Seems like the biggest complainers are people who can't get in to play SCA or do professions when they are actually being paid to be doing something else..that thing called a job! Gotta laugh and not feel sorry for you. I have to actually work hard for a living. This is how you do professions without Gateway. Log in once in the morning, and once at night. So it's not the most efficient, but it still gets the job done.
Or maybe some of us don't work punch in / punch out jobs. Maybe some of us work 14 or 15 hours daily, but not continuously. We are also salaried... so we get paid the same if we work 4 hrs or 20 hrs. Keep on rocking those dishes in the back... it's honest, hard work and someone has to do it... but don't pretend to judge people's working situations. It's not uncommon for people to have pockets of downtime. Some people shop Amazon... some people log into the gateway.
Really?????? Ok lets figure this out on our own......If this downtime is about "BOTTERS" then why punish everyone? Botters , Goldsellers are everywhere in just about every online mmorpg game....I get at least 5 - 10 ingame emails and private messages a day....I flag the emails and ignore the senders of messages....So the sellers and botters are not hiding They are basically jumping up and down waving their arms screaming " HERE I AM LOOK AT ME" If all regular players ignore them and flag them we can get rid of them as they would be out of bussiness quickly.....who cares how much gold , zen , or ad you have if nobody is buying your product you go broke fast.....The auction house would be next if we "The players" set our own prices at normal rates and flood the AH with multiple items the botters and sellers eventually go broke buying up our sales trying to control the prices....And if the game company did more to catch and punish the botters and sellers instead of punishing everyone we could enjoy our gaming time more.
1. You do realize the botters and the spammers are almost certainly on entirely different accounts, right? Probably even different IP's? Banning a spammer doesn't do anything other than force honest players to ignore the (likely automatically created) replacement account. (at least in a F2P game. In an P2P game they lose money each time a char gets banned, which is a *strong* argument why messaging should be restricted to accounts that have paid.) 2. Obviously, there are less scrupulous players than us actually buying gold from the gold sellers on pretty much every game, otherwise goldsellers would have stopped a Loooong time ago. (Note: I have no clue who these idiots are that are ruining games for both themselves and everybody else, but the evidence demonstrates that they must exist.) And, my 2 cents, it's these people actually buying gold that are the real problem.
But yes, the way to stop botters/spammers is to stop the point of sale. Whether that's managing to find/ban the buyers, prevent them from learning about the sellers (good luck with that), or simply making it impossible to make lopsided transactions. Everything else is pretty much trying to fix a severed leg with a bandaid.
As for the QOL issue of gold spammers?
1. In addition to the normal "URL in the message squelch it", add an option to the client (defaults to on) that uses spelling check/grammar check to squelch any message that isn't close to a real sentence in the language the users client is set to. All their attempts to get around the filter squelching URL's means that message will get caught by this. 2. If you send a whisper to somebody who doesn't have you on their friends list, isn't in the same party/guild, and who hasn't recently said anything to you/in a public channel, you are automatically globally squelched until they reply or until some number of minutes have passed. With the number of minutes increasing if you get squelched again within a certain amount of time. 3. Squelch anybody who sends the same message too many times in too short a period. (preferably serverside, but even clientside wouldn't hurt.) 4. Unless you have to pay to chat, (which I don't think you have to do to chat in this game?) do NOT ban spammers. That just means another name for honest players to ignore
Not sure why they can't have live GMs in the game to do on-the-spot bans of botters. There could be a minute? delay in the chat. As soon as a botter posts, the comment is deleted and never makes it to the chat server and the botter is quickly banned.
Because there are far more spammers/zones than there are GM's, and banning a spammer only hurts innocent players who have to add the replacement to their ignore list. Any solution to an automated problem needs to be automated itself.
I think they will make, again, the worst solution devs come by: remove "RP tasks" from Leadership's Gateway as they did back in the day with rAD tasks, affecting both their own server due the big increase of bots doing scripted professions tasks (after all, a bot can be rewrinten to be up to date) and players, once again, for their bad choices and lack of prevision/anticipation.
As long as we're making predictions... I think they'll remove AH and ZaX access from the Gateway. Or make it read-only.
I don't think professions were the cause here, and I don't really expect them to be effected if the Gateway ever comes up. Hahaha i guess we might never see :P
I just recently started doing SCA again, shame things went down so soon after. I figure there must have been a pretty catastrophic exploit being done on the Gateway and they panicked, pulling the plug just to be sure. That's probably also why they purged AH Monday.
I'm surprised it's been down this long, but as a software developer, I know these things can take time. I don't really NEED to know how long it will be down, but I would really appreciate hearing WHAT is wrong. It seems like it must be more than one thing. If it was just the AH or just the ZAX, they could disable that and let me roll some dice, but the fact that they are keeping the whole thing down AND refusing to give details is really concerning. It makes me think that it's something so bad and so core to the Gateway that they're not even sure if they CAN fix it.
