º People have been talking about the issue with BOTs in games for quite a while now, even though it’s nice that the fanbase is discussing different strategies to prevent the game from beeing crowded by BOTs, none of them seem to really fix the issue, most of the “solutions” they’ve come up with are incredibly inefficient and a bad plan for any company, because it’d requires a crescent amount of money to be spent on for it to work properly(hiring people to be hunting Bots, checking logs etc).
º In my opinion, the best way to solve the BOT problem is to value Player-to-Player interaction over Player-to-NPC interaction. Maybe it be from completly removing the silver you get from random material drops/recipes from monsters or making it so you can’t get any outcome out of NPC-selling and mobs start dropping close to no silver per kill.
º If there’s a good enough crafting system in this game in a couple of months, and I’m not talking about crafting classes excluively, I’m talking about crafting in general. The game needs to give drops an actual use other than just making it available to have BOTs using them for money grinding. Some sort of downgrading items(Scrapping if you will) would be a good way to make almost every material drop desirable, while not excluding the drops from quests and different uses. Thanks to @azureWOX for this suggestion.
º The best way to get rid of BOTs in a game, from my point of view, is by making it not as profitable as other games. Botting is a business for those who do it, obviously, they’d rather do it in games where they can actually get a good outcome out of it instead of places that it’s too hard/unpractical to get a good and reliable outcome. It’s like ppl say, you don’t need to run faster than the bear chasing you, you just need to run faster than your friend.
º It’s about making botting not worth it. One of the ways BOTs get money(the most common way AFAIK) is by killing the same mob over and over again for it’s loot, then selling it to a NPC, repeat. If they were to cut this part of the cycle(the one with selling their stuff to the NPC), they’d be forced into doing things like selling materials that no1 wants to hunt for(which is already a good thing for the community), waiting for rare drops to be sold in the Auction House(AH) etc. None of these ways are anywhere near as effective when you compare the Player-NPC interaction, they’re already losing money because of the Tax from the AH and not only that, they’ll also have to deal with themselves.
º Naturally, there will be a few particular mobs that are a better choice for them to hunt because of what they drop. If the BOTs rely on this drop to make money, they’ll just make it cost scrap in a blink of an eye because of how much there’d be of it in the market and then again, losing more income. Not only that, they’d also delay their income because they can’t know when some1 is going to buy their stuff.
Okay, so now that you guys know what’s the idea, we need to go to the next step of the process.
How to implement it?
Implementing this sort of thing should be a slow and graduate process, here are the steps that should be followed:
- The first step into implementing this system into the game is to improve the Crafting System by creating more recipes of items/usable items that can be used and crafted by the players.
- Implementing the Scrap function. This allows players to scrap materials, recipes and equipments to obtain a diverse amount of materials to be used in the crafting system. With this, the game should also change some of the recipes to accomodate the use of the Scrap functionality.
- Improving the Equipment upgrade. Right now, all we need to upgrade Weapons and Armor is money. You get a bunch of anvil and start upgrading the item untill it has 0 potential, which is a lackluster system tbh. This system should be changed to not only require money but also items obtained through Scrapping to upgrade your Equips(To increase the use of Scrapping different materials) and to increase the sucess chance up to a set cap depending on how many of the Scraps you put in it. Rare items obtained from Scrap could be used to decrease the chance of losing Potential when upgrading an Item.
- BIG UPDATE implementing most of the next things at once like; Setting all monster drops to have value 1 when sold to NPC; Creating new ways to get money into the players pockets; Decreasing the amount of Silver dropped per monster kill; Increasing the amount of items regular players can put in the AH for sale.
And ta-daaa, the system is implemented. But, there’s a few more things to be mentioned, like the new ways to get money into players pockets, which is going to be answered in the next part of this topic. This next part’s purpose is to incude other ppl’s questions regarding this system.
Questions!
- From @nuriomarayana. Are you saying to make it impossible to sell loot to NPCs? Then where would the Silver even come from in the game?
ANSWER: Yes! I mean, not impossible, but the loot is just not going to be worth anything if sold to NPCs. The silver would come out of these methods that can be applied(some already are in game) at the 4th step.
There’s a bunch of ways to get silver into the pockets of players.
1:Regular quests(with actually hidden ones giving extra silver) now giving Silver.
2:Dungeon area events(Like legwyn family and Mausoleum Chapel thingy)
3:Instanced Dungeon mob silver drop(Instanced mobs would start granting alot of silver, same goes to bosses)
4:Storyline quests(following the regular quests purpose)
5:Daily quests
6:Instanced Missions. In icbt2, the purpose of those were to obtain some fun equips, like Vulvuzela and such, they could just give it a money incentive instead of the exp one, like what they’re doing in kTOS
7:Crafting recipes and selling those items to other players
8:Achievment goals
9:“Clear Area reward”, where you’ll get it when you kill all of the different mobs in that area and explore 100% of it.
10:As I mentioned, regular mobs would also drop silver, but a low value. Making it so being in a Party also increases the amount of silver mobs drop, whereas the increased rate depends on the map lvl(also to avoid botters, they don’t seem to do well at all against high lvl trash mobs)and the amount of party members.
11:PvP arena rewards, one of them being Silver. With bigger rewards if you’ve remained in top20 or so for a week/a couple of days.
12:Guild activities, whatever they are/are going to be.
13:Field bosses.
14:Mobs give less silver the more you kill it in a set period of time. This time is going to be reset per MAP and according to each Mob killed separatedly.(Thanks to @Derael)