I think it's time you reconsider what is more important to you <snip>
It's quite simple. Stopping botters is NOT more important to me. Bots hurt Cryptic's bottom line, not mine. In fact, bots actively HELP the player base. Don't get me wrong, if Cryptic can stop bots without harming players I'll cheer Cryptic on, but unfortunately Cryptic's BtA solution hurts the general population far more than it does bots. In this situation Bots are the lesser evil and Cryptic the greater.
It doesn't seem like anybody here truly understands what a Bot is. Or perhaps what is going on behind the computer screen of that bot.
It isn't some middle aged dude sitting in his mom's basement watching LotR while automated scripts run on his multi-boxing setup.
Bots are managed by an entire building full of people. Their job is to make sure visually that their assigned legion of bots are functioning as programmed. And to withdraw those that have been suspended or blocked in game.
And they aren't all logged in to NW. They have thousands of accounts, each, logged in to a bunch of other games such as WoW, Guild Wars 2, etc. simultaneously. They do not see the game screens. They see lines of scripts running down their screens.
Now with that picture painted. Consider some of the well intentioned, but utterly useless ideas presented here. A contest to tag bots so they can be reported? What is the point if the "operator" of that bot is just going to pluck that string out of his script and open 12 more strings inside of 6 minutes?
I'm offering this information cause I had an opportunity to visit two of these "gold mills". Imagine what the call center for e-Trade or AT&T looks like. Thousands of cubicles. Not a single one vacant, ever. Each operator managing an average of 1200 accounts spanning over 25-50 different online games. Its quite a sight to behold in person I tell you. But it would give you perspective about the "bots" that frustrate you so much.
You aren't trying to take down that nerdy man in his mom's basement. You are trying to take down an entire industry that is not regulated by any entity or government.
I don't mean to pee on anybody's Cheerios here. But, people have a tendency to personify these pita bots and develop unrealistic ideas of thwarting them. When in reality, if there were currently an effective way of handling gold harvesting mechanics, it would have been taken care of over a decade ago.
In this situation Bots are the lesser evil and Cryptic the greater.
I beg to differ. The game is being exploited by use of programs and, like all exploits, will eventually be fixed regardless of how beneficial the exploit is to the player base. Dungeon/AD/whatever other exploits are fixed because the game was not intended to be worked that way. It's not Cryptic's fault that people get used to renting 5-star hotel rooms for next to nothing and forgetting that, when their occupation is over, they have to return to the ghetto where they belong. Cryptic is not the greater evil here- exploiters and those who support them are. What you are saying is comparative to playing around in the neighbors yard and then getting mad when they post up a "No Tresspassing" sign.
I think the real matter here is that people think, for some reason, they have to have the best stuff as soon as it is available and 100% perfect/whatever. New content is constantly being released. Eventually, these upgraded artifacts will be obsolete and we will all be forced to start the process over again with a different item. As always, those who want to spend money will get ahead the fastest. People who grind for their items will get there a little slower. Those who sit around p***ing and moaning about how hard it is will get there the slowest. This is how the game has always worked and nothing will change. Everyone will advance and upgrade at the same rates as before and, believe it or not, this will balance out the process and people will be advancing at a relatively similar pace. You seriously can't blame Cryptic because people got used to some malcontent that was never supposed to be there in the first place. Spend money and get rewarded. Work hard and get rewarded. Sorry to say, but those are going to be your only options. It should be so.
It doesn't seem like anybody here truly understands what a Bot is. Or perhaps what is going on behind the computer screen of that bot.
It isn't some middle aged dude sitting in his mom's basement watching LotR while automated scripts run on his multi-boxing setup.
I've been lurking for three months and this is my first post.
You sir are one of the few people I've seen who understand what these bots are. Its an industry. A industry designed to circumvent any and all measures to stop them. A hand full of programers and armchair quarterbacks cannot compete with an army of thousands running hundreds of thousands of bots.
I just got my first Artifact the day the news came out. It took almost everything I had saved to get it to Epic. Looking ahead at needing another 4 million to get to Legendary. I don't mind the grind so much, I just wish they would instill more value to either grinding or paying for it. The cost of a PS4, for enough RP to get to Legendary seems a little excessive.
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onecoolscatcatMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 575Arc User
edited November 2014
@ sdffgghdfh
You raise some good points and I agree with most of them, however we've reached two entirely different conclusions. We have differing ideas about what is "good" and what is an exploit. It's unlikely either of us will persuade the other to another way of thinking, but I do respect your reasoning.
I don't view Dragon Hoard Enchantment drops as an exploit. I believe they, along with artifact gear's implementation, are terrible game design, but the drops themselves are working as intended. Cryptic simply pulled a boner by making refining points the sole source of artifact gear progression and a sizable source of AD. Cryptic DECIDED farming should be rewarded as opposed to adventuring, exploring, and playing. This was a conscious decision to maximize use from limited game design resources, but guess what? Bots farm better than people. Everyone already knew that, but Cryptic chose this path in spite of the fact.
Cheap artifact weapon refining points themselves aren't the issue. The ability to SELL them is. Players have an extremely limited number of ways to make AD above their 24k rough/day. Now Cryptic is removing a large portion of player income because of poor decisions and design. That, IMO, is far and away more harmful to Neverwinter's players than cheap Bot-farmed refining points could ever be.
