There’s info on how they are going to prevent silver selling and report feature. It’s the most recent announcement.
I’m really disappointed they called having live support on around the clock to investigate suspicious activity/players primitive, because it probably would be working worlds better than the crap we’re dealing with now because they think it’s working. And people would like the increased communication from staff, it’s a win win.
I think the bots need to be actively hunted, all the time. It’s the launch of the game, bots and sellers are all trying to set up roots and spam their services when they can make the most impact. But it’s also the best time for IMC to put their foot down and say they won’t tolerate any of it in a way that doesn’t cripple their own players.I think the old fashioned way isn’t primitive, especially if they ask us to also report suspicious activity while they respond to reports and inspect known botting areas. People will do it because they appreciate a clean and bot free game.
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Tracking down and banning gold sellers and bots individually is primitive, but it works. I don’t mind them trying to develop a better, more sophisticated, solution (like something mentioned here: https://forum.treeofsavior.com/t/anti-botting-strategy-imc-needs-to-start-using-behavioral-biometrics), but they need to be manually banning bots in the meantime.
The bot problem is so bad that there are now bots that are higher levels, and with better gear, than many legitimate players. That is just incredibly discouraging. Bots should not be ignored so much that they are allowed to reach levels > 100 …
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Wheres the valve VAC??? they should able to identified it since it linked to Steam right? anyway I have to agree we have to stop this bot/hack before it ruined the game… GM.hear us please? @Staff_Julie
I will release a video with the solution to the trade system today and if that gets approved i will contact IMC to help tackle the bot problem, i have it solved already with a simple equation.
There’s several problems with “behavioral biometrics”, notably cost and processing power. The latest developments in Cognitive Computing that can detect these things (by IBM and Google), are very powerful but also very expensive. You could expect a bigger company like Blizzard or SE to afford it from the get-go, but probably not smaller companies.
It is admittedly easier to implement early on, when you have less players and the players are more willing to put up with bugs, patches, and latency issues (early adopters tend to be “all in”). Unfortunately, these additional costs have to be explained to investors and included in the initial development plan or it’s unlikely to be implemented from the beginning. Considering the current status, I doubt the argument for the software was successfully made.
As for banning players who buy silver, it’s actually rather limited in its scope. Most of those players already run the risk of having their game accounts, credit card numbers, and/or personal id stolen.
I doubt typing 2 DOS command lines and spending 5 minutes resetting your router to change your IP address and get around a ban is enough to inconvenience them compared to those potential problems.
Placing timers and limits on the transfer of the market items is the most effective method now, but it is frustrating to see the market crippled in such a way. There are ways to cripple the RMT economy for high-end items, but I doubt the game will use raid tokens or anything similar to that (considering that it’s based off RO design).
Unfortunately, I don’t think the spam will ever quite stop. Bigger companies with subscription models have tried, and the spam never quite stops. It’s possible to reduce it to a trickle with automation (say registering X block requests within Y time period), but getting around the IP address is so easy if you’re ready for it that they can just rotate it (unless you ban entire regions from the server).
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Allow me to remind everyone that botting and goldselling are two different problems.
No need for such complex methods, i know the equation to solve the bot problem, i will be releasing a video today explaning the solution to the trading system and then i will contact IMC to help them with the bot problem.
I fail to see how hiring an army of GMs would be less expensive… of course they could choose not to hire enough GMs (seems like the current situation)…
Having a market license system as proposed by @ridleyco and others would probably help significantly.
The problem is so bad, that the majority of the bots now have arde dagger. LMAO
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It is more expensive in the long run to keep an army of GMs available 24/7. But to simply hire that army for 1 or 2 months, probably not. Also, the way a CC works requires you to hire an army of GMs at the beginning, or have an extensive ban history for it to use as reference before you can actually use it. Without that data, it might as well just be a very expensive, and very cpu-intensive pet terminator.
One solution is that you hire a bunch of temporary GMs at the start to simply provide the manpower to comb through 100k users 1 by 1 and ban them. You also build a QA and support team to receive User feedback and handle complaints about unfair bans.
Ideally, you would collect all the data from that and feed it in to your heuristic algorithm so it can start learning. After that, you replace the GM army with your automated CC while the QA and Customer Support Teams are expanded to continue updates and offer corrections to your automated CC.
Either way, this means you end up having to pay for both the army and the CC license in the end. The army just has a bigger impact in the launch.
As for why they’re not using it now, I can’t say. They may be saving all their money and manpower for the release date on April 28. Paying Double or Triple-time gets expensive really quick, even if GMs are making minimum wage; and I think they will be going to those higher rates at least in the initial month just fighting the spammers alone.
Anyway, this is mostly my opinion, so take the comments with a grain of salt. It’s one thing to talk about this in an armchair, another to actually be handling it in the front lines.
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It’s funny to see threads like this posted where people realize how significant of a problem bots are, then demand in other threads that IMC remove every limitation they’ve made to attempt to control the ability of bots to profit from this game.
