How to end unattended gold farmer bots...

Discussion in 'Archived Topics' started by Mingo, Jan 26, 2014.

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  1. Mingo

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    --Scenario: Red thePK is wandering through Care Bear land, just looking around. Red comes upon an avatar working busily with his pick, mining. "Good morrow Miner!" Red calls cheerily. No answer from the avatar (suspiciously named Gold Bot)
    --Red wishes he were not in Care Bear land, as this snub is intolerable, but wait....the miner acts...odd. Red suspects (gasp!) a Chinese Gold Farming Bot!!! heh heh heh. Now Red can have some fun!
    --Opening up the "duel" command, Red checks the "challenge bot" icon. edit "challenge bot" is a separate item from the regular "challenge duel" item. A timer starts in the UI of both Red thePK and Gold Bot. (length of timer TBD, let's say 1 min, 5 min? some length of time.). After the timer ends, Gold Bot becomes AUTOMATICALLY (edit 2) flagged for PVP, much to the delight of Red thePK, who happily dispatches the botting gold farmer.
    --The player running his herd of bots checks on this bot and finds it dead! Player's supervisor is very unhappy and docks him an hour's pay ($0.25).
     
  2. Fatty

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    Lolz. I like the idea. And free loot as well from all the materials mined from the bot! :D
     
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  3. PrimeRib

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    Idiots spamming dual requests are already annoying in games. I'm quite thankful I can auto-block them.

    If gold = power, people will get gold. People have systems to run dozens of clients even without actually botting. I'm not saying to avoid some counter measure entirely, but the only real solution is to many sure an excess of grinding doesn't break the economy.
     
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  4. Mingo

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    --I edited my original post adding: edit "challenge bot" is a separate item from the regular "challenge duel" item.
     
  5. Mishri

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    people who run bots, especially at the professional farming level is going to be able to easily decline it, and shouldn't be forced to engage in it. Just as real player shouldn't be able to. And if they wanted to have some fun, they might have a well skilled/geared player doing their botting and have such an awesome combat bot built that they'll whoop up on you. However, I doubt that will be possible with the way they are doing combat. In a standard combat system I think it would be easy for them to make it give best possible results. However, I just never see anyone actually accepting the duel if they are botting.

    I liked playing on open-pvp servers for that reason, especially before flying mounts in WoW. I'd kill farmers. Even after flying mounts as fast as people tried to harvest and get right back on I'd usually be able to engage them, sometimes I'd camp a spot with resources and attack people as they flew down. Now they'd usually send in their buddies to kill me and chase me for awhile which as fine too, best part was when I'd beat multiples of them because I pvp'd quite a bit, and my shadow priest was pretty awesome back when the shadow healing actually could keep me healed.
     
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  6. Mingo

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    --After the timer ends, Gold Bot becomes AUTOMATICALLY (edit 2) flagged for PVP
    --The idea is that Gold Bot, an unattended bot, will be unable to decline the "challenge bot" once the timer times out. Of coarse an "honest" botter who comes back to his computer before the timer times out can actively Decline the challenge. It is the UNATTENDED bot that is in jeopardy.
     
  7. Mishri

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    You can easily right a script to choose decline and not wait for a timer to run out. Even if they make the box appear randomly on the screen.

    However, it isn't a bad idea to discourage more casual people from doing it. Although I'm not sure how common the casual botter is these days, I don't know people who bot in modern games, although we all did in UO.
     
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  8. PrimeRib

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    Again, I like the idea in theory. I always wanted to kill the farmers in L2 without bad karma. But again, professional farmers are professional. You'd be amazed at how good they are when it's their full time job with unlimited resources and technology.

    They have unlimited patience and multiple accounts to manipulate whatever karma / faction / guild war system is in place. Good farmers can simply destroy most legit players. Because they can log in a dozen accounts as needed or log them out. You can try to wrap band aid after band aid on a system to try to stop them, but again they're professional players. The rules you put in will hurt legit players far, far sooner. They simply can stay steps ahead. Every game goes through patch after patch to try to manage it. You can slow it down with diminishing returns, but ultimately the only answer is to remove grind to win.
     
