Exactly, we have already seen the effect of these forces as small-pop servers were merged into larger communities, allowing a more healthy economy to develop.
I constantly see people in global chat defending the use of bots by claiming they are somehow required to ensure a healthy economy, utter jibber jabber…
It’s fairly clear that some people are simply defending bots because they are employing them, and therefore have beneficial interests to defend.
to be frank not many ppl are bothering to gather any thing and I see most of the time bots are doing th job constantly gathering and me only reporting them doesnt work also and ppl buy the mats they gathered and craft thier shite with that while bot owners sell their gold …
I am not even botherd to log in to game to see the same bots lvled up each day seriously …
it is too late in my opnion as there are tons of websites that you can buy gold for real money in any avaible server in the game which is populated…
some ppl mine crypto coins and some ppl mine the ‘’ NEW WORLD’’ ffs…
and I will not support neither the gold sellers nor the AGS that can not even see the prblem yet protect their own game …
I hope that too, tbh. If they not only ban bots, but also the gold buyers and players, who abused this issue, i fear only 30% of NW population is left. But on this side I REALY hope, it will be a kind of restart. To regain trust and players, who quit and maybe new players, AGS need to fix loads of problems and must implement more PvP and PvE content soon. The devs and responsibles know that. It is their task to come in action.
It needs a (little) miracle, but the game is still alive and many players realy want to become NW a success, more important, a good game, where we all can have a lot of fun together.
It would be an AND not an OR to your query. As such it would just narrow your query.
Not having a Moderator responding to this post is alarming.
We’ve been having the same problem on my server , same bots same places doing the same routes with same movements and still no one got banned , has been reported multiple times too.
I think that in the short-term you are correct, but I think it would be remedied pretty quickly. Take motes for example… no one bothers trying to farm them because they cannot do it efficiently with all of the bots running around. If the bots were banned, mote supply would probably dry up quickly which would cause the prices to increase. It wouldn’t take long for people to notice and start farming them again.
Possibly wishful thinking, but I love this idea and I agree it would be fantastic if AGS took this matter that seriously. One additional thought that I hope someone with the authority to take action sees… if you are able to identify the accounts that are consolidating all of the ill-gotten gains from these bots, take that money and distribute it evenly to all non-bot accounts on the server. This does two things:
a.) gives your existing player base a nice reward for sticking around throughout all this mess
b.) reduces the likelihood that anyone will buy from the gold sellers in the future
Well said. I hope anyone that blindly disagrees, takes a moment to read what you wrote with an open mind.
Instant gratification is one of the issues we have to deal with sadly; also the need to feel important is strong in some players to the point of not caring what damage it does to everyone, including themselves, in order to achieve status.
wait till you see the numbers after this patch. /rip
Identifying bots is not hard, all any person or system needs to do is look at the number of times an actor touches depleted nodes. It should not be difficult to design a moderation algorithm that tracks this single data point and issues a temp ban to any actor that accumulates X depleted node visits per unit time. The game already uses a moderation algorithm for chat that tracks spam and abuse reports and issues a temp ban to any actor that accumulates X such reports per unit time. There is no moral justification for judging botters according to different criteria. Also, I’m not sure exactly what a botter’s profit margin is, RMT-wise, but I’m sure that if the majority of their bots started being temp-banned on a regular basis, they’d see that margin drop substantially. If they quit, you don’t have to try to make a case for perma-banning them.
It makes sense to wait and gather a lot of info to figure out very good ways of eliminating bots. Instead of stop gap measures that the bot users learn how to get around. Let’s hope they do this because it sure is disheartening seeing the same reported bots add bot buddies and team up on all the gathering nodes.
They run around the new areas in teams leveling up… it’s really sad.
I realy, realy hope that not only bots, but also the players, who bought gold from them, will get banned. They dont believe AGS will be able to do it or want it. I m sure, if they notice, AGS gets serious hunting them, their buts start shaking.
I will appriciate the ban wave, no doubt ! And furthermore we all will see on our servers, when companies lose members to this and wont dominate the scene anymore, how many cheaters were around.
Nevertheless the people, who benefit from the tax desaster stay anyway. Thats a pity.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. I think it would hurt the bots more by banning them EARLY & OFTEN as reports come in. They are so easy to notice and would take 2 seconds for GMs to verify & ban. The long extended ban waves let them “get their money’s worth” before they are banned.
Yeah I get that. That a short term “skirmish” kind of strategy, But their first attack needs to be much more profound than banning a few bots. Let them think they’re getting away with everything now so they become careless and show all their tricks and IP’s, and then nuke the lot of them.
But I 100% agree with you in essence. It’s so easy to tell who the bots are and would be great to see a mod going to the entry zones, and around the starting towns banning them.
It sounds like they implemented a passive solution at palace isle.
Once the bots are identified there needs to be an account/IP address/MAC address/email account ban. That would go a long way to prevent repeat offenders.
now today, 2 hour patch mid-afternoon. more players off to a different game. we all get the game is messed up from another fail patch, but…pm patching is even more fail. maybe o hope left for this game i fear, as much as i do love it.
it seems some 24/7 botting accounts got banned apparantly on my block list. while there were 6-8 bots active 24/7 at any given time there are only 1-2 online atm since the update. Not quite sure the downtime has to do with it but maybe there’s been finally a banning spree. But not to mention the bots pumped a shitload of resources and ruined the economy for weeks/months with the devs ignoring every single report and lying about taking care of bots.
The trust in whatever the community managers or devs saying about the effort they’re doing is far far gone with their ignorance towards all the effort the community is taking to try and report these bots and cheat abusers…
I mean they’ve been ignorant towards us for like weeks/months not doing a single shit about the bots or cheaters. I’m glad to see there’s many 24/7 botters on my blocklist offline. But might be a bug in the friendlist user interface too ( :’) ).
This is why the first line of defense against bots will have to be the player community, via bot reports. I watched a YouTube video of a player following bots of various levels of sophistication. Some bots are simple to recognize. Others have certain routines built into them to throw off automated monitoring programs. But human players can still recognize them and their behaviors.
For my part, the most difficult ones to recognize are the ones that are going after common resources like wood or stone. I think that’s the current trend among the commercial gathering bots now. It’s not as intense a competition for wood or stone as for metal or motes or plant fiber nodes, so they are less conspicuously annoying. But it’s amazing to watch a fleet of bots turn the slope south of Monarch’s Bluffs, for example, into a temporarily treeless grassland.
I still think AGS needs to IP-ban or even CPU-ID ban the owners of these accounts. We are talking about Amazon, after all – one of the most effective companies at tracking online activity six ways from Sunday, and finding ways to use that info to insert ads tailored to our activity into our web browsers.
If Amazon can do this in our Web browsers, they can do it in their games.
I quit the game because AGS does not ban the bots. Level 40+ bots are everywhere.
And I quit because of the irksome housing tax system. I don’t enjoy grinding coin just to give it to some other player that I don’t know. The town owners that receive the tax revenue are being grossly overcompensated. Chances are that they are the ones spamming chat with the coin selling ads.