"I can solve this botting problem." "I have all of the solutions." Don't make me laugh. The problem with these suggestions is that players reporting players is just completely stupid. Sure, you might get a lot of legitimate reports, but you're also going to get false reports out of spite. "Oh, this person has better gear than me. He must have spent money on the game. I don't like people who spend money on the game. I'm reporting them." "Oh, this person killed me in PvP and then trolled me. Reported." You might as well just put everyone under review because, eventually, everyone is going to get reported at least once and I'm sure Cryptic doesn't have the manpower to look into false reports 24/7. Stupid solution, really, because you just can't trust your entire player base with that responsibility.
Here's the thing about all of these bound-RP-negatively-effecting-the-economy posts- THE ECONOMY IS ALREADY NEGATIVELY AFFECTED. I watched the price of Black Opals go from over 1 mil per stack of 99 down to 400k. What seemed like a legitimate way to make AD was ruined fairly quick. I can think of about 5 different dungeons in this game currently that payout an enormous amount of peridots and aquamarines from skills nodes, not to mention enchants, considering the time it takes to farm them.
Why would Cryptic want to make RP bound? Simple. Don't have time to farm? Spend money on the Zen market to buy RP. Enough said. Grind or pay to get ahead- that's the name of the game, people. Always has been.
You REALLY want to stop botters? Instead of targeting botters specifically, target WHERE and HOW they bot. Dungeons like the Reservoir that are being botted, well- you can't continuously bot a dungeon if you can't get back into it once you leave it. Go by the "three strikes and you're out" rule. Sometimes, people need to legitimately abort/leave dungeons. They should NEVER have to do that legitimately more than 3 times. Set a daily abandonment limit of 3 times and, if that is not enough, have the players contact a GM for exceptions. Problem solved. Want to solve the foundry botting problem? Well, you can't, not without hurting legitimate farmers. There's really no way to distinguish when someone's botting a foundry or not unless they're in your guild, on your friend list, or being actively monitored. You can't flag people by time spent or how many times they accept the same quest because people could legitimately do that. The only ways to prevent foundry botting are going to be unfavourable to the legitimate-farming community: Remove RP/enchant drops altogether from the foundry or make the Fey/Dragon enchant drops bound. Bound RP is the only reasonable way to fix that, and I'm in favour of it. Let the botters use their RP to refine enchants. They still need to upgrade everything, so it's going to cost them. Eventually, once they drive the price of enchants so low, profit won't be worth the cost of upgrading anything. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have rank 10s and Vorpals for 500k than peridots for 15k. Why worry about refining your own stuff when you could just buy it for super cheap?
Whether you like it or not, binding RP is the ONLY way to fix the foundry problem. I think it's time you reconsider what is more important to you.
The very first page was all about targeting where the bots were.
Plus there was talk of a penalty if you report non-bots a lot. Also if you think that you can't tell the difference between a bot that runs a foundry 24/7 and someone who grinds foundries then you haven't ever heard of bot detection software.
LOL. never gonna happen. I'm the founder of one of the largest (and oldest) guilds in Neverwinter - if Cryptic were to approach any guilds on any topic whatsoever, the Greycloaks would be on the list they'd approach. It doesn't really seem like Cryptic spends a lot of effort soliciting player feedback. They get a lot of reactionary feedback, and there does seem to be some small measure of outreach - but, for example, they haven't gone to any effort to approach guild leaders of large guilds to find what things would help us manage the 1000+ members we have (all of which would, of course, also be of help to smaller guilds too). They haven't established any sort of formal player-board / council to help with testing or feedback or just talking through things from a player perspective. Neverwinter is a decent product, and while it's pretty cool because the Developers and Producers aren't stupid, it's not a product being designed with it's audience in mind, but instead it's being designed with what Cryptic's staff THINK the audience wants based on unofficial feedback and/or extremely limited interaction.
It's the same problem all enterprise software has. Those of you who have every used anything from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft -- not the consumer stuff, I mean like Sharepoint, Salesforce -- etc. Same problem. You know what I mean.
Cryptic needs to spend more time listening to players rather than trying to think about what the ROI for a new feature is. The fact is, if they listen -- REALLY listen -- and make the game better based on player feedback, they WILL increase their ROI. A producer kept saying on Reddit a while ago that X feature was unlikely because of ROI. Well, what's the ROI of a keyboard? If you don't have a game people like, they don't stick around. If the game works great, isn't very buggy, and has good controls AND happens to have good content, people stick around. Players that stick around longer tend to pay you more money.
Here are some suggestions: Not all combined but pick one or possibly combine
* Set a time limit on foundries, how long you can be in that foundry and make it so that you can only run that one foundry once per day.) There may be complaints that someone didn't get to complete the foundry so make it reasonable that a foundry cannot take the average gamer over an hour to complete. Once the person has reached the time limit, they cannot re-do the same foundry until next day.
-AND/OR-
* If a foundry quest takes the average user 20 minutes to complete but the user is in there for 45 minutes, set up a "Are you there" check much like being afk for too long. Make this randomly pop up on the screen in different sizes every 10 minutes that wouldn't be easy for a botter to guess where it would pop up next. If the user doesn't click on it within a couple of minutes, boot the user from the foundry.
