May 22 Edit: The problem is the same. This high bot percentage used to be a conspiracy in February, so let me introduce you to the new conspiracy: Amazon and Smilegate use the “concurrent” players(bots) to boost investor relations.
Feb 28 Edit: New data collected from character screen, plugged into same calculations. Please tell me I made a huge mistake somewhere.
Feb 28 Edit 2: Turns out the other main NA-West server Valtan is now majority bots! See my comment below.
TL:DR: Clickbait title, but true from my calculations. BOTS MAKE UP OVER 35% 49% OF ALL CHARACTERS! (on NA-West Mari) My result was 35.27% 49.05%, meaning there is more than one bot per two players nearly one bot per player. I am hoping this does not get buried because this needs to be addressed.
Over the past few days I have reported a huge amount of bots teleporting, speed hacking, and glitching out throughout the zones. I knew that an enormous amount of bots were on the server and decided to get a quantitative grasp on how bad the problem is.
Needless to say, players are not responsible for solving an issue of this magnitude (“Just report them bro!”). Reports are not fast enough, and I guarantee the queues are due to bots which never log off.
Feb 24: older data
Feb 28: updated data
Left: Original vs now, including bots
Right: Original vs now, excluding bots (“real player” representation)
Feb 24: older data
Feb 28: updated data
I assumed a few things:
- “Bot classes” are Berserker and Sorceress (bot routines currently use these)
- The disproportionate increase in percentage of Berserker and Sorceress is from bots
- The percentage popularity of classes are the same for founders and f2p players
I had access to the early launch (there were no bots) and used data that others recorded during those first three days. The launch data in these calculations is from the last day of the founder’s early access. I recorded the other data on Feb-24 (update: and Feb-28) from NA-West Mari.
It is important to note that this “launch data” is similar for every server in the game, and accurately reflects the pre-launch polls. It is safe to assume this is what the natural player spread looks like.
Graphs:
The first graph is the launch data and the unmodified Feb-24 (update: and Feb-28) data. As you can see, the proportions are wildly off and I do not believe this is natural. For this to be realistic, f2p players would have been many many times more likely to choose berserker and sorceress compared to founders, while still choosing other classes in the same proportions.
What does the second graph mean? Not including 35.27% 49.05% of bots, this is what the “real player” percentage looks like at launch vs now. This is what the first graph would look like if there were no bots. I believe this is realistic, and still shows berserker and sorceress to be 2 of the most popular classes in the game, which we all know to be true.
There is a slight disparity in the total % of the new calculation, but this can be attributed to a non-uniform change in class representation. You can see the popularity of support classes went down a little, and other DPS classes had uniform increase.
Note: Calculations below are for original Feb-24 data.
Calculations:
The calculations are quite simple, and can be proven doing a basic pen and paper exercise if you want to try them yourself.
- (1) I calculated the average “non-bot” classes percent compared to the founders launch. This essentially means that these classes only have 66.15% of their original representation (avg of feb24% / launch%)
- (2) I calculated the “bot-classes” percent compared to the founders launch. This means their representation is 231.33% the size of their original representation (feb24% / launch%).
- I divided the “new bot-class %”(2) by the “new non bot-class %”(1) to obtain the actual percentage of “bot-classes” compared to launch
- I removed 100% to account for the base representation, leaving 249.68% which represents the disproportionate increase attributed to bots
- Finally, determined the “percentage of bots” by calculating ( % increase due to bots * original % ) / ( total % + % increase due to bots * original % ), in this case (249.68% * 21.82%) / (100% + 249.68% * 21.82%) = 35.27%
I will continue to update these numbers and graphs as the bot problem worsens.
Feb 26: Bots still steadily increasing on the server.
- Warrior: 38.5% → 41.9%
- Mage: 23.2% → 23.9%
Feb 28: Bots still steadily increasing on the server.
- Warrior: 41.9% → 45.1%
- Mage: 23.9% → 25.4%
