Bots are becoming a huge issue. Possible solutions?

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1

I see more bots than players now in game, and its sad.
Personally i have given up reporting them when i see them, there are just so many that it takes up a huge chunk of my playtime just to report them all.

They’ve infested every part of the game, every chat (area/say/whisper) is filled with bot gold spam, they are even in the matchmaker and group finder for guardian/dungeons(chaos&abyss), some even enter groups for abyss dungeons.

It’s gone beyond using player reports to solve this issue, there are just so many or them it becomes impossible to report everyone you see.

It’s possible the number of them are in the 10000’s possibly even 100000’s making up a large majority of the players in game.

Easy anticheat just isnt working to combat this.

This is something Amazon and Smilegate will need to solve together.
While the community can do its part to help by reporting, there is only so much this will do to solve the issue.

This isnt a great look for the game when new players immediately encounter 100’s of bots as they enter Prideholme, and every Tier 1, Tier 2 zone is filled with them.

Possible solutions/ideas:
-Weekly ban waves, the last ban wave we had was beginning of march where they banned 1 million accounts, that was probably 1/3rd of the player base at that time.

-Limit auction hall access to level 50 (I believe its level 30 to access AH currently)

-Add a random captura for character creation &/or auction house &/or for login access. While this will be annoying for real players, I would rather have this then see the world populated by bots. (Runescape has something similar for storage access)

-Increase the ignore player limit, 100 is not nearly enough, considering the 1000’s of gold seller spam accounts there are per server. This wont solve the issue but will reduce the impact on players communication.

-Limit suspected bots/gold spammers to hidden channels. This will effectively shadow ban them while you investigate the accounts.

-Add RNG puzzles in the gameplay itself that cant be predicted by bots, effectively halting there progression to access later parts of the game.

-Add a game client which requires amazon login with linked steam account.

-Add 2FA (suggestion by Selfish)

An idea would be if non-verified accounts (or if 2FA was introduced) are prevented from any trading activity. 2FA if it was one phone number per account, blacklist virtual SMS numbers, and if concerns about a legit player somehow ending up with a number a botter had in the past temp block numbers from being registerable after initial registration for a period or contact support to remove the block.

-(suggestion by Tmoe and Selfish) Harsher punishments (instant permanent bans) for gold buyers and players that are driving the gold sellers, no second chances.

Will add more idea’s when i think of any.

11 Likes
2

So many suggestions and not a single one in regards to the people actually driving the demand :partying_face:

3

Yeah im online now and its just botcity… really sad…

1 Like
4

They should just put up a fake charity campaign called adopt a bot, for 1$ a bot can live his happy life of finally reaching a vocation of his calling.

That way they can raise awareness that rwt players are causing the bot issue and not the botters(them too). Why would you stop Botting if you make real life money.

5

the good ol if you can’t fight them , join them , since obviously ags doesn’t give a fuck ( i refuse to believe they’re so incompetent especially when the exact same thing happened with new world)

6

I mean the bot owners literally are stealing money from AGS/Smilegate own product, together with ruining the ingame economy, and buyers who are driving the demand don’t even get a particularly harsh punishment for it.

The only reason I can possibly see is that they want to keep these players since they atleast are willing to spend. There is literally no other reasonable explanation for not getting them permabanned straight away at this point.

7

You make a good point I was only focusing on what I can see in game, not the invisible gold buyers.

8

Yes because channels being packed with bots teleporting around, interfering with quest progress, gives a horrid first game impression to new players. Top that with the fact so many slam the servers causing queues, people are going to get sick of it and start to drop out.

The head of the problem needs to be addressed, bots roaming around does more than just ruin the economy, it’ll kill the player base and new player retention. By all means buyers should be punished equally for supporting the practice, but they’re small fish in the big pond.

9

Yep they clearly don’t care of longevity of the game. So sad.

10

I disagree, if there are very few who would dare to put their 1k+ hrs in jeopardy to save a few bucks on gold, then demand would atleast go down. When the only punishment is a 24hr temp ban and having your gold removed IF you get caught, then there really isnt much of a deterrent from atleast trying it out.