-And-
*Remove any foundry that is specific to farming. All that needs to be done to see it is simply type in "farm". There are maps that aren't for farming with the word farm but it's pretty obvious which ones are designed for bots.
Open World Botting:
*Hiring in game invisible GM's to investigate a report of an open world botter. If PWE is scrapped for money and don't want to hire GM's for this then give the GM's astral diamonds or virtual goods.
Now on to understanding why some people bot and I'm not talking about the network of bots that are making a profit but just profiting to play the game.
People bot because making AD in this game isn't easy for everyone. The AH's prices keep shooting up. This benefits people who already have enough AD to not care from back in the day of their castle never runs being profitable etc...
For new players, it's really tough or players that just want to play the game instead of doing professions or turning into robots themselves.
So how can this be changed for the better?
-PVE-
*Increase the amount of rough astral diamonds you are allowed to convert. 24k is not a good amount. Over that limit, many people now travel from character after character turning into players that cannot play the game for fun but trying to raise up enough money just to be a good enough player. Raise the bar to 75-100k because realistically, that 24k a day may have once been a reasonable amount but in today's Neverwinter world, it's like giving a kid 10 cents to buy a candy bar.
*For skirmishes at lvl 60. The event hands out the same astral diamonds whether you are level 5 or 60. My suggestion would be for the tougher skirmishes that take 10-15 minutes to complete, the chest should give out 5k. For the skirmishes like Master of the Hunt, 1k. So Shores of Tuern and Kessel's Retreat = 5k per chest.
*For dungeons during the dungeon delving event, there is a big decline on doing the older dungeons. If you pay attention to zone chat I see Pirate King is still active, Castle Never but most people are asking for Epic Lair of Lostmauth. Dungeon Delve events should drop anywhere from 200k-10k AD per chest depending on tier one vs. tier 2. Castle Never should drop 10k AD since it takes longer. Pirate King goes by so quick that people have that on farm mode. Even though it's tier 2, it's so fast that there should be 200 AD per chest because then people will just rather still farm Pirate King.
-PVP-
During Arena Event-
*Award 1st-3rd place on the board with AD but only the match was played for at least 7 minutes. If the match is over so quickly that it's a pug stomp, no AD.
1st place gets 2,000 AD
2nd place gets 1,000 AD
3rd place gets 500 AD
Instead of pointing fingers at valid players that love the game but sometimes farm, think about why that is going on. The people that are running this as a scheme for possible selling of real life money, they aren't in it because of enjoyment factors. Just in it to turn a profit.
If there were a reasonable way for people to get AD for playing the game, the community may strengthen as well. The game itself is very fun. I enjoy looking at all the details and love the creativity put into it. Not everyone is a AD genius in this game. Even when I've been told some stuff on how to make AD, I felt that it would turn me into a bot and I'd rather play the game!
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chemboy613Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,521Arc User
Seems to me like the amount of (paid) man-hours needed to actually check the reports would be kind of a major snag with that idea though.
Ideally there would be some software to check reported accounts for botting.
The sheer amount of bots would be overwhelming for just devs to catch.
I also like the idea of making farmable instances available only once or twice a day. Make all those level 60 bots in Sharanderp find another farm, and another , until that way is too much work to get AD.
Unfortunately, if you wiped out all farmable instances and nodes you would still have invoke bots that can make an average of 5-7 k a day just on RAD from invoke and elixirs from coins. The gold sellers would still have gold to sell, but at least AH wouldn't be flooded with bot RP.
Just curious, I havent really done much research on this topic.
I know bots are technically "legal" in the sense they arent breaking any actual laws.
But since these MMO (especially RPG) companies seem to have such an issue with them, are MMO companies devs/publishers making any attempt to try to put limitations in place on them through actual legal means?
Since actual people in game, coding doesnt seem to work; just go straight to the courts.
This isnt a post about what this company does, so dont get it twisted mods, just in general; does the MMO dev/pub community see at as such an issue to push it that far?
I'm more than a little leery about leaving the final judgement to a pile of code.
In other words you want a dev to review every bot in game?
The bots are endless, devs aren't. No game ever could afford enough devs to review every bot.
If you get flagged as a bot now, i'm sure you can have your case reviewed through customer support anyways.
I doubt banned bots will file a support ticket to get an account reactivated. Then the devs would only have to review disputed accounts and it wouldn't be software that had the final word.
You're looking at this from the perspective of a player. Unfortunately for us (the free players or small spenders), the company looks at this from a business perspective. If something is hurting revenues, what is the most effective way (the best combination of cost and result) to fix it?
It is no coincidence that they had blood ruby sales shortly after artifacts were released. The problem that they're trying to solve is "how do we get people to buy more blood rubies / zen?"
That isn't to say that they don't care about player issues. But the perspective, approach and priorities are going to be different than what you described.
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chemboy613Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,521Arc User
edited November 2014
About the legality -
Technically the bots are in violation of the TOS - which is a contract. Violating the ToS is a breach of contract, and yes it's not "Criminal" but they probably could sue you. The problem is the transaction costs are prohibited.
Now, they run the servers and run the evniornment. I suspect that I and all you don't actually "own" anything in the game, rather we own a liscence to use them in game, which could be revoked at the liscenee's discression. Now obviously they don't ban you without a very good cause, because the damage to their PR would be severe (theoritically).
