3 nodes 1 tent (yes the title is satirical)

General Discussion General Discussion
25

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

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26

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.

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27

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

28

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.

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29

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.

30

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.

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31

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

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32

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.

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33

Reporting bots does nothing. We have had the same bots gathering the same spots for months. I report them daily…

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34

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.

35

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.

36

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.

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38

Do you have a link to this image?

39

And ladies and gentlemen I present you with a bot runner. Had no doubt one or more would show up in this thread.

40

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.

41

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.

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42

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.

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43

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. :slight_smile:

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

44

None of this should be seen as endorsing bots just a discussion on their impacts in the economy.

This literally is supply and demand.

Bots only sell for more for the simple reason a market supports a higher sell price. Bot or player they arent going to list something people will pay 10g for for .01. Both bots and players are there to generate gold if selling, they arent there to provide welfare.

Its selling for more because demand far out stripes supply. Bots farm as fast as possible and price to sell. If it wasnt selling the price would be lower

If bots werent there the supply would be lower and prices would be higher. Just like how undocumented workers are underpaid keeping prices and costs down. Take that out you pay a prevailing wage and the delivered good is more expensive or less supplied.

Again not supporting these issues just explaining.

Goods in an mmo typical balance on a gold per hour opportunity cost based pricing. Except where bots drive prices lower.

The lower the price the less morivation players have to farm. I doubt you will see a huge drop in price however those who farm their own materials would benefit greatly.

Bots can work forever require no rest and dont eat or sleep or complain. So they dont care if they are making 10g an hour or 1kg an hour they just do what they can script.

And again id support personalized nodes. My wife and i adventure alot. Getting nodes more frequently. 2x for us would be huge!

45

The supply and demand equation is a little skewed on some of the higher population servers because of the massive wealth imbalance between the companies that own EF and WW and everyone else. On Camelot, the last time I checked, the company that owned EF and WW was pulling in around 6-7 million gold per week. Meanwhile, the owners of a smaller territory had to purposely lose an invasion so that their facilities would get downgraded, which would get their upkeep costs in line with their revenue.

There’s only so many things that rich people are going to spend gold on repeatedly in this game. BiS items, asmo, runic leather, phoenixweave, ori ingots, ori ore, cinnabar, tolvium, starmetal and certain craft mods. Items like trophies, crafting gear and houses are one-time purchases and lower tier mats don’t seem to be affected because once you’ve leveled to 200 in all of your refining, why would you continue to craft if you have an inexhaustible supply of gold?

So the resources that are in demand get hoarded by non-bot players. The bots don’t, and can’t get 100% of the ori ore, even if they are getting a lot of it. I hoarded a lot of mats leading up to the last patch because I wanted to level my weaponsmithing. Had about 6000+ units of cinnabar, tolvium and ori ingots, and I had stopped crafting asmodeum. Ended up only taking me a little over 2k mats to get to 200 since I was able to do it all through expedition replicas for the extra XP, and the salvage gave me back around 500 ori ingots. I sold about 3k of the remaining cinnabar and tolvium to another crafter the day of the patch, and I’ve just been sitting on the rest, doing my daily asmo ever since. I grab ori nodes when I see them, which is rare, but with prices the way they are, I’ve pretty much just been sitting on whatever I have. I’m definitely collecting enough for my daily asmo every day, so my stockpile of ingots is dropping. But with ore prices where they are, I’m not participating in the market anymore, because as long as the price keeps going up, I’m going to keep the option to sell available. I’m sure there are other people who have the same idea.

So the market right now is basically just the rich people buying ore and the bots and some farmers selling. Ori has become a luxury good, and the pricing has become relatively inelastic because of buy orders that maintain a floor that can’t be breached because there isn’t enough ore making its way to market to satisfy them all, so they just get filled and renewed every few days, and the competition keeps the price up.

Giving us personalized nodes would bring more low and middle income people back into the market. If I were able to freely mine the available nodes in Shattered Mountain once a day, I would probably smelt the ore until I get the full smelting set, then I would sell either the ore or ingots at whatever the market price was.

Personalized nodes would also be a good way to increase the supply, at least on mid and high pop servers. There are currently ~216 ori nodes across the entire map, according to Aeternum Map. With a respawn time of between 12-16 minutes each, that means each node respawns and can be mined ~90-120 times a day. If the nodes were personal, and on daily single reset, you would have the potential for each node to be mined 2000 times a day. If it was shorter reset, it would obviously be more. Or maybe it could be like the juniper berry bags- you could mine each node a certain number of times each day. Lots of different ways they could do this.