ghoulz66Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,748Arc User
I don't see how limiting the availability of R4s/R5s helps the game at all. Even if you get artifacts to mythic, it doesn't mean a whole lot for your overall performance. You still have to worry about weapon enchants, coal wards, GMoP, SMoP, bonding. If anything this only hurts players trying to hit 2.5k without busting their marbles.
I too feel the best solution was BoA for those items that can be abused by botter, because obviously their goal is to place them on AH. Without that then only people that really play and going to use the item would benefit when they mine the node. Ah well.
On that note, is this why we are have 2 hour maintenance or is there other unannounced patches? I mean, you really need 2 hours to change a few value in drop table and their binding type?
Just another instance of NWO removing refinement points from the game, that we need a whole lot of, and blaming it on bots. It's really really really really getting old..... Anything bound to account can't be used for botting.
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tripsofthrymrMember, Neverwinter Moderator, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,624Community Moderator
Let's be honest now. Any normal player can regard the RP in skill nodes like finding a quarter on the street. It's nice to find money but the amount you find during normal game play just won't change your character's life.
The amount of RP only impacts the game when armies of bots farm the nodes over, and over, and over. Oh and by the way, make them less likely to be available to normal players if it happens in non-instanced content, and strains the servers when done anywhere. I still have a screenshot where Ghost Stories had over 1000 (!) active instances.
The change is fine. It's not harming a normal player in any meaningful way, and indeed brings some benefits.
+1 to making the insignia (and almost everything else in the game) BtA.
I don't see how limiting the availability of R4s/R5s helps the game at all. Even if you get artifacts to mythic, it doesn't mean a whole lot for your overall performance. You still have to worry about weapon enchants, coal wards, GMoP, SMoP, bonding. If anything this only hurts players trying to hit 2.5k without busting their marbles.
Mythic artifacts were perhaps the most cost efficient way to get stats. By far. Insofar as it was a wide gap, I can sort of understand why they'd want to nerf their production, but it's just another thing that widens the power and income gap between old and new players.
Wow. Epic fail. Yet again. Do you guys ALWAYS take the worst solution? Or do you just gather the 5 worst and throw a dart at a board?
1. Bind to Account -- Probably the #1 solution proposed by the entire community? 2. How about a Captcha for Account Creation -- prevent the botters from auto-generating accounts like water? 3. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game ala STO?) on skill nodes?? -- instant botter prevention. 4. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game) on zone transition?
So the war against bots is basically going to penalize anyone who wants to interact with the game via gateway... Who can't spend 6 hours per day on the actual game.
I just came back to Neverwinter a week ago and now I feel like I should just leave again...
Minsc is dual wielding Occam's Razor. The change made was the simplest solution, and the one leading to the least complicated loot bag contents. Bravo. Perhaps some people are missing the fact as long as you're killing your way through the zone or dungeon instead of running or stealthing through it, you'll get more rp from your kills and all will even out.
Personally I've stopped squeezing my sphincter when I see an 'Upcoming Changes' notice because they've been common sense and good lately. A nice habit to get into.
Wow. Epic fail. Yet again. Do you guys ALWAYS take the worst solution? Or do you just gather the 5 worst and throw a dart at a board?
1. Bind to Account -- Probably the #1 solution proposed by the entire community? 2. How about a Captcha for Account Creation -- prevent the botters from auto-generating accounts like water? 3. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game ala STO?) on skill nodes?? -- instant botter prevention. 4. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game) on zone transition?
Let's be honest now. Any normal player can regard the RP in skill nodes like finding a quarter on the street. It's nice to find money but the amount you find during normal game play just won't change your character's life.
The amount of RP only impacts the game when armies of bots farm the nodes over, and over, and over. Oh and by the way, make them less likely to be available to normal players if it happens in non-instanced content, and strains the servers when done anywhere. I still have a screenshot where Ghost Stories had over 1000 (!) active instances.
The change is fine. It's not harming a normal player in any meaningful way, and indeed brings some benefits.
+1 to making the insignia (and almost everything else in the game) BtA.