However i know people who have had their accounts temporarily banned due to the spark exploit and then had accounter permanently banned due to the resonantor exploit.
Why is this?
Thought is creating AD out of nothing is theoritcially fraud, because you can convert AD back money. Surely, not through legetimate means, but it's possible.
The thing about caturday, while I admit this is just hearsay, is that people were duping astral diamonds and then turning around and selling them for real money through third party sites. This is likely some form of wire fraud (though I'm a patent attorney, which is quite a lot different).
So the bots are at least in breach of the ToS and can be banned for cause. I don't know the details of wire fraud well enough to say if they violate that - but they could be.
Now sadly unless we are talking many thousands of dollars, the lawyers to bring the suit cost more than it's worth, so they have to take that lost. Best course of action is to, of course, find another way to stop the bots.
Cryptic is honestly trying to do this through their "fix", however it impacts real players to negatively.
When i saw the bots in PE today i wish i could just right click and report. I think something like that should be instituted.
When i saw the bots in PE today i wish i could just right click and report. I think something like that should be instituted.
...or, you could simply press a key and send a "please stop spamming in game" e-mail directly to the spamming company.
Do you suppose it would be cost-effective for them very long to read through thousands of such e-mails?
@ sdffgghdfh
You raise some good points and I agree with most of them, however we've reached two entirely different conclusions. We have differing ideas about what is "good" and what is an exploit. It's unlikely either of us will persuade the other to another way of thinking, but I do respect your reasoning.
I don't view Dragon Hoard Enchantment drops as an exploit. I believe they, along with artifact gear's implementation, are terrible game design, but the drops themselves are working as intended. Cryptic simply pulled a boner by making refining points the sole source of artifact gear progression and a sizable source of AD. Cryptic DECIDED farming should be rewarded as opposed to adventuring, exploring, and playing. This was a conscious decision to maximize use from limited game design resources, but guess what? Bots farm better than people. Everyone already knew that, but Cryptic chose this path in spite of the fact.
Cheap artifact weapon refining points themselves aren't the issue. The ability to SELL them is. Players have an extremely limited number of ways to make AD above their 24k rough/day. Now Cryptic is removing a large portion of player income because of poor decisions and design. That, IMO, is far and away more harmful to Neverwinter's players than cheap Bot-farmed refining points could ever be.
Well said.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
edited November 2014
Ultimately, game designers need to accept that any repetitive or boring task that is profitable (if you can stomach the grind) is going to be automated. It's what humans do.
Bots are always going to win. As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, MMO farming is an industry dedicated to finding ways to continually automate profitable parts of an MMO, then sell the proceeds back to players. The people working in bot farms are probably just as smart as anyone working in an MMO.
I created this post for you guys to do exactly what you are doing. Bringing up possible solutions, argue, give up on bots and for some of you to take the adversarial ****** approach to counter posting. That being said. I have heard a few great ideas which is what I intended to do here.
ID's linked to instances that are being farmed like Arcane Res to limit the amount of times they can bot them. Great idea
Investigating accounts posting large amounts of RP on AH and the bots that feed them using bot detection software. Also doable.
I am well aware that my idea that was used in another game to report bots by players would be miss used by immature players that hate on others. Because it happened in the game we used this method in but no honest players actually got banned. The actual not reporting of these accounts at all is a huge mistake. And a large job for Cryptic to handle said incoming reports. But even though you are just shutting down one line of code for these botting sweatshops, remove hundreds of lines of code a day and at least make it harder. Make them have to bot more 60's to reproduce their profit maker.
Not trying at all is like letting someone punch you in the balls a few times a day because " Meh, its what that guy does. He punches people in the balls so lets just leave him to his ball punching and forget it until he does it again." Cryptics reply. "We are cutting off your balls so he wont punch you in your balls."
Moving on. Implementing a new way to level artifacts through players experience and time spent playing. Bound artifacts cant be sold its a fact. Not a bad idea either.
Also another thing I would like to bring up is the bizarre needs to be more extensive to battle rising prices such as rare marks of power are now upwards of 110k AD. Like greater marks of potency they should be available in the Bizarre for say 50K? Or a higher drop rate in dungeons or lock boxes.
As for the the Rp bought in the Zen Shop. Name me one person that would buy a Blood stone to Rp anything at that price lol. No, just no. Cryptic has some spenders on this game but most of us were smart enough to buy wanted items and flip them for small to larger profits such as Pres Wards or Companions with the bonding stone.
Cryptics move to bind Rp will work. I just don't think its fair that they didn't try to get to the root of the problem a long time ago and now the Rp apocalypse is upon us. But hey they are bringing double Rp weekend back so I wont ***** about that.
Not trying at all is like letting someone punch you in the balls a few times a day because " Meh, its what that guy does. He punches people in the balls so lets just leave him to his ball punching and forget it until he does it again." Cryptics reply. "We are cutting off your balls so he wont punch you in your balls."
BAHAHAHAHAHA!
Very funny, but sad that its also the most accurate description of Cryptic's actions towards botting.
Ultimately, game designers need to accept that any repetitive or boring task that is profitable (if you can stomach the grind) is going to be automated. It's what humans do.
