I am seeing a lot of action regarding bots and banning in the past few months. I have to say that the GM team is doing a relatively good job on this matter.
Recently I understood how the GMs are checking if a player is legit and I can't stop wondering .... why the hell would a GM need to log in-game in order to check on somebody's behaviour?!?!?!? This really amazes me. The GM team of NCsoft acts like a GM team of a private server which uses hacked files and has a great lack of knowledge on programming and developing tools.
Imagine how hard it is to log into a server and start checking accounts one by one if you have 2000 or more online players at the moment.
Yes, it is not hard for us (the players) to detect all the bots because we see them all the time but imagine how time consuming it would be for a GM to get in-game and track a party of players for hours before he takes action.
That is what amazes me. Why, why are they doing this when they have full control of the servers and have a development team there?!?!?!?!?!
Here is what I would do if I were in the GM's shoes.
First and foremost if one wants to defeat his enemies he should get to know them. So... what would I do to get to know my enemies?!?!?
Simple! I would get a copy of all the bot programs I can get my hands on and I would try them on a test server. I would go and see what the bot programs are capable of and when I get to know them reeeeaaaaalllyyyyyy well I would sit down and think for a while. How can I get evidence that somebody is using one such tool?!?!?
Well, what is the thing that we, the players, use in order to determine if the party which we are observing is a bot party or another legal party?
If you ask them questions, they may answer or they may chose not to answer to you. That doesn't make them bots.
So what are we doing?
We are searching for patterns in the behaviour of the party members! That is right folks, the bots are following patterns in their actions.
Cool, now that we know the botted characters are following patterns in their behaviour, what can we do about it?
oh, I just now remembered that I have my server logs. Cool, cool, cool!
But it takes ages to search through them :(:(:(:( But I have a development team here!!!! OMG!
I would ask my development team to make me a tool which takes the actions of a single character for a given period of time and put them into a separate file (it is an easy to write program, takes me 20min to write it with my poor knowledge of programming languages) and after that I would ask them to write another tool for me which draws charts omg! correct folks charts!.
I would ask to have the time on the X axis and buffs for example on the Y axis.
What do I need charts for? Ooooh, here is the one million dollar answer! I need those charts in order to see if I have bots here or not!
A bot buffer buffs his bot friends on a regular basis. You would say that normal players do so too but with one major difference - the bots are doing it so sharply every 15/16/17 or 20 minutes with a difference of 1 sec that no real player can achieve even if he is using a chronometer.
You can put a lot of parameters on the Y axis. I just gave an example of one such parameter.
Now, as I have a tendency of being lazy I don't want to check all the characters on my server one by one, I would ask my development team to make this tool a bit sofisticated, automated and user friendly. I would ask them to make it draw charts for all characters, check the charts by itself and only send to my e-mail those that have the above mentioned patterns in their behaviour.
BINGOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! We just got all the botters on our server!
All rights reserved (c) ApaMuc 2009 (lol) - That is a joke!
Why, why are they doing this when they have full control of the servers and have a development team there?!?!?!?!?!
1. They don't have a development team, that team is in Korea. The NCNA GMs are only using the methods and tools and follow the business procedures set up by the Koreans for the Koreans.
2. As for your actual idea, yes it is entirely possible to determine at least some bot-behavior from suitably made logs and carefully constructed queries. As to why this isn't done, see point #1.
@OP the same reason police in the real world don't put people in jail cause they look like criminals, drug dealers or whatever.
You miss that whole thing called burden of proof.
And we really don't need everybody with a lightbulb idea making a new this is how to stop boting !!!!ONEONEONEONE11111 thread. We ve heard it all before
It's not love for bots, it's people acting like the wheel needs to be reinvented if we want to ban all the bots. It's not all that complicated, get 1 guy and make it his job to patrol the servers 9 hours a day, all the bots will be gone within a week ... it's not like the l2 map is so huge :S
1. They don't have a development team, that team is in Korea. The NCNA GMs are only using the methods and tools and follow the business procedures set up by the Koreans for the Koreans.
ApaMuc was talking about analysing server logs, which is available for each of the server administrators. I don't think they would need any korean developer for this.
@OP the same reason police in the real world don't put people in jail cause they look like criminals, drug dealers or whatever.
You miss that whole thing called burden of proof.
In RL you can't monitor every entity and look for patterns, as it is available for you in the digital world of L2. You can't put a cop to every corner to look for drug dealers, but you can monitor every dwarf if it spoils only one type of mob, and if it does, then you can mark it. The next time the name pops up again, you can check throughly if it is using a bot program.
