Man, i do support to penalize the botters, but now i cant log on from my work to check out all the available tier 3 items that can be crafted! I got to wait for the night after i get out of work, and then hope something good appears before i go to bed! So crafting been slow lately! So yes something of gateway should be back!! Maybe another software thats no web based or a internet website!!!
I have 5 alts for storage so being able to quickly flip back and forth between them on Gateway would always be better than logging in and out 5 times (or more!)
To me still absurd that you don't have a way to efficiently to stop the botters there are several security program that do so. Still, my main question is what about the equipament that we get in the sword coast adventure for our pets. That will be included in the dungeon of the game for drop as well the others normally drops of each dungeon?
By the way if through html Crytic can control the botters why not made a mini game so we can download through steam or arc so we can continue playing the sword coast adventures? Or they can't even control botting in Neverwinter as well....?
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,401Arc User
Read only Gateway is good for many things.
1. You can use it to check the profession progress for another toon without switching out just for the sake to check when you are playing one in game. You can do that when you are queuing, waiting for dragons, waiting for a party member coming back from DC, etc. 2. You can check the gear of toon A so that you don't need to switch when you are trying to use toon B to purchase gear for toon A. 3. Find out which toon has a particular item without switching to every characters you have. 4. Reading email. e.g. if the guild has a special event, you know that at work and arrange accordingly. Time to time, guild leader send out email to remind people not to forget to get that one day only free gift. 5. AH in game is brain dead in terms of sorting. Gateway sorting is not perfect but a mile ahead of in game. I often used Gateway to find the information and buy/sell in game.
*** 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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silverkeltMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,235Arc User
Items that need to be addressed in QOL.
1. Effective way to share AD. Gateway made this ten times faster. 2. Effective way to do professions in game, it takes 10 mins longer for me doing it in game then in gateway and its annoying. In gateway I would hit , collect now and it , you know did that, in game, I hit it and I have no idea why it drags like 4-5 seconds.. but it all adds up to just super annoying. 3. Effective way to monitor guild activity rosters, how are guild leaders supposed to know when to kick people otherwise? this is ridicolous, this puts as light years behind other games.. you should be ashamed this wasnt in game already. 4. SCA should be placed in game somehow.. since it A. Made comps more valuable and B. Was a valuable tool to get gear with.
3. Effective way to monitor guild activity rosters, how are guild leaders supposed to know when to kick people otherwise? this is ridicolous, this puts as light years behind other games.. you should be ashamed this wasnt in game already.
+1 In big guild like my this is hot problem, I can't kick anybody from guild for long absence, until Cryptic make somethink like Gateway guildmates list....
About @morrgans not everyone have Apple or Android device, better way to make it desktop (an App). I have Nokia E55 :* But this is my opinion.
I was a big fan of the Gateway. I travel every week and it was nice to be able to change professions on my phone and not have to connect a computer and log in I will also miss the dice game.
It is with some regret that we are announcing the closing of Gateway for Neverwinter. This was not an easy call. I'd like to remind people to please keep all conversation respectful. Insults, flaming, and toxicity doesn't help anyone, especially in this situation. Thank you.
i think it would be nice to bring gateway back until the next patch update, that way the auction house will be fixed for a bit and some people have a chance to keep doing their professions; maybe even the servers will stop doing this random disconnecting. not asking for gateway to stay forever just until the next patch. this is just my opinion as well; it would also grant more people this companion that is not great at all, some classes might find it useful but most wont.
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demonmongerMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,350Arc User
Bitters have been in client since day 2 of the game release. I leveled up on many pvp botters.
There are botters in every skirmish, every dungeon, every map of this game. Any of them have programs that capture all names in the area and send spam mail. Capture all gear scores in the area and phish for passwords on the highest item level players. Capture all players in area and monitor how long you play, and when you don't the bot tries to log on as you.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
I hate paying taxes! Why must I pay thousands of dollars in taxes when everything I buy is taxed anyways!
Was going to go into a long explanation of the hows/whys I think this happened. But I would probably just get myself banned or something. Anyway I highly doubt they will bring it back in any form. All we can hope for is they do something to improve the SNR and constant lag/DC from the game. This all happens just when I come back from a break and makes me wonder why I even bothered coming back.
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
A token companion is hardly worth the 800k AD or so I just spent on buying purple companions for my two characters without any kind of warning less than a week before they took the gateway down so I could spend more time playing SCA.... You know what guys, I quit.
IPs of tor exit nodes are published. There are proxy/tor/vpn rbl dns servers that are freely open for anyone to use to reverse dns an ip and see if it's a known proxy. They dont even need to maintain anything.
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
gateway was closed because of botting, money was never an issue for gateway. it was about how long it would take for doing the process of making gateway less bottable, yes resources would be put into it and money is a resource, but money was not the reason gateway was closed.
They proved before they can disable certain aspects, and it isn't like would have to build anything. Just get in the code, turn off the AH, Zax, Professions and bam, useful tool.
Useful? What's left?