That's true, but it's also true that the only thing keeping RP prices reasonable are those armies of bots. That does harm normal players.
PWE just needs to suck it up and put reasonably priced RP in the bazaar.
If this is part of some great and awesome plan to even out the economy AND smooth out the progression so you don't need to either put down a car payment or be a no-lifer who can't afford a car payment (or one of those who takes advantage of AD/resource exploits from one of their many, many, many, many previous bugs) to get to the point where your character can (in say six months or so) join the "lfg 3k+ speed run" group that currently dominates the economy then by all means go for it....AND mention what the damned plan is too.
Apparently you guys are good enough at sharing to leak this info to insiders who cornered the markets before the announcement so how about telling us mere luddites?
You know what? No buys this line about bots. No one except deluded idiots who joined your broken VIP system. This is not about bots, I mean really bots are usually the only things on Neverwinter any more. I still get spammed like crazy in the Enclave but where are the players? Where are your big cash mines who bought into your VIP (Subscription basically) in December? Nowhere to be found. This game is empty and I am tired of waiting for the players the development team chased off to come back. Have fun stealing pennies from the few VIP chumps left. You deserve each other in your war to get those mythical bots.
Lowering the amount of RP needed per rank to refine enchantments is something we would also like.
YUP!!!!!
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putzboy78Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,950Arc User
I bet this is another change (like leadership AD) that never goes to XBOX because.... well we aren't the same until a nerf is needed.
Any chance that all the insignia variances will start showing up? Cause ATM I got 15 different variance in my bag out of a possible 50. Specifically I've only gotten the barbed skill variant and I want more variants of the skilled.
Actually, this is only going to strengthen botting on the professions side. Now the 50+ character accounts maxed on leadership and running bots through professions will have a stranglehold on the RP economy and they're gonna charge so hard through the nose for RP that any new players out there are going to be crushed to financial dust and their progress brought to a sharp and sudden stop. On the flip side, they did promise us the leadership profession would become useful again...,
Way to provide the crutch before blasting holes in our feet.
I must say as I have been playing MMO type games for the last 15 years or longer, and the one thing that I have noticed from those years of playing is that once a botting issue begins in a game, there is no real way to combat against it. You can do all the changes you want, the only thing you do is make the botters begin to think abstractly. Instead of botting one thing they will find another to bot, in example to this would be the fact that you are now making these items drop from critters. So instead of botting the skill nodes, they will now bot something else.
A prime example of this is to look at the history of other gaming companies, lets take a big one that has been battling botters for around 20+ years, Blizzard Entertainment and their Diablo series. The botting started to get very bad around the time of Diablo 2, Blizzard spent many years combating the botters, ban wave after ban wave, it did no good, the botters just worked harder in their game of chess with the Developers, its a cat-n-mouse game with them. If you stop their actions one way they will just go right back to the drawing board and devise a new plan. D2 died, and D3 came about, shortly after the release of D3 the botters came back, and have since then plagued Blizzard developers. The Blizzard developers even went to the limits of making all equipment account bound after a certain amount of time in an attempt to try to "bore" the botters away.
This still did them no good as botters dont really care if they can give/sell items to other players, at least the ones that are not in it for a monetary gain (your currency selling companies). A botter bots for just a few reasons:
1. They enjoy playing the game but can not find the time to balance the gaming life with the real world life, remember one must eat, sleep and work, without those things we can not live. This is the biggest reason why botters bot, they want to play the game they want to excel at the game but can not due to real life.
2. Some botters as stupid as it sounds just enjoy watching the games be automated, it amazes them to see the character move itself and play the game for them, its almost like how people watch television for enjoyment.
3. There is a natural urge to feel as though one is getting ahead of everyone else in other words cheating. This feeling brings a superiority to the player. It makes them feel as though they are getting ahead of their friends and clan mates as they are progressing faster than other players.
4. Boredom. People turn to botting once they have gotten bored of playing the game entirely, but do not want to move onto other games because either they still have friends on the game they play with, or because they are just to lazy to start another game all over again. So they start botting while they wait for new content to come about. Once they have played the new content they generally turn the bot back on and go about their lives.