It's not love for bots, it's people acting like the wheel needs to be reinvented if we want to ban all the bots. It's not all that complicated, get 1 guy and make it his job to patrol the servers 9 hours a day, all the bots will be gone within a week ... it's not like the l2 map is so huge :S
As the OP pointed out there are less complicated and more accurate methods to weed out botters than to patrol 2000+ users.
Well lets take a look at my example here and tell me what you think. I know its hard to see the name there of the hero. But Saturday night for 3 hours we sat there deleveling our current hero on Devianne called DrakeVR. Taking a total of 350 Reputation Points from his clan before they were able to kick him out because he was on auto rez. From there we pked him and Rezed him another 78 times over the remaining coarse before someone got in contact with the owner he was being deleveled. Here is a link to my post on L2guru with links to video's hosted on Filefront.com and YouTube.com.
Of which I am absolutely sure NCSoft will do nothing, they can check the logs of him accepting rez one after another after another while never actually being at the PC. But will they? Nope they will do nothing. Currently he is back leeching afk in a Bot Group in DO was last night when I went to check although he was smart enough to uncheck the Auto Rez button.
Please tell me is NC Soft ever going to do anything, Nope because if they do something now they will lose to many customers and Lineage 2 will die. Currently Drakevr is "Petitioning" to get his Xp and Rep Points back because "Someone from not from the Orginal Account Owners IP Address logged on". I'm almost certain Drakevr will threaten to have people leave the game if he doesn't get it back etc and the GM's will reverse it which I think is complete bull. That lets us know that Botting and Auto Rezing is completely legal and nothing will be done. By our calculations he was 78 as per a friend in his clan and he was on his mainclass.
350 x .4% = 140% War Death
80 x 2% = 160% PK Death
Total of 300% at the minimal he lost in that 2 1/2 hour period we were killing him. No doubt he will petition us and try to get us banned as he was in Hero shout earlier this month telling everyone to petition us while we were in clan hall sitting there. So please tell me why I continue to play this game when all people do is bot to hero and keep botting only to lose nothing because they just gain it back fast. Or like Dr0b transfered to Bartz botted to 82 I hear purchased S80 and +15 HD w/150 Fire w/Foc for real money transfered back and is now ruling in Oly on his Titan because of his deep pocket book. Yep Love this game because Gm's actually do nothing about it even with proof like I have. They just say "Sorry we can't take that video as proof even though the logs back it up.
R3D3vil did you actually report him? As in go in the support section of the plaync site and write out a concise explanation along with links to your videos?
R3D3vil did you actually report him? As in go in the support section of the plaync site and write out a concise explanation along with links to your videos?
I just got to work 2 hours ago I haven't had the time, going to report him and call the PlayNC Phone line once I get home. I'm going the distance on this because its out right stupid and for them to Petition to get Exp back because they account share admit it, and laugh because GM's do this for them all the time is just outright stupid to people that actually take the time to show botters a lesson.
ApaMuc was talking about analysing server logs, which is available for each of the server administrators. I don't think they would need any korean developer for this.
For automatic testing, they do need a team of developers with very good understanding of what's going on inside. There is a lot of situations that could cause massive false positives if you are just automatically tracing for "a bot behavior".
Here is the Reference Number that I just posted the petition with on the support site. I almost garuntee that nothing will happen to this besides he gets his exp back and laughs at us for wasting our time deleveling him.
Thank you for reporting this incident to the Support Team.
We will investigate this report and review all available information and take any action determined to be necessary. To ensure the privacy of all of our customers, we hope you will understand that the Support Team will not be able to provide specific information regarding the outcome of this report. However, we would like to assure you that the Support Team takes these violations seriously and is doing everything within our means to eliminate botting from the game. We appreciate your help in making Lineage II a fair and enjoyable game.
In the future, you can also submit these reports using the bot reporting system. This will allows us to respond more quickly and will automatically provide us all of the necessary information to begin the investigation. To use the in-game bot reporting tool:
1. Target the suspected bot.
2. Click the “Actions” button.
3. Click the “Bot Report” button, under Basic Actions.
Please note that you may not see the player disappear immediately. This is because of the time necessary to investigate these reports and that we research every reported incident thoroughly.
Thanks again,
GM Alex
************************************************** **********
Standard Reply from them. I suspect that Drakevr will still be ingame for months/years to come until he decides to quit nothing will change at all.
