I don't think penalizing players for buying AD will do much of anything. I think a great deal of the players that have done it probably felt that they had to since almost all other forms of gathering AD in game outside of leadership, which was severely nerfed with mod 6, were available to them.
I personally bought zen and bought zen through the exchange just for more character slots to farm AD with. I used gateway at work, and at home in order to try and fill the gap to the loss in AD I was getting premod 6, it was a bit of a hassle however it was working for me anyway. The loss of gateway to keep my dudes going is an absolute pain in the potukus with no other alternative to gather AD.
This leads me full circle back to the issue at hand which is blotters that are selling AD, if the currency I need in game to advance with and compete with is severely cut like it has been what other alternative is available? In looking at that and seeing what is about to happen I started this thread, heck look at the zen exchange now, the " only" solution I have been able to come up with after working in the game industry 11 years ago was to remove direct player to player trades for the major items in game and instituting a player to player trade system using an alternative currency for low end goods, for the use if grinding up, and general low end gear.
I truly see no other viable alternative to stop botters. You must remove the ability for them to transact goods to players that is the only long term way to combat it.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!" pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all." looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
In game gm's cost a lot of money, I do not expect to see any gms in game at all because of this. That is why I posted the idea above.
GMs are how Nexon handles its bots. It's part of the cost of doing business in a F2P unless you want to use DRM. If company can not afford to employ someone, or ask for a group of Volunteers, to ban bots daily, the bot companies will take over the economy of the game.
Post edited by lewstelamon01 on
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drkbodhiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,378Arc User
edited July 2015
Compare the loss of revenue that Cryptic deals with vs. how much GMs would cost to employ. I am almost positive that they will pay for themselves... in comparison. What they lose from the bots they will be spending on the GMs... so either way... it is going out the door.
Going out the door with loss of revenue or going out as a system to remove botters.
They could implement trade for items only.
Atwil "At" - Tiefling TR / Saardush - Black Dragonborn GWF / White - Tiefling OP
No to GMs in-game. It is a slippery slope and will indeed result in censorship and false bans. It is way too open for abuse by less-than-honorable GMs.
It's not, there are logs for all player actions, and there are also logs for all GM actions.
If a GM bans someone falsely or abuses his powers, he gets fired.
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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soditalloverMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 88Arc User
this is one of the best sugestions ive read cant say i read it fully just skimmed but i know the only reason i buy zen is for items and the only reason i craft ad is again for items if they took away the ah and replaced it with bound to account items and a vender id be happy as long as making as much ad as i needed aka pre mod 6 that is not this new <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>, and as for gm's i also worked as one for a few games mostly fps we had to take screen shots and videos and upload them to the file server for review till we got the green light then we just had to keep the evedence for 6 months just incase but 99% of the time its easy to see a ingame but i see them all time ingame jumping against the inside of a closed gate trying to get out
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,218Arc User
It's not, there are logs for all player actions, and there are also logs for all GM actions.
If a GM bans someone falsely or abuses his powers, he gets fired.
Don't bet on it. The log is internal. Nobody will spend time and resource to audit it. Even someone does audit and does find something wrong, they will deal with it internally and the news will never come out.
*** 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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drkbodhiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,378Arc User
Don't bet on it. The log is internal. Nobody will spend time and resource to audit it. Even someone does audit and does find something wrong, they will deal with it internally and the news will never come out.
No to GMs in-game. It is a slippery slope and will indeed result in censorship and false bans. It is way too open for abuse by less-than-honorable GMs.
This seems to be a necessary evil.
On one hand we have botters destroying the game slowly on the other we have small potential of abuse by hypothetical GMs. again, it seems we have people who are believing that the sky is falling... before they even leave the house.
Atwil "At" - Tiefling TR / Saardush - Black Dragonborn GWF / White - Tiefling OP
It's not, there are logs for all player actions, and there are also logs for all GM actions.
If a GM bans someone falsely or abuses his powers, he gets fired.
Don't bet on it. The log is internal. Nobody will spend time and resource to audit it. Even someone does audit and does find something wrong, they will deal with it internally and the news will never come out.
Yeah, don't bet on it. They will check logs, and when they see a GM doing something wrong, there will be consequences for that GM.
A GM is a service industry employee of the parent company. They serve the public. So in this case they are a Cryptic employee, subject to their in-house rules. Some companies the customer is always right and some companies the customer is always right some of the time.
If a GM is abusive and rude to the players and generate a lot complaints, at some point a supervisor investigates, the logs are a absolute evidence trail. If the company is a "customer is always right" sort then it takes very little abuse of power on the GMs part to get them fired. If they are the "customer is right,some of the time" type then the evidence to fire threshold is going to be much higher.
In fact, if they are a absolute A-whole, maybe the higher manager types will give them a promotion, it's been my experience that most, if not all, middle management types are A-wholes
Gold/AD spammers are near impossible to stop. It's like stemming a tidal wave with shot glass. You can ban all day and never cut by much, most the spammers are false front accounts anyway. When you see something like this :
$BHD&%$^& said: Ad for sale go to xyz.com for best rates.
The first name is just a random driven name, they can set up accounts all day with toons to spam from. The GM can ban accounts all day and the spammer can create new ones just as fast.
To stop the SELLERS however is a whole other animal. If they take note of the IP etc. and proactively ban players that go there, it actually hurts the sellers, they take all the effort to develop toons to farm stuff and then a GM bans them, THATS how you fight them. You just have to have an appeals process though, to leave room for those innocently caught up in a ban to get it rectified.
Banning the level 60+ farming bots in Neverdeath Ghost Stories will hurt the goldsellers, they may be able to level up characters again and bring them there, but this will cost them time.
And while those bots are leveling up again, they are not collecting/selling anything. At some point they might even try to find other farm spots, but if the players keep an eye open for that, they will be banned again and again and again...
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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drkbodhiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,378Arc User
The way to end AD Spammers is by removing the market for AD. @ldedric1 and I have stated and shared... to end botting and AD spammers we all need to accept the changes to the economy.
When we kill the need to find any AD necessary, by bringing in more ways for ALL players to make AD; make everything BtA, BtC or BoP... and sellable to a vendor who will give you AD in exchange, etc....
In M6 Cryptic reduced the amount of AD that players can generate, in an effort to damage the bots... but this actually had the opposite effect. It increased the need for bots and their AD spammers. Yes... people really do use the AD spammers to buy AD despite the threat of lifetime bans for using them. If they didn't they would disappear.
Atwil "At" - Tiefling TR / Saardush - Black Dragonborn GWF / White - Tiefling OP
GMs can find the AD buyers through logs too, and then just bann their accounts temp. for some more thorough investigation, and make it a perm. bann, if this player has bought AD several times from goldsellers.
+ First violation, temp. bann and anything gets removed from every character on that account. You get a set of white equipment, and you can continue to play from there after your temp bann.
+ Second Violation, perm bann. You can get a new account, and this time, don't buy AD from goldsellers...
And about RP, who is forcing any player to get insane amounts of RP anyway?
The answer is, no one.
Just stop ugrading your equipment, when it becomes a huge grind. Stop running after the next shiny thing, and force the Devs/Managment to come up with a more reasonable upgrade system.
As long as players just keep on grinding or even buying AD from goldsellers, why should the Devs/Managment change anything?
From their point of view, everything is just working fine...
And i doubt, that there are any GMs actively looking into banning any bug/exploit user or even AD buyers at the moment.
The "motivation" for changes in PvP has to come from the players too. A lot of them have to stop jumping right into PvP with normal gear, until the Devs come up with a working matchmaking system.
Queue times have to go way up, and more people, especially the players, that put a lot of money into their characters, have to feel that loss of cannon fodder... but look at the last PvP event.
All the Devs had to do was offer some good gear and the chance for a good mount... and more then enough players were lining up for the meat grinder.
Sure, there was some complaining going on about the event, but again, as long as it's working just fine, the Devs will not bother with a real change to the system.
Strongholds will be just the same, PvE and PvP wise, players will complain, but at the end of the day, they will just jump right into the grind.
And i'm a bit curious about how many active PvP guilds will be left after the first 1-3 months of strongholds PVP...
The big PvP guilds probably allready have alt. character guilds standing by for Stronghold PvP farming rounds.
And if the Elemental Evil is any indication on the current pace of bugs fixing, then we might not even see anything relevant being fixed before Underdark hits the game at the end of this year.
With probably just adding another huge grind to the game in form of new artifact equipment... in the end, i see no light in form of any bug fixes coming with those modules too, just more grind.
I do believe in killing the messenger...
Want to know why?
Because it sends a message!
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drkbodhiMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 2,378Arc User
I've read a lot of these suggestions and, for the most part, it seems like many of these ideas would make for a great system. Unfortunately, you guys are talking about a game that already HAS a system in place- regardless of whether you think it's broken or not- and changing that system right now would require an enormous amount of effort to not only change the system in question but also every other facet of the game that the system relies on. You have to pay people to make these changes. You can't work on new changes while you're occupied fixing old changes. You don't make money during downtime while these changes are being implemented. It's actually quite absurd to think a company that can't even be bothered to fix their buggy programming could be bothered to fix something of this magnitude. Currently, we are forced to believe that Cryptic views these problems simply as an acceptable byproduct of their business. To put it simply, the longer you complain about the game and give reasons why you (or anybody else) shouldn't want to play this game without actually quitting the game yourself, why should they care? You're STILL playing despite these problems, and they're playing magician with smoke and mirrors to make you look over here to distract you from what's going on over there. Every "new" recycled content release is just another way to distract you from the problems. Everyone talks about attacking the motivation to bot instead of the botters themselves. The problem is, you guys are so far off from the motivation to bot that you can't even see it from there. Cryptic is the cause of the botters. Think about all of those sites out their selling services and goods. What do they all have in common? They're competing with each other, of course. They're competing with each other for YOUR business while Cryptic does nothing to compete with them. Someone above nailed it when they said bots exist in every game. That they do. But think about WHY people buy from those sites. Spend $25 to buy 2500 Zen, which equals 1,250,000 AD at a 1:500 rate, or go to a different site and buy 5x that amount for the same price. Buy a Zen market item for $50 (that's just outrageous) or go to a different site and spend $20 for the same item. Why are they selling it that low? Because they buy it for AD! It costs them NOTHING! Why would anyone want to pay $20 for 3 Blood Rubies (worth 150,000 RP) when they could go to a site and spend the same amount to get 2x, 3x, maybe even 4x or 5x that amount? The point I'm trying to make is that botters are "ruining" this game simply because Cryptic STILL charges outrageous prices for the same items these sites are offering for far less. You can all talk about making it harder for the botters to bot places, implementing your grand schemes to fix these problems... The problem is always going to be that botters will always find a way to bot and make money. The ONLY realistic solution is to offer the same type of product for cheaper OR completely prevent the problem before it even starts. Next time you hop on the AH and look at something you want to buy, instead of buying the cheapest item (this will represent third party sites), scroll all the way to the end and buy the most expensive item that costs 2-5 times more (this will represent Cryptic). See the problem?
I say let the botters bot. It's not like they're botting anything game-breaking. Does anyone REALLY have a problem with being able to buy 50-100k worth of refining points for 10k a pop? I sure don't. Botters aren't ruining the economy. They're competing with each other and we're reaping the benefits. The majority of the people that I see complaining are the ones that can't find a way to make that kind of profit themselves. That is partially Cryptic's fault for making the legit player base suffer with every countermeasure they take. The ONLY one getting hurt by the botters is Cryptic. They, in turn, refuse to compete, hide behind their ToS and threaten people with it, and break you poor, poor souls even more with every "fix" they come up with. Meanwhile they still charge outrageous prices for their VIRTUAL items and currency. You can't even argue that Cryptic would lose money by having more competitive prices. Look at what those sites are offering. You cannot honestly tell me that they're not making a killing, especially when the amount of money they're making is such a concern for Cryptic. This is simple business, guys. One store sells something for $10 and the other sells it for $20. All Cryptic (the $20 store) is doing is trying to find a way to prevent the customers from traveling to the other store. They're putting up road blocks, slashing your car tires, et cetera. Funny thing is, all they have to do is lower their price or find a way to make it more appealing and rewarding to buy from them. It's their own greed and stubbornness that's ruining the game. That, and their inability to fully consider and realise that bots are and will always be a problem in every game and having not taken the proper measures to counteract it in the first place. Someone mentioned about raising/removing the Zen:AD cap. DING! DING! DING! Don't you think that would give people a little more incentive to buy Zen from you if they could sell it for more? OH! WAIT! BUT WHAT ABOUT MARKET