Bots, is anything really ever going to be done about them?

[WinglessSeraphim]

A lot of the buyers are relatively young and don't really understand all the ramifications. They're too used to their parents handing them money so they can get what they want. So they want X item, X item costs Y gil, they buy Y gil from a RMT vendor so they can purchase the item thinking it's the normal way to do things.

Didja come up with this all on your own or do you have something to back this up?

[Saraide]

They're not doing much about botting because it's an expensive arm's race that they know they will lose.

[Merrigan]

No, there's not much to do. Almost every company has tried, and they've all failed. The closest we've come to a solution was probably the wow token... which itself had disastrous results for the fanbase. Nor is it a question of companies not doing their job, given that bots are genuinely dangerous to the health of a game (and require a great deal of work in terms of banning and so on).

For bots, as for many other things, the only hope is that nobody, absolutely nobody, buys their services. Of course, that's impossible: there will always be customers for that. I wouldn't even be surprised if most of them were just sporadic buyers, convinced that "well, once is not that bad", when they exceptionnally purchased some gils. Except they join the thousands who thought "well, once, it's not so bad", and contributed to this parallel market.

[Jojoya]

Didja come up with this all on your own or do you have something to back this up?

I've read past discussions in game forums where players would talk about why they choose to purchase game currencies and whether they stopped or still do it. Most of those who said they did it once and never again said they did it because they were young and were used to buying what they wanted. They didn't realize at the time that it was considered the wrong thing to do.

Then there were those who said they didn't care and would keep using RMT because the penalties didn't mean anything to them. Lose one account to a ban, they'll just start another and then use RMT to get their new account to where their old account had been.

So those are some of the experiences shared by players who have engaged in RMT. Were some of them lying? Could be but most seemed sincere and honest enough so there was no reason not to believe their stories.

Have you read different explanations of why people engage in RMT or do you have your own personal experience to share?

The closest we've come to a solution was probably the wow token... which itself had disastrous results for the fanbase.

The WoW token became a problem because they gave it a value outside of WoW and uncapped the number of tokens you could buy on the AH. If they had left the token to only being exchanged for WoW game time/paid character services or left a cap on how many could be purchased off the AH annually, it wouldn't have blown up the way it did.

Then again, limiting the use might have left it less competitive against RMT. Blizzard would have been able to make a little money off players who wanted to buy gold but didn't want to go through third party RMT but they may not have attracted the interest of those already buying it from RMT.

[Merrigan]

The WoW token became a problem because they gave it a value outside of WoW and uncapped the number of tokens you could buy on the AH. If they had left the token to only being exchanged for WoW game time/paid character services or left a cap on how many could be purchased off the AH annually, it wouldn't have blown up the way it did.

Then again, limiting the use might have left it less competitive against RMT. Blizzard would have been able to make a little money off players who wanted to buy gold but didn't want to go through third party RMT but they may not have attracted the interest of those already buying it from RMT.[/QUOTE]

Of course, we could have imagined healthier ways of implementing this token, but the idea itself is disastrous. Playing time IS money, there's no difference to be made; the fact is that someone else is paying for you, and more expensively at that than someone who pays for their subscription in the traditional way.

This compensation system, which prides itself on being falsely free for those who have time / know the game well, is what lies at the root of all the economic atrocities we currently see in micro-transaction games (mobile, in particular). ‘You don't have to pay, someone else will’. What isn't made clear is that this ‘exchange’, which at first sight seems to be beneficial for everyone, involves two dynamics:

- The sale of tokens will be encouraged... This means that as soon as they appear, keeping them in a ‘healthy’ market is a losing battle. Some have noted that Blizzard seems to be encouraging boosts of late. One wonders why.
- The imbalance between two fanbases, those who pay, and those who don't. The equality between these two playerbases cannot be established; some games fully assume it (mobile games), others hide (wow) behind their token by claiming not to be ‘pay-to-win’, whereas the purchase of boosts via token is the very definition of pay-to-win.

[tsuchii]

They deal with them in masses. You can mostly see them during updates/post-maintenance.

[Asako]

It's fun to break their scripts. In Coerthus you can see them teleport into a quest where they have to kill a few aevis mobs. As a Healer or PLD you can grab the aggro and drag them far away resetting them. As the bots don't actually move and only teleport they are unable to reset the quest by leaving and reentering the spawning quest ring until whoever the botter is comes and does it themselves to reset the script. I remeber having about 25 bots stuck there one day.

[Lucyfurr1988]

This is intended to be a serious discussion about them. They still seem to be everywhere, vending bots, market board pricing bots, crafting bots, gathering bots, etc.

Is anything ever going to be done about them or is it some unwritten rule that they will always be there and you either ignore them or perhaps Square actually wants them because they're more paid subs which feeds into their marketing about the millions of subscribers?

They're not hard to locate in the crafting, gathering, and market board related iterations.

Heck you could probably auto suspend any new account that /say 5gold.com + some other key words.

report them and move on. bots are a problem in every MMO. SE does remove RMT vendors quite often but theres nothing stopping them just creating new accounts.

[Arkdra]

This is intended to be a serious discussion about them. They still seem to be everywhere, vending bots, market board pricing bots, crafting bots, gathering bots, etc.

Is anything ever going to be done about them or is it some unwritten rule that they will always be there and you either ignore them or perhaps Square actually wants them because they're more paid subs which feeds into their marketing about the millions of subscribers?

They're not hard to locate in the crafting, gathering, and market board related iterations.

Heck you could probably auto suspend any new account that /say 5gold.com + some other key words.

Find me a single online multiplayer game that at some point had a serious botting for gold-selling issue that ever managed to fix it.

[Lemuel81]

SE is constantly banning Bots and they do a pretty good job of it. They do it mostly in waves. The hard truth is, there is no way to keep bots and money sellers out of an MMO. There never was and never will be. Just ignore them and report them.