Lets rename this forum into "The Official Bot Forum" cause every few minutes a new thread about THE SAME **** is popping up.
I would say "Let's rename this game into "The Official Bot Game"" and get over with it all. What would you say?
Oh, you are botting so it would suite you well, wouldn't it?
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@Others who said something like "It might just look like a bot"
Well guys and girls, in my experience there is no such thing as "look like a bot" It is either a bot or it isn't and there is a huge difference between a bot and a real player. It is not just one particular thing that makes the difference and NCSoft should know it at least as well as I do.
I mentioned the patterns in behaviour but there are a lot of things that can help you identify a bot without logging into game.
Once you have a chart of the online presence of the character you will be able to tell exactly when the real player is behind the computer and when a third party software is in command of that character. It is so obvious you can't miss it.
NOTHING CAN BEAT THE STATS! IT ALWAYS TELLS THE TRUTH!
sadly this will continue in aion its like windows u ever chnaged ur windows when its running properly ?
and this image cleaning before the release is so lol its like a 100 year old house u paint it new and say its restaurated sure it looks good from the outside but inside.......
btw my russian botter made it to magnus now on shrine of loyalty lol public spot nr1 guess he started there with 74 why should i report him is it my job that the company should care for her own game ?
if you play legit you get owned by radar users / botters get use to it,
i was waiting for aion as i hoped NC will not make the same mistake as with lineage2 but there are bots already so screw them they absolutly dont care about legit customers the main player basis is in korea for them europe and NA is just like a bone thrown to dog so we can play and they earn some money,
until they earn something they will update it else they will close the servers
to NC soft, if you plan to release any other MMO games beyond korea get the f*** to the keyboard and clean up the game from botters / radar users and god know what else, and clean up your company name bcos now :
And the story continues. After HGSpam left L2 the bots are back to their places. It is hard to find a place at varka already. The trains are so arrogant they take areas good for exping for 3 different small parties.
I am not a programmer but can tell at least 3 ways to 100% detect any 3rd party program which messes with the server.
And it was discussed already hundreds times:
1. no bots = 70-80% less income for NCSoft
2. banning couple of bots once weekly = much more retail games sold (then if there were sold to the really new players only)
1+2 = collecting the golden eggs but being carefull not to kill the chicken itself...
I am not a programmer but can tell at least 3 ways to 100% detect any 3rd party program which messes with the server.
And it was discussed already hundreds times:
1. no bots = 70-80% less income for NCSoft
2. banning couple of bots once weekly = much more retail games sold (then if there were sold to the really new players only)
1+2 = collecting the golden eggs but being carefull not to kill the chicken itself...
If they don't ban that player with all that evidence and the videos that's a huge thing...
what evidence they have?
a person is getting killed and accepting rez over and over again.
what this exactly proof that he is a bot?getting killed and accepting rez isnt game mechanic?
for ppl that play on servers is easy to tell who is botter and who isnt but for a gm that never played on certain server they never know this and that why they need to check bots ingame.
if you play legit you get owned by radar users / botters get use to it,
i was waiting for aion as i hoped NC will not make the same mistake as with lineage2 but there are bots already so screw them they absolutly dont care about legit customers the main player basis is in korea for them europe and NA is just like a bone thrown to dog so we can play and they earn some money,
until they earn something they will update it else they will close the servers
to NC soft, if you plan to release any other MMO games beyond korea get the f*** to the keyboard and clean up the game from botters / radar users and god know what else, and clean up your company name bcos now :
NC soft = massively multibotter online game
"God knows what else"
Well now AutoPot almost makes them invinceable. In PvsP they just don't die unless you get like 5 people on them.
To ensure the privacy of all of our customers, we hope you will understand that the Support Team will not be able to provide specific information regarding the outcome of this report.
Would someone understanding/knowing the privacy act tell me why releasing a toon name is an privacy issue? (I just dont get it, it is only a toon/Character name, nobody asking them releasing the real name of the toon, just the action they are being take for that TOON)
for ppl that play on servers is easy to tell who is botter and who isnt but for a gm that never played on certain server they never know this and that why they need to check bots ingame.
That mean NC need to put undercover live GM on each server...
Funny thread. Keep thinking NC is against bots. Did u guys ever read the description of the word "naive" in dictionary?
Agreed.
Hey guys, did you know they removed the word gullible from the english dictionary?
Go check it out! www.dictionary.com , try searching it x:. I don't know why they'd do it.