Bots are always going to win. As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, MMO farming is an industry dedicated to finding ways to continually automate profitable parts of an MMO, then sell the proceeds back to players. The people working in bot farms are probably just as smart as anyone working in an MMO.
But to stop bots, you have to stop designing grinding, repetitve tasks as a means to progress in a game.
You hit the nail right on the head. In the end it all boils down to this.
This phenomenon has been plaguing every MMO i've ever heard of, and I think that developers of all games have just come to terms with it, trying to limit the most "blatant" violations (the game-breaking ones) and keeping the bots in mind when they're balancing progression as a natural part of the game.
The fact is that it's impossible to design MMOs without grinds, these games, with their huge investments are designed to last for years to recoup the costs and make profits, and without grinds there is no game that lasts years out of pure "first-time" content.
...or, you could simply press a key and send a "please stop spamming in game" e-mail directly to the spamming company.
Do you suppose it would be cost-effective for them very long to read through thousands of such e-mails?
If you really think that such companies would EVER read a single one of those e-mails, I'd like to introduce myself as the sole vendor of Buckingham Palace and London Bridge.
I can arrange for you to purchase both at a reasonable price. For a slightly extra cost, I can arrange for them to be transported brick-by-brick to the destination of your choice.
Please pm me for details.
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ironzerg79Member, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 4,942Arc User
You hit the nail right on the head. In the end it all boils down to this.
This phenomenon has been plaguing every MMO i've ever heard of, and I think that developers of all games have just come to terms with it, trying to limit the most "blatant" violations (the game-breaking ones) and keeping the bots in mind when they're balancing progression as a natural part of the game.
The fact is that it's impossible to design MMOs without grinds, these games, with their huge investments are designed to last for years to recoup the costs and make profits, and without grinds there is no game that lasts years out of pure "first-time" content.
The last few MMOs I tried, Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls and Wildstar all had crippling problems with bots...for the most part, their influence is fairly benign in Neverwinter.
But, to your second point, I think there are a lot of ways you can design MMOs to help mitigate some of the need for bots. Bots are really great at replicating simple to moderately complex actions, but these actions have to be repetitive with a very low amount of actual decisions. And that piece has to be tied to something that creates value in game. Remove the reasons for bots, and you cut out the bots all together.
If you really think that such companies would EVER read a single one of those e-mails, I'd like to introduce myself as the sole vendor of Buckingham Palace and London Bridge.
What makes you think they wouldn't read an e-mail from a potential customer?
The e-mail subject and contents are completely customizable as well as randomizable so that they could not simply "filter" them out.
Either they would require someone to read through them all OR their e-mail accounts would be completely flooded and worthless for business, thus forcing them to buy/setup new "customer contact" e-mail accounts. Either way, their e-mail communications become completely worthless for their spam business.
What makes you think they wouldn't read an e-mail from a potential customer?
The e-mail subject and contents are completely customizable as well as randomizable so that they could not simply "filter" them out.
Either they would require someone to read through them all OR their e-mail accounts would be completely flooded and worthless for business, thus forcing them to buy/setup new "customer contact" e-mail accounts. Either way, their e-mail communications become completely worthless for their spam business.
No. They would just track where the emails are originating from, and block them.
Comments
It's quite simple. Stopping botters is NOT more important to me. Bots hurt Cryptic's bottom line, not mine. In fact, bots actively HELP the player base. Don't get me wrong, if Cryptic can stop bots without harming players I'll cheer Cryptic on, but unfortunately Cryptic's BtA solution hurts the general population far more than it does bots. In this situation Bots are the lesser evil and Cryptic the greater.
It isn't some middle aged dude sitting in his mom's basement watching LotR while automated scripts run on his multi-boxing setup.
Bots are managed by an entire building full of people. Their job is to make sure visually that their assigned legion of bots are functioning as programmed. And to withdraw those that have been suspended or blocked in game.
And they aren't all logged in to NW. They have thousands of accounts, each, logged in to a bunch of other games such as WoW, Guild Wars 2, etc. simultaneously. They do not see the game screens. They see lines of scripts running down their screens.
Now with that picture painted. Consider some of the well intentioned, but utterly useless ideas presented here. A contest to tag bots so they can be reported? What is the point if the "operator" of that bot is just going to pluck that string out of his script and open 12 more strings inside of 6 minutes?
I'm offering this information cause I had an opportunity to visit two of these "gold mills". Imagine what the call center for e-Trade or AT&T looks like. Thousands of cubicles. Not a single one vacant, ever. Each operator managing an average of 1200 accounts spanning over 25-50 different online games. Its quite a sight to behold in person I tell you. But it would give you perspective about the "bots" that frustrate you so much.
You aren't trying to take down that nerdy man in his mom's basement. You are trying to take down an entire industry that is not regulated by any entity or government.
I don't mean to pee on anybody's Cheerios here. But, people have a tendency to personify these pita bots and develop unrealistic ideas of thwarting them. When in reality, if there were currently an effective way of handling gold harvesting mechanics, it would have been taken care of over a decade ago.
