How will these MMO plagues be dealt with?

So there are two things that happen in every MMO.

Spammers/Goldsellers
Bots

They are directly connected as the bots farm the gold for the sellers to sell. Even without tab targeting, bot creators like viperbot that use the data on your pc's RAM to identify where enemies are in the game world, your hp/mp levels etc shouldn't have much of an issue creating a bot for SotA.

Does anyone know if there is going to be a bot/spammer report system or actual software in place to prevent gameplay automation?

 

This is an excellent question, especially considering how bad it was in UO with programs such as EasyUO and Razor. I just don't understand the point in using these things, doesn't it ruin the game experience for that person too?

 

I imagine the majority of people doing it are doing it for some monetary value and not for the enjoyment of the game. Those that are doing it to progress or become in-game "rich" probably need to find a new way to get their dopamine fix.

 

Yeah the gold sellers are doing it strictly for money, I was more talking about people who are doing it to quickly advance or something. Like the people who would script mining in UO and then once they had enough resources to legendary blacksmith they would script that too... I just don't see why is all, you're taking away most of the game. P.S. mining was my favorite part of UO, could do it for hours lol

 

You will have cheaters in every video game. It is the nature of the beast. It sucks.

 

I hope that with a smaller tight-knit community who's vigilant, the behavior could be self policed by the players. The only thing better than that is a systematic solution. I haven't heard much about it yet.

 

Chris discussed a bit of it but they don't want to give away their secrets.

Even Blizzard has trouble with bots/gold sellers. With a massive amount of resources to combat it they still only catch a small part of the bots.

So, when we ask what are they going to do about it, we also should ask; how do they impact your gameplay? Spamming chat? yes that is annoying, luckily this game is supposed to have no chat, you can only hear what people near you are saying. The tells could still be an issue, but if there is no global look up of other characters that should help too. (It's one reason I don't want API's that let you track player info, the less tools you give the spammers/botters the better, even if it is less legitimate tool usage).


Botters hurting gameplay? Yes they can, if they farm everything in an area with macros so fast you can't compete that is an issue, I've seen it in every online game going back to muds. Best solution is a reporting system along with whatever bot detection tools they want.

 

The reason why it happens in every game is that silly people support the gold sellers/spammers and what they earn in WoW is enough to get them to go to every new game and see if it will be a lively market there too. So, if they do appear make sure you don't support them and ignore them and they will go away when they aren't making any money.

 

Ah yes, but I think the biggest impact is to the economy. If a few players say.. bot a monster 24/7 that drops diamonds. They then vendor those diamonds for millions of gold and buy everything from every player vendor in the game. Now every player has tons of gold and nothing to sell. The bottom falls out of the economy and poof... 1mm gold iron swords.

 

The souliton is simple.
Open PvP everywhere + full loot - no bot mining.

 

Gold sellers will never be stopped but no global chat, no global, regional or local auction houses, and no ability to send items and gold globally instead relying on the player based vendor system will help keep gold sellers not as in your face as other games.

Bots unfortunately will be quite rampant still as tab targeting along with keeping the optional traditional "locked" ability hotbar makes it extremely easy manipulate the game for any basic bot. Bots will occur but the location based player to player or player to player vendor trade that is required to sell gold, it may help lower the demand.

 

The goal of bots isn't to impact economies, they don't want to devalue gold, they want to keep it rare so they can sell it. They may have billions in the bank compared to the thousands of normal players, but they dont want all their botting efforts wasted by causing inflation. They just want to sell it. They might have 1000 of a rare item/ingredient but they aren't flooding the market with them, they are charging $50 each for them.

Duplicators, beware of those that find easy wealth...

 

Again (because I noticed that nobody liked my previous post and thats an outrage) open pvp will solve all botting problems.
I myself would police all those bots (and the rest of the players, anyway).
It would be a wonderful time. Everyone I find in the woods would be accused of botting and executed immediately.

 

I will kill them.

 

That works two ways. Sure, you can "take their stuff" but so can they farm people and take their stuff and sell it.

That is not a solution, it is an easier opportunity to farm people, rather than MOBs or resource nodes by the bots/farmers/etc...

Especially if they multibox, or have rooms of farmers all gang up on people. Ganking is definitely not a good tradeoff.

 

Well how about this. Anyone who spams the same message more than once every five minutes (12 times an hour) gets flagged for open PVP and open looting regardless of location, and their character takes on a glowing red aura visually flagging them as targets, and it lasts for fifteen minutes. It would create an instant bounty on spammers, and a little mini-game for them to hide and for us to hunt them down.

 

And immediately all botters scale back their spam to 11 times an hour, becoming invisible once again.
This isn't a problem easily dealt with.
However what was said above is true. There isn't really a way to spam, and in game barriers on open trade will alleviate a lot of it. Otherwise just report and move on. It's seriously the best defense.

 

Make bot-finding a profession.. in game sleuths piecing together clues that lead to identifying a botter that game admin can deal with. Have a set reward for successfully stopping a bot. Perhaps the reward could be a percentage of all resources looted by the botter. I know... not a straight forward solution, but maybe a concept that people smarter than me could explore

 

I think we have a hard enough time spotting people who have multiple forum accounts let alone people spamming gold in game..

Many will play SPO and farm without worrying about anyone even seeing them...I'm curious at how they will combat that.

 

You won't spot them.

Single Player Online.