5. Bot developers design these bots for monetary gain, knowledge or the enjoyment of competing against the game developers to prove they can defeat them when they implement their hack detection systems.
Those are just a few reasons why most people bot, a lot of it is just because the user has grown bored of the content as its not exciting enough for them. The sad thing is most people don't realize the damage they are causing by botting. It causes a high amount of resource usage on the servers and causes the servers to be unstable and laggy for other users because the users are running their programs for long periods of time. This in turn causes the companies that host these games large amounts of money for the resources being used. This is the unfortunate fact of the entire thing. So where the companies are in fact after the money they can get they are using a decent chunk of what money they do get to pay for the server usages. Not every company own the servers they are hosting on.
The worst part about the entire thing is the fact that once a game company has a botting problem, they will always have a botting problem. Botters are like cockroaches they can survive nuclear explosions they dont just go away because you make changes to the game that you feel will deter their habits, they will just find another method to achieve their enjoyment. This being said, all the changes you make in a way is punishment to the good players, the ones that actually legitly play the game like its supposed to be played. You make it harder for them to achieve greatness. You take away the methods they used before hand to build their characters up. Now I am not saying the change your making to skill nodes is necessarily a bad thing but I personally do not see it stopping the botters its a small bump in the road to them. They will find another way to do what they did before, which will bring about another change. If the picture isn't developing for you yet, its like a circle you make changes to make it like a square and they turn it into a circle again.
There is no real way to combat against botting, you can ban them, fine they make a new account and start again. You attempt an IP ban on them to prevent them from making new accounts and trying again, fine they reset their modem and change their IP, if that doesn't work they call their ISP and get put on a new IP block. Do you see what I'm getting at? This is an on going battle that will drive you to the brink of insanity. Its a never ending cycle for game companies and developers.
I'm sorry to say this but if your having a botting issue in your game, you might as well prepare yourself for a long and hard battle. These cockroaches are here to stay and are here to bring you much head ache and financial harm. This is just the sad fact about the entire thing..
The even more sad thing about the entire process is there is no way to prevent it, you can try to code the game so the bot developers can not disassemble it with their Debugging programs, but it will just be a matter of time before they figure out a way to attach their disassemblers to the process once again, and then your right back to the same cycle you were at before.
You could always try to take the Blizzard way and sue the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of the people making these bots, but its just going to make way for a new person to take their place..
So I wish you (Arc & Developers) good luck, and wish you the best in your battle of the botters. You are in for a long rocky battle.
Will be able to sell rank 5's for much more again, I'm fine with this change. I only Refine with bound RP anyway. Sure its slow but I'm in no hurry. Much rather make money off the burnouts who want BIS in a month.
I really like this game. Have for a long time. Was with Blizz for vanilla WOW. Then Guild Wars and GW2. Now playing ARC games but mostly Neverwinter. Loved it when they had the stand alone games. Yes im older than the hills but a little younger than the mountains. Dont ask I dont know where that came from. But to make a short story long....
Have to agree with most should have gone with BOA. Would be nice then wouldnt have 3 types of everything in our bags. Saleable rp, BOA rp and BOC rp. Add to that all the rest of the junk that have the same issue. BOA and dropable since you cant sell them id scrolls. Add whatever you can think of to the list. Oh I forgot they want us to buy bigger bags to hold all this garbage.
To finish the rant its what the company wants. Blame the bots but rally the issues is to try to push us to have to buy zen to do anything. They put up on almost any ad that all their games are free to play. Read the fine print somewhere it says ...but if you dont pay for stuff you will never go anywhere in the game. Just another money ploy to get as much out of us before the game goes under...notice I didnt say company....they will just come up with another free to play game.
In the near future I can see them charging AD to play your chars on a daily basis. Thank you for the 1k AD to play your lvl 70 CW today and oh thank you again for the 1k to play your lvl 70 GWF. Fill in your own amounts.