Strum, ANY actual details you could give us would be greatly appreciated and maybe lower the pitchforks for a time. The silence is being filled with all manner of fear and speculation, and people are starting to blame the company instead of the people causing the problem.
3. Squelch anybody who sends the same message too many times in too short a period. (preferably serverside, but even clientside wouldn't hurt.)
They allready have this in place, it's one of the reasons you never see the same bot more than a few messages in a row. Seems to disappear after a random amount of in game time. As for automated banning, in this day and age an actual functional auto ban should work without issue if done properly, the problem is as i understand it it's quite a fair wad of work to code it all.
I just recently started doing SCA again, shame things went down so soon after. I figure there must have been a pretty catastrophic exploit being done on the Gateway and they panicked, pulling the plug just to be sure. That's probably also why they purged AH Monday.
I'm surprised it's been down this long, but as a software developer, I know these things can take time. I don't really NEED to know how long it will be down, but I would really appreciate hearing WHAT is wrong. It seems like it must be more than one thing. If it was just the AH or just the ZAX, they could disable that and let me roll some dice, but the fact that they are keeping the whole thing down AND refusing to give details is really concerning. It makes me think that it's something so bad and so core to the Gateway that they're not even sure if they CAN fix it.
Strum, ANY actual details you could give us would be greatly appreciated and maybe lower the pitchforks for a time. The silence is being filled with all manner of fear and speculation, and people are starting to blame the company instead of the people causing the problem.
I suspect multiple area's of issue, but the AH was almost certainly one given the stuff they've done and what we saw when it came back up. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out bots were running the SCA for companion gear to sell.
Paingiver is not an acurratte or Useful measure of your actual sustained damage output, (i.e DPS), in various ways it lies. For a true idea use ACT. Link below:
Because there are far more spammers/zones than there are GM's, and banning a spammer only hurts innocent players who have to add the replacement to their ignore list. Any solution to an automated problem needs to be automated itself.
They did and they created a big freaking mess. And that happened more than once.
*** 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. ***
We took it down because automated activity was putting undue pressure on our servers and it was clear that it was risky to leave Gateway up any longer as it was causing performance issues to more than just the Gateway servers. We have been monitoring the amount of RP generated from Leadership and have not identified it as causing enough distortion to the RP economy to make any changes at this time.
We have talked about what to do about Gateway internally and looked into the issue, we plan to have a decision on how to tackle this issue next week.
I want to have more details for everyone by the end of next week on what our plans are. As much as I like Gateway too, we can't let it threaten taking down the rest of the game servers let alone itself.
We took it down because automated activity was putting undue pressure on our servers and it was clear that it was risky to leave Gateway up any longer as it was causing performance issues to more than just the Gateway servers. We have been monitoring the amount of RP generated from Leadership and have not identified it as causing enough distortion to the RP economy to make any changes at this time.
We have talked about what to do about Gateway internally and looked into the issue, we plan to have a decision on how to tackle this issue next week.
I want to have more details for everyone by the end of next week on what our plans are. As much as I like Gateway too, we can't let it threaten taking down the rest of the game servers let alone itself.
@panderus Thank you! I don't think it's known just how much a simple communication like this means to us! We really love the gateway
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,407Arc User
Now, can someone pin that simple announcement in the top of the forum? This message will soon disappear in these pages and will be hard for a frustrated user (new to forum) to unearth it.
*** 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. ***
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
Now, can someone pin that simple announcement in the top of the forum? This message will soon disappear in these pages and will be hard for a frustrated user (new to forum) to unearth it.
I believe it's in the process. The other thread asked for it and he said ok I'll close this one
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
Sure, but then they make more accounts, continue the behavior and the cycle starts anew. We would prefer to have a preventative solution rather than a reactionary one.
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
It's too easy for them to make more accounts. Find a way to level the playing field and make the botters lose profits, maybe they'll focus on the next MMO and back off of Neverwinter!
I can understand that, but I don't see how these latest restrictions are going to prevent anything. For example, the gold sellers are now just spamming away from level 15 characters... I don't think the latest restrictions are doing much to stop them.
Botting, on the other hand, is something every MMO has had to deal with, usually with mass-bannings of accounts. Sadly though it will probably always be a bit of an arms race... I just hope that the regular players don't get caught in the cross-fire.
I made a post over in the Player Feedback forum about perhaps changing the AH to a blind system to stop the gold sellers outright. As there is no other way for players to trade AD, except via indirectly the AH, making the AH "blind" should stop the gold sellers outright. This is something other games have done with great effect... getting rid of the gold sellers would also get rid of a lot of bots I would wager!
