Tree of Savior Forum

Server Protection against spammers/botters

General Discussion
#1

My main worries are around this subject.
Back in RO( IRO and Brazilian servers ), I used to bot … yes, I used to do it for leveling. I didn’t have time to play by myself and did enjoy to go to war of emperium, so I used it to level up and supply my chars for war.
After many years far from RO/Grindfest MMOs I found myself willing to play this game in a fair way and willing to know if there are any plan to introduce a ticket report around spammers and bots.
Many games, after RO, that I played bots were around and they really bother me; Atlantica Online, World of Warcraft, Aion Online all of them there is a spammer/botter to put down you game experience( Aion was really frustrating … the game was very good ).
So there will be:

  • systems to block/avoid third party applications from the game?
  • systems to block in-game spam?
  • system to report possible bots/spammers?
  • system to report any kind of misbehaving as: discrimination, homophobic behavior, bad language?

Sorry for my bad english.

#2

RO1 had garbage net code and was insanely easy to bot in, and these days most games will have bots, if not all.

There are in-game systems to block botting already (grim reaper spawn), as well as a mention of IMC working on a in-house protection system (other than hackshield/etc), so that will help.

An in-game reporting system would be nice as well, though abuse able if it has effects other than just plainly reporting.

In the end, the bot precautions are only temporary at best, and it’ll be an ongoing struggle to take care of them, just depends on how effectively IMC will be able to take care of them over time.

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#3

Systems to block/avoid third party applications from the game?
There are rumours that IMC is developing it’s own system to prevent 3rd part apps from hooking into the game, but I do not have any quotes from IMC about this.

There is actually a very interesting system to stop/slow down botters. After you kill too many mobs a Grim Reaper boss will spawn. If you are a botter, you will need to deliberately kill slower than a regular player or else you will trigger the boss and, unless you have an AI smart enough to kill bosses, die.

Systems to block in-game spam?
Chat spammers will be stopped/slowed down by the need to buy a Megaphone to send a message in global chat. Technically chat spammers can exist, but it is not economically efficient to spam global chat.

System to report possible bots/spammers/misbehaving?
I kind of assume there will be a Report system in place to report bots/spammers/rule breakers, seeing as every MMO has one.

IMC’s anti-bot/spam systems seem promising in preventing a good portion (obviously not all) of the botters/spammers though.

2 Likes
#4

[quote=“Chebus, post:3, topic:37946”]
Systems to block in-game spam?
Chat spammers will be stopped/slowed down by the need to buy a Megaphone to send a message in global chat. Technically chat spammers can exist, but it is not economically efficient to spam global chat.
[/quote]You’re wrong. As I’ve posted elsewhere, gold spammers earn so much money, it’s economically efficient to target even p2p games, with having to open a new paid account every time one of the spammers gets banned. Having to buy a Megaphone will certainly not deter them. The only solution against spammers is for people to stop buying from them.

#5

@Soukyuu

Gold farmers and other people who are profiting off spamming will be able to cover the cost of the Megaphone no problem, you are right. Those type of spammers can only truly be stopped by active GMs or active reporting.

What I was referring to was ordinary players spamming the chat. For those type of players who are not profiting off of their spam it is not economically efficient. Even if a player is trying to sell an item in chat, continuously spamming one message after the other will just waste their Megaphones and give them little extra exposure. Practically, it would be more economical to send your message every 5, maybe 10, minutes so that people see your message but you are not wasting Megaphones so the same person can see your message 100+ times.

I am also kind of expecting that the cost of Megaphones will increase a lot once the game is released. If the price stays as low as it is now, then I don’t see what the point of having it as a requirement is.

#6

I’ve encountered problems in RO when gold spammers would actually PM the player repeatedly until you excommunicate them, or flood a mailing system. It can be really bothersome especially when you’re in a high-level field or dungeon and a spam PM pops up and you’re killed because of it. There’s a nospam programming in RO developed by some volunteers (even if it’s half-baked and mediocre), maybe it’s possible to also have a program encrypted and scripted to prevent that type of thing?

#7

Ha Ha Ha, yeah, no. That’s not going to happen. Botters, hackers, RMT’s will always find a way to do their thing.

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#8

@Chebus, that wasn’t quite clear from your posting, so I assumed gold spammers. I never saw regular players spamming so far.

The PMing/mailing problem could be solved by limiting PM and Mail to people on your friend list only. Since you have to meet the person to invite them from what I saw, it will make automatically spamming friend invites more difficult.

#9

Does the fact that the servers will be in steam have any effect on the difficulty for people to be able to bot without getting caught???

#10

I feel that a system to help restrict gold sellers from being effective would be to pull off the market system from Firefall.

Where the market uses a untradable currency separate from the easy to get currency, and there are limitations on how much normal currency can be converted into market currency per day.

What would be the point of someone paying for 20m silver from a gold seller when it takes 800 days to convert all of it to market currency?

On the subject of megaphones, they only cost silver for the CBTs. Once we get to OBT and release (since OBT is typically soft release anyways) then the megas are going to cost IC.