NA have queues. So take a guess where the bots are and the demand for RMT is the highest.

11

A perm ban looming over your head for shelling out to what is a breach of TOS is far more effective than a slap on the wrist. Why else do you think people buy gold without any concern? The punishment is minimal if caught and the gains are big if not. If you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

3 Likes
12

Yepp. It’s mindblowing that the community isn’t demanding this instead of complaining about the existence of bots.

People completely overlooking the fact that others are not playing with the same rules the rest of the well-behaving playerbase are, and instead sponsors bots which leads to ruined economy, queue times, and a less appealing ingame environment.

What everyone really should be demanding from Amazon is severe punishments for those who are sponsoring this.

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RDT_20220429_1609135542524727244545285
RDT_20220429_16091355425247272445452851080×1656 147 KB

Quite self explanatory of the urgency of the situation…

14

It’s a two way street on the manner by all means, the way I look at it is that the serpents head needs to be cut to reduce the visible damage it causes. Absolutely it causes frustration for how much it is damaging the economy, the inflation rate as of the last 2 to 3 weeks has been absurd once the bots went into overdrive.

I don’t think it’s realistic to say that every single bot can be eliminated, every MMO even subscription MMOs will have botting but what is going on in this game right now is another level that overall is going to cause a decline population retention for both existing and new players if something effective isn’t done.

It’s rather embarrassing when I’m helping newbies or bringing a friend into the game, and have to talk about the bots having to convince them the visual/gameplay aspect they interfere with will be lesser at higher tiers. The reality is that even at higher tiers you’re still going to be hit by them when it comes to the economy despite them not being visible.

I know many people including myself aren’t huge fans of phone verification, captchas, etc. At this point though I’d take any or multiple of these if it could make a dent into the problem.

An idea would be if non-verified accounts (or if 2FA was introduced) are prevented from any trading activity. 2FA if it was one phone number per account, blacklist virtual SMS numbers, and if concerns about a legit player somehow ending up with a number a botter had in the past temp block numbers from being registerable after initial registration for a period or contact support to remove the block.

This would create a new problem for botters, it’s much easier for them to VPN, VM, create Steam accounts, mass manage/salt emails, but having a valid phone number creates more cost for them and setup/risk. With the current setup they can easily bypass the trade restrictions by having specific mules that are verified and trade their non-verified accounts.

2 Likes
15

2FA is a good idea or some sort of account verification that requires randomly generated numbers. I know in warframe its required for trading. This would help account security as well.
We sort of have it with steam but its optional not mandatory.

1 Like
16

GD shame man…BOTS!!!

Bot Ark
Bot Ark1920×1097 317 KB

17

easy solution:

  1. make gold easier to get for players, this game was developed for real ID in korea, this is not at all an efficient system for western market unless everyone has a real ID account. If you give players more gold there is no incentive to buy it from bots and RMTS.

  2. make gold value prices in the market fixed. As much as i love “real world” economy, you can not apply that to a videogame without causing disaster, so every thing will have a fixed price and you know before hand when something drop what its going to be worth.

I know that both of these things will never be implemented cause usually everyone ignores what makes sense.

have a good day

18

It shouldn’t be mindblowing… People are giving feedback on the thing that they see in-game that they don’t like, and that’s bots. The best methods for bot removal should be the dev’s territory as they have all the info.

19

  1. Not at all, everyone FOMO’s like mad which is why everyone is broke. People are going to still FOMO run out of gold and run to a seller. EDIT: Also inflation will hit an absurd high, have fun paying 500 gold for 100 flowers, etc.

  2. You’re playing an MMO, MMO’s have economies they work perfectly fine if you understand the underlying issue of why economics in LA are broken. The flood of botting gold spikes up the prices of everything AKA inflation, if you paid attention to the economy 2-3 weeks ago it was stabilizing from the excessing botting and everything was reaching reasonable pricing reflecting the amount of legitimate gold in the economy.

20

This only happened AFTER they banned the bots. Your whole point is surrounded by a scenario that was literally a result from banning bots.