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
Sure, but then they make more accounts, continue the behavior and the cycle starts anew. We would prefer to have a preventative solution rather than a reactionary one.
all due respect but it has been 3 years, the preventive solution ship has sailed. Now what we (you and us) have learned is that removing something from the gateway does not solve the issue (AD in leadership).
Why don't you all set up queue system for professions so people can log in once a day and set up all tasks for 24-48 hours in game. Give some power back to your players.
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
Sure, but then they make more accounts, continue the behavior and the cycle starts anew. We would prefer to have a preventative solution rather than a reactionary one.
The bad thought on this..is usually in the past by implementing a preventative measure you take away from the legitimate players...it is known history. How much more of the games mechanics do we need to do without in the name of combatting bots?
If some were Permanently Banned hopefully it will get rid of some with tons of AD and Stocked up items. Can't sell if they don't have. Plus, it will show the BOTTERS you are serious. Right now I think they are laughing...because you take away from the players and the bots sell more! in-turn actually helping them.
What I don't understand is if you can identify that botting is causing undue stress on the Gateway servers, and your network in general... you must be able to identify the accounts actually doing the botting.
Why must they be able to identify the bots? There's a huge leap between knowing botting is occurring putting stress on the servers, and being able to differentiate between accounts doing said botting, and accounts that are perfectly innocent players.
Why don't you all set up queue system for professions so people can log in once a day and set up all tasks for 24-48 hours in game. Give some power back to your players.
While that's a nice QOL improvement, how exactly does that solve the problem at hand? You're making the (extremely unlikely) assumption that it's "legit" botting players impacting the servers, and not gold sellers running server farms of bots.
On the upside no need to get anymore character slots the longer they wait the less likely people are to buy more
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morrowind69Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 26Arc User
edited September 2016
I think the AD sellers moving there AD safely without any problem and if cryptic what to ban the bots they need to make it fast and secret not telling them we will start a war against bots 2 weeks from now ?!!
Renewing my plea for you to put an official (sticky'd if necessary) post about the status of the Gateway. You closed the other thread but unless you put out a clear message all that will amount to is causing the conspiracy theorists to move into this thread.
It would mean a lot for the community, and I really think it wouldn't be much effort on your part Even if you just repeated what you already wrote, just in a central and clear location.
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jaysun1977Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 177Arc User
We took it down because automated activity was putting undue pressure on our servers and it was clear that it was risky to leave Gateway up any longer as it was causing performance issues to more than just the Gateway servers. We have been monitoring the amount of RP generated from Leadership and have not identified it as causing enough distortion to the RP economy to make any changes at this time.
We have talked about what to do about Gateway internally and looked into the issue, we plan to have a decision on how to tackle this issue next week.
I want to have more details for everyone by the end of next week on what our plans are. As much as I like Gateway too, we can't let it threaten taking down the rest of the game servers let alone itself.
What he said that I said.
I for one would still like to know what changed so suddenly to increase the load to such levels. Any information on that? If not then the update is pretty much useless as far information is concerned.
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plasticbatMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 12,407Arc User
No thanks. It's already hard enough trying to find an IP that isn't banned via VPN. Since upgrading to Windows 10 using a VPN is the ONLY way I can play NW since for whatever reason it hangs up during the zone loading otherwise. I had it working without VPN but everytime I reboot Windows seems to mess up my network drivers.
And seriously you guys are buying the whole "botters" thing once again? Bunch of suckers... How many times are you going to let them pull that wool over your eyes? The Gateway has been there for over THREE YEARS! And it's now a issue? After the AD was removed from Leadership (also due to botters)? Suuuuure. Every time Cryptic finds something they want to remove from the game to get people to spend more real $$ they blame it on the evil botters.
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Thank you Loadouts for allowing my toons to be all the things... they ever wanted to be....
2. Obviously, there are less scrupulous players than us actually buying gold from the gold sellers on pretty much every game, otherwise goldsellers would have stopped a Loooong time ago. (Note: I have no clue who these idiots are that are ruining games for both themselves and everybody else, but the evidence demonstrates that they must exist.) And, my 2 cents, it's these people actually buying gold that are the real problem.
But yes, the way to stop botters/spammers is to stop the point of sale. Whether that's managing to find/ban the buyers, prevent them from learning about the sellers (good luck with that), or simply making it impossible to make lopsided transactions. Everything else is pretty much trying to fix a severed leg with a bandaid.
As for the QOL issue of gold spammers?
1. In addition to the normal "URL in the message squelch it", add an option to the client (defaults to on) that uses spelling check/grammar check to squelch any message that isn't close to a real sentence in the language the users client is set to. All their attempts to get around the filter squelching URL's means that message will get caught by this.
