Issue:
So a friend of mine started to play and I decided to help her out with killing mobs in lower level areas and dungeons so that she can progress through the early game faster.
While she was doing fetch quests in Mount Zagoras, I was chillin inside the Fortress.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that every few seconds a bot went to interact with that NPC. How do I know it was a bot? They were either running super fast, walking through walls or teleporting to and away from the npc.
I stayed there for around 10 minutes and the bots never stopped coming (it wasn’t a wave of them, but a recurring constant amount of them).
For every 1 player that I’ve seen there were at least 20 bots running past me - and that’s including the players talking in zone chat.
This doesn’t only affect the ingame economy (since they are essentially farming gold that they will be selling for real money), but they are taking a HUGE chunk of the available slots, creating a much larger queue than needed. solution
There are several things you could do about this.
Since the main source of leveling in this game is through quests, what I suggest is to add various “human verifications” (like captchas) in a random interval while doing them for the first, let’s say 20-30 levels.
It doesn’t have to be much and it doesn’t have to happen too often - it just has to block their progress, by making them unable to predict when they would have to go through the verification process. It would demand some coding from Smilegates, but it would most probably be beneficial for the longevity of the game.
Another option would be to make every account bound to a specific phone number (everyone would have to verify their number or identity).
Another option would be to make a smarter botbuster system. One that would be looking at the pathing of the characters as well as their movement speed (taking in consideration their acquired swiftness boosts and if they are on a mount or not). Which would first flag them and dc them after every X times they would get flagged (putting them on the back of the queue line and letting another player in)
Another option would be having a captcha that would kick a player if they wouldn’t complete the verification after a while. (similar to the current afk system, but instead of the system checking for any kind of input in the game, it would check the specific string and match it with the requested one).
I don’t know the extend of what they can or can’t when it comes to programming such thing in game, so I’m just writing down a few potential solution in hopes they might be useful in one way or another.
I came to the forum to report the same observation. At the West Luterra, Medrick Monastery elevators, it’s very clear which characters are bots. Over the past few minutes there have been at least a dozen “players” that tap consistently at the ledge waiting for the elevator to arrive. They don’t have pets, and their virtues have all been 12 Wisdom, 3 Courage, 0 Charisma, 2 Kindness.
I noticed if I position myself in their path so they “click” my character instead of the ground I can sometimes interrupt their pathing causing them to miss the elevator, but it’s not consistent.
Here is my recording of a few of these instances. I was able to completely stop two of them towards the end, but once I moved away they continued on their way.
I tried doing that too, some went right through me (they had no hitboxes)…
Adding my own video as well. Besides the obvious short NPC port, pay attention to the top (left side of the exit) side of the screen too.
There are a lot of topics going on about it, they are also aware and “work in progress” as stated somewhere. It’s out for a week atleast but they are started to leveling more after area chat restrictions I guess. I wonder how they can’t apply a patch still. This might reduce queues to 1/3 even if they manage to stop them using that speeding program and ban current ones asap.
I’ve seen threads about gold sellers and obviously gold farmers, but I was still shocked to see the amount of bots literally running through walls, teleporting around ect.
Most of the time they are not being so obvious and running around in such quantities…
I imagine it’s not a simple process to ban specific accounts without endangering legitimate players. The last thing they want and the last thing the players want is to get banned because they look like a bot running around, when in reality they’re stopping and going in odd spots because they’re messing with UI or menus or w/e. Or they randomly teleport due to an instance of lag, had that happen a few times to my buddy where he just teleports through a wall on my screen, and we were memeing him about hacking.
Just report and move on until they get a system in place to combat it more efficiently. This is a common thing that happens in MMOs and most games take a few weeks, sometimes a month or two to efficiently solve the problem. Hell, some MMOs are 5+ years into their development and still have a variation of these problems.
Hopefully they solve it quicker, but I’m sure their team is working on a solution as we speak, and we’ll know when they’ve refined the system for a live build.
Just the dangers of the f2p mmo at launch. I don’t know many companies that wont iron it out once they find the source of these issue, just got to give them a bit of time. There’s a lot on their plate right now, I’m sure. Might be further development on anti-cheat systems too, trying to get a hold of the hacking avenues. It’ll get worked out.
EDIT: You’re above ideas are certainly good ones, although in practicality I’m not sure they wouldn’t get immediately dunked on because people have to stop and solve a captcha for random things. The best one is 2FA with the phone.
Well yea, new releases maybe, but this game has been out for years now. You would think that smilegate would have find a way to deal with this by now. Then again, based on what I heard, they did solve this by implementing an ID check for every registered account.
Yeah, in KR at least, they have to register with like an SSN-equivalent or something, I believe. I don’t know that first hand, but had a buddy who had to go through some serious hoops to get into it in KR.
Honestly 2FA is the best option, but a tricky one to implement without loopholes or fear of data breaches.
It might be out in other regions, but I imagine new regions bring new challenges in these regards I’m not clued into anything to specific because its way out of my expertise, my expertise is people, not machines.
Or I could be completely wrong and they’re just sitting behind their desks, laughing as they rake in the cash by the millions, only to take it down in a few months and give it the Anthem treatment.
EDIT: That part was meant in jest, not a reflection of my opinion of Smilegate. But it is my opinion of EA.
Best option might be to verify phones or make steam guard (authenticator) attached to account is a must to play if it’s possible to implement for a game specifically.
Clearly, a good solution will take time and there will probably not be a better solution than 2FA but for now even an inconvenient and “temporary” solution is better than allowing this flood of hacking bots any longer. The implementation of CAPTCHA or something equivalent for every main quest NPC on the first 3 maps should bring bots to struggle. RElocation or walking arround main quest npcs could be another easy temporary fix. Bots can probably adapt but they need to rewrite their scripts and CAPTCHAs will still be difficult to overcome especially if you add enough new puzzles…
Well they go on a rampage now. A lot more bots today it seems. Also we hit 8k+ queue so early on Thirain today, which was our peak queue yesterday prime time.
We are coming to a critical point now. The current state is absurd and far from any “classical case of bots and cheaters”. The amount of them running around and clogging the queues is BEYOND acceptable. AGS has a very short period of time left to do something about it. No more pondering on the issue. Gotta focus on in first, since it won’t only solve one issue, but will also impact the queue times in a positive way, @Roxx you gotta hurry for both your guys and the playerbases sake.
i mean the economy is already ruined … and u can really see who bought gold in the later stages of the game,… there is a huge amount floating around and it basically makes it impossible for most players
Same! While I was reporting one 2 others passed me by. There’s no end to this and the previous suggestion by the CM to just “report them for now” would make reporting them a full time job.
Well this sucks… I have just witnessed two hackers as well. I thought I was seeing it wrong but it did not feel good :<
Wish there was simply a “report a hacker/cheater” section.
same, been witnessing them all over the place, took a screen shot to report the names, they were all bundled together and wasnt pretty much paying attention to it at first but i have seen the posts and the tweets and realized it. All paladins walking in the same way