INFLATION??? Rofl... You guys. If things cost more then the things you SELL will cost more. Balances out, right? All Cryptic needs to do is give you guys just a few more ways to make a profit with item drops that aren't all bound and worthless. For example, why do we NOT have a dungeon that awards a black opal for every boss killed and/or one in the chest at the end? Why do we NOT have a 1% chance (or whatever their ridiculously low drop rate is) to find a brilliant diamond instead of some useless artifact? Probably because they're giving just enough token resources to us to say "Hey, it's still free to play," but nearly FORCING you into spending money just to get anywhere. They could even add a new refinement item that's worth half of a diamond. It wouldn't matter. SOMETHING to make PvE worth doing. SOMETHING to add a new way of making AD. SOMETHING to make the refining process for their demanding artifact gear a little less tedious. They could even go so far as to make it harder for 3rd party sites to sell AD by... I don't know, doing something intelligent like NOT letting people post potions for 1290845237459783 mil AD? Maybe take the average going rate for items and fix it so that you can't increase/decrease the bid/buyout past a certain percentage? What will that do? If someone wants to buy 5 mil AD, it forces them to post an item up for sale with an exceptionally high bid price. It also prevents people from buying up every available amount of 1 item and drastically increasing its price for personal profit. If you're buying AD because you NEED AD, who is going to be able to afford to pay a couple hundred thousand AD just to post an item? Then you have the AH cut, which takes MORE AD out of the hands of the 3rd party sites. Guess what? They have to start charging more. Oh my god! It's almost... almost... too EASY! But OH! For shame! People who undercut on the AH won't be able to undercut by such large deficits anymore! Oh my... Are botters ruining the game? No... Cryptic is ruining the game. Regardless of whether you guys like the game or not, bad company is bad company. Either quit or deal with it, cause Cryptic will NEVER accept this as a solution and everything else just simply isn't feasible for them. Eventually, yes, they may just make it so that the only thing these sites can offer are leveling services. No, that will not impact their sales. Then, you guys will be right back to paying $50 for the items you want instead of paying a botter less than half that amount (in $$$ or in AD on the AH), having everything you pick up bound and utterly useless, and spending months and months scrounging for refining points until a new artifact weapon/gear is released that you can start on all over again. Why can't we just TRADE our current artifact weapon and its refinement rank for a NEW one of the same quality after certain circumstances (quests, levels, or whatever) are reached? Oh... Maybe because some people really do buy RP from Cryptic still? Maybe they might actually have to add REAL content instead of just recycling it and stretching it out. Again with the greed. It's circular. Seriously. Do you guys see the problem now?
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
Strongholds is a PWE mod. It's just for the game.
Underdark, on the other hand, has some backing from the licensing company (eg WotC), so I can't help but wonder if it'll be implemented differently.
Course, if WotC gets sick to their stomachs looking at NWOs numbers and decide to pull back on their promoting, you could see Underdark falling through the cracks, release date being pushed back indefinitely, and the game just sort of self-destructing.
I used to play a game that was space based type (I think it's a violation isn't it to name the game?) let's say the company was based in iceland..and the game had 3 letters E*E....and the company had 3 letters starting with C*P .
Anyway, they soon learned after launch that they too, couldn't stop Bots. So they had a solution, the EMBRACED them. One of the main activities of the game was mining, a task that required different sized ships as you increased in skill that had to warp to a remote location, prospect, select ore you wanted to mine, then remain in that location for long periods of time.
The process was rife with bot potential, staying in one spot while your hold is filled in small increments in 30 sec-2 time cycles? All the tasks that were required could be done by a rudimentary keylog program. Now the ores provided by this process could effect real game processes and build rates and market dynamics..that was a bad thing. And the Chinese/Russian expansion of the game started to get bad that way.
So the next mod of the game they introduced something new, player owned structures and starbases. To build the structures it took mass amounts of previously overstocked ores that the botters had flooded the markets with. It was a ore sink to fix the near worthless ores market that true players couldn't make a profit and play style from.
But they took it a step farther, to MAINTAIN the new content took new resources and a new mined item, Ice All the new catalysts and reactions needed ice items to create and the fuel the structures. So the new item took new ships and gear to mine and the mining cycle was pushed out to 10 minutes each, and a ship could hold like 4 units max. So a mining trip was like 30-40 min. PERFECT for a bot. A tedious task, long return cycle, a item that was always going to be needed, with a reasonable and steady currency return.
The botters were on it like white on rice. Then the company took it a step farther. Knowing that people were going to Ebay in game accounts and currency (ISK) they created a in game mall! You could save up your hard earned (or semi easy bot earned ISK) and buy game time codes, RL swag like company logo T-shirts etc.
Yes, the botters were going to earn ISK and spam/ebay it, but they (the company) embraced it as going to happen, and sucked some of the wind out of their sails by actually offering stuff cheaper and real world stuff. So you bought ISK from the botters? What were you going to buy with them..stuff you could have earned yourself. Or logoed gear that promoted the company products, or some more free play that got you continually playing! lol
Cryptic, Embrace the bot! Suck out the INCENTIVES for their existence rather than punish players to combat them like a drive by gang shooting. If you plan it right you can actually turn the bots to your advantage.
I am quite liking this suggestion. There really needs to be more thinking put into fixing the in game economy. I hope they are working on it and get input from players like you.
Comments
I personally bought zen and bought zen through the exchange just for more character slots to farm AD with. I used gateway at work, and at home in order to try and fill the gap to the loss in AD I was getting premod 6, it was a bit of a hassle however it was working for me anyway. The loss of gateway to keep my dudes going is an absolute pain in the potukus with no other alternative to gather AD.
This leads me full circle back to the issue at hand which is blotters that are selling AD, if the currency I need in game to advance with and compete with is severely cut like it has been what other alternative is available? In looking at that and seeing what is about to happen I started this thread, heck look at the zen exchange now, the " only" solution I have been able to come up with after working in the game industry 11 years ago was to remove direct player to player trades for the major items in game and instituting a player to player trade system using an alternative currency for low end goods, for the use if grinding up, and general low end gear.
I truly see no other viable alternative to stop botters. You must remove the ability for them to transact goods to players that is the only long term way to combat it.
myles08807 said, "Back in my day, we didn't have any of this fancy Mulhorand gear while we were leveling . . . we walked uphill both ways while dying once every five seconds while leveling, and we liked it fine!" . . . Now, get off my lawn, you kids!"
pointsman said, "I don't rue the game. In fact I don't feel any regret for the game at all."
looomis said, "I don't like people changing to alts and then bragging about their mains like schizophrenic role players."
GMs are how Nexon handles its bots. It's part of the cost of doing business in a F2P unless you want to use DRM. If company can not afford to employ someone, or ask for a group of Volunteers, to ban bots daily, the bot companies will take over the economy of the game.
Going out the door with loss of revenue or going out as a system to remove botters.
They could implement trade for items only.
It's not, there are logs for all player actions, and there are also logs for all GM actions.
If a GM bans someone falsely or abuses his powers, he gets fired.
Don't bet on it. The log is internal. Nobody will spend time and resource to audit it. Even someone does audit and does find something wrong, they will deal with it internally and the news will never come out.
This seems to be a necessary evil.
On one hand we have botters destroying the game slowly on the other we have small potential of abuse by hypothetical GMs. again, it seems we have people who are believing that the sky is falling... before they even leave the house.
Keeping Bots out of Online Games
another good read is this
Bots Problem in Online Games from International Journal of Soft Computing and Engineering (IJSCE)
Yeah, don't bet on it. They will check logs, and when they see a GM doing something wrong, there will be consequences for that GM.
If a GM is abusive and rude to the players and generate a lot complaints, at some point a supervisor investigates, the logs are a absolute evidence trail. If the company is a "customer is always right" sort then it takes very little abuse of power on the GMs part to get them fired. If they are the "customer is right,some of the time" type then the evidence to fire threshold is going to be much higher.
In fact, if they are a absolute A-whole, maybe the higher manager types will give them a promotion, it's been my experience that most, if not all, middle management types are A-wholes
$BHD&%$^& said: Ad for sale go to xyz.com for best rates.
The first name is just a random driven name, they can set up accounts all day with toons to spam from. The GM can ban accounts all day and the spammer can create new ones just as fast.
To stop the SELLERS however is a whole other animal. If they take note of the IP etc. and proactively ban players that go there, it actually hurts the sellers, they take all the effort to develop toons to farm stuff and then a GM bans them, THATS how you fight them. You just have to have an appeals process though, to leave room for those innocently caught up in a ban to get it rectified.