I beg to differ. The game is being exploited by use of programs and, like all exploits, will eventually be fixed regardless of how beneficial the exploit is to the player base. Dungeon/AD/whatever other exploits are fixed because the game was not intended to be worked that way. It's not Cryptic's fault that people get used to renting 5-star hotel rooms for next to nothing and forgetting that, when their occupation is over, they have to return to the ghetto where they belong. Cryptic is not the greater evil here- exploiters and those who support them are. What you are saying is comparative to playing around in the neighbors yard and then getting mad when they post up a "No Tresspassing" sign.
I think the real matter here is that people think, for some reason, they have to have the best stuff as soon as it is available and 100% perfect/whatever. New content is constantly being released. Eventually, these upgraded artifacts will be obsolete and we will all be forced to start the process over again with a different item. As always, those who want to spend money will get ahead the fastest. People who grind for their items will get there a little slower. Those who sit around p***ing and moaning about how hard it is will get there the slowest. This is how the game has always worked and nothing will change. Everyone will advance and upgrade at the same rates as before and, believe it or not, this will balance out the process and people will be advancing at a relatively similar pace. You seriously can't blame Cryptic because people got used to some malcontent that was never supposed to be there in the first place. Spend money and get rewarded. Work hard and get rewarded. Sorry to say, but those are going to be your only options. It should be so.
I've been lurking for three months and this is my first post.
You sir are one of the few people I've seen who understand what these bots are. Its an industry. A industry designed to circumvent any and all measures to stop them. A hand full of programers and armchair quarterbacks cannot compete with an army of thousands running hundreds of thousands of bots.
I just got my first Artifact the day the news came out. It took almost everything I had saved to get it to Epic. Looking ahead at needing another 4 million to get to Legendary. I don't mind the grind so much, I just wish they would instill more value to either grinding or paying for it. The cost of a PS4, for enough RP to get to Legendary seems a little excessive.
You raise some good points and I agree with most of them, however we've reached two entirely different conclusions. We have differing ideas about what is "good" and what is an exploit. It's unlikely either of us will persuade the other to another way of thinking, but I do respect your reasoning.
I don't view Dragon Hoard Enchantment drops as an exploit. I believe they, along with artifact gear's implementation, are terrible game design, but the drops themselves are working as intended. Cryptic simply pulled a boner by making refining points the sole source of artifact gear progression and a sizable source of AD. Cryptic DECIDED farming should be rewarded as opposed to adventuring, exploring, and playing. This was a conscious decision to maximize use from limited game design resources, but guess what? Bots farm better than people. Everyone already knew that, but Cryptic chose this path in spite of the fact.
Cheap artifact weapon refining points themselves aren't the issue. The ability to SELL them is. Players have an extremely limited number of ways to make AD above their 24k rough/day. Now Cryptic is removing a large portion of player income because of poor decisions and design. That, IMO, is far and away more harmful to Neverwinter's players than cheap Bot-farmed refining points could ever be.
The very first page was all about targeting where the bots were.
Plus there was talk of a penalty if you report non-bots a lot. Also if you think that you can't tell the difference between a bot that runs a foundry 24/7 and someone who grinds foundries then you haven't ever heard of bot detection software.
It's the same problem all enterprise software has. Those of you who have every used anything from SAP, Oracle, Microsoft -- not the consumer stuff, I mean like Sharepoint, Salesforce -- etc. Same problem. You know what I mean.
Cryptic needs to spend more time listening to players rather than trying to think about what the ROI for a new feature is. The fact is, if they listen -- REALLY listen -- and make the game better based on player feedback, they WILL increase their ROI. A producer kept saying on Reddit a while ago that X feature was unlikely because of ROI. Well, what's the ROI of a keyboard? If you don't have a game people like, they don't stick around. If the game works great, isn't very buggy, and has good controls AND happens to have good content, people stick around. Players that stick around longer tend to pay you more money.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
* Set a time limit on foundries, how long you can be in that foundry and make it so that you can only run that one foundry once per day.) There may be complaints that someone didn't get to complete the foundry so make it reasonable that a foundry cannot take the average gamer over an hour to complete. Once the person has reached the time limit, they cannot re-do the same foundry until next day.
-AND/OR-
* If a foundry quest takes the average user 20 minutes to complete but the user is in there for 45 minutes, set up a "Are you there" check much like being afk for too long. Make this randomly pop up on the screen in different sizes every 10 minutes that wouldn't be easy for a botter to guess where it would pop up next. If the user doesn't click on it within a couple of minutes, boot the user from the foundry.
-And-
*Remove any foundry that is specific to farming. All that needs to be done to see it is simply type in "farm". There are maps that aren't for farming with the word farm but it's pretty obvious which ones are designed for bots.
Open World Botting:
*Hiring in game invisible GM's to investigate a report of an open world botter. If PWE is scrapped for money and don't want to hire GM's for this then give the GM's astral diamonds or virtual goods.
Now on to understanding why some people bot and I'm not talking about the network of bots that are making a profit but just profiting to play the game.
People bot because making AD in this game isn't easy for everyone. The AH's prices keep shooting up. This benefits people who already have enough AD to not care from back in the day of their castle never runs being profitable etc...
For new players, it's really tough or players that just want to play the game instead of doing professions or turning into robots themselves.
So how can this be changed for the better?