Its kind of sad that the die hard players that play the game for fun and want to work for they're chars get beat down the most rather than the ones causing the problems. How long before people get fed up and they wont even be able to fill a single instance and you can hear the crickets when you log in. Protectors Enclave becomes a ghost town.
There are very very few enchants that are bound. Asking to make commonly occurring bound versions is just asking them to force an entire extra bag worth of refinement storage on you.
Ok. So for some reason my "quote" thing isn't working. Have to check my security software.
What I am seeing falls into 3 categories. 1) Insignias? Who cares? 2) Leveling Up enchantments? Bwaha, noobs are screwed. 3) We should bind to account all RP etc to screw over bots.
Last one first. While I acknowledge the point that it would HURT botters, not being able to trade, sell or buy Enchants etc. will KILL all the normal players. If you bind on account all that RP goodness, then the P2W guys won't be able to buy stuff off of YOU when YOU get it. EVERYONE will be locked in to their own drops, and ONLY their own drops, and that will screw EVERYONE but the guys who are already maxed out... and of course the botters. Seeing as they're already cheating, their bots can now go out and KILL Mobs in mass quantities. It will be EASIER under this proposed system for botters to make RP, NOT more difficult.
So Bind on Account for Any RP items has just got to be the Dumbest Idea ever.
I fully agree that leveling up enchantments just got WAY more expensive. Although it really depends on the drop rate from Mobs. My guess is that we're going to see a short term rise, followed by a sharp drop off as the botters get their killing machines into full swing.
What's messed up is under the PREVIOUS system, nodes were time gated, dropped random goodies, and anyone could come along and grab them. But NO, apparently this concept is a bad idea. Now we're going to make it so RP stuff drops from mobs... what's that drop rate? One in ten? One in Twenty? One in Fifty? One in a Hundred? It's going to have to be CRAZY high, because otherwise the botters will just exploit that as well. And the higher it is, the more Screwed the honest ordinary player IS. At least under the current system you can go out and find nodes as you walk around, you can open them up and HEY PRESTO, you MIGHT get some RP goodness.
That's one thing that seems to be missing here. Getting RP from a node is NOT a guarantee... so why not change up the drop rate some? Or change the drop table so say more Runestones drop vice Enchantments? Just taking the Runes and the Enchants away... sigh.. shakes head.. not intelligent guys.
I fully agree on insignias. All you really need is about 12 good ones... that will outfit 3 or 4 of your best mounts. Any more is just a waste. So adding more insignia drops to skill nodes is just plain stupid.
It would seem that the real problem here is those dratted botters. Now, If I HADN'T SEEN all the AD sellers in PE EVERY TIME I log in there, I would think that "Botters" were the devs designated fall guys. You know, the devs decide to screw us over, so let's blame it on the botters and do whatever. I think that to some degree that this is STILL TRUE, but the AD seller evidence speaks for itself.
What needs to happen... a systematic ongoing effort to seek out, identify, block and ban AD seller botters. I've seen many suggestions, and made some myself. And frankly, I'm getting tired of the devs NOT doing what is NECESSARY.
Here goes. 1) a dev needs to create an avatar w/ an empty block profile, preferably one that can block 200 or more people. 2) said dev THEN needs to log into the game, and sit in PE. 3) As the dev sits in PE, he needs to block all AD sellers that he sees. 4) after an hour or so, the dev logs off, having filled his block list. 5) the dev prints out the block list and then systematically blocks and perma bans everyone on it. He also takes note of domain trends for emails and servers for future reference. Say the email provider "crazymail.com" shows up on over 100 of his blocks. If this email provider continues to have a high incidence of botters using it, then crazymail.com needs to be blocked as an acceptable email source host for new accounts.
Repeat steps One thru five 10 or more times EVERY DAY for a week. I GUARANTEE that this will exterminate most botters, and MORE importantly, identify servers and domains that said botters are using to perform their misdeeds.
Trend Analysis Guys. There's a reason that EVERYONE that has assembly lines USES it. And for that matter, so does the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. It shows patterns, tells you where to look and sometimes identifies where you HAVEN'T LOOKED.
There is no real way to combat against botting, you can ban them, fine they make a new account and start again. You attempt an IP ban on them to prevent them from making new accounts and trying again, fine they reset their modem and change their IP, if that doesn't work they call their ISP and get put on a new IP block. Do you see what I'm getting at? This is an on going battle that will drive you to the brink of insanity. Its a never ending cycle for game companies and developers.
It is entirely too cost effective for “gold selling” sites to spam-advertise within the game environments own chat channels, friend invitations, in-game mail, etc. They can often create accounts, and have those accounts spew spam all over the online game automatically or with extremely simple to use tools that take no time at all for them.
Imagine if that were different. Imagine if every time one of their spam-bots advertised, they received hundreds or thousands of e-mails requesting they halt their in-game spamming tactics.
Now you, and your thousands of closest online friends can do just that. Send an e-mail request to halt their practices and all it takes is for you to press a single key anytime you see one of their in-game spam messages.
Comments
If anything this only hurts players trying to hit 2.5k without busting their marbles.
On that note, is this why we are have 2 hour maintenance or is there other unannounced patches? I mean, you really need 2 hours to change a few value in drop table and their binding type?
It's really really really really getting old.....
Anything bound to account can't be used for botting.
The amount of RP only impacts the game when armies of bots farm the nodes over, and over, and over. Oh and by the way, make them less likely to be available to normal players if it happens in non-instanced content, and strains the servers when done anywhere. I still have a screenshot where Ghost Stories had over 1000 (!) active instances.
The change is fine. It's not harming a normal player in any meaningful way, and indeed brings some benefits.
+1 to making the insignia (and almost everything else in the game) BtA.
Sci-fi author: The Gods We Make, The Gods We Seek, and Ji-min
Do you guys ALWAYS take the worst solution? Or do you just gather the 5 worst and throw a dart at a board?
1. Bind to Account -- Probably the #1 solution proposed by the entire community?
2. How about a Captcha for Account Creation -- prevent the botters from auto-generating accounts like water?
3. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game ala STO?) on skill nodes?? -- instant botter prevention.
4. How about a random Captcha (or mini-game) on zone transition?
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
I just came back to Neverwinter a week ago and now I feel like I should just leave again...
Personally I've stopped squeezing my sphincter when I see an 'Upcoming Changes' notice because they've been common sense and good lately. A nice habit to get into.
Signature [WIP] - tyvm John
PWE just needs to suck it up and put reasonably priced RP in the bazaar.
Apparently you guys are good enough at sharing to leak this info to insiders who cornered the markets before the announcement so how about telling us mere luddites?
This game is empty and I am tired of waiting for the players the development team chased off to come back. Have fun stealing pennies from the few VIP chumps left. You deserve each other in your war to get those mythical bots.
Any chance that all the insignia variances will start showing up? Cause ATM I got 15 different variance in my bag out of a possible 50. Specifically I've only gotten the barbed skill variant and I want more variants of the skilled.
Way to provide the crutch before blasting holes in our feet.
A prime example of this is to look at the history of other gaming companies, lets take a big one that has been battling botters for around 20+ years, Blizzard Entertainment and their Diablo series. The botting started to get very bad around the time of Diablo 2, Blizzard spent many years combating the botters, ban wave after ban wave, it did no good, the botters just worked harder in their game of chess with the Developers, its a cat-n-mouse game with them. If you stop their actions one way they will just go right back to the drawing board and devise a new plan. D2 died, and D3 came about, shortly after the release of D3 the botters came back, and have since then plagued Blizzard developers. The Blizzard developers even went to the limits of making all equipment account bound after a certain amount of time in an attempt to try to "bore" the botters away.
This still did them no good as botters dont really care if they can give/sell items to other players, at least the ones that are not in it for a monetary gain (your currency selling companies). A botter bots for just a few reasons:
1. They enjoy playing the game but can not find the time to balance the gaming life with the real world life, remember one must eat, sleep and work, without those things we can not live. This is the biggest reason why botters bot, they want to play the game they want to excel at the game but can not due to real life.
2. Some botters as stupid as it sounds just enjoy watching the games be automated, it amazes them to see the character move itself and play the game for them, its almost like how people watch television for enjoyment.
3. There is a natural urge to feel as though one is getting ahead of everyone else in other words cheating. This feeling brings a superiority to the player. It makes them feel as though they are getting ahead of their friends and clan mates as they are progressing faster than other players.
4. Boredom. People turn to botting once they have gotten bored of playing the game entirely, but do not want to move onto other games because either they still have friends on the game they play with, or because they are just to lazy to start another game all over again. So they start botting while they wait for new content to come about. Once they have played the new content they generally turn the bot back on and go about their lives.
5. Bot developers design these bots for monetary gain, knowledge or the enjoyment of competing against the game developers to prove they can defeat them when they implement their hack detection systems.
Those are just a few reasons why most people bot, a lot of it is just because the user has grown bored of the content as its not exciting enough for them. The sad thing is most people don't realize the damage they are causing by botting. It causes a high amount of resource usage on the servers and causes the servers to be unstable and laggy for other users because the users are running their programs for long periods of time. This in turn causes the companies that host these games large amounts of money for the resources being used. This is the unfortunate fact of the entire thing. So where the companies are in fact after the money they can get they are using a decent chunk of what money they do get to pay for the server usages. Not every company own the servers they are hosting on.
The worst part about the entire thing is the fact that once a game company has a botting problem, they will always have a botting problem. Botters are like cockroaches they can survive nuclear explosions they dont just go away because you make changes to the game that you feel will deter their habits, they will just find another method to achieve their enjoyment. This being said, all the changes you make in a way is punishment to the good players, the ones that actually legitly play the game like its supposed to be played. You make it harder for them to achieve greatness. You take away the methods they used before hand to build their characters up. Now I am not saying the change your making to skill nodes is necessarily a bad thing but I personally do not see it stopping the botters its a small bump in the road to them. They will find another way to do what they did before, which will bring about another change. If the picture isn't developing for you yet, its like a circle you make changes to make it like a square and they turn it into a circle again.
There is no real way to combat against botting, you can ban them, fine they make a new account and start again. You attempt an IP ban on them to prevent them from making new accounts and trying again, fine they reset their modem and change their IP, if that doesn't work they call their ISP and get put on a new IP block. Do you see what I'm getting at? This is an on going battle that will drive you to the brink of insanity. Its a never ending cycle for game companies and developers.
I'm sorry to say this but if your having a botting issue in your game, you might as well prepare yourself for a long and hard battle. These cockroaches are here to stay and are here to bring you much head ache and financial harm. This is just the sad fact about the entire thing..
The even more sad thing about the entire process is there is no way to prevent it, you can try to code the game so the bot developers can not disassemble it with their Debugging programs, but it will just be a matter of time before they figure out a way to attach their disassemblers to the process once again, and then your right back to the same cycle you were at before.
You could always try to take the Blizzard way and sue the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of the people making these bots, but its just going to make way for a new person to take their place..
So I wish you (Arc & Developers) good luck, and wish you the best in your battle of the botters. You are in for a long rocky battle.
Have to agree with most should have gone with BOA. Would be nice then wouldnt have 3 types of everything in our bags. Saleable rp, BOA rp and BOC rp. Add to that all the rest of the junk that have the same issue. BOA and dropable since you cant sell them id scrolls. Add whatever you can think of to the list. Oh I forgot they want us to buy bigger bags to hold all this garbage.
To finish the rant its what the company wants. Blame the bots but rally the issues is to try to push us to have to buy zen to do anything. They put up on almost any ad that all their games are free to play. Read the fine print somewhere it says ...but if you dont pay for stuff you will never go anywhere in the game. Just another money ploy to get as much out of us before the game goes under...notice I didnt say company....they will just come up with another free to play game.
In the near future I can see them charging AD to play your chars on a daily basis. Thank you for the 1k AD to play your lvl 70 CW today and oh thank you again for the 1k to play your lvl 70 GWF. Fill in your own amounts.
