longer a point of the bots. A beneficial side effect is: since they can't sell them they can't get AD, but they will need the AD to buy the GMOPS etc. to upgrade their gear, so they will actually have to pay zen to use those RP the botted and funneled to their main toon.
About the OP original idea:
If it's a flag and tag system for customer service to research deeper, and customer service ACTUALLY does so ,and FOLLOWS THROUGH with bans. That would work. But if it was a GM flag and ban, that wouldn't work, it's very rife for abuse (I've seen it in other games) and even if it was a concensus of GM, that too if a problem, all to many GM's and other players get chummy and a cliche (I have also seen that).
Once a ban is in place, a player has a uphill battle of somehow proving innocence rather than guilt instead of a presumption of innocence. How do you prove a negative? Once banned, how does a player access and "prove" they didn't do some activity deemed inappropriate? In a room full of people, prove or disprove who is a criminal. Given the power to punish that someone, the one in power will tend give their friends and associates the presumption of innocence and blame the outsider/stranger, how does the stranger prove otherwise?
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
if they were interested in fighting bots they would limit ghost stories (or arcane res. earlier) # of instances, or # of instances created per hour, or moved/deleted the nodes, or made node RP BOP.. or.. or...or... any one of the dozens of ideas they could have easily done.
but, they didn't. move along nothing to see here......
If you give power to a person to ban an account in game, they can use this power for themselves or their friend's to ban ppl.
As an example (ı am not giving a name). A player from one of the biggest pvp guilds in game got killed by me in Sh pvp , then started to talk ""You have to say I am sorry , i will go and kill you in 1v1"". Blah SH pvp is for G vs G and he want 1v1.
After that he switched his sneak accounts in other guilds and started to pm me more. Because he was rank 12 ench and i was mainly rank 8 and i killed him in pvp.....bla bla bla
If you give ppl such power they wll use this for their own. Case will be started aganist company due to this reason and game will suffer..... eventually will die .
Its much better if they investigate send messages to GM helps or customer service.
If you need examples go old mmo games. And ppl who are highest tier player in this game have friend's as GM.
If they analyze number of instances of some maps they will see that while Temple of Spider (epic) was having 5 instances (i didnt see more ...) , Ghost stories have at least 2000 created instances or even more.
Sincelerly.
Also, the DDoS attacks affected all of PWE's games.
I'll take the time-limited instances any day....
— (The unwritten rule)