And while those bots are leveling up again, they are not collecting/selling anything. At some point they might even try to find other farm spots, but if the players keep an eye open for that, they will be banned again and again and again...
When we kill the need to find any AD necessary, by bringing in more ways for ALL players to make AD; make everything BtA, BtC or BoP... and sellable to a vendor who will give you AD in exchange, etc....
In M6 Cryptic reduced the amount of AD that players can generate, in an effort to damage the bots... but this actually had the opposite effect. It increased the need for bots and their AD spammers. Yes... people really do use the AD spammers to buy AD despite the threat of lifetime bans for using them. If they didn't they would disappear.
+ First violation, temp. bann and anything gets removed from every character on that account. You get a set of white equipment, and you can continue to play from there after your temp bann.
+ Second Violation, perm bann. You can get a new account, and this time, don't buy AD from goldsellers...
And about RP, who is forcing any player to get insane amounts of RP anyway?
The answer is, no one.
Just stop ugrading your equipment, when it becomes a huge grind. Stop running after the next shiny thing, and force the Devs/Managment to come up with a more reasonable upgrade system.
As long as players just keep on grinding or even buying AD from goldsellers, why should the Devs/Managment change anything?
From their point of view, everything is just working fine...
And i doubt, that there are any GMs actively looking into banning any bug/exploit user or even AD buyers at the moment.
Queue times have to go way up, and more people, especially the players, that put a lot of money into their characters, have to feel that loss of cannon fodder... but look at the last PvP event.
All the Devs had to do was offer some good gear and the chance for a good mount... and more then enough players were lining up for the meat grinder.
Sure, there was some complaining going on about the event, but again, as long as it's working just fine, the Devs will not bother with a real change to the system.
Strongholds will be just the same, PvE and PvP wise, players will complain, but at the end of the day, they will just jump right into the grind.
And i'm a bit curious about how many active PvP guilds will be left after the first 1-3 months of strongholds PVP...
And if the Elemental Evil is any indication on the current pace of bugs fixing, then we might not even see anything relevant being fixed before Underdark hits the game at the end of this year.
With probably just adding another huge grind to the game in form of new artifact equipment... in the end, i see no light in form of any bug fixes coming with those modules too, just more grind.
Why do you think that Express is 3 different guilds?
And why in the world are we talking bout PvP in a thread about botting and how to solve the problem?
I say let the botters bot. It's not like they're botting anything game-breaking. Does anyone REALLY have a problem with being able to buy 50-100k worth of refining points for 10k a pop? I sure don't. Botters aren't ruining the economy. They're competing with each other and we're reaping the benefits. The majority of the people that I see complaining are the ones that can't find a way to make that kind of profit themselves. That is partially Cryptic's fault for making the legit player base suffer with every countermeasure they take. The ONLY one getting hurt by the botters is Cryptic. They, in turn, refuse to compete, hide behind their ToS and threaten people with it, and break you poor, poor souls even more with every "fix" they come up with. Meanwhile they still charge outrageous prices for their VIRTUAL items and currency. You can't even argue that Cryptic would lose money by having more competitive prices. Look at what those sites are offering. You cannot honestly tell me that they're not making a killing, especially when the amount of money they're making is such a concern for Cryptic. This is simple business, guys. One store sells something for $10 and the other sells it for $20. All Cryptic (the $20 store) is doing is trying to find a way to prevent the customers from traveling to the other store. They're putting up road blocks, slashing your car tires, et cetera. Funny thing is, all they have to do is lower their price or find a way to make it more appealing and rewarding to buy from them. It's their own greed and stubbornness that's ruining the game. That, and their inability to fully consider and realise that bots are and will always be a problem in every game and having not taken the proper measures to counteract it in the first place. Someone mentioned about raising/removing the Zen:AD cap. DING! DING! DING! Don't you think that would give people a little more incentive to buy Zen from you if they could sell it for more? OH! WAIT! BUT WHAT ABOUT MARKET INFLATION??? Rofl... You guys. If things cost more then the things you SELL will cost more. Balances out, right? All Cryptic needs to do is give you guys just a few more ways to make a profit with item drops that aren't all bound and worthless. For example, why do we NOT have a dungeon that awards a black opal for every boss killed and/or one in the chest at the end? Why do we NOT have a 1% chance (or