27,000+ Accounts Banned This Week

[Drakhon]

16,000 on Monday
11,000 on Wednesday

All for botting or being involved with RMT transactions.

[Warseth]

I don't get it... how can you prove someone Paid for Kinah and ban them. That i find a bit BS on NC's PR department thing there.

Now I have noticed on Thanksgiving hardly a bot around Bel...or a bunch of those who farm for sales to RMT people over seas were on Thanksgiving break.

Seriously find that to be an exaggeration.

What ever...NC soft can fluff up there PR front all they like... if it makes people get off the harping "bots made me want to stop playing" blabbering.

Side Note: I know someone personally that got caught up in that first ban wave you mentioned but last week. And he doesn't bot at all. He has absolutely no reason to lie to myself and the other person we have as a mutual friend.

The claim by NC. He was reported by very many players for "bot like" Behavior. WTF? I would like to see how many of those 27,000 are unjustified ..non verified ...lack of evidence having bad bans like that.

No Game Guard = needs human intervention to verify if bot...by tells and asking player to respond and perfomr some general actions to prove they are not AFK botting. They can't stop Monitored botting since you are there.....

Packet sniffer and Radar cheats using them...they can find those im sure by the way i read they catch sniffers nowadays on a different forums. Still hard to catch.

Simply...They need to get a Blizzard Warden up..."Game Guard joke" is not on anyway...even that has a work around...but still ....without that I dont see how they will catch people without a GM physically catching people.

So if I trade a item to someone who is caught as a RMT seller and they give me Kinah does that mean I get a ban to since we did business? I think not...if so Frick Aion and the horse it rode in on.

Sorry so hostile but seeing someone legit play (*who is absolutely not one to lie to me*)get banned....and knowing someone very personal that does use a BOT to farm and grind never get caught....I find this irritating ...

Feel like they are feeding the community huge helpings of Horse Crap with this latest info you posted.

[Gisli]

The number of false positives (people banned that should not have been) is an important question. If there are more than a tiny number, that will lead to big problems. Hopefully it is very rare, but there's no way to know until the feedback starts coming in.

That aside, I think this approach of mass wave banning is fundamentally the wrong way to go. It is entirely geared toward PR, not toward effective control of RMT. The only effective way to control RMT is to have humans in the loop that stamp on it immediately.

Look at it this way. Let's say that there are once-a-month bannings. Assume further the best-case scenario posssible: no false positives, and nearly all bots are caught. What happens then is that the botters can spend a day or two (botting 24/7) to level up to farming level. Then they get nearly a month of effective use. So the overhead is probably less than 10%, easily absorbed as a cost of doing business.

On the other hand, I think that a single GM working 8 hours/day could clear pretty much every bot from a server, or even multiple servers, with competent tools. Just read the /block logs to do a quick check on spammers. Probably could clear 2 spammers/minute easily. Follow auto-botting reports to check up on the activity of bots. The obvious ones could probably be spotted in a minute or two. Less obvious ones could be spot-checked for a minute or so every few hours over a day or so. 10 minutes total time max. I think that a single GM could bring the half-life for spammers down to an hour, and the half-life for botters to a few days. This makes the overhead something like 50% or more. That's enough to put them out of business. And it wouldn't cost that much. I bet GMs could be hired cheap, or even on a volunteer basis. And the protocols could be made so that there are no false positives.

Yes, the bots might learn to make themselves less obvious if they had to. But if they did... then they wouldn't be a problem anyway, would they? Really, botters/spammers are really only a problem if they (1) spam, or (2) take up your hunting points. If they aren't in your way, and they don't pester you, then they don't really affect you.

[Drakhon]

@Warseth:
If you received 3 million kinah from an account that sold one of the bandages that a character starts with for 3 mil to an account known to bot (that's often how they transfer funds), then I'd say it's pretty damn reasonable to conclude that you just bought kinah.

The truth is that, at least according to NCSoft, they have taken several weeks to compile the data necessary to verify these bans and require multiple pieces of evidence to perform such verification. For some reason, you assume that that involves no direct observation by GMs. Why?


@Gisli:
At this point they really had to do some big waves to "show that they mean it", for lack of a better way of describing it. I don't think that the events of this week actually indicate that their plan is just to do large scale monthly bans (or similar) as you've described. However, it is possible and I agree that it would not be particularly effective.

Bots are a problem if they impact legitimate players in any way, even if they don't get in the way of you completing your quest or getting your grind on. I would venture to say that even effects that many might consider positive (such as lower prices on Ore, for instance) are actually not good - it would be very hard (if not impossible) to design an economic system that can effectively support both people who do and people who don't buy money, at least in this kind of context.

By the way, there's no such thing as zero false positives.

[Gisli]

Here is one effect from bots. You can decide whether it is good, bad, or indifferent.

