[OFFICIAL] How to report a bot

This (http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=98781) is a complete guide from 2004 written by a former NC employee, possibly a moderator.

Without further ado…

The rule:

Absolutely no 3rd party programs or files are allowed to interact with Lineage 2. This means no bots or spamming programs. The response for botting is a total account ban without appeal on the first offense.


How we catch bots:

Game Masters have a strict rule set they must follow while investigating bots. GMs have several tests that must be performed before any administrative action can be taken. If action can not be taken right away suspected “botters” are put on a watch list. We build profiles.

How to help us catch bots:

If you see a potential botter, do not interact with them in any way, shape or form. Observe them for a while. If you believe you have found a bot, type /gm <name> is botting. That is all we need. Feel free to continue playing; no interaction with the bot suspect is necessary. Do not give the suspect any indication that you are scrutinizing them.


Who responds to bot petitions:

Second-tier GMs respond to bot reports.


How GMs respond to bot petitions:

As quickly as possible. GMs may answer bot petitions out of order at their discretion. We understand that the more time that passes between the report and the investigation, the less likely it is that we will catch them. But we still have to do the investigation anyway. So GMs actually have an incentive to get to bot reports as soon as possible. We do not want to go into bot reports with the odds already against us.

You may receive an automated response shortly after petitioning. This is to minimize response time. You may receive an automated response a little while after petitioning. This does not mean that the investigation was not performed at that time. The GM may have simply chosen to conduct the investigation first, and reply to the petition second. Again, this is to minimize response time.

We do not establish live contact with the petitioner because player testimony is not admissible evidence when making banning decisions.

Nor are we allowed to say, “Yes, we have verified that the player you reported is a bot.” We do not discuss the disciplinary status of other accounts.

Once the investigating GM has verified bot status, the issue is escalated to a Head GM for banning. This process is not instantaneous. You may continue to see the bot suspect after your report even if our tests were successful.

How not to be mistaken for a bot:

Our tests our designed to minimize the chances of mistaking a legitimate player for a bot. We have numerous ways of getting your attention as a player, beyond the chat interface. I hate to say “Trust us, you’ll know if we’re testing you,” but see the last section of this post for more on our sometimes cryptic comments.

Challenges:

As our methods of catching bots grow more sophisticated, so do bot counter-measures. They get smarter. It’s eerie.

About our public statements about the bot issue:

As much as we would like to alleviate the frustration experienced by honest players over this issue, the nature of the issue itself prevents us from doing so as much as we’d like. The more information we publicly reveal about our strengths and weaknesses in our efforts to ban bots, the more we’re helping the botters.

That said, if you feel you have a question that doesn’t fall into this category, it can never hurt to ask.

- Ash


Anybody knows if this actually works?

Because it never worked, for me. Nor for almost anybody else since 2004, it seems.

Anyway it can never hurt to ask, if nobody ever answers.

Ash was the game's second community coordinator (same position Sace holds now).

As far as I am aware, the /gm playername command isn't meant to be used anymore, but rather a petition just be sent. That said, I have doubts many people get banned for botting (I dunno, something about 80% of those in hunting grounds being bots), but maybe so on occasion just to give people a scare.

I can't help but think of just how different this game would be without bots. No gold-farmers and no players gaining their levels illegally. It'd be amazing. </pipe dream>

How to help us catch bots:

If you see a potential botter, do not interact with them in any way, shape or form. Observe them for a while. If you believe you have found a bot, type /gm &lt;name&gt; is botting. That is all we need. Feel free to continue playing; no interaction with the bot suspect is necessary. Do not give the suspect any indication that you are scrutinizing them.



The staff seems to forget their own rules. If that WAS indeed all they needed..

Nope, never worked. AshNC was a liar (about this and GameGuard).

Nope, never worked. AshNC was a liar (about this and GameGuard).

Ash wasn't a liar - that's information he had to relay. There's a big difference between a community coordinator and a game master. The real fault lies with the head game master.

Ash wasn't a liar - that's information he had to relay. There's a big difference between a community coordinator and a game master. The real fault lies with the head game master.


Keep posting, people!!

I definitely wanna hear somebody saying that he/she recently managed to make a bot get banned by following the proper procedure!!

Ash wasn't a liar - that's information he had to relay.

Yes he was a liar. He posted that GameGuard would not affect any programs that didn't try to interfere with L2. He went on to say that if he was proven wrong, he would post that. I PMed him with a laundry list of programs that had nothing to do with L2 but GameGuard shut down. He read the message and never responded. That, to me, is a liar.

[REVIVING]



[TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS]

In the interest of the whole community this thread is
going to be revived periodically until it will be changed to a
"sticky" thread.