I agree the bots are absolutely out of control and actually more than being frustrated with the developers, I’m mostly frustrated with the players that pay for their services. These people cause so much frustration and ruin the economy to a point where it completely destroys the game’s playability. Bots would not exist if there wasn’t a significant amount of shortsighted, selfish people that do not care if they ruin the game for everyone else.
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Yes… let’s blame people who buy from silver sellers! How’s that working out for us? The problem is totally disappearing right?
EDIT: I agree with you on the issue of people buying from silver sellers. But condemning them on a small forum that they likely don’t even read anyways does bupkis.
I really like this game and feel that imc is going to kill it.
Ban of 1:1 trade, cap on ah, cap on dungeon runs, cap on spawns, cap on chat, cap on the cellar, cap on the roof.
Im sorry, but we already are past the point where bots are less of a problem than IMC’s “”"“SOLUTIONS”""" to them.
You feel that bots will kill the game? Dont you worry. If this keeps up, IMC’s solutions will kill it way before that.
To begin with, how will a botter kill your game?
At best they can kill the game economy, and thats the entire extent of it. What IMC is doing right now, is making the entire play experience worthless.
Just to tell you an example:
Today me and my two friends went to farm some collection items. Less than 1% drop rate, one of my friends got 4 of the damn things and we got none. We spent more than 2 hours there, before we managed to get 1 item for everyone and even tho we needed only 3 altogether, we had to farm out 7 items due to the fact that we cant trade, nor is there a need/greed loot mode.
Why cant we trade you ask?
Because supposedly that stops gold sellers.
Now let me tell you the punch line of the joke:
Tokens, which allow you to trade, can be bought from the auction house.
Do you get it? No?
IMC literally wrote it down in their statement that gold sellers have near limitless silver due to hacks and bots.
This literally means that they can buy any number of tokens.
Conclusively the ban of 1:1 trade does absolutely jack ■■■■■■■ nothing to gold sellers. It exists because its humorous to ■■■■ your players.
http://www.jansontech.com/rage/rageface2.jpg
Do you know what else is capped?
My wallet. ■■■■ giving a dime to people who screw over their customer base for no reason.
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This is a discussion forum, where people discuss general topics related to ToS regardless of whether or not their point of discussion can influence the game. If you would like to make suggestions the suggestion forum is located here: https://forum.treeofsavior.com/c/suggestions
You’re welcome.
Not sure if there are many popular games safe from bots out there.
But they’re working on it. It’s not a one-day issue and I’ve played games where they tried to stop bots for years and years without restricting players and finally the game is just filled with bots, not just economy, but grinding spots overran with bots so you can’t do your quests.
People get too pampered coming from other games, and they left those games because it ‘died’ because of what they want IMC to ‘fix’ in the first place, and player-to-player trading is often the root of all this. Can’t stop the gold sellers and botters, but it sure make their lives harder and discourage gold buyers.
Plus, they did listen to players - I’ve seen that megaphone level limit in the forums multiple times. I’m actually surprised how well it worked to kill the spammers. Though it didn’t lessen much lag in accordance to those who accuses the shout spams are cause of lag.
@eduardo_r_gyn > Please post a link here to the thread and solution when you can. I’d love to see your solution.
Also, to return to the topic:
I think botting and goldselling are very related in this game. Considering that the focus of leveling and itemization in ToS is on drop rates and monster farming, having bots readily available means goldsellers are able to create currency simply by fielding more bots.
It’s a very vicious cycle, and one that requires a secondary economic system completely divorced from Silver to offset. Other games have used a “raid token” system to limit itemization for endgame raiding and is controlled by weekly caps instead of how much silver you can make, but that tends to focus high-level players to specific dungeons/bosses and rather destroys the current free-exploration gameplay design of ToS and RO. I don’t think it’s a good solution, but I’m at a loss for an alternative that would aid players make more trades while deterring automated Bots.
I very much liked this suggestion:
The solution to the trade system.
I LITTERALLY can’t play two of my characters right now. Too many bot parties 1-2 shot-ing groups KSing me. And the spawn times are so low, I’m basically waiting to be KSed… Earlier this week, it was waiting to kill, now it’s waiting to be KSed… This is worse…
The people who bought money from silver sellers, you caused this… Like if the admins went to the church and did a bot run, they’d probably kill easily over 60 (like four bot parties per channel running around). And sadly, they can easily remake them due to all the profits they’ve been getting from those stupid people buying silver. Which also need to be banned… BAN THE SILVER BUYERS TOO! You have to realize they are in a parasite relationship (6.5 mil silver sold in 5 hours? BAN THOSE FOOLS!).
All the maps around both characters levels are bot party infested, and because of the AMAZING MECHANIC OF LOSING EXP AND DAMAGE WHEN FIGHTING SOMETHING HIGHER LEVEL THAN YOU, I really don’t have the option to fighting harder things.
I’m so annoyed about the new age MMO mechanics where character level > personal choice.