I’m on Bergstrom, one of the reportedly lowest pop US WEST servers. I used to report every bot and spammer I’d come across. I even supported the idea of rewarding reporters. I can’t keep up anymore.
I go to Stern to do my current daily rapport, and I can’t see Sasha or Bastian through the cloud of Berserkers and the only sound I can hear is the first 5 notes of Song of Triport on infinite loop.
I go to Vern Castle to run Chaos on an alt and there’s a contiguous human centipede, a writhing, unbroken line of bots cycling from the Chaos statue to the nearby Repairer and back.
I had a spambot join my open enrollment guild today and spam non-stop in /guild until ban.
I’m done. I used to chuckle at the bots getting bodyblocked here and there and still being there when I come back hours later, but now I realize that this only means there is nobody actively monitoring this game. Even an unpaid intern could log in, see the stream of bodies walking through empty space in the Stern city hall, and clean out that section of a server in a day. But instead you’re relying on players to report. We’re supposed to be playing your game, not performing someone’s job.
I’m done. I’m actually playing the game now (when bot queues let me log in). Pay someone else to do this job, or hire me, but stop relying on players to clean up your game or you won’t have a game much longer.
I’ve reached the same point. I still report gold spammers but I’ve let everything else go. I would occasionally go sit in Prideholme and repot them at the source hoping an early report would expedite their ban but I too have become fatigued. The same bots advertising in Party Finder for weeks is especially discouraging. I just hope controlling the bot situation remains a high priority and that they don’t become discouraged themselves. I’m curious if they have some sort of “nuclear” option they’re holding onto hoping that it won’t be necessary. Personally, I wouldn’t mind some sort of more rigorous account verification if they knew it would be effective.
I gave up reporting weeks ago. I don’t even bother blocking chat anymore. If AGS/SG aren’t going to take bots seriously, then why should I? They been so quiet about bots, it’s been weeks since any communication on the problem. Like OP said, I’m a player, not an employee.
You’d think they’d be more motivated to address this issue, since bot gold sellers are taking revenue away from AGS/SG. It would seem the playerbase is still spending enough “legitimate” money that AGS/SG simply don’t care.
I’m in exactly the same boat. It’s just too much… my last straw was when they started sending me in-game mails to advertise their shady sites. I saw no way to report the messages from the mailbox and couldn’t be bothered to copy their letter soup of “names” to do it manually. It feels like it’s doing nothing.
i stopped caring & reporting the moment my blocklist went full.
i jst close the chat (unless it is to look for Tooki/Shangra Location) & communicate with guildmates/friends in discord xD
I’m about to give up, I still report gold spammers in chat but the bots are just to numerous and it doesn’t seem reporting does any good. I would sit in Raina Village or near Sasha in Arthentine and just report bot after bot for nearly an hour and they would just keep coming.
Having filled & cleared my block list about 7 times now I’m more or less in the same boat… I report them on the high seas because I communicate there and it’s only an extra couple of steps to blocking them, but if I’m anywhere like Stern or Luterra like you mention, I realised I’m never chatting in those zones anyway and just ignore it. Saves me from having to clear out my list as regularly.
For me it is extremely disheartening to watch those trains of thousand and thousand of bots running and warping and teleporting around, to see them spamming their adds in every chat of every major hub. I don’t believe those claims anymore that the botting problem is top priority to them.
There is just too many proof around that it is being ignored.
Even the simple things are not done.
For many weeks now it is known that the gold sellers are advertising in “Find Party”, in every dungeon, every raid in the Party Finder.
Yet nothing at all is being done about that for many weeks now.
Nothing is done about the insufficient block list management. Raise limit over 100? Nope. Make block list sortable by date, so we can remove the oldest easy? Nope. Add option to auto-remove blocked that are older then 3-4 weeks? Nope.
They always claim that they are working on some super secret, super efficient tools that will allow them to remove bots easy and prevent them from
coming back. For how long now we see those claims? 1 month? 2 month? Nothing, still nothing.
pointless to report em, all the ones i reported are still there farming 24/7 and most you can’t report anyway anymore since they are layered on top of each other and zip around too fast to even click on… bots have won… for now.
maybe they can put captcha systems or make it so that playing the game requires legit mobile numbers. (and not allow those technologies online that can utilize virtual mobile numbers/mobile services)
I’ve redistributed most of my time with this game over a week ago to somewhere else already. After keeping a pic log of reporting the same bots for over 20 days with practically no actions taken, the fluff about taking a hard stance on bots just got to me.
I just can’t stand behind companies that doesn’t follow through with actions from their statements.
My log post can be found here for anyone that’s interested and I’m pretty sure the same bots from the first day of reporting are still there to this day. Good luck with the game.
Literally same. I’ve been reporting the same ones for over a month now and nothing is done about them. The bots are so out of control that if they removed them most servers would be close to empty. I had to give up lvling my gunslinger and rolled on a new server hoping it would be better but nope! Their lack of action speaks louder than words.
Just minimizing chat window at times instead of bothering to block out the spammers.
It SEEMS like it should be simple enough – if 3 humans report a person for being a gold spammer, maybe go ahead and give that person a soft chat ban immediately.
If a player posts identical messages over and over … maybe go ahead and give that person a soft chat ban immediately.
If a player posts super rapid fire over and over … soft ban.
If it’s literally 4-5 specific web sites over and over, continue to update the chat filter algorithm until they have to garble their own site names so bad nobody knows what the heck they’re saying at all.
Bumping this while waiting in queue again. Not like I have much else to do, aside from playing a different game which is becoming more appealing with each passing minute.