-PVE-
*Increase the amount of rough astral diamonds you are allowed to convert. 24k is not a good amount. Over that limit, many people now travel from character after character turning into players that cannot play the game for fun but trying to raise up enough money just to be a good enough player. Raise the bar to 75-100k because realistically, that 24k a day may have once been a reasonable amount but in today's Neverwinter world, it's like giving a kid 10 cents to buy a candy bar.
*For skirmishes at lvl 60. The event hands out the same astral diamonds whether you are level 5 or 60. My suggestion would be for the tougher skirmishes that take 10-15 minutes to complete, the chest should give out 5k. For the skirmishes like Master of the Hunt, 1k. So Shores of Tuern and Kessel's Retreat = 5k per chest.
*For dungeons during the dungeon delving event, there is a big decline on doing the older dungeons. If you pay attention to zone chat I see Pirate King is still active, Castle Never but most people are asking for Epic Lair of Lostmauth. Dungeon Delve events should drop anywhere from 200k-10k AD per chest depending on tier one vs. tier 2. Castle Never should drop 10k AD since it takes longer. Pirate King goes by so quick that people have that on farm mode. Even though it's tier 2, it's so fast that there should be 200 AD per chest because then people will just rather still farm Pirate King.
-PVP-
During Arena Event-
*Award 1st-3rd place on the board with AD but only the match was played for at least 7 minutes. If the match is over so quickly that it's a pug stomp, no AD.
1st place gets 2,000 AD
2nd place gets 1,000 AD
3rd place gets 500 AD
Instead of pointing fingers at valid players that love the game but sometimes farm, think about why that is going on. The people that are running this as a scheme for possible selling of real life money, they aren't in it because of enjoyment factors. Just in it to turn a profit.
If there were a reasonable way for people to get AD for playing the game, the community may strengthen as well. The game itself is very fun. I enjoy looking at all the details and love the creativity put into it. Not everyone is a AD genius in this game. Even when I've been told some stuff on how to make AD, I felt that it would turn me into a bot and I'd rather play the game!
The forums edit out the formatting when copy and pasting from other sources. We have to be careful when posting.
Everything you need to know about CW:
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?780981-Chem-s-CW-Compendium-Everything-you-need-to-know
I.e. Report an account for botting.
If that account is in fact botting, get a reward.
That's a cool idea, but it has to be gated somewhere so that noobs don't report everyone for bottling in hopes of an easy reward.
That said, good idea in principle. I'd like to see it developed more.
Thanks for the post,
Chem
Everything you need to know about CW:
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?780981-Chem-s-CW-Compendium-Everything-you-need-to-know
The sheer amount of bots would be overwhelming for just devs to catch.
I also like the idea of making farmable instances available only once or twice a day. Make all those level 60 bots in Sharanderp find another farm, and another , until that way is too much work to get AD.
Unfortunately, if you wiped out all farmable instances and nodes you would still have invoke bots that can make an average of 5-7 k a day just on RAD from invoke and elixirs from coins. The gold sellers would still have gold to sell, but at least AH wouldn't be flooded with bot RP.
Great Weapon Fighter: Because when is today not a good day to die?
PC and PS4 player. Proud Guildmaster for PS4 Team Fencebane. Rank 5 Officer for PC Team Fencebane. Visit us at http://fencebane.shivtr.com
I'm more than a little leery about leaving the final judgement to a pile of code.
I know bots are technically "legal" in the sense they arent breaking any actual laws.
But since these MMO (especially RPG) companies seem to have such an issue with them, are MMO companies devs/publishers making any attempt to try to put limitations in place on them through actual legal means?
Since actual people in game, coding doesnt seem to work; just go straight to the courts.
This isnt a post about what this company does, so dont get it twisted mods, just in general; does the MMO dev/pub community see at as such an issue to push it that far?
Fox Stevenson - Sandblast
Oh Wonder - Without You
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
In other words you want a dev to review every bot in game?
The bots are endless, devs aren't. No game ever could afford enough devs to review every bot.
If you get flagged as a bot now, i'm sure you can have your case reviewed through customer support anyways.
I doubt banned bots will file a support ticket to get an account reactivated. Then the devs would only have to review disputed accounts and it wouldn't be software that had the final word.
It is no coincidence that they had blood ruby sales shortly after artifacts were released. The problem that they're trying to solve is "how do we get people to buy more blood rubies / zen?"
That isn't to say that they don't care about player issues. But the perspective, approach and priorities are going to be different than what you described.
Technically the bots are in violation of the TOS - which is a contract. Violating the ToS is a breach of contract, and yes it's not "Criminal" but they probably could sue you. The problem is the transaction costs are prohibited.
Now, they run the servers and run the evniornment. I suspect that I and all you don't actually "own" anything in the game, rather we own a liscence to use them in game, which could be revoked at the liscenee's discression. Now obviously they don't ban you without a very good cause, because the damage to their PR would be severe (theoritically).
However i know people who have had their accounts temporarily banned due to the spark exploit and then had accounter permanently banned due to the resonantor exploit.
Why is this?
Thought is creating AD out of nothing is theoritcially fraud, because you can convert AD back money. Surely, not through legetimate means, but it's possible.
The thing about caturday, while I admit this is just hearsay, is that people were duping astral diamonds and then turning around and selling them for real money through third party sites. This is likely some form of wire fraud (though I'm a patent attorney, which is quite a lot different).