They build profiles !! That's so cool.

[REVIVING]



[TO COMMUNITY MEMBERS]

In the interest of the whole community this thread is
going to be revived periodically until it will be changed to a
"sticky" thread.

Nope, never worked. AshNC was a liar (about this and GameGuard).

All community coordinators are paid to lie to you, in case you haven't noticed. Nothing they say is legally binding and there is no way to hold them physically responsible as we live in a totally unconnected country with zero mmo gaming regulations.

That aside, it did work. It just didn't work very efficiently. The reason ncsoft told you to leave the bot alone, was because attacking it, training it, or whisping it would trigger an alarm in the bot program which would then archive the negative action and alert anyone near by the computer. This would put any competent botter into live mode where they would stop botting and start playing until you left them alone. The method ncsoft used to detect botters wasnt so much a means to detect botting outright, but to detect afk botting. To do this, they would strike up conversations with bots through the petition window. To a regular player, it would be a kind of "what the heck i didnt send a petition" moment and no big deal, but to a bot they would have 5 seconds to get to their computer and respond with something meaningful.

To get around this, people started botting mainly at night, what was perceived to be gm hours. The /gmlist command was made invalid in c4 or c5 if I remember correctly, because all the bot programs would /gmlist when they logged on and archieve all the gm names and the times they were on, making it easier to bot safely.

However, this thread is no longer valid. Ncsoft changed the rules for botting in 2010 and they changed their methods as well because over the years, everyone caught on to their rather simple methods. As any gm of a private server will tell you, Ncsoft has always had the ability to detect and instantly ban players loggining in through third party software but I imagine it was an internal policy to only ban infamous, obvious, and entirely afk botters or something along those lines. In oct 2011, when they fired most of their staff, a large part of that was most likely the professional bot finding team which is why we see an unstopable wall of bots now.

You have to remember, that even if they did choose to autoban bots, someone at the office would still have to sit down and write a report for each and every account. This wasn't a problem back in the old days, when ncsoft had people to do this busy work, but now they do not. F2p has made the problem even worse, because there is nothing stopping from people from making a million accounts if they wanted and they of course can do this almost automatically. Also consider the cost effectiveness of it all. It may cost you 20 dollars an hour to hire a gm but a chinese farmer can pay 20 cents a day to some kid to make accounts and watch fresh bots. Something drastic needs to be done to remedy this problem, but I don't think ncsoft has the motivation to do so. While we complain nonstop, some of you defend them, and even more of you continue to purchase from them even when you know you arent going to be able to play. They have no incentive to change their broken business model because at the end of the day, they are still making money which means they get to keep their jobs.

Didn't they change the bot banning thing a while ago? I thought they changed it to a three strike system, if you get caught botting you get 2 temp bans and then on the third time you get perma banned.

Didn't they change the bot banning thing a while ago? I thought they changed it to a three strike system, if you get caught botting you get 2 temp bans and then on the third time you get perma banned.

Yes. http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=214837 was the thread, but it appears to have been deleted?

http://boards.rochand.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=20 has the original post.

This (http://boards.lineage2.com/showthread.php?t=98781) is a complete guide from 2004 written by a former NC employee, possibly a moderator.




Anybody knows if this actually works?

Because it never worked, for me. Nor for almost anybody else since 2004, it seems.

Anyway it can never hurt to ask, if nobody ever answers.

Thank you, that is a really amusing post. I had almost forgotten how strict the GM's were in the olden days.

Oh wait a minute.. no they weren't; we have seen the same bots in every area for days/weeks/months on end. farming, dieing to guards (when they could de-level). and I particularly like the youtube video of one server where there were so many bots hitting on a guard, he actually died.. now THAT was funny.

To make it worse, the /gm doesn't work most of the time either (gm service offline), which is really frustrating as it tells you after you type the petition and not before!

As you know, things change, especially after 8 years and going from a paid subscription to free-to-play. A method or post made 8 years ago cannot be used to represent current systems. The old post has since been removed to avoid further confusion.

Addressing the topic at hand, the current method of bot reporting is as follows:


Use the in-game Report button, the in-game petition client, or the website support form to report suspicious players. If using the petition or support form, be sure to include the server name, character name, and a rough estimate of when and where the character was acting suspiciously. There is no need for screenshots, descriptions, links to videos, or any other user-made evidence.

The reports feed into a list of players for our GMs to check in their regular monitoring of all servers.


Remember, never publicly accuse another player of cheating. Bans and such account matters are confidential to NCsoft staff and the account owner only.


Locking this thread as it is a moot topic about a necro'ed thread from 8 years ago.