I feel as though if any of the AGS staff actually played the game at all, they’d be able to see the rampant bot behavior and rein in it.
The simple fact that these ZZXXY* named bots are hitting level 60 now… Are we going to have OPRs filled with nothing but farming bots? You know that is the next step, right?
The level of botting is ridiculous. Worse that the same bot I reported a week ago and two weeks before that has gone from farming trees around town at level 5 to running around open world areas at level 55 is crazy.
How about we do our jobs, guys? Seriously. This is embarrassing.
*Might be an actual player name, might not be, was used as an example.
I agree. I see the same five bot train around WW everyday. They were in the low twenties…not they are forty plus from bottling 24/7. The give away, other than the bot behavior, is the level forty using a flint tools.
With the player constantly dropping to 24 hour peaks of around 88k. 90% of these are bots. It baffles me what people are actually do in this game as it is absolute garbage.
The lack of attention this topic gets is mind boggling to me.
Am I to understand, then, that AFK scripting is A-OK? Because these particular scripters/bots pause at every single resource that’s taken–even if I take it while they’re running at it. I have deliberately stayed a few paces ahead of a bot, mining/harvesting everything it’s headed for and they just go tot he empty node and pause. If I can pop a tent in their path, they get stuck for a while. Clearly afk behavior.
So, just checking. This is okay, right? We all can just start doing this overnight, maybe, to build up our materials base? /endsarcasm
There is a bot issue. It’s not 90% of the player base. Most of the people I come across are actual players. However, the bot numbers are high enough that they are absolutely noticeable. And, I do see more and more of them, every day, so the number is creeping.
I would say its close to 20-25% of daily player base is bots. Since I farm a lot to get mats to increase my crafting skills and all the nodes are picked clean even in off peak time like 5-6AM EST and I run past many bots all the time so I stopped playing. Sign in craft asmos or whatever and sell 10 for 3.8k /day…sign off.
Gotcha. I don’t care if they farm or not. I notice most of the bot behavior when I’m running back and forth for quests - you tend to get sent to the same places over and over.
Literally all AGS has to do is quest in their own darn game to see this on their own.
I think AGS needs a dedicated GM train that has a set process on tracking down bots and applying bans. It shouldn’t be too hard now with the reduction of live servers.
Maybe tie a 5 min long OBS video recording for each bot ban (can cross-reference same video for grouped bots, i.e. fishing), make the ban indeterminately long, and leave appeals open just in case a mistake was made.
It would be interesting if the dev’s can make a tool for GM’s where they can just tell the server to latch a camera, keystroke/event recorder onto any live player they suspect is a bot with a simple command.
honestly at this point it is safe to assume that most devs at big box companies like AGS, EA owned studios, ATVI owned studios, ubisoft studios etc, dont actually like or play games at all. they just do the programming, have someone else test it, and then maybe fix some bugs but just move on to the next project.
all the talent and designers/devs with the passion for games left these studios a decade+ ago and all formed their own little studios, and the big boxes just need anyone with a pulse and basic programming knowledge to throw something together for them