whatever their ridiculously low drop rate is) to find a brilliant diamond instead of some useless artifact? Probably because they're giving just enough token resources to us to say "Hey, it's still free to play," but nearly FORCING you into spending money just to get anywhere. They could even add a new refinement item that's worth half of a diamond. It wouldn't matter. SOMETHING to make PvE worth doing. SOMETHING to add a new way of making AD. SOMETHING to make the refining process for their demanding artifact gear a little less tedious. They could even go so far as to make it harder for 3rd party sites to sell AD by... I don't know, doing something intelligent like NOT letting people post potions for 1290845237459783 mil AD? Maybe take the average going rate for items and fix it so that you can't increase/decrease the bid/buyout past a certain percentage? What will that do? If someone wants to buy 5 mil AD, it forces them to post an item up for sale with an exceptionally high bid price. It also prevents people from buying up every available amount of 1 item and drastically increasing its price for personal profit. If you're buying AD because you NEED AD, who is going to be able to afford to pay a couple hundred thousand AD just to post an item? Then you have the AH cut, which takes MORE AD out of the hands of the 3rd party sites. Guess what? They have to start charging more. Oh my god! It's almost... almost... too EASY! But OH! For shame! People who undercut on the AH won't be able to undercut by such large deficits anymore! Oh my... Are botters ruining the game? No... Cryptic is ruining the game. Regardless of whether you guys like the game or not, bad company is bad company. Either quit or deal with it, cause Cryptic will NEVER accept this as a solution and everything else just simply isn't feasible for them. Eventually, yes, they may just make it so that the only thing these sites can offer are leveling services. No, that will not impact their sales. Then, you guys will be right back to paying $50 for the items you want instead of paying a botter less than half that amount (in $$$ or in AD on the AH), having everything you pick up bound and utterly useless, and spending months and months scrounging for refining points until a new artifact weapon/gear is released that you can start on all over again. Why can't we just TRADE our current artifact weapon and its refinement rank for a NEW one of the same quality after certain circumstances (quests, levels, or whatever) are reached? Oh... Maybe because some people really do buy RP from Cryptic still? Maybe they might actually have to add REAL content instead of just recycling it and stretching it out. Again with the greed. It's circular. Seriously. Do you guys see the problem now?
Underdark, on the other hand, has some backing from the licensing company (eg WotC), so I can't help but wonder if it'll be implemented differently.
Course, if WotC gets sick to their stomachs looking at NWOs numbers and decide to pull back on their promoting, you could see Underdark falling through the cracks, release date being pushed back indefinitely, and the game just sort of self-destructing.
Anyway, they soon learned after launch that they too, couldn't stop Bots. So they had a solution, the EMBRACED them. One of the main activities of the game was mining, a task that required different sized ships as you increased in skill that had to warp to a remote location, prospect, select ore you wanted to mine, then remain in that location for long periods of time.
The process was rife with bot potential, staying in one spot while your hold is filled in small increments in 30 sec-2 time cycles? All the tasks that were required could be done by a rudimentary keylog program. Now the ores provided by this process could effect real game processes and build rates and market dynamics..that was a bad thing. And the Chinese/Russian expansion of the game started to get bad that way.
So the next mod of the game they introduced something new, player owned structures and starbases. To build the structures it took mass amounts of previously overstocked ores that the botters had flooded the markets with. It was a ore sink to fix the near worthless ores market that true players couldn't make a profit and play style from.
But they took it a step farther, to MAINTAIN the new content took new resources and a new mined item, Ice
The botters were on it like white on rice. Then the company took it a step farther. Knowing that people were going to Ebay in game accounts and currency (ISK) they created a in game mall! You could save up your hard earned (or semi easy bot earned ISK) and buy game time codes, RL swag like company logo T-shirts etc.
Yes, the botters were going to earn ISK and spam/ebay it, but they (the company) embraced it as going to happen, and sucked some of the wind out of their sails by actually offering stuff cheaper and real world stuff. So you bought ISK from the botters? What were you going to buy with them..stuff you could have earned yourself. Or logoed gear that promoted the company products, or some more free play that got you continually playing! lol
Cryptic, Embrace the bot! Suck out the INCENTIVES for their existence rather than punish players to combat them like a drive by gang shooting. If you plan it right you can actually turn the bots to your advantage.