Recent Bans for Botting and Exploiting

I truly hope these bans apply to the player and not just the account.

"Hey, I have a Duke+ level pledge, but I only cheated when I was logged on to my throwaway steam account!"

Botting and cheating really boils my pee, and the community is better off without these individuals - 'pillars' or otherwise.

Breaches of the EULA should remove access to the game, not just the account

 

Botting should always be a perma ban.

Macros are not the same thing as running a bot program

The one bug that they should have rolled some players skill levels back was Mastercrafting. There was a 3+ day window where ill gotten GMs happened with almost no mats.

Finding an exploit is one thing, and perhaps replicating it, but abusing it after is when it becomes a punishable offense.

 

I grind about 12 hours a day most days or more since i van because I have a work from home remote job....so I end of getting banned over alot of my efforts that i am putting in to this game and my 20k i intvested in this game will cause this oklahoma boy a road trip across that red river .

 

I have to get smarter about the differences. I've always thought that a macro was exactly what a bot is. I can see using macros to streamline the same repetitive things avatars have to say to NPCs during interactions, not really an exploit since I'm actually playing the game... but a macro designed to loop a scene harvesting or mining is an exploitation bot since I could just turn it on and go get some coffee or take a trip to the beach while my inventory just filled up.

 

Bots have lots of subroutines for healing, movement, fighting and looting.

You could loop macro a single node for harvesting. Not very productive though for the risk.

Playtime is only a flag, and there should be ingame GMs to observe behavior to verify. Pretty easy. Just remove mobs or nodes or PK and see the change in behavior

 

With that sort of context bots should certainly be getting instant permabans.

 

And you reported this immediately ?

 

@Duke Richard VonHaley So, are you saying you got banned or what exactly ?

 

Does your employer know they're paying you to play Shroud of the Avatar?

 

if they do.. are they hiring?

 

and if he's a self proprietary contractor, I hope he wouldn't mind sharing some contacts. Delegate tasks = more time to play.

 

I don't think you are alone with not being "with it" on all things tech. Now when *I* think of somebody botting I get the mental image of someone having a script or w/e written that automates everything they do. Mind you.. I am no where near the front of the bus with my understanding of these things. While it may seem dumb for the super savvy crowd I think a good official ( Hi @Chris @Berek ) written policy outlining the differences (this is your char on bot/this is your char legally using available tech) in definitively specific terms could be helpful going forward. Of course as I have previously stated there are those who are cheating and they know they're cheating and we should boot them all to some corner in a 3rd world zone to panhandle for gold. On the other hand there are those who might want to make use of legal tech (newsflash...ppl do not buy gaming gear... such as the stuff we see advertised in Sota itself) to write emails faster.
Some may say.. "it's in the EULA you dweeb" to which I say...if I read this one it'd be the first in my life.

Oh as an aside (slight hijack here) it might be nice if I could refine my stuff....like ore and wood) in quantities > 20

 

This reminds me of a true story. Some years ago, Microsoft Germany gave a guy a community award for answering thousands of questions related to Excel in public forums. The other Excel awardees were up in arms, claiming that it was absolutely impossible for one single person to answer so many questions. They suspected that a team of three or four people were posting under the same name, not leaving any questions for other people to answer. It turned out that the guy in question really was only one guy. He was a network systems specialist consultant who was being paid big money by a bank to be physically present on the bank premises just in case there was a server failure. He had nothing to do, so he spent 8+ hours a day in the Excel newsgroup.

I am sure that all the players who are saying they are able to grind so many resources because they play at work all day have a similar situation.

 

I can. Multi task my friend..so as lomg as my projects hit thier milesones and and the email and phones get answered and addressed then there is no conflict.
That is why i was able to help back this game.... friend

 

I reported it immediately and many times after! If I find you cheating, you bet I'll report you too!

 

No excuses, are you not understanding Persistence? Find a exploit > report it, don't abuse it, if you cant tell the difference, then a ban might just what you need anyways!

 

No i have not been bann..what i am saying it woukd be sad for people to put in many hours of game play and since maybe some people can put in alot of hours ...such as myself...i would be very piss to find myself banned because I had played to much in a day and collected to much..per a dev quota.

I think that would go for most players that play their azz off.

 

In the past, there were several occurrences of legitimate players who got their accounts blocked due to the false positive on the auto-ban system. It isn't a big deal if it's during the business hour while the staffs are available to review and unblock the account. It is a PITA if that happened on Friday night while these folks would like to allocate their time to play the game, but can't due to the false positive suspension and there is no one available to unflag that.

It's admirable have a bunch of armchair social justice warriors to try to detect botters and get them punished, but at the same time there need to be due process to ensure that dedicated players are not suffered from this and turned the whole incident into witch hunts. These are things that would suck the huge passion out of legit people who spend many hours into the game.

 

asking the important questions lol

 

I'm pretty sure a "DEDICATED" player wont be twisted if their account is on hold while being checked. Id rather have a slight delay in my game play than allow a true exploiter to rip the system on off hours. Besides, you assumption that these Armchair Social Justice Warriors are turning people in is kinda moot. Most of the exploitation in this game happens in single player instances. Why would someone openly exp0loit in multi-player when they can easily log into Friends or single and play alone.

Besides, your initial statement was about the Auto-Ban system that kicks in AUTOMATICALLY, not from a report. And again I say it a small price to pay to assure that the system is not super exploited during hours when the Devs might not be around. In the future, there may be GM's or some system where there will be a 24 hour presence to investigate.

When I read post like this, I have to ask myself why I'm reading it.. I look at the poster and wonder what his motive is.