Looking at inventory on alts or reading mail? I hardly call that a "must have" feature worthy of continued support, or even the effort to dig into the code and make it work, as well as ensuring that these features are indeed "off" and inaccessible to botters and exploiters.
It's a waste of time.
As much as I'll miss the gateway for QoL reasons @ironzerg79 is right, you wouldn't hire a Lighting Designer to fit a kitchen light or an engineer to teach your kid how to build LEGO. Even with my rusty circa 2000 HTML knowledge I know it's not as simple as "turn it off", hell the Broken/Glitched Tutorial workaround showed that, you'd need resources and Dev Time to build even a Read Only version... something they seem loath to provide.
They proved before they can disable certain aspects, and it isn't like would have to build anything. Just get in the code, turn off the AH, Zax, Professions and bam, useful tool.
Useful? What's left?
Looking at inventory on alts or reading mail? I hardly call that a "must have" feature worthy of continued support, or even the effort to dig into the code and make it work, as well as ensuring that these features are indeed "off" and inaccessible to botters and exploiters.
It's a waste of time.
Agreed with oldbaldyone. There are many of us that still want to use those "worthy" aspects for you, Iron. And please, "continued support"? Leave it as is, the base of all GW is done, dunno it will take 1 month to add a few new items to collection page, if not, leave it AS IS, and turn off professions and AH, and don't say it's more difficult that do this all from the ground. Don't need to update it EVERY DAY, do it once a month or even two. We don't ask them to create NEW thing, just to leave AS IS old ones. They say it was greatly affect live shard. C'mon, what live shard they play on? Haven't seen any imporvement since GW is down. Disabling prof and AH will free quite good amount of traffic. Even maybe put it all on lower spec servers. It will be a bit slower but I think we wouldn't mind. Thousands of users happy.
Looks like you're going to make the botters learn some Autoit3 or Autohotkey and start botting the client itself.
It wasn't about the botters its the lack of money they are making .... Now people are botting in game and increasing the lag way to go combating the bots :*
gateway was closed because of botting, money was never an issue for gateway. it was about how long it would take for doing the process of making gateway less bottable, yes resources would be put into it and money is a resource, but money was not the reason gateway was closed.
How many people do you know actually buying rp from the zen store ??? With the gateway going down and people manually crafting the market will take a hit after the surplus has dried out so yes it was a pretty calculated move on their part . And when hasn't it been about money with this game lol ....
IPs of tor exit nodes are published. There are proxy/tor/vpn rbl dns servers that are freely open for anyone to use to reverse dns an ip and see if it's a known proxy. They dont even need to maintain anything.
As far as i know (i don't tryed "TOR" or its network yet up to that extend) The thing is that a "TOR" user can change the IP he or she gest when enters into the TOR Network so, a bit hard to do so.
(tl;dr: tor is easy to block. botting is largely easy to detect and stop. arc made cryptic stop caring.)
TOR relies on bouncing a route between peers in the network, then uses an exit node with a known publicly facing IP address. Anyone can set up or take down their own exit node at any time, but it's ip address is soon discovered by bots people run to find new ones (http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/). The IP is then added to the database of known nodes. There aren't many exit nodes. Today there are 926 exit nodes, each with their own IP address. That's a very manageable.
If you want to blacklist proxies, public vpns, and tor you don't need to think about the database though. All you have to do is do a reverse dns check on one of the many rbl/dnsbl DNS servers when someone connects and see if it's on the blacklist. There are people who volunteer their time to maintain these databases free of charge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists). This is actually very easy to implement and is the first step in stopping people from using borrowed IP addresses on the net.
The next thing would be to log all gateway activities in a sql database. Then you'd write a small script that found the highest usage per IP. If an IP address is polling the AH or whatever is causing degradation at regular intervals over a long period of time, you ban the IP. If enough IP's are banned within a subnet, you flag it and manually review it to ban the whole subnet. If a botter is renting access to (or has created their own) malware driven botnet to use IP addresses, you will eventually filter those and be able to automatically contribute new abuse IP's to existing blacklists, contributing back to the abuse prevention communities.
Once an IP is banned you leave it up to the user to put in a support ticket for manual review. Many botters know this is a futile attempt to get their IP unbanned and won't even try at that point, rather they would focus on trying to buy another IP somewhere. Paying for a new IP every day or two cuts into profit margins significantly and takes more of a time investment, discouraging botting.
This is what should have been done from day 1. It takes about a day to write the scripts and set up the database. Maybe another day to watch it and debug it, with boundary tweaks over the course of a week or so.
The whole "We dont want to spend the manpower to do it." is a cop out.
The truth is, historically, when Neverwinter transferred management from Cryptic to Arc, the development on the gateway stopped completely, and left it in eternal "beta limbo". Noone did any development on it from that point forward. There are many bugs in the gateway and a couple of significant exploits that I reported and never were corrected (and I never publicly released). The exploits were never abused to the point that an emergency response was required, which is the only time they seem to patch leaking holes (remember Caturday?). I can only imagine, but it seems that Arc didn't want to spend the money on paying skilled HTML5/SQL coders to work on it, the gateway/neverwinter api wasn't fully developed or documented and the person who was in the middle of development left the company or was reassigned, or everyone involved just stopped caring and focused on raking in the money.
