Harvest bots

All of my toons are on PVP servers. I see what you are saying though about PVE servers.
The lady who mentioned being reported as a possible bot and being confronted by an in-game GM made me wonder if a GM might "go undercover" and actually join the guild I reported.
After all I not only reported the botter but his guild. If an undercover GM were to join that guild and bust it from the inside, that would be neat. I'd get a big kick out of that. I can see how that would take months to accomplish, but it would be worth it.

Spyderbite@Venekor wrote:

Agree completely. I also work in tech and have dealt with these issues for over a dozen years now. First ones that were big were scripts use to emulate web surfing back in the early nineties when there were companies that would literally pay you for the time you actively surfed the web using their advertising add-ons and/or by the click through for their ads. They lasted less than a year due to unattended scripting.

As for PvP and PvE - I kinda disagree there. Yes, you can farm bots in PvP but quite honestly I created a toon on nagafen recently and found out within a week I absolutely hate PvP. The reason - gank squads and level lockers. Tier 2 SUCKED, I cant tell you how many level 14 toons I ran into who were wearing fabled and such. I found the same to be true in T3. In addition, it was nigh impossible to find a guild that was looking or would accept anyone lower than level 65. To compound it I found that groups of the same faction would screw you in your own city in the T1-T2 zones by using mentored toons to slaughter everything in sight and would pull entire areas and not let you join the group. So needless to say I found the drama factor of PvP to be about 10 times what we endure on the exchange servers for PvE. Right, wrong or indifferent, if PvP was the only choice I would not be playing this game. Just a personal choice but I dont need to feel like I am going through college hazing every day over and over and over for weeks or months on end until I become so cynical I feel the need to subject someone else to it because I had to endure it.

/shrug

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

I hear ya. And it isn't for everyone. But, I wanted to play devil's advocate for a bit. Because, let's face it.. scripting and farming didn't exist when there was unpredictable risk and challenge in the games we play today. That's why the farmers and bots on the PvP servers are so far and few between.

So enough of the historical ethics lessons.

For those of you who want scripters, farmers and bots gone yesterday.. you have about a 2-3 year wait before a technology is developed that can analyze a players movements and determine with at least a 50% accuracy that its a bot and ban it on site.

Until then.. type /report and let CS do their job. Beyond that.. well.. the tears don't speed up the process.

Spyderbite@Venekor wrote:

Realistically this is VERY optimistic. The biggest issues are simply the mechanics of the game. You use a mouse and keyboard to play the game. As long as there is a way to emulate those actions scripting will always be around.

Truthfully the issue is not in the mechanics, its in the business model. If botting were not lucrative it would not exist. IF no one was buying what botters were selling they would have no reason to acquire the product in the first place.

SOE makes money from every botting account. It is not in their best interest to ban accounts and disallow new ones based on IP address, Credit Card usage, billing address, etc. If SOE truly wanted to protect its subscriber base from REPEAT OFFENDERS it certainly could by requiring some verifiable information and using that to monitor accounts and violations but again, its not a technology issue its a business model issue.

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

Actually, a recent interview with Smed noted that SOE loses tons of money to farmers/botters who chargeback (deny the credit card charge when it comes in), forcing SOE to not only reimburse the credit card company, but pay higher fees for causing the CC company grief. Lemmee find a link.

Interview: http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14...n-smedley-pt-2/

Discussion: http://forums.station.sony.com/stat..._id=11500008077

A quote: "We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it's getting extremely expensive for us."

Calthine wrote:

Well maybe they will finally take some action then. The problem from a business perspective is quite simple but isolates the "game card" users. You require a credit card to play, period. That credit card has to have a verifiable address and name on the card for billing and security code. All information should be tracked and associated with accounts. When a banning violation occurs all accounts belonging to that set of information are banned as well and none of the information can be used to ever create another account.

A more broad sweeping action is to deny by IP or regional location. All IP domains are associated within a geographic region. If you find a certain region is not profitable but generally creates problematic or costly issues you can deny access to your systems from any system within that ip range. We do it all the time in coporate america. Spam is our biggest battle but we identify countries and regions that generate large amounts of spam and where we do not conduct business and systematically disallow email and network access to our systems from those locations.

Again, this comes into SOE knowing its customer base and such. I am sure they have the data to perform such analysis but yes, they are a global company so there are different concerns but none the less, it will now be interesting to see IF they take any action.

I am actually proud that I got an entire guild banned about 1 year and a half ago. I was in Sinken Sands harvesting....but long story short, I got wind that these guys weren't behind the keyboard.
My best friend is from China and I had him chat with these guys in chinese. Basic gist of the story is they took over a dead Guild and formed it into a plat guild for the sole reason of selling plat to a specific website (I wont state what the site is). I then pretended that I wanted to work for them in exhange for some rare items.
I developed a rapport over the next month and took screenshots of every conversation and transaction that was done. I had proof for everything. Later, i turned it all in to SOE and in about 2 weeks every single player from the guild was gone. I then left the guild and went my merry way.

Bot /= Farmer. PvP servers can at least take some action against them. Farmers will actually get tired of ... er ... being farmed. I've seen them group up to kill the guys killing them. Kinda funny. Bots, well, if you kill them enough, their human monitors will log. There must be some sort of "Just died 20 times in 30 minutes" alarm. After they camp, come back 5 minutes later and kill them again. If you're pretty sure that they're bots, share the killing. Announce to the zone the botters name, level, title (yeah, some actually need that motivation) and location. It's the little things in life that help make it worth living.

Artemiz@The Bazaar wrote:

As Smedley himself mentions in the interview Calthine linked, these folks use stolen credit card information to buy new accounts. So Joe decides to buy himself some nice platinum to get a shiny new horse, well now he has a horse, but the folks he buys the platinum from have his credit card details, and use it to buy themselves a bunch of new accounts. The actual people selling the platinum may never even use a credit card of their own. And yes, the stolen credit card details can be banned -- bye bye Joe also, and all the accounts they bought, but in the mean time they also sold platinum to Sally, Fred, and John and have 50 more accounts still unbanned, and that number keeps increasing every time some other idiot buys platinum. And of course, when Joe, Sally, Fred, and John enquire why they were banned and discover they've been paying for numerous accounts they don't own, they reverse the charges, SOE lose lots of money, and everybody is unhappy except the platinum sellers who by now have probably picked up a dozen more credit cards to use instead.

If it were a simple solution, don't you think it would have been solved by now? There is every incentive for both company and players to be 100% against it, and we have some very, very smart people around here. They don't talk about what they're doing because every scrap of information can potentially help the plat sellers avoid being caught, but despite the silence there is stuff being done, and the entire industry is trying to find solutions.

But it ain't that simple. If only it were.

It also isn't really relevant to the tradeskill forum, however, and since this discussion seems to be getting a bit off track and going in irrelevant directions, I'm going to lock this thread. Those interested in learning more about the challenges facing the industry regarding platinum sales can certainly do a little searching around Google and the community sites and learn a lot more about it, if you are so inclined.