Easing the bot flooding

[LalaRu]

Assuming true that bots comes from free trials, it will be worth of consideration adding one or more servers dedicated to free trials only, and datacenter-wide content as duties or other, restricted to work only between those servers. Sort of a separated datacenter, we may call it.

Then, when the player will choose to pay the subscription, give him/her a free server transfer to the standard, unrestricted servers.

About the friends you can get there, if them don't sub, they don't play anymore after free time expired, and if they sub, you all together can decide where to go with your free ticket to another server. So, no missing friends either, and we all are spared from all free trials bots pestering us. win-win.

[Rinuko]

Free time no longer expires though. They can now play as long they want, just only level to a certain level, lv30 iirc

[BillyKaplan]

You're assuming a very limited social network to be constructed within this hypothetical server, if you think you can just tell them all to move somewhere else together. The worst case scenario is that they all want to move to the same server, and then either that server becomes congested overnight, or the community is fragmented after all which you assume is something that won't happen. Another case is that one group whose trial ended moves, the next group wants to follow, but somewhere in between that server became locked and that second group can't go where they wanted to. It's a situation which likely means some of those players won't continue to be subscribed for much longer.
Letting people choose which server to create their new characters on is one of the few natural ways in which this is circumvented.

[Zojha]

I'm afraid that a large amount of bots doesn't actually come from free-trial accounts, but regular players that simply don't feel like playing along with the classic reward baiting design of MMOs. Instead of forcing themselves to the boring grind to get a reward, they use bots to reap the rewards while effectively skipping the grind.

Hence why SE is rather hesitant to just ban them. They are paying customers and they don't want to lose the revenue. The free trial is already extremely limited as is.

[LalaRu]

Free time no longer expires though

Oh, well, good for who wanna take his time to feel the game, but at least bots can stay and pester only their servers.v

I'm afraid that a large amount of bots doesn't actually come from free-trial accounts, but regular players that simply don't feel like playing along with the classic reward baiting design of MMOs. Instead of forcing themselves to the boring grind to get a reward, they use bots to reap the rewards while effectively skipping the grind.

Hence why SE is rather hesitant to just ban them. They are paying customers and they don't want to lose the revenue. The free trial is already extremely limited as is.

I see SE is banning accounts in number of thousands per week, will not think people not banned just because have an active sub. My assumption is bots coming most from free accounts than paying subs. But the real numbers are only in SE's hands and I guess they will not deliver to us these stats.

[BillyKaplan]

Oh, well, good for who wanna take his time to feel the game, but at least bots can stay and pester only their servers.

And hinder the new players whose fresh gaming experience will be filled with only those bots who'll continue to multiply in that newbie server. Also not a good idea.

[Lastelli]

Assuming true that bots comes from free trials

That is probably a wrong assumption. Anyway, as long as bots don't do anything that effectively hinders other players' enjoyment of the game, I personally think it's fine, even though I never used a bot myself.

I mean, if someone wants to level another job but doesn't want to waste dozens of hours spamming pltd/dungeons, I think it's fine to use a bot. It's not like this causes any problem for other players. However, people that use bots for crafting and flood the market with several 99x stacks of infusions and other things...that is another story. But I suspect that most crafters are using a bot nowadays since crafting rotations are so stupidly long and time consuming.