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.
Comments
Maybe another software thats no web based or a internet website!!!
By the way if through html Crytic can control the botters why not made a mini game so we can download through steam or arc so we can continue playing the sword coast adventures? Or they can't even control botting in Neverwinter as well....?
1. You can use it to check the profession progress for another toon without switching out just for the sake to check when you are playing one in game. You can do that when you are queuing, waiting for dragons, waiting for a party member coming back from DC, etc.
2. You can check the gear of toon A so that you don't need to switch when you are trying to use toon B to purchase gear for toon A.
3. Find out which toon has a particular item without switching to every characters you have.
4. Reading email. e.g. if the guild has a special event, you know that at work and arrange accordingly. Time to time, guild leader send out email to remind people not to forget to get that one day only free gift.
5. AH in game is brain dead in terms of sorting. Gateway sorting is not perfect but a mile ahead of in game. I often used Gateway to find the information and buy/sell in game.
1. Effective way to share AD. Gateway made this ten times faster.
2. Effective way to do professions in game, it takes 10 mins longer for me doing it in game then in gateway and its annoying. In gateway I would hit , collect now and it , you know did that, in game, I hit it and I have no idea why it drags like 4-5 seconds.. but it all adds up to just super annoying.
3. Effective way to monitor guild activity rosters, how are guild leaders supposed to know when to kick people otherwise? this is ridicolous, this puts as light years behind other games.. you should be ashamed this wasnt in game already.
4. SCA should be placed in game somehow.. since it A. Made comps more valuable and B. Was a valuable tool to get gear with.
About @morrgans not everyone have Apple or Android device, better way to make it desktop (an App). I have Nokia E55
But this is my opinion.
There are botters in every skirmish, every dungeon, every map of this game.
Any of them have programs that capture all names in the area and send spam mail. Capture all gear scores in the area and phish for passwords on the highest item level players. Capture all players in area and monitor how long you play, and when you don't the bot tries to log on as you.
the game it self, bcouse no option can befound for the spammers/goldsellers.
VIP status is not proof that your account is operated by a plays-for-entertainment human being.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
Where the f alt-friendly character management UI?
Fix the game.
Dead🔪TOR relies on bouncing a route between peers in the network, then uses an exit node with a known publicly facing IP address. Anyone can set up or take down their own exit node at any time, but it's ip address is soon discovered by bots people run to find new ones (http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/). The IP is then added to the database of known nodes. There aren't many exit nodes. Today there are 926 exit nodes, each with their own IP address. That's a very manageable.
If you want to blacklist proxies, public vpns, and tor you don't need to think about the database though. All you have to do is do a reverse dns check on one of the many rbl/dnsbl DNS servers when someone connects and see if it's on the blacklist. There are people who volunteer their time to maintain these databases free of charge. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_blacklists). This is actually very easy to implement and is the first step in stopping people from using borrowed IP addresses on the net.
The next thing would be to log all gateway activities in a sql database. Then you'd write a small script that found the highest usage per IP. If an IP address is polling the AH or whatever is causing degradation at regular intervals over a long period of time, you ban the IP. If enough IP's are banned within a subnet, you flag it and manually review it to ban the whole subnet. If a botter is renting access to (or has created their own) malware driven botnet to use IP addresses, you will eventually filter those and be able to automatically contribute new abuse IP's to existing blacklists, contributing back to the abuse prevention communities.
Once an IP is banned you leave it up to the user to put in a support ticket for manual review. Many botters know this is a futile attempt to get their IP unbanned and won't even try at that point, rather they would focus on trying to buy another IP somewhere. Paying for a new IP every day or two cuts into profit margins significantly and takes more of a time investment, discouraging botting.
This is what should have been done from day 1. It takes about a day to write the scripts and set up the database. Maybe another day to watch it and debug it, with boundary tweaks over the course of a week or so.
The whole "We dont want to spend the manpower to do it." is a cop out.
The truth is, historically, when Neverwinter transferred management from Cryptic to Arc, the development on the gateway stopped completely, and left it in eternal "beta limbo". Noone did any development on it from that point forward. There are many bugs in the gateway and a couple of significant exploits that I reported and never were corrected (and I never publicly released). The exploits were never abused to the point that an emergency response was required, which is the only time they seem to patch leaking holes (remember Caturday?). I can only imagine, but it seems that Arc didn't want to spend the money on paying skilled HTML5/SQL coders to work on it, the gateway/neverwinter api wasn't fully developed or documented and the person who was in the middle of development left the company or was reassigned, or everyone involved just stopped caring and focused on raking in the money.
I'm sure Arc paid someone a significant amount of money to gain control of Neverwinter and the focus went from developing and innovating an amazing product to recouping those costs.
I should know by now that when games change hands, I should just bail out and go find something else to play. Viacom screwed me with neopets. Zynga screwed me with omgpop. And now Arc with neverwinter.