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  9. Umbrae

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    I think the bigger problem is that PVP will probably not be enabled on the character, but the scene the character is in. So a "duel" system wouldn't really work in SOTA because if the gold farmer is in a non-PVP area they would stay that way. Having PVP and non-PVP characters in the same area at the same time is a buzz kill.

    Of course, if we are not talking SOTA specific then just ignore me. :)
     
  10. mike11

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    I had a really rough idea for some sort of 'trick' to instead of trying to stop gold-farmers, instead create some sort of 'trap' for goldfarmers. A way to capitalize on money spent for those accounts and a way to equalize the potential damage that they could cause...

    No idea how to, though, perhaps some sort of small line of text hidden deep inside a Terms of Service agreement..
     
  11. Umbrae

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    I had a friend that had a website and forums for his business. A competitor would make accounts and contact people through his forums to steal his customers. He would close the accounts when he found them but they would just create more.

    He ended up building a system where he flagged their accounts so that none of their messages were were visible and any private messages went to him. The competitor would see their posts in the threads, so they had no idea their stuff wasn't working. He would also respond every now and again as fake users, so they did not get wind and just thought they were unsuccessful at convincing customers to leave.

    Imagine in SOTA that an account got flagged, and the gold farmer would only go to instances with other gold farmers. The gold and items they found were not part of the economy, and whenever they tried to perform a trade with another user they simply were never "matched" with them. If they could never get matched no gold could be traded. End users might end up paying for something they can never get, but hopefully they could their credit company to charge back.

    That's might be an interesting idea though. Of course, Portalarium would have to keep quiet about it, and this post probably ruins the whole thing. :)
     
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  12. mike11

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    Heh, that's pretty cut-throat strategy. A great example of what your friend did, though. It was perfect that the competitor didn't know, that seems like the best thing.
     
  13. Mingo

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    (facepalm) -- "duel Bot" would be a SEPARATE option from the REGULAR "duel" icon. Duel Bot would work in Care Bear land (aka non pvp land) or pvp land. If in fact the avatar is player run, said player can decline the "duel Bot" upon returning to his keyboard. The premise is an unattended Bot run by a gold farmer.
    --"Duel Bot" could be any kind of icon, selection, "/duelbot" command or whatever and named anything. The only thing "duel bot" has that is special is a) the timer and b) will work anywhere, even care bear land.
     
  14. Lord Baldrith

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    I think this idea is genious myself :)

    All it requires is clicking okay to prove you are there...If someone gets crazy with spamming you, just block that person ... piece of cake ... Plus this would be a legit way to ruin farming and have some fun! Even I would enjoy killing a pesky bot.
     
  15. Mishri

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    The other issue is I think botters will play in single-player online mode. or possibly friends-only online with their other botter buddies.

    So people would use the system to PK AFK people.
     
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  16. Umbrae

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    I still think you are a little confused on the Selective Multiplayer thing. If I am in an zone that is non-PVP you will not be able to PVP me. It is zone based, so there would be no Duel Mode. You would have to leave the area. So in SOTA the most likely scenario is the bot would just never leave the area. To kill them you would have to wait and follow them and hope you are matched with them in future area which may or may not be PVP zones.

    If you are in a PVP zone then no need for a duel just hit them with your sword.

    As I said there should be no situation where there is a duel popup that will allow you to PVP in a non-PVP area. If there is it will be abused both by bad PKs and other trying to take advantage of people that went to the bathroom.

    To me it sounds like a solution for another game: not in SOTA where the multiplayer has been described differently.
     
  17. Mingo

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    --If a chinese gold farmer is in a single-player venue, how does he transfer his gold to other players then pray tell?
     
  18. Mishri

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    he switches to friends-play online, transfers gold to his gold mule who doesn't farm. His gold mule is still also only ever in friends play online, so if you buy gold from him he has to add you to his friends list. He will tell you where to meet him (safe place like a town that he never leaves).
     
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  19. Violation Clauth

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    I actually chatted with GMs while botting in UO... they didn't care unless you were unattended... so I would start my macro scripts up and wait for a good chat when they appeared... I always like getting the days count of kicked/suspended/banned players who were actually AFK macroing ;)
     
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  20. Mingo

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    --I need to study this matter. I was under the impression that when you played the "stand alone" version, your avatar and all it's belongings STAYED in the "stand alone" world.
     
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