So the bots are at least in breach of the ToS and can be banned for cause. I don't know the details of wire fraud well enough to say if they violate that - but they could be.
Now sadly unless we are talking many thousands of dollars, the lawyers to bring the suit cost more than it's worth, so they have to take that lost. Best course of action is to, of course, find another way to stop the bots.
Cryptic is honestly trying to do this through their "fix", however it impacts real players to negatively.
When i saw the bots in PE today i wish i could just right click and report. I think something like that should be instituted.
Everything you need to know about CW:
http://nw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?780981-Chem-s-CW-Compendium-Everything-you-need-to-know
...or, you could simply press a key and send a "please stop spamming in game" e-mail directly to the spamming company.
Do you suppose it would be cost-effective for them very long to read through thousands of such e-mails?
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Well said.
Bots are always going to win. As someone pointed out earlier in the thread, MMO farming is an industry dedicated to finding ways to continually automate profitable parts of an MMO, then sell the proceeds back to players. The people working in bot farms are probably just as smart as anyone working in an MMO.
But to stop bots, you have to stop designing grinding, repetitve tasks as a means to progress in a game. That's exactly why I suggested supplementing the current Artifact refinement process with one utilizes experience points, which are awarded to players for simply playing the game. And you can't "bot" experience and sell that back to players.
ID's linked to instances that are being farmed like Arcane Res to limit the amount of times they can bot them. Great idea
Investigating accounts posting large amounts of RP on AH and the bots that feed them using bot detection software. Also doable.
I am well aware that my idea that was used in another game to report bots by players would be miss used by immature players that hate on others. Because it happened in the game we used this method in but no honest players actually got banned. The actual not reporting of these accounts at all is a huge mistake. And a large job for Cryptic to handle said incoming reports. But even though you are just shutting down one line of code for these botting sweatshops, remove hundreds of lines of code a day and at least make it harder. Make them have to bot more 60's to reproduce their profit maker.
Not trying at all is like letting someone punch you in the balls a few times a day because " Meh, its what that guy does. He punches people in the balls so lets just leave him to his ball punching and forget it until he does it again." Cryptics reply. "We are cutting off your balls so he wont punch you in your balls."
Moving on. Implementing a new way to level artifacts through players experience and time spent playing. Bound artifacts cant be sold its a fact. Not a bad idea either.
Also another thing I would like to bring up is the bizarre needs to be more extensive to battle rising prices such as rare marks of power are now upwards of 110k AD. Like greater marks of potency they should be available in the Bizarre for say 50K? Or a higher drop rate in dungeons or lock boxes.
As for the the Rp bought in the Zen Shop. Name me one person that would buy a Blood stone to Rp anything at that price lol. No, just no. Cryptic has some spenders on this game but most of us were smart enough to buy wanted items and flip them for small to larger profits such as Pres Wards or Companions with the bonding stone.
Cryptics move to bind Rp will work. I just don't think its fair that they didn't try to get to the root of the problem a long time ago and now the Rp apocalypse is upon us. But hey they are bringing double Rp weekend back so I wont ***** about that.
BAHAHAHAHAHA!
Very funny, but sad that its also the most accurate description of Cryptic's actions towards botting.
I was getting bored at work. So I was doing some research on my own or at least informing myself a little better.
http://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~swc/pub/bot_identification.html
http://iseclab.org/papers/botdetection-article.pdf
http://www.syssec-project.eu/m/page-media/3/platzer-icics11.pdf
Probably older articles/studies, but were interesting and informative non the less.
Fox Stevenson - Sandblast
Oh Wonder - Without You
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
- Dylan Thomas
You hit the nail right on the head. In the end it all boils down to this.
This phenomenon has been plaguing every MMO i've ever heard of, and I think that developers of all games have just come to terms with it, trying to limit the most "blatant" violations (the game-breaking ones) and keeping the bots in mind when they're balancing progression as a natural part of the game.
The fact is that it's impossible to design MMOs without grinds, these games, with their huge investments are designed to last for years to recoup the costs and make profits, and without grinds there is no game that lasts years out of pure "first-time" content.
If you really think that such companies would EVER read a single one of those e-mails, I'd like to introduce myself as the sole vendor of Buckingham Palace and London Bridge.
I can arrange for you to purchase both at a reasonable price. For a slightly extra cost, I can arrange for them to be transported brick-by-brick to the destination of your choice.
Please pm me for details.
The last few MMOs I tried, Final Fantasy, Elder Scrolls and Wildstar all had crippling problems with bots...for the most part, their influence is fairly benign in Neverwinter.
But, to your second point, I think there are a lot of ways you can design MMOs to help mitigate some of the need for bots. Bots are really great at replicating simple to moderately complex actions, but these actions have to be repetitive with a very low amount of actual decisions. And that piece has to be tied to something that creates value in game. Remove the reasons for bots, and you cut out the bots all together.
What makes you think they wouldn't read an e-mail from a potential customer?
The e-mail subject and contents are completely customizable as well as randomizable so that they could not simply "filter" them out.
Either they would require someone to read through them all OR their e-mail accounts would be completely flooded and worthless for business, thus forcing them to buy/setup new "customer contact" e-mail accounts. Either way, their e-mail communications become completely worthless for their spam business.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
No. They would just track where the emails are originating from, and block them.