I guess afk marco clicking inside the wall of a mountain where the npcs can’t hit you isnt a violation of TOS, but it fucking should be. big sad this is a thing people have to deal with
2 Likes
Your making it sound like every node is camped like this. This clearly a violation of tos, video them and submit it. They will get suspended eventually.
Be nice if tp auctions showed seller names. Be alot easier for players to raise suspicion of nefarious activities.
1 Like
1-look at the pics above, they dont move and have all been reported in game
2-forum admins said you can’t post here and report and reporting in game options are the only ones that “work”
3-reporting bots doesn’t work. Either AGS reports are used as toilet paper or the guy getting reports is a small animal and the little paw can’t type on the keyboard to delete these accounts.
Botting has been a problem day 1, and they said they would have in game admins to try and clean things up. The guy on Camelot showed up for 37 minutes and left, nothing was done.
I have 0 faith in AGS doing things without fucking it up lol
1 Like
This is the offline method for reporting players or companies and the only way to pass along screenshots to the appropriate team that moderates these activities that I am aware of. The CSR team on the forums does not have access to in-game moderation tools. They reiterate this nearly daily to people asking about suspensions and bans.
Additionally, there is live online support help that might be able to take down information though I know some people who have gone so far as to call their help line and talk to live support and complain about one particular farmer on our server.
It took a conjoined effort of about ten people but eventually that individual no longer appeared on our server.
It’s not a one and done process - they don’t have the resources to track down every single report. I am willing to bet money, they have a threshold of unique complaints a player has to get to show up on their moderation teams radar.
1 Like
outside or inside the game reporting doesnt work… im trying to explain that player can be mass reported for nothing and still be banned, bots are immune to the system. AGS dropped the ball and I can’t do anything but watch them pilfer my server eco
If there are enough players camping and bots farming you run into a serious drop in resource availability. That can drive price increases. In some places those increases can be extreme.
1 Like
And there it is: violation of the technical terms not the intention of the terms.
There is no way that the original intent of the ToS was designed to allow that kind of workaround to give a player an advantage.
Oddly enough it sounds an awful lot like pay to play. In order to gain an advantage ingame all you need to do is purchase something from AGS.
But of course this doesn’t apply to you or your friends. It never does.
Wait until you have 200 bots and coin sellers on your block list from reporting them and have to remove a few to do more, then immediately start getting coin selling messages again, from one that was offline when you removed it from the list.
Meanwhile good old “FF Lin Lin” botted starmetal, and oil in weavers all the way to 60 while being reported by most of the entire server, and was still around as of yesterday.
3 Likes
Your server is obviously different than Camelot. A single, 20 minute trip through the Illurmin Rift used to get me ~800 ori ore back in the days before the campers came to farm Pit Lord. Now if I run through the entire thing, I might be able to snag a node or two if I’m lucky. I’ve pretty much given up on farming ore on this server. If I can snag a few nodes in SM while I’m doing PvP missions, or farming Levithan, I will. But I’m not getting nearly enough ore to keep up with my daily asmo cd.
I’ve tried other things, but on a high pop like Camelot the competition is intense. Farming motes- GL, bots are going through everywhere grabbing what they can, Ironwood trees? There are like two places to farm them with any type of efficiency, and you’re going to run into at least one other player doing the same thing. And the only thing they drop that is actually worth anything is the craft mod for Thwarting Strikes, which has gotten as high as 13k, but maybe drops every few hundred trees. Ironwood itself is less than 1g.
Had a good run farming tarragon and hyssop for about 48 hours. But then I started seeing 2 or 3 players running the same route. Even one of the ori farming bots has now added the herbs to his route in between node spawns.
Platinum ore was pretty lucrative for a minute, but the bottom kinda dropped out. Everyone was buying anything they could to get smelting aptitude, because they wanted the smelting gear. Now that the fervor for that has passed, it’s about 50% cheaper, and it’s still pretty damn hard to find veins.
Currently the best return on time I’ve found is making infused regeneration potions. Lots of people doing pvp means a lot of potions getting consumed, and azoth water is one of the few resources that hasn’t been farmed to death yet. Of course, it’s actually more profitable to just sell the hyssop and azoth water than it is to make the potions (at least until they give us bonus items when crafting potions), but I’ve been leveling arcana at the same time, so I’ll take the less profitable route for the extra XP.
I don’t expect this to last, though. Competition is moving in on anything that can make money. Arbitrage on the trading post is incredibly rare right now… Lots of people farming rabbits, too. Although I have heard that the drop rate seems a lot lower right now. Not sure how much bear flank is actually going for, but if it’s profitable I can guarantee there are people farming them at every spot.
And that brings us back to my biggest complaint about the ore campers- that I’m being forced to waste my time chasing other methods to make gold that haven’t been completely saturated with other players. Whereas, if nodes were personal, I could spend 20 minutes, get all of the ore I need every day, and go back to doing things that are fun and rewarding. I think it’s more a problem of being on the highest pop server than anything else, and I’ve considered switching, but I’m going to do whatever my company ends up doing. It is something that AGS could fix, in any number of ways, but I’m not optimistic about it actually happening
3 Likes
GW2 did this and it worked really well.
Aside from AGS not seeming to be aware of the more recent developments in game design there probably is a reason for non-peronsalized nodes.
Primarily this would be about the original focus of the game which was world pvp.
1 Like
Reporting bots does nothing. We have had the same bots gathering the same spots for months. I report them daily…
1 Like
Agree that personalizing nodes for slow regenerating materials like high value ores would be awesome. Let the more dispersed plant materials and foundation ores like iron and starmetal re-spawn as normal.
At this point the game has moved so far away from that original focus, that it should be completely irrelevant. World PvP doesn’t really exist. I see some clashes outside of dungeon entrances, and the occasional clash at or around a fort. But nothing with any regularity.
Not saying that they aren’t making decisions based on this, just that they shouldn’t be.
You show me where in the TOS it says multi boxing is against the TOS and I’ll let those people know they are breaking the rules. You cant automate gameplay - that’s the intent and spirit. Having two characters and being able to do two things at once you couldn’t police if you wanted to. No company is going to make that stance and obligate themselves to trying to figure out if someone is multi boxing or is playing via lan with family or whatever.
How you choose to play your game if it’s crafting, pve, or pvp is your business. They also aren’t going to tell someone you can’t sit logged in camping a node.
What they can dedect and will have issue with is your doing that using some automated 3rd party tool so that you can play unattended for an advantage.
The greater point though is people use the term “bot” to refer to anyone they have an issue with. Many times it is misused when it literally is intended to refer to someone running a third party script to automate game play. Being a human sitting at a keyboard watching a tv show while you wait for a respawn is not botting, that is camping. Again something that’s been done in MMORPGs since the beginning of conception. You do it when you farm an NPC for a BIS sword.
The individuals in the rock in the screenshot however don’t get this sort of protection. They are exploiting terrain to allow them to camp safely and that IS against the TOS. Regardless of any other factors that may be in play. You can see they are abusing terrain that should be enough to take action for exploiting.
1 Like
Do you have a link to this image?
And ladies and gentlemen I present you with a bot runner. Had no doubt one or more would show up in this thread.
A month ago I argued against this. As the bot problem has not improved in the slightest bit and the only downside I see for doing this is that market prices fall (which I think is a good thing), I believe they should implement this. Like you said, there will always be people that don’t want to farm materials. They will always pay for stuff. For those that want to farm, we shouldn’t have to visit 10 different spots only to find all 10 spots are camped and now we have to pay some jacked up fee for ori just so we can make our daily asmo.
This is the absolute opposite of what happens. More camping and bots drives surplus availability and supply. In a stable financially sound economy this causes prices to fall. When bots whete more prevelent it was hard to collect your own mats but it was a third of the cost on the trading post. Iron ore was .01 to .02 on buy order and they filled orders of 10k units within hours.
What is driving price increases at the moment is a surge of players pushing for smelting boxes for smelting gear.
Higher demand… lower supply from less players and bot waves…higher gold surplus from rich ww and ef owners and whalla material prices go up.
Blaming bots for high prices on the trading post is like blaming undocumented workers for rising grocery costs on produce. Cheap labor lowers prices doesnt make it good but its a fact of economics.
The problem is the nodes arent spawning fast enough to make up more supply to compensate for the added demand. If resources spawned faster the value would drop.
1 Like
Yeah i agree, personalized nodes would be ideal. Thing is supply and demand work. If its worthless to gather the masses will stop and just buy as needed which will lower supply and increase value naturally.
Also personalized nodes also make spotting bots easier. It removes randomness from their patterns no outside forces to disturb a rigid pattern. That is FAR easier to find and flag with AI.
1 Like
I would agree with you if this was a working true economy with checks and balances. Like you said, the basics of supply and demand would dictate that the more “bots” you have farming the cheaper materials should be, yet oddly that is not what has happened. I agree that the biggest issue was people trying for smelting gear, but the bot’s selling the ore realized they could get A LOT more gold so they charged more. So it IS the bot’s that are raising the prices, along with players that are normally gathering and selling materials. Basically, greed. 
Again, if they just made nodes personalized then it wouldn’t be an issue. Don’t want to farm materials? Go buy em. If you want to save money then go and farm them. With more people now farming the prices should drop significantly. Less people will need the stuff since they can farm it, and more people will be farming it. Win/Win