Bots have killed the market, please disable gold and item transfers via mail before they kill the game.
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I donât think thatâs a valid solution. Among my friends when we send each other mats/gold to borrow to push certain ilvl we do it through mail as we play at different times. Solutions that inconvenience others are not the best ones in my opinion. Other steps like 2 step authentication or new systems are needed to combat bots.
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Disabling gold and item transfers would not work becaue of the AH. Instead of receiving 1000g via mail, a person could just put a sell order for a trash item worth 1000g, the other person would buy it and the result is the same (except for the lost 5% fee).
They need to combat the bots themselves by banning them, otherwise they would need to significantly inconvenience other players just for the botters to find another ways to work around the solutions anyway. Thatâs the unfortunate truth
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Great point, youâre correct that disabling mailing gold wouldnât work as I suggested.
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If you want some feedback what might work from my perspective, it would be community based vote-banning.
Certain regular players could apply to amazon for some bot-culling. These players would be unrecognizable ingame, but they would be somehow authenticated by amazon as actual people and not bots. These people would then play the game normally, but whenever they would report a bot/rmt scammer, their vote would have a more significant value than reports from other players, making the ban be more confident and happen quicker. If one of these players files a valid report and the bot/rmt scammer is banned, they get hidden merit points. If that report was a false flag or an intentional attampt at griefing, they would lose a lot of merit.
Once a player loses too much merit, they are removed from the program and are just a regular player.
If a player is doing a great job, they would gather tons of merit points and know that they are actually greatly improving the gaming experience. To disentify people who donât care about helping, there could be harsh merit punishments, and to reward them, there could be some minor things like a cool new title.
Obviously, this would get abused instantly. Thatâs where the player authentication with amazon while applying would come in. This authentication would require some form of real world identificator, like a phone number, so essentially a multi-factor-authenticator.
Combining the authentication process with harsh punishment for misbehaving while in this program would imo be a benefit for the community which genuinely wants to improve the gameplay experience.
Other folks have the right idea â while it may slow down the bots a bit, ultimately it would just slow things down and block legitimate players out of a feature. Ultimately we need to continue to improve our anti-bot/anti-cheat tools and fix this issue at the source.
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True, but âcombat the bots themselvesâ ⌠canât do that in NA, because the only real way to prevent botting is to tie accounts 1:1 to real identity (e.g. govt ID, bank acct, etc) like they do in other regions. People are afraid of tracking/privacy in NA (as if they donât take their phone literally anywhere - why would a game matter?) so devs are stuck with typical IP/mac address/email banning, etc which doesnât work (IPâs, mac address, emails can all be a) spoofed, and b) recreated/reassigned at will) and can have false positive side effects for legitimate players. vote-banning also has false positives, including situations like we saw in New World where guild leaders or others would be vote-banned strategically (or just to be trolled).
tldr - agree with you but the bot problems will never be solved in NA without real identity being attached to accounts.
Guys, the currency exchange was 1000 gold per 95 last week, now is 565⌠bots are being destroyed more than we see I believe. This drastic drop speaks volumes.
This is an absolute waste of your time and resources. Itâs a losing battle where the attacker always has an advantage. Stricter action against gold buyers / RMT is the solution as it makes people too afraid to buy from the botters which neuters their revenue and makes botting less profitable.
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We do ban gold buyers as well; it is actionable on both sides of the transaction
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Maybe anecdotal, but, it seems like you guys only ban the gold buyers dumb enough to buy some obscene amount like millions of gold and push some dumb ilvl like 1450+ and draw attention. I know many people who openly say theyâve regularly bought amounts ranging between 100k-1M of gold consistently throughout the launch of the game and none of them have received any repercussion.
Iâll believe it when I see it, but so far this inaction has done nothing but encourage other mutual friends to want to buy gold from the botters as well.
@Roxx Im done with the game 514hours played but bots are killing the game so bad i cant even pick flowers the bots are farming hard.
I really believe that you ban bots, gold sellers and buyers, but if a few of them gets free, how the huge amount of gold can affect the game ?
I mean, every new content you release they can insta max-out, be the firsts to farm new materials, badges, sell them with inflated prices and be richer.
Probably due to danger of false positives - while it may be obvious in some transactions/mails, it may not be super obvious in others where it may look like a player is just a whale, super-active/no-lifer, etc. Donât want to ban legit players, especially if theyâre whaling.
I donât know of anyone personally thatâs bought (doesnât mean they havenât, they just arenât talking about it, idk), so canât speak to how quickly theyâre being banned, but most games do typically ban in âwavesâ, not incrementally, so could be that your friends are on a âlistâ and will eventually get their due. Although, obviously, this does nothing to stop them from using such gold now/short-term and affecting economy.
Also, gold/item sharing disable wonât stop bots from just posting trash items on AH for obscene amounts and transferring that way.
No easy fix here for botting unless devs force real identity to be attached to game accounts (e.g. govt id, bank acct, etc - which NA will never go for).
The only real chance I see is if you somehow change something in the storyline NPC interactions every week and trick the bots that way, because they are not programmed for the changed sequence.
Small changes that we players do not notice at all, but the bots then stop somewhere in the story. You could do such a rotation undercover on a weekly basis.
Actually, bots donât have to be that static. They probably are at the moment, but as soon as the devs put in the significant work to make such changes, the bots will just be coded to adapt to it. Even if devs went extreme and added captchaâs to dialogues (lol) those can also be defeated nowadays. Thereâs a whole science to making bots less/un-detectable, including semi-randomizing pathing, keystrokes, etc to imitate real players. In your example, because you can retry dialogue choices, a bot might just be coded to retry all combinations until it works. So it might slow the bot down by 30s while it stands there trying to talk to the NPC over and over, but ultimately wouldnât do anything other than annoy real players following guides.
Creative idea, but wouldnât have any long-term effect on bots (and would actually just push the bots to be more effective and difficult to deal with later).
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I also dont think there will ever be a way for Anti Cheat to fix the problem as long as the community doesnt scour the entire web and download the illegal bot tools from all the known sites and send them directly to Anti Cheat so to they can tweak.
But maybe the community here will come up with other good ideas that we havenât thought about yet.
Yeah⌠for a couple of days.
So many people I know have said âOh, Iâll just buy a bit of gold. Even if I somehow do get banned, itâll only be for a couple of days lol. Maybe then Iâll take a break XDâ
Thatâs basically what the general sentiment is. If the punishment is less costly than what they gain from the infraction, then of course they gonna break the rules.
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Yep, Iâve been both seeing and hearing this too in groups that Iâm a part of. I donât blame them, Amazonâs slow inaction is incentizing it as they feel like the idiots for not RMTing. The sad part is the longer Amazon waits, the less likely they actually are to do something meaningful about it because more and more âaverage usersâ will have engaged in RMT by then.
Thanks Roxx, I agree that my solution would not have solved the problem.