2. If you send a whisper to somebody who doesn't have you on their friends list, isn't in the same party/guild, and who hasn't recently said anything to you/in a public channel, you are automatically globally squelched until they reply or until some number of minutes have passed. With the number of minutes increasing if you get squelched again within a certain amount of time.
3. Squelch anybody who sends the same message too many times in too short a period. (preferably serverside, but even clientside wouldn't hurt.)
4. Unless you have to pay to chat, (which I don't think you have to do to chat in this game?) do NOT ban spammers. That just means another name for honest players to ignore Because there are far more spammers/zones than there are GM's, and banning a spammer only hurts innocent players who have to add the replacement to their ignore list. Any solution to an automated problem needs to be automated itself.
I don't think professions were the cause here, and I don't really expect them to be effected if the Gateway ever comes up. Hahaha i guess we might never see :P
I'm surprised it's been down this long, but as a software developer, I know these things can take time. I don't really NEED to know how long it will be down, but I would really appreciate hearing WHAT is wrong. It seems like it must be more than one thing. If it was just the AH or just the ZAX, they could disable that and let me roll some dice, but the fact that they are keeping the whole thing down AND refusing to give details is really concerning. It makes me think that it's something so bad and so core to the Gateway that they're not even sure if they CAN fix it.
Strum, ANY actual details you could give us would be greatly appreciated and maybe lower the pitchforks for a time. The silence is being filled with all manner of fear and speculation, and people are starting to blame the company instead of the people causing the problem.
They allready have this in place, it's one of the reasons you never see the same bot more than a few messages in a row. Seems to disappear after a random amount of in game time. As for automated banning, in this day and age an actual functional auto ban should work without issue if done properly, the problem is as i understand it it's quite a fair wad of work to code it all.
I'm surprised it's been down this long, but as a software developer, I know these things can take time. I don't really NEED to know how long it will be down, but I would really appreciate hearing WHAT is wrong. It seems like it must be more than one thing. If it was just the AH or just the ZAX, they could disable that and let me roll some dice, but the fact that they are keeping the whole thing down AND refusing to give details is really concerning. It makes me think that it's something so bad and so core to the Gateway that they're not even sure if they CAN fix it.
Strum, ANY actual details you could give us would be greatly appreciated and maybe lower the pitchforks for a time. The silence is being filled with all manner of fear and speculation, and people are starting to blame the company instead of the people causing the problem.
I suspect multiple area's of issue, but the AH was almost certainly one given the stuff they've done and what we saw when it came back up. I also wouldn't be surprised to find out bots were running the SCA for companion gear to sell.
https://github.com/nilsbrummond/Neverwinter-ACT-Plugin
This message will soon disappear in these pages and will be hard for a frustrated user (new to forum) to unearth it.
Ban them all. Permanently if necessary. Eventually people will not want to risk their accounts botting the Gateway.
I don't understand all these restrictions being added to the game, restrictions that the people botting will just bot around anyways... all you're doing is mildly inconveniencing the botters while greatly inconveniencing the regular players of the game!
Botting, on the other hand, is something every MMO has had to deal with, usually with mass-bannings of accounts. Sadly though it will probably always be a bit of an arms race... I just hope that the regular players don't get caught in the cross-fire.
I made a post over in the Player Feedback forum about perhaps changing the AH to a blind system to stop the gold sellers outright. As there is no other way for players to trade AD, except via indirectly the AH, making the AH "blind" should stop the gold sellers outright. This is something other games have done with great effect... getting rid of the gold sellers would also get rid of a lot of bots I would wager!
Why don't you all set up queue system for professions so people can log in once a day and set up all tasks for 24-48 hours in game. Give some power back to your players.
If some were Permanently Banned hopefully it will get rid of some with tons of AD and Stocked up items. Can't sell if they don't have. Plus, it will show the BOTTERS you are serious. Right now I think they are laughing...because you take away from the players and the bots sell more! in-turn actually helping them.
Forgot to add...there is possibly IP Blocking!
Renewing my plea for you to put an official (sticky'd if necessary) post about the status of the Gateway. You closed the other thread but unless you put out a clear message all that will amount to is causing the conspiracy theorists to move into this thread.
It would mean a lot for the community, and I really think it wouldn't be much effort on your part
Whatever happened to MUDs? Plain text based roleplaying?
And seriously you guys are buying the whole "botters" thing once again? Bunch of suckers... How many times are you going to let them pull that wool over your eyes? The Gateway has been there for over THREE YEARS! And it's now a issue? After the AD was removed from Leadership (also due to botters)? Suuuuure. Every time Cryptic finds something they want to remove from the game to get people to spend more real $$ they blame it on the evil botters.