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Bots and the simple truth
ldedric1
Member Posts: 36 Arc User
This is a discussion on Bots their origins and how they effects the in game economy of MMO's now.
Here is a brief history of Bots:
Bots have been around for decades they are relatively easy to create by those with relative skill in programming, they began in the mid 60's to do repetitive tasks and as technology has increased so have the bots to do mostly simple repetitive tasks. As more people began investing time into bots they began to get more and more complex and able to do a great variety of tasks making the workload for many business much easier.
Now as the video game industry started moving into MMPOG's games the bots inevitable followed. Most players would use bots to do repetitive tasks to build skill, a small group of people in different games with some programming knowledge began finding new ways to do simple tasks in game to get things like resources or to keep track of rare events. Soon after we would find much of the things they were doing on ebay and other trading sites.
The industry inevitably we after these "exploiters" as they saw them as detrimental to their game however they represents such a small portion of the player base and they were not actually breaking any TOS rules at that time, the overall effects were negligible. However as programmers began making better and better bots the effects started to become more apparent.
Now here is where it effects you in any game you play where botters and or gold sellers are prevalent.
First and foremost resources: Bots will gather resources for things like professions, and enchantments and some high end bots can even combat the mobs set to guard these points of interest be it nodes or a chest or simply killing mobs to gather from heroic encounters and drops from dragon hoard enchantments. Now how does this effect you as a player? Because of the bots ability to gather a great many of something quickly the price of these items will drop down dramatically for players to purchase, so they the players themselves do not have to do a repetitive task for several hours, this may seem like a good thing however let's look at the rest of it.
As bots are gathering simple resources and selling them and gaining in game currency, they also do many things in game to directly effect the player driven economy by artificiality inflating the price of more rare items by manipulating the market by buying out these items until they reach a level where they can sell them to make even more of the in game currency, this inevitably forces the price of the items to go up, purposefully out of the reach of the casual players ability to get it. The Bots then sell the items at this price while offering to sell you the same item or the Astral Diamonds to buy it in game for actual money. This is where they profit, and you pay, not once not twice not even three times, but every time they make any transaction with a player it costs you the player three times as much. These are only the direct results of the bots within a game.
More indirect actions include, but are not limited to, a loss in public trust in the gaming company to properly manage its product, lost revenue to the video game company, and as this problem increases a clear reduction in players playing their game.
The only thing you as a player can do to combat this is not buy from botters and gold sellers, and encourage your friends to do the same. As long as their is a market for it botters will continue to operate in the game(s) you enjoy playing inevitably destroying them.
Also please feel free to post in other topics regarding the botters their issues and possible solutions for it.
Here is a brief history of Bots:
Bots have been around for decades they are relatively easy to create by those with relative skill in programming, they began in the mid 60's to do repetitive tasks and as technology has increased so have the bots to do mostly simple repetitive tasks. As more people began investing time into bots they began to get more and more complex and able to do a great variety of tasks making the workload for many business much easier.
Now as the video game industry started moving into MMPOG's games the bots inevitable followed. Most players would use bots to do repetitive tasks to build skill, a small group of people in different games with some programming knowledge began finding new ways to do simple tasks in game to get things like resources or to keep track of rare events. Soon after we would find much of the things they were doing on ebay and other trading sites.
The industry inevitably we after these "exploiters" as they saw them as detrimental to their game however they represents such a small portion of the player base and they were not actually breaking any TOS rules at that time, the overall effects were negligible. However as programmers began making better and better bots the effects started to become more apparent.
====== What the players want to know is here ======
Now here is where it effects you in any game you play where botters and or gold sellers are prevalent.
First and foremost resources: Bots will gather resources for things like professions, and enchantments and some high end bots can even combat the mobs set to guard these points of interest be it nodes or a chest or simply killing mobs to gather from heroic encounters and drops from dragon hoard enchantments. Now how does this effect you as a player? Because of the bots ability to gather a great many of something quickly the price of these items will drop down dramatically for players to purchase, so they the players themselves do not have to do a repetitive task for several hours, this may seem like a good thing however let's look at the rest of it.
