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Ideas to kill "bots" WITHOUT trashing players too much
brandrik
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 16 Arc User
I have been thinking about this problem and have come to the conclusion that nothing that Cryptic has done recently will really have any significant effects on roboplayers. Things like the removal of LSAD in theory lowered their take from 24k to 3K per toon per day. First that is at best a temporary inconvenience since their business model is effectively only limited by computer power (to run multiple clients) and bandwidth, both of which are trivial to expand at very low cost or they can stay at 3k per toon and still make very good profits or more likely they will just spin up more toons by 8X and be back in business in no time. Lets face they already have all of the scripts to autorun new toons up to level 10 to earn 3k/day. The end result will be worse stats for Cryptic to build decisions on, mung up the login servers and keep making things worse for the players. Now they could get rid of AD by invocation but lets face that would cause even more people to quit. The game is , by its design, prone to support bots. Companions, which are money makers for Cryptic ARE bots and the engine has to allow then to operate to aid the players. Anything they can do roboplayers can. So the question is how do they do something to mess with the bots and not really just continue to hurt human players? I'm hoping some ideas could come from this thread. I know people will go OH MY GOD NO! on every idea, but think about this: trashing an idea is simple if you don't like it please come up with another the more ideas suggested the better the chances the game will not continue to be ruined by more bad solutions like the ones we have seen being implemented recently.
To start off how about this we need a way to hamper a roboplayer from playing; could some sort of a random picture login word like banks and sites use be put into the login client? I know I hate them also but that would mean a real person would have to login for a given group of toons. Maybe also put a hard upper limit on the number of toons per login? The companies who really run these farms probably are running hundreds of clients and this would hamper them more than the average real player.
Please do not turn this into a flame fest just give opinions without any attacks and come up with something better. Ideas have to be implemented or the game WILL fail have no doubt about it. Cryptic seem either unwilling or unable to run scripts to test for script run players if nothing is done to really make it difficult to run bots then this game and every other free to play MMO game will be either forced to just accept it or close.
To start off how about this we need a way to hamper a roboplayer from playing; could some sort of a random picture login word like banks and sites use be put into the login client? I know I hate them also but that would mean a real person would have to login for a given group of toons. Maybe also put a hard upper limit on the number of toons per login? The companies who really run these farms probably are running hundreds of clients and this would hamper them more than the average real player.
Please do not turn this into a flame fest just give opinions without any attacks and come up with something better. Ideas have to be implemented or the game WILL fail have no doubt about it. Cryptic seem either unwilling or unable to run scripts to test for script run players if nothing is done to really make it difficult to run bots then this game and every other free to play MMO game will be either forced to just accept it or close.
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Comments
Stopping bots should not be too hard, it's just the devs don't want to do it yet. If they killed the bots today, the game would become barren and the only people left are the ones who already have BiS. It requires an insane amount of RP to refine an artifact to the end. No one wants to pay thousands of dollars for one mythic artifact for one toon. And there isn't enough playable hours, or even waking hours, to grind the RP for even one legendary artifact for one toon.
Also, while people are not willing to pay hundreds of dollars on blood rubies, people are will to pay some money for cheap RP and the upgrade materials. So these bots are actually a source of income for cryptic.