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Bots in Random Levelling Queue
pyrite
Member Posts: 4 Arc User
Since I started playing the game around last month, I've been reporting every single bot I've encountered in the random levelling queue, which is the only queue I do daily. Now, after a month I would have expected some of them banned but instead I keep seeing the same characters/handlers over and over.
Does really cryptic's support do something on the matter? As far as I can see, I don't think so. To be honest, I feel like every single report I've made so far seemed pointless given the former circumstances mentioned.
Edit. There were 3 bots on my last random levelling queue party.
Does really cryptic's support do something on the matter? As far as I can see, I don't think so. To be honest, I feel like every single report I've made so far seemed pointless given the former circumstances mentioned.
Edit. There were 3 bots on my last random levelling queue party.
Post edited by pyrite#2967 on
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Problem being, it is rather difficult to say for certain that a character is a bot (automated game play) or a player that has multiple characters in the instance and controls one at the time (his other toons afk or attacking/moving with macros).
There are a couple of indicators for botting and/or multiple account farming, but there is always the chance to be wrong.
For instance, new players tend to behave "suspiciously" rather often. You would not want to penalize them.
Having said that, the current reporting process is time-consuming and it is frustrating to see, that nothing actually happens (and you see the same characters doing the same thing another day).
For this reason I have stopped reporting all together. I just abandon the instance, when I think there are bots (or afk, multiple account farmers) and take the 30 min leaver penalty.
I wish, Cryptic would add a simple right-click menu option to report *suspected* botters, afk farmers or multiple account farmers. A single report should not lead to any action, because a suspect is not necessarily an offender.
Internally they could implement something along the lines: When an account gets 10 or more reports of suspicious behavior, a real person looks into it)
While I agree with you on most of your thoughts, there are a few lines above I would like to talk about.
Generally speaking, I personally think it's not rather difficult to say whether a certain character might be a bot or not. At least from my personal experience most bots tend to not be very well coded as far as I can tell by judging their behaviour in game.
Needless to say, I honestly believe cryptic does zero effort on the matter or very close to it. I can't help it but to think that the amount of in-game tickets they get daily make them prioritise bots reports very little. Once month ago when I started reporting bots accounts they had like 7x.HAMSTER number of incidents opened (tickets). As of today I think they have like 20k more.
The reporting process is utterly wrong designed. I'm in no way spending more time reporting why/how I think someone's is botting than the current time it takes me to finish the dungeon (~11m).
And I suspect they don't have an automated flagged system in place as which was what you suggested on your last paragraph.
Any account that gets a certain amount of reports should instantly get automatically flagged for manual revision.
But as I said, after so many repeatable reports made on several accounts I got the feeling nothing was done by cryptic.
Which is worse, and I didn't mentioned on my original post, is that I'm seeing some of those bot accounts farming "energon" companion day and night. Because, yeah, not only the levelling queue is infested with bots, also Dread Ring skirmish have a few of them working on a 24/7 basis routine.
That alone has an impact on the overall AD market enough for cryptic to take this issue in serious consideration.
Just watch the path the toon takes before the last boss when he tries to get to the interactible that triggers the purple circle "waiting for your party" => zigzag into the axe in cloak tower/greywolf den, weird back and forth between the anchor and the firecamp in pirate king's retreat, etc...
I don't think it about no one at Cryptic "caring" about bot behavior, I think it is a combination of factors that makes dealing with suspected bot behavior very difficult and time consuming. ¢¢
I believe someone on the Cryptic side has the ability to pull up a video of reported activity and review it, but even if they just checked out those few instances when someone does report credible suspicious behavior it would probably be very time consuming. Add to this some people seem to have a very liberal concept of what actually constitutes bot behavior and I suspect a good portion of those reports turn out to be inaccurate.
I do like the idea of "X" number (multiple) of reports about the same character displaying suspicious or bot behavior from different players and the reported character is moved closer to the top of the list to be checked out, but still I suspect it would require a great deal of someone's time and that's time when they are probably supposed to be doing something else so time spent chasing down bot reports (especially inaccurate reports) is probably a very frustrating endeavor.