As bots are gathering simple resources and selling them and gaining in game currency, they also do many things in game to directly effect the player driven economy by artificiality inflating the price of more rare items by manipulating the market by buying out these items until they reach a level where they can sell them to make even more of the in game currency, this inevitably forces the price of the items to go up, purposefully out of the reach of the casual players ability to get it. The Bots then sell the items at this price while offering to sell you the same item or the Astral Diamonds to buy it in game for actual money. This is where they profit, and you pay, not once not twice not even three times, but every time they make any transaction with a player it costs you the player three times as much. These are only the direct results of the bots within a game.
More indirect actions include, but are not limited to, a loss in public trust in the gaming company to properly manage its product, lost revenue to the video game company, and as this problem increases a clear reduction in players playing their game.
The only thing you as a player can do to combat this is not buy from botters and gold sellers, and encourage your friends to do the same. As long as their is a market for it botters will continue to operate in the game(s) you enjoy playing inevitably destroying them.
Also please feel free to post in other topics regarding the botters their issues and possible solutions for it.
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Comments
This is not just bots this is the player who thinks he is playing "merchant" these are the "whales" of the game. Players like this are the detriment of the game economy. Like stocks they think buy low, sell high, make marginal profit but of course this just raises prices of items in high demand.
A Bot sells whatever they are farming for what they want to, in most cases they sell basic resources for crafting and enhancements from farming skill nodes or running a bot program tied to 5 accounts doing heroics or instances for hours/days on end. Now as I said above these "resources" are cheap for the player because they toss so many of them on the market.
Now the refineing system is the way it is "because" it is very easy for the average player to buy the enhancements from the botters to level up their artifacts and other gear.
I can almost guarantee, with a bit of speculation, that the cost of refineing items would be 1/2 of what it is now or less if players had to get the items on their own and with the removal of botters to have the average price of enhancements go up.
This also benefits the new player and veteran player who chooses to farm nodes/chests as it gives them a legitimate income for in game currency that otherwise would not be available. Combined with a slow reduction in cost of the artifact or equipment (whales will inevitable try to keep prices higher) as a whole and a reduction in the cost of refineing said artifact or equipment because the base refineing points are more difficult to get.
So in the end without bots, you get a higher costing and more stable way of getting your refineing points, a reduction in how much it costs to get the item and refine the item, as well as a legitimate way for players to earn astral diamond in game which you are asking for anyway.
So what is the downside, because I don't see one.
Players will put prices at higher than the lowest price because they want to make profit and they need to get the most currency for the work they do.
A player see's his/her time as much more important so they demand more value from an item.
The botter obtain's insane amounts of items so they see less value in the item and sell at lower prices.
There are two types of bots in this game.
The Farmer: This bot collects items to sell.
The Merchant: This bot is an auction house bot its job is to get the low bids on items and turn around to sell them with high buyouts. Ever wonder why its so hard to beat those bid snipers? This is why.
They can't sell Seals, they can't sell the items that they get from Seals. Allow them to keep the "HAMSTER greens" and "HAMSTER blues", no one picks those up anyways. Why because no one really needs them. I used to pick them up for gold, but now I run lv 6 Dungeons in SCA for all my gold needs.
I saw a guy with good gear(mod1-3): oh he must have good skills and do lots of good CN/GG runs.
Now (mod4+) I see someone with BIS gear: Meh. Just another wallet warrior or botter...
Each rank 7 enchant would need 5 GMOP's to become rank 10
13-22 rank 7 enchants upgraded to rank 10 requires 65-110 GMOPs
That's 6,500,000-11,000,000 AD or 271-459 days of fully refining your RAD (and earning said RAD). This does not include the RP, wards, and other reagents you are required to acquire.
So in order to get yourself back to the same level you achieved by playing for two years prior to the module release you need to spend 271-459 days just on the enchants. In that time you will also need to acquire new mounts because your BIS mount is no longer BIS. New gear because your Mod 6 BIS gear is no longer BIS. Effectively there is no way for a F2P to keep up with the power curve in the game without turning to other means of acquiring goods at a lower price... insert gold spammers here.
So you want to know why gold spammers exist, its because they help to make plausible what the game company did not. Once upon a time in NW a person could play X hours a day to overcome the pay wall but since NW has been effectively relegated to RAD refinement limits for income that is not possible. People then moved to alt farms to overcome the RAD limit; however, you cannot play alt farms else you will hit the same challenge above in equipping them. Which is why people turned to methods of income that do not require equipping/maintaining enchants. Insert leadership profession.
The answer is simple. For F2P players progression should be tied to playing time not daily limits. A F2P player should be able to get an item up to BIS just as it gets replaced. For example its reasonable for a F2P to get their main-hand up to legendary before new BIS main-hands are introduced (the recent trend has been 3-4 months). This ensures F2P players remain competitive and interested so they can serve as fodder to the P2W players.
As a person living in a low paying/cost of living country where my lunch costs $1.60 US, I can assure you that twisting my arm to buy zen will not work (you cannot draw blood from a stone).
This is just for 1 character. Consider the players who would like to be able to play more than one class. It's not hard to see how difficult it would be achieve the above with more than one character, and there are 8 different classes to date, and more on the way.
This game is so alternate hostile it's toxic.
Bots are there because people don't want to put in effort and time into what may be a repetitive task. The old UOAbigail and CRN305 crafting systems had bots created for them since somebody didn't want to sit there clicking a button 100 times in a row at a stationary crafting station. The argument against these bots were " if this is a social place where people are supposed to roleplay, and interact with each other being permanently AFK works against this, and is not the goal of the server".
This makes sense! In order to achieve anything in a game or accomplish goals you need to put in effort. Bots are non-effort cheats that encourage anti-social behaviors. It makes no sense try to get a high level character with best gear if you're going to do nothing with it but stand there for hours AFK defeating the purpose of an MMO.
Massive Multiplayer Online, not Massive Singleplayer AFK.
Another reason people have used bots is for the "must have every class and every item and everything and be rich" mentality. This is a lack of focus on quality over quantity. Nobody makes you have 30 charecters. Nobody makes you buy 20 companions, particicpate in events, run dungeons, or open Lockboxes. These are choices, and some people forget they have a choice to NOT have it all. It is okay to not be top everything. Materialism will not bring you play skills - practice will.
Sure, it helps to have an Epic mount, and maybe some nice dyes over that armor looks better so go ahead and spend a LITTLE money. That supports the game itself, the staff, the developers, and keeps it going for US the players. Just keep to a sensible budget so RL money stays where it's needed most.
Don't bot "because it's harmless". Don't passively sit there refusing to report bots saying "that's the Devs' job to fix it, not mine". People send bots in with creative new methods that can take time to spot or fix if there are fewer people helping out. The playerbase here can help keep ahead of the bot problem by being the many responsible people whom level responsibly, trade responsibly, and act as a community working together.
"Why is it dragons only use ketchup? I'd like a little wasabi please. Us silvers like a variety of condiments."
"Don't call them foolish mortals. One, they don't learn from it. Two, It just ticks them off." - An Ancient Red Dragon
People do report bots but nothing seems to get done. While gateway may be a source of botting, in game it has to be worse, just looking at AH shows all the literally thousands of refinement stones and profession stuff that is so obviously from bots being sold all day every day.
It's the grind that creates the demand. Everybody needs so much stuff for refinement and it's no longer feasible to get it, so people buy from bots on AH or from gold sellers.
That's the "Tough Decision" that needs to be made to combat bots!
Yup, but they need to make the whole game far less grindy and more rewarding to play as well. Banning botting accounts is a needed step that they don't seem to be doing, but there are loads of other measures too that could limit the amount undetected bots can make while not impacting on genuine players.
But, well, let's be frank: levels 1-60 only take a few days, so I can certainly see why that might be extremely difficult to pull off.
I actually liked the way boons were implemented. There was serious power creep but they were available to anyone who wanted to spend the time to get them. I'm not really sure why they moved away from that model.
Take away the AH, and you take away most of the need for AD. Take away most of the need for AD, and you take away a good hunk of the need for Zen. Take away any of the need for Zen, Cryptic's profits plummet. Cryptic's profits fall, they have less incentive to maintain or improve this game. Game Over.
And if you were to slowly start re-introducing the AH, and unbound items, what exactly did you accomplish, outside of just a temporary flat-lining of the economy? the bot/farmers will just start right back up, focusing on those items.
The solution that is being used on the Gateway is just an easy way out where the developer doesn't really have to do much and the causal player like myself gets screwed.
Honestly, when the Gateway was introduced, I thought it was Cryptic trying to channel bots there, rather than have them in-game, adding to server load, or fighting the quixotic battle to keep them out.
That being said.....I really miss being able to have Gateway open (but usually minimized) all day on my work computer.