I voted anti bot measures simply because as cryptic often does, they make a simple change that would be enough to put a serious dent in the botters profits or whatever but then they also tend to go a step to far and make a unneeded change that ultimately hurts the legit players as well. Now if they'd stop at the first change then I'd say the botter but because they repeatedly continue to make the extra unneeded change I have to say cryptic is to blame.
Much like when they made the change to coalescent wards when they rolled out the new refining system.
Simple change: make coal wards BoP.
Unneeded change: reduced the drop rate of coal wards.
Simply making the coal wards BoP ruins the botters profits, reducing the drop rate hurts every player. And it continues everytime they take any new anti botting measures.
If the real intention is to fight bots, why not start with the "elephant in the room"?
The zone chat.
There is allready a chat filter in place with the profanity filter, all they have to do, is upgrade that one, to let the player add keywords to it, and to sent a message with those keywords in it, to another chat window.
Then give us more options to manage the ignore list more efficient, no point in keeping goldspammer in there and bloat the ignore list, when those only use an account for a single spam round, and then jump onto the next account...
Which also explains, why any attempt (level restriction to the zone chat...) this far was just a waste of time and money, and didn't help a bit against the spam.
With making it harder for the goldseller to get their advertisement seen, the next step could be to listen to their players ideas against bots, and to work with the players together to find a better way to fight bots, without hurting the regular players itself.
If the real intention is to fight bots, why not start with the "elephant in the room"?
The zone chat.
Any kind of detection would need to be a little more sophisticated.
For example if I report "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD" they can just go "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD kldgjdf" and mix it up "hence why we've seen \/\/ instead of w in a website.
Any kind of detection would need to be a little more sophisticated.
For example if I report "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD" they can just go "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD kldgjdf" and mix it up "hence why we've seen \/\/ instead of w in a website.
Actually, in its most basic form such a system would probably be regex-based, which would flag anything that contains "totallylegitAD.com"
- you can only participate twice on this event with your character/per day.
these limitations dont really work against bots, unlimited nr of accounts and unlimited nr of characters
- the mobs should attack you in 1 group of 10 mobs with a spawn of 6s difference , and each group should be resonable to defeat, but impossible for a bot to do that.
1 strong mob would be better for this than groups since groups are more or less zerg tactics, vs one strong solo mob you have to evade reds and stuff
Interesting the anti-measure voting options was not botted to 5000 votes.
Now down to serious business all though I understand the reason behind those measure, their could be some more efficient ways to do so.
Summer is coming I think that rather then Hiring 1 developer to come up with anti-botting measure they could hire 6 summer students to actively gm and ban bots 24/7 for 3 months.
When game companies report results to shareholders and Wall Street they typically report their player base. If bots were successfully eliminated in any game they'd have to report a player base a fraction of what it was before. While they'd be improving the game enormously they'd be whacked for losing 'players'. To ask them to completely get rid of all botting instead of moderating their impact is to ask them to slit their own financial report throats. This is an unfortunate reality of the larger world any publicly held gaming company lives and works in.
When game companies report results to shareholders and Wall Street they typically report their player base. If bots were successfully eliminated in any game they'd have to report a player base a fraction of what it was before. While they'd be improving the game enormously they'd be whacked for losing 'players'. To ask them to completely get rid of all botting instead of moderating their impact is to ask them to slit their own financial report throats. This is an unfortunate reality of the larger world any publicly held gaming company lives and works in.
...yeah, but currently they're whacking, alienating - and losing - their real-human players, which happen to be to some extent also the ones dumping money here. Smart move...
Comments
Much like when they made the change to coalescent wards when they rolled out the new refining system.
Simple change: make coal wards BoP.
Unneeded change: reduced the drop rate of coal wards.
Simply making the coal wards BoP ruins the botters profits, reducing the drop rate hurts every player. And it continues everytime they take any new anti botting measures.
Transfer the losses to costs affecting legit players to make amends. and close the gap of fleeing revenue.
I understand they want and have to make money in order to keep this game up and running.
But please...not this way.
The zone chat.
There is allready a chat filter in place with the profanity filter, all they have to do, is upgrade that one, to let the player add keywords to it, and to sent a message with those keywords in it, to another chat window.
Then give us more options to manage the ignore list more efficient, no point in keeping goldspammer in there and bloat the ignore list, when those only use an account for a single spam round, and then jump onto the next account...
Which also explains, why any attempt (level restriction to the zone chat...) this far was just a waste of time and money, and didn't help a bit against the spam.
With making it harder for the goldseller to get their advertisement seen, the next step could be to listen to their players ideas against bots, and to work with the players together to find a better way to fight bots, without hurting the regular players itself.
Any kind of detection would need to be a little more sophisticated.
For example if I report "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD" they can just go "totallylegitAD.com $5/1m AD kldgjdf" and mix it up "hence why we've seen \/\/ instead of w in a website.
May help but there's still:
"totallylegitAD (DOT) com", "totally7legit7.com (remove the 7s)", but I agree more should be done about it
1 strong mob would be better for this than groups since groups are more or less zerg tactics, vs one strong solo mob you have to evade reds and stuff
Now down to serious business all though I understand the reason behind those measure, their could be some more efficient ways to do so.
Summer is coming I think that rather then Hiring 1 developer to come up with anti-botting measure they could hire 6 summer students to actively gm and ban bots 24/7 for 3 months.
...yeah, but currently they're whacking, alienating - and losing - their real-human players, which happen to be to some extent also the ones dumping money here. Smart move...