Its kind of sad that the die hard players that play the game for fun and want to work for they're chars get beat down the most rather than the ones causing the problems. How long before people get fed up and they wont even be able to fill a single instance and you can hear the crickets when you log in. Protectors Enclave becomes a ghost town.
What I am seeing falls into 3 categories.
1) Insignias? Who cares?
2) Leveling Up enchantments? Bwaha, noobs are screwed.
3) We should bind to account all RP etc to screw over bots.
Last one first. While I acknowledge the point that it would HURT botters, not being able to trade, sell or buy Enchants etc. will KILL all the normal players. If you bind on account all that RP goodness, then the P2W guys won't be able to buy stuff off of YOU when YOU get it. EVERYONE will be locked in to their own drops, and ONLY their own drops, and that will screw EVERYONE but the guys who are already maxed out... and of course the botters. Seeing as they're already cheating, their bots can now go out and KILL Mobs in mass quantities. It will be EASIER under this proposed system for botters to make RP, NOT more difficult.
So Bind on Account for Any RP items has just got to be the Dumbest Idea ever.
I fully agree that leveling up enchantments just got WAY more expensive. Although it really depends on the drop rate from Mobs. My guess is that we're going to see a short term rise, followed by a sharp drop off as the botters get their killing machines into full swing.
What's messed up is under the PREVIOUS system, nodes were time gated, dropped random goodies, and anyone could come along and grab them. But NO, apparently this concept is a bad idea. Now we're going to make it so RP stuff drops from mobs... what's that drop rate? One in ten? One in Twenty? One in Fifty? One in a Hundred? It's going to have to be CRAZY high, because otherwise the botters will just exploit that as well. And the higher it is, the more Screwed the honest ordinary player IS. At least under the current system you can go out and find nodes as you walk around, you can open them up and HEY PRESTO, you MIGHT get some RP goodness.
That's one thing that seems to be missing here. Getting RP from a node is NOT a guarantee... so why not change up the drop rate some? Or change the drop table so say more Runestones drop vice Enchantments? Just taking the Runes and the Enchants away... sigh.. shakes head.. not intelligent guys.
I fully agree on insignias. All you really need is about 12 good ones... that will outfit 3 or 4 of your best mounts. Any more is just a waste. So adding more insignia drops to skill nodes is just plain stupid.
It would seem that the real problem here is those dratted botters. Now, If I HADN'T SEEN all the AD sellers in PE EVERY TIME I log in there, I would think that "Botters" were the devs designated fall guys. You know, the devs decide to screw us over, so let's blame it on the botters and do whatever. I think that to some degree that this is STILL TRUE, but the AD seller evidence speaks for itself.
What needs to happen... a systematic ongoing effort to seek out, identify, block and ban AD seller botters. I've seen many suggestions, and made some myself. And frankly, I'm getting tired of the devs NOT doing what is NECESSARY.
Here goes.
1) a dev needs to create an avatar w/ an empty block profile, preferably one that can block 200 or more people.
2) said dev THEN needs to log into the game, and sit in PE.
3) As the dev sits in PE, he needs to block all AD sellers that he sees.
4) after an hour or so, the dev logs off, having filled his block list.
5) the dev prints out the block list and then systematically blocks and perma bans everyone on it. He also takes note of domain trends for emails and servers for future reference. Say the email provider "crazymail.com" shows up on over 100 of his blocks. If this email provider continues to have a high incidence of botters using it, then crazymail.com needs to be blocked as an acceptable email source host for new accounts.
Repeat steps One thru five 10 or more times EVERY DAY for a week. I GUARANTEE that this will exterminate most botters, and MORE importantly, identify servers and domains that said botters are using to perform their misdeeds.
Trend Analysis Guys. There's a reason that EVERYONE that has assembly lines USES it. And for that matter, so does the FBI and other law enforcement agencies. It shows patterns, tells you where to look and sometimes identifies where you HAVEN'T LOOKED.
Nuff 'said.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics