Tree of Savior Forum

Congratulations, you just incentivised botting!

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Your team will continue to receive Blessed Shards through the bonus Cubes until the third run of the day. From the fourth run on, however, each character will only receive one Cube of Blessing per run.
In the updated Cube of Blessing, the chances of acquiring Blessed Gems increase by 20 times (from 0.15% to 3%). Reopening the Cube, however, will not be possible. Statistically, the expected number of Blessed Shards dropped per Cube of Blessing will be 1.3, and Blessed Gems will not drop from bonus Cubes.

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After this update, Blessed Shards will drop not only from Hunting Grounds, but also from Elite monsters in regular fields starting at level 240. These monsters can drop up to 2 Shards at a time, but not if they are 30 or more levels below your character.
We will also be increasing the chances of acquiring Blessed Shards in Hunting Grounds by about 3 times (the drop rate of Elite Monsters, however, will be the same as those from regular fields).

So this means that normal runners of Saalus are getting a nerf hammer, and 24/7 bots are getting a huge buff. Great job guys you did the exact opposite of optimization.

If anything you are supposed to give people MORE options, not nerf one and add another.

Leave Saalus the same and just add drops to hunting grounds, otherwise you are literally inviting people to bot this game.

4 Likes

I’m already having my doubts when Frundsberg in telsiai is still alive.

And looking at the telsiai bot banlist…eh…

2 Likes

Well… if you gonna always consider bots for everything, you not gonna give anything new, cause pretty much any PvE content can be exploited by bots, besides these hideous dungeon speedrun nonsense.

Saalus runs are tedious and add for the “Tree of Alts” category of the game. This will give more Blessed Shard spread, and with the less consumption fo Transcendence too… it is overall nice.

Yes, bots are a problem, but they will always be, regardless what you do for PvE.

11 Likes

‘Normal’ runners of saalus do it on 2-3 characters. If you have 10+ chars running saalus daily, you are not ‘normal’.

12 Likes

yep this will definitely make the bots benefit the most out of it, i don’t understand why they haven’t thought of adding back the class advancement quests for necromancer and sorcerer so it will be alot more difficult for bots to free farm with summons…

the unlock quests should be like miko that changes hourly etc.

it also annoys me how they give free megaphones for afking… it should give you free tp for pvping / guild raiding, events and party missions (people hardly do these)

2 Likes

Look on the bright side, more bots farming equals more shards equals lower shards price.

4 Likes

Tree of Alts vs Tree of Bots

Actually I want neither. But if I have to pick one I would like shards to be more equally distributes and less dominated by the whales that play 3 accounts with 10 characters each.

O well

They could rework necros and other summoning classes with a “power guage bar” like Maplestory2’s fishing controls to combat afk macroing and botting.

image
MS2’s fishing UI.

Basically instead of having only yellow area it will be yellow -> green -> blue , like the image below

image

The bar will be displayed whenever the player summons a companion, zombies, boss summon or skeletons. The line (the one with popolion icon) will slide up and down slowly (over 3 secs) and the player will attempt to press a button as close to the yellow area as possible.

When the player hits the yellow area, he/she will gain a buff that makes all summons will deal 1.5x damage (hit harder and faster) than usual for the next 60 seconds. Hitting on the green area makes summons deal 1x damage (normal damage) for next 60 seconds. Anywhere else (blue area) all summons will deal 0 damage for the next 60secs.

As depicted by the image above, the green and yellow zones will be randomised every 60secs when the buff wears off. The player will again need to regain back the buff in order for his or her summons to continue fighting.

Other visual cues can be added to the summons too, like when under blue buff effect, the zombies will have a lethargic emoticon. Yellow buff effect puts a frenzy icon on their heads etc. This makes it much much easier for players to spot who is afk necro botting in the fields too. Most likely a necro who has lethargic summons over the past 5-10 mins is a confirmed bot.

Pros of this implementation:

  • Not intrusive to general gameplay
  • Mini gauge that doubles as an afk/bot checker Incentivises players with beneficial buffs and fits in as part of the summoning mechanic.

Hence, with this in place, there will be lesser bots around to flood the markets with many blessed shards.

6 Likes

lol its BEST saalus change imo, dont forget about transcendance changes because it’s related

Wish they could just remove the 3 alt limit for farming Saalus. It affects players with a lot of alts but it does nothing for players with multiple alt accounts (just some random whining).

Spent founder pack money on character slots alone, feels like I just got cheated for my money’s worth.

That’s a great idea. Instead of a bar, a random input sequence required to complete the summoning could work too:

  • Cast any summoning skill
  • Character enters a “Summoning” state, which lasts for 1 second
  • During that time interval, the first 4 hotkeys are replaced with “chant” words
  • The player has to input a random sequence of chants to complete the summoning
  • Success: the skill is completed, CD kicks in; the character fails to complete the summoning, no CD is applied to the skill
4 Likes

it may be just coincidence, but… in my 5 day stay in NA (due to the internet issue in hongkong) seems to show that almost every map i go, there are 2-3 bots roaming around

in contrast to SEA, the bots are concentrated in specific maps

For a game that is based on a huge ammount of classes and vast possibilities of builds, having more than just 3 characters is pretty normal.
Running saalus on a daily basis of 4 to 7 is pretty doable, specially with the big ammount of carries
I’d say they should expand it a bit more, like 10, since it’s stupid, people buy TP to get more characters and one of the reasons is also getting extra money to compensate the investment on buying a new char slot, IMC is just masochist…

About bots, that problem will be there forever haunting us the good players and not just that, the easy way on how independent “developers” just abuse the game flaws and manipulate it for their own good with their hack tools and the lack of security is just absurd… they should adress those 2 problems first before talking about huge changes like these

ALSO they should think twice the schedules, they can’t have big updates + so many events running all together, the raninbow bs takes some time and effort, its pretty demanding and kinda stressful to do it 3 times instead just once for a better prize (500+500) from the previous jumping event.

Seriously IMC …

image ???

hmmm, i see this in an opposite way, sorta…

bots will come around and gather at the hunting grounds which will make it easier to eradicate them if they all stick to one spot if IMC choose too, highly doubt it though, solitary cells is still packed with robots boys

if they do pop the bots, normal players will come round in large numbers and ks each other, so just another toxic environment lol (thats if ToS has the population for it kek)

but then again botting 300+ maps already give a ■■■■ tone of silver lol…

Sorry, but… this idea is good but doesnt work. I made myself a “get pixel macro” for fishing in MS2, work pretty fine, and its pretty simple, those who use bot here will do the same.

For UI we can always make it in a way to throw the pixel color detection bot/macro script off.

An example will be to design the bar to have an opacity/alpha setting that reveals a portion of the background it is covering. That way as long as the player moves on the map the hex/RGB code of the pixel of the “hit spot” will be different.

It can also go 1 step further to make the entire bar pulsate subtly together with the opacity to make it even harder to detect a color range.

Example of something similar which is already in ToS, look at the scrollbar on the chat dialog for ToS. It is translucent.

you can get around transparency with overlays to homogenize the color behind, eg. if you make a 80% black overlay over a 20% transparent ui element, you can make a script that detects colors 20% near black at the area where the ui and the overlay is and it will work.

movement can be thwarted by scanning an area instead of a single point.

basically scripting pixel detection is so advanced that throwing off the determined / knowledgable players wont really work

the real hackers bypass any protection then inject DLL’s and directly work off the packets the game is sending, i dont think ToS even needs a bypass, which why you see such advanced botting from so many players.

i thought gameguard made that annoying, did you use AHK? or something else?

Thanks for the knowledge, learnt something new :3

Agree that it wouldn’t stop all bots, as nothing is foolproof. Just like real world crime, not all crime can be stopped/prevented, what we can do is to implement measures to lessen the occurrence of it.

What I think is although it wouldn’t stop everything, I hope at least it does deter the much simpler ones from working.

There’s no point in engineering the game against bots, if a human can do an action a bot can too, and if the botter is a gold seller they will have a service to solve captchas in their stead.
What you can do as a dev is gather data around the behavior of players and issue banwaves based on patterns to discourage blatant botting.

I think buying slots just to farm daily saalus more is a pretty distorted way to play the game. This change in game is meant to tell you that the game is not about doing saalus on 40 chars and log out, but… To actually play the game. Go in fields, farm elites, go to the PvP daily thing and gather some more shards… It’s more varied. Slots should be bought for when new classes are out and you want to try a new build, for pets… Having 30 or 40 chars that have basically no investment and are used only as saalus “bots” is kinda sad. I have a total of 5 characters, and only one is completely geared and with lots of titles; the others are a bit gimped. Having more time to play the game (and less to ‘play saalus’) means farming more silver, getting more attributes, doing more quests and other stuff for those nifty titles and consequently stat ups, etc… You guys don’t want to get stuck with daily saalus only, that’s damn boring!