There is a certain item that I know how to craft that has a pretty high sell rate to the vendor. If I can buy the various components at the AH for cheap enough, then it is worth my while to buy them, make the item, and make a profit at the vendor. I bet there are quite a few crafted items just like this, but I haven't done enough research to discover too many yet. Anyway, I watch the AH periodically for the necessary ingredients for this item, and buy in bulk when their price is low enough. When times are good, I make a fair living from this. (My other main source of income is gathering certain key items.)

When the ban wave hit, my source of cheap ingredients suddenly disappeared entirely. Its probably going to be made up in sales of gathered items whose price is up, so its not like I'm suddenly losing a lot of income. But it is interesting what the effects are. Basically, the Botters were giving me "free" kinah (well, relatively low time investment kinah, anyway).

[Drakhon]

On the surface, that seems nice and it was certainly useful for you to have an easy source of kinah. However, what you made was a money generator that created kinah in a way that was not intended by the people who designed the economy. You might say that you could have killed mobs for kinah and vendor loot drops to get the money, but you didn't do that. Your system was more time efficient or more effort efficient than the "standard" methods, but either way you increased the money supply by more than you otherwise would have. I don't blame you and I would likely have done the same thing in your place, but that doesn't mean it was good for the health of the game.

Based on my observations, when farmers sell mats on the broker, they don't tend to really do an economic analysis. Rather, they just price them a bit lower than the going price at the time as long as it (presumably) meets some minimum price. Therefore, prices are still largely determined by players, but players that are aware of the huge money supply that's out there due to other players buying kinah. To paraphrase Zahasha, "put it up for a ridiculous price, some kinah buyer will buy it". Prices of limited-supply items (like crafted weapons) go up with the money supply and the rarer mats (like flux) follow. With farmers, they get to the point that someone who doesn't buy kinah has a very hard time purchasing a reasonable quantity of these items. I've encountered this with my Expert Weaponsmith quest, though part of that is the limited number of high level players that are out there to acquire the mats I need.

Money sinks (both mandatory and frivolous) are necessary in a game economy because they cause currency to have value. At the same time, there must be money generators and pretty much every MMO does this in the form of quest rewards and loot from mobs. When an unintended money generator (or sink, for that matter) is created, it throws the design off.

[Gisli]

I agree that the unexpected throws things out. The points I was making are
* the effects of bots are unexpected, and
* its not obvious who gets the benefits from these things, but even people who don't buy kinah sometimes benefit in unexpected ways.

One thing I can say for certain. Bots and and RMT transactions are not driving the price of high-end fluxes up. If anything, they might bring them down. Clearly, right at this moment there are more people hitting the expert craft quests than there is high-level population to generate the drops.

[Drakhon]

Ah, but if the prices are higher for products or drops that you would buy for purposes other than making money (like better gear for your character) due to RMT-based inflation, are you really benefiting from your bot-driven vendor-sold profit?

I only gave the example of fluxes because I've been dealing with them lately, but you're quite wrong about RMT not driving the prices up. It's certainly far from the only force, but do you really think that people who haven't bought kinah or found a way to make money from those who have (such as selling crafted armor for a ton) are the ones buying most of the fluxes sold at 220k+ each? Eventually if more bots get to the upper 40's the price will come down as fluxes are not a particularly uncommon drop, but that doesn't mean that they weren't a major cause of the problem in the first place.

It's a very complex dynamic and that's why you see so many conflicting views. Botting drops the price on things that can be farmed, are fairly common (ore, some greens) and are within the level range of the existing bots. However, the inflation botting causes by increasing the money supply boosts the prices on things that can't be/aren't botted (crafted items), are beyond the level range of the bots or are otherwise just rare (blue/orange drops).

[Gisli]

That is a reasonable hypothesis, that common items drop in price, while exotic items inflate in price. Overall, it appears to me that the amount of cash brought into the system by bots balances the amount of goods brought into the system (which does make sense as well). But there must be some strange edge effects.

In any case, we're seeing an interesting experiment right now, with the supply of bot items suddenly cut off for the moment. It might take a few days for the economy to shake itself out. Of course, a month from now we'll be right back to where we were last week.

[Kelan]

Since that wave of bans, it sure seems hard to find certain items on the broker now... especially ores and fluxes. Yesterday there was only 1 stack of Adamantium for sale on the entire broker! It almost seems like part of the economy was based on their being botters, assuming they would always add a constant supply of fluxes and mats and other items to the market.

I sorta come and go on my opinions on it all, but the bots farming entire areas of mobs have definitely impacted my play at times and it does get very frustrating trying to compete for the completion of quests. We even quit WoW 5 months after release and never went back because the bots were farming every outdoor 50-60 hunting area at the time and there was nothing to hunt in between dungeon runs. With specific mobs dropping specific drops there, that was the end of it for Islila and I. So, showing a response and doing something about it can impact subscriptions for some people.

Hopefully they will get a person at least per server to combat some of the farming they do. It wouldn't take much, as you mentioned, to clean them out quickly. It really is quite obvious when they are running programs to auto-farm/harvest stuff. Like, when you tag a mob when they are running to it and they instantly switch direction on a perfect bee-line to the next closest one, or part of their pattern.