A poster calling themself “aot” made several posts last week in these forums revealing details about the workings of the Chinese botting operations. One of their most important assertions was this:
(Note, I am not linking the original quotes because the posts/threads have been locked by moderators.)
I am wondering if our big bot ban was the result of aot’s disclosures! If so, this individual has done our community an exceptional service. Does anybody know what the heck a TOP secondary validation is, and how it might stop these bots?
In any event, if ags really wants to get rid of bots, they need to prevent the use of virtual machines in the game. Bots require vms, and until they banned vms in New World, bots were a problem there, too. They finally banned the vms in NW and the bots were gone.
do you guys really think the largest company in the world needs the advice of some random forum dweller?
look now - people will argue with me that this weird speculation is actually what solved bot problems (hint: it didnt solve, give the bots afew days then celebrate)
He was a random guy who starting to make weird looking threads and posting everywhere about that, his English was bad so i guess he isn’t a native English speaker.
He looked like a conspiracy theorist cuz of the things he was saying
Tencent’s NExT studio got its third-person shooting game Synced: Off-Planet approved. The world-leading game developer also won approvals for five imported games: Pokémon Unite, Valorant, Don’t Starve Newhome, The Age of Navigation: Sea Overlord, and Crossfire developer Smile Gate’s Lost Ark.
This all goes back to when they celebrated the “800k concurrent” and discussed launching in China way back:
Right afterwards we seen the first major bot wave ban knocking out 300K+ concurrent.
So it’s a fun tin foil hat theory that they left the bots alone to make the numbers look good so that they could push the game to China.
If you want to go further, Tencent released they are delaying publishing LA now:
Maybe they banned the bots to early and Tencent backed out!
Maybe SG just had a really good pitch at that first 800k celebration (back before the botting issue was really public news) and they already signed into early testing and prep.
Now they see us at 70k and declining and decided this isn’t going to be worth the headache that comes along with it.
Publishers want quiet little games that don’t cause them any headache and make the money, not some endless workload nightmare where they have to solve the worlds botting issues. I’m sure if AGS knew then what they knew now they’d have passed LA to another publisher lol.
Not that it’s SG/AGS fault specifically, just that what ended up happening here is probably worst case scenario for any publisher to have to deal with.
I thought the dude was a LARPer to a certain extent. That account tried to expose the activities to the point there’s IRL threats because of hackers getting shut down and frozen accounts from RMT activities if really true.
Tencent are really deadlocked into releasing the game now since they can’t really back out of the contract to release the game into Taiwan. They should be fine to delay the game if it can help stopping massive botting activities. They should have the spare funds, most pocket money comes from investment share stocks. They could be the disney version that trying to invest and keep shares of alot of IP and franchises of video games.
They’ve been ‘sitting’ on a ban wave for literally months and not pulling the trigger.
Maybe there were valid reasons like tracing the source of the bots, or identifying special weak points and leaving the bots to roam free was a giant ‘sting operation’.
More likely they were forced to finally pull the trigger from a variety of factors, not the least of which was making Smilegate look extremely bad on the global scene while trying to publish in Taiwan and mainland China.
I agree, the delay was AGS/SG dragging their feet.
But speaking of potential “causes” of the banwave happening now. Could be coincidence but SG is under a lot of pressure just these last months/weeks to make new deals while global version’s been burning.
I have no idea who that particular dude was and i don’t think by any means they solved the bot problem, bots will most definitely infest back in a few days but your enthusiasm towards largest company in the world is bit funny. A random forum dweller could very well be better at fixing this game than AGS lol.
Too many people…
The intern monitor and restart the server weekly as schedule, also apply patch sent from SG on due time, following instruction.
If anything goes wrong he grabs the phone and call lead enginer, which should be somewhere playing with his phone in the cafeteria.
