The situation with gathering bots and fishing bots is bad, ruining ingame economy and removing a portion of the content for the players to play with. Gathering and fishing makes no sense for the normal player, as for everything you can get with this activities, you will find a botter that will undercut you, and all the wealth ther cheaters bring together, will just feed a substrate of dishonesty, that will grow with time and make people quit.
I have seen no effort whatsoever on investigating and banning this people. I have seen the same bots standing and fishing or walking the same gathering path day after day, 24 / 7, for ages, untouched.
AGS Do you even have gamemasters that look into the botting reports? Are you understaffed and can’t spare workforce to look for cheaters ingame? If so, realize you are killing the game just to save some bucks, and at the end you will have wasted a lot more capital then you saved with not hiring enough gamemasters.
Without bots, there would not be enough resources to keep the dwindling playerbase interested.
I love to go out and get my own stuff, but there’s no way I am gathering 5000 water.
The problem is in the excessive Farming that has to be done for the professions.
AGS has so few ideas to make the game entertaining, that we only have hours of play walking on the map looking for resources, which are then wasted with the absurd RNG, because it makes dozens of useless PERKS that are only there to extend the time of I farm even more.
Nah. I just understand that the economy they have built is too flawed, and they don’t know how to fix it, so they’re letting the bots run so it doesn’t break.
They don’t punish exploiting or botting or hacking, which is basically an open invitation from AGS.
For example, leveling weaponsmithing from 1-200 using just the basic metals requires 112,800 iron ore, 63600 starmetal ore, and 32000 orichalcum ore ± 10-20% for procs
Oh, and 85,600 green wood JUST TO SMELT THE SHIT DOWN
Nobody forces you to gather 5000 water, nobody points a gun to your head for you get to 200 in weaponsmithing asap, on the other hand, the value of something in the game is given by how hard it is to get or how much grind it requires. What you are saying is basically you want stuff cheaper and therefore easier to get, and are happy that botters do the dirty work for you. Me and some silly people like me, like to play games the way they are meant to be played, and your bot friends are undermining that by diminishing the value of the things gathered and crafted by honest players. Botters do not keep the economy work, they keep the economy work for people like you, it’s different.
You are kind of projecting I think, the one doing wild assumptions is you when you say AGS willingly lets bots be so that the flawed economy keeps working, because apparently they don’t know how to fix it. That’s borderline slander.
Bots are not the solution, they are the problem! In your case, if there weren’t bots, then AGS QA could come to the conclusion “Hey people don’t want farm 5k water, lets make it more decent”, but with bots this kind of feedback will never come up.
The game should have some things that are hard to gather, but, considering bots as “common”, there are only a few things that will be hard to collect or buy on the market. Then the balance team will have to make things harder to craft, since the access to those items is easy. Controlling this aspect of the game means having a lot of power!
I mean, the bot guys can stop bot selling but keep bot farming, then prices will go up or down according to the bot dude will, then the market is bot controlled. This way they are not only controlling the market, but they are also manipulating the data feedback about items that AGS teams receive from this server.
These guys should be severely penalized, with ip/hardware/steam_id bans , so that this kind of behavior is avoided. Since having total control over a mechanic that is somehow the heart of the game should be impossible.
Imagine if it happens like Ragnarok, where the guilds of the game started having control over the mechanics of the game with bots and this made the game sink in a way that never made it back
After reporting bots for 6 weeks ++ on El Dorado, I caved into the “cheaters” and gave up on NW, after I saw Amateur Game Services valued the bots over the long time players and wasnt going to do anything to address the bots.
I am now enjoying GW2 and waiting for Throne and Liberty to release
We’re in complete agreement here. I really wish bots didn’t exist in NW at all. That being said,
Bots are neither the solution or the problem: they are symptoms of poor design and implementation, and a gaming community that values their time over a broken system.
I understood parts of what you meant and you have a great point, but I don’t know how this “symptom” wouldn’t be a problem.
I particularly can’t identify a solution to the bots in NW other than through some sort of “witch hunt”, but as you said, I understand that they are not THE PROBLEM of the game. I think an answer on how to improve the game design to reduce the stress of this situation with bots is exactly what they are looking for
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The text below is no longer an answer but my opinion
I see as a practical solution a more heavy handed and educational approach, something like what Riot Games tries to do in Valorant, but fails, since it is a free to play game. I imagine banning Bots at the Hardware level and preventing the player from logging in through the steam account identified as a botter would be the ideal measure.
Launching a list of players banned for cheating and giving feedback like “hey the bot you reported was banned and will appear on the next ban list” to the players who reported it would be good too
I’m taking into account that bots cannot be ignored, as it can get to the point where they become the majority of the player base. Still moving resources to identify and fight bots, even in a big developer, is very complicated
Hope you enjoy it!! No interest is a Korean P2W style MMO with much different combat to NW for me, but go on and hope it is everything you’re looking for
Thank you, I know T&L will be different than NW, I just cant give anymore of my time to ags, who does not value non cheating regular players.
I just saw this article and think your P2W argument will be a non issue: