There are easy solutions to get rid of most bots who annoy us and make levelling between lvl 40 and 80 almost impossible and get people to quit even before they reach 85, which makes NC soft lose a lot of customers, I lost 19 friends because of this, who could not take the enormous amount of bots anymore, and it were people buying Nc coins like crazy.
Solution 1 : make the game not totally free but just a 10 or 15 dollar purchase to create an account.
It will avoid the problem that the bot that got banned is right back the next day with a new account.
Solution 2: IP-banning of the account that got banned for botting or even Mac-address ban.
Solution 3 : no banning but every account that receives more then 10 points from players for botting gets frozen, if the player does not react while being in game within 12 hours the account gets permanently-frozen characters upon login.
Solution 4: whenever a player receives a bot report from another player , they get placed inside a room where they can't target anything but have to move in a specific patter or move to a specific NPC, if they don't do this within 2 hours the account gets automatically banned.
These are all fairly easy to implement
and may I recall to NC soft that these types of bots I am referring too do not buy Nc coins
They do cost you players that would have bought a lot of NC coins
All the bots you have banned were back right the next day
You are fighting against a never ending tide, it's time to take the gloves off because you are losing paying customers.
Those paying customers are part of the problem roo. The whole game got screwed and as it goes, the paying customers (those are the true randoms to me) are gonna lose their investment, but nobody cares, really.
By the way, all your suggestions are easy to bypass or be exploited. There are way more sophisticated ways to deal with the handless, but NC doesn't see this as a top priority.
You know, this whole "omg so many bots!" would have been avoided if they just kept the subscription fee and added in the microtransaction. This would have kept the real official players of L2 servers playing, and kept the riff raff privies out. Yeah, yeah, there were bots before, but NOT THIS MANY! As to your suggestions:
1. The RMT sellers buy stuff out of the NCStore to get the product (accounts and farmed coins/items) out the door. Why would a 15 dollar account creation fee stop them.
2. Doesn't work and it's imprecise. You would have to IP ban a whole country to make it work, and they did.
3. The "3 strikes and your out" method never worked because by the time the account reached it's second strike, it was probably in another person's hands. Why would they give anyone 20 chances to break the rules. They's not our mamas.
4. The GM consultation room is not very big, in fact most of the original players saw what it was like back before GoD rolled out. Thanks to the "Pre-GoD" tests and events. Let me enlighten you. There was an event where the GMs would appear at an appointed time and open a portal gate on Fantasy Island that led to a special room with a special NPC. That NPC would give you an event item to open for very nice prizes. You guessed it, that room was the GM consultation room. So, having EVERYONE's toon (3500+ logged on currently on Chronos) appear because you know people are JACKHOLES and report just about EVERYONE who isn't an elpy would be the "Tersi's Light" event all over again.
Funny. I seem to remember loads of bots even when you had to buy the accounts and pay a monthly fee...
That suggestion just won't make any difference. So long as the game is making people money, there will be bots to take advantage of it. It won't matter if it's pay to play or free to play.
And any suggestion of a small number of reports and moving people to rooms, etc is stupid. It will get abused and actual people will get caught in it as much, if not more, than bots.
Want to win/keep a castle? Get a bunch of throway accounts and report the leaders of the opposing clans to get them stuck in the GM room.
All you need to do is be a bit above average in terms of ability and/or gear to get accused of being a bot in this game. The power to completely incapacitate someone's gameplay is not something that a normal player should be able to leverage with any sort of ease.
IP/MAC bans? You can spoof/mask both of those. Most bots use proxies anyways because they want to keep their "main" account active. And it also ignores the issue of mixed legit/botting people behind the same NAT address like at a school. It's not so easy to implement things like that across the board.
The simple fact is, if you make something automated and routine, it won't take long for the people botting/scripting to figure that routine out and adapt to it.
The only "guaranteed" way to catch them all is to have live GM's looking at the servers 24/7 to put a stop to things. They could certainly do better with automated tools than they do now, but that's mostly for the afk bots, not the more complicated PvP assist programs.
those paying customers are part of the problem roo. The whole game got screwed and as it goes, the paying customers (those are the true randoms to me) are gonna lose their investment, but nobody cares, really.
By the way, all your suggestions are easy to bypass or be exploited. There are way more sophisticated ways to deal with the handless, but nc doesn't see this as a top priority.
I agree with all of you and you propably gave me an extra idea that might eliminate the adena sellers
Everyone knows that most of the bots are there to farm adena well ...
Nc soft should simply SELL adena for Nc coins .... Bot sellers ELIMINATED!
Just put a bit of restriction on it per month like for instance :
-lvl 40 player can only purchase 50 million
-LVL 60 player can purchase 100 Million
-LVL 80 Player can purchase 150 Million
-LVL 85 Player can purchase 200 Million
-LVL 90 Player can purchase 250 Million
-LVL 95 Player can purchase 300 Million
Not really exuberant amount but enough to keep everyone rich enough to NEVER EVER want to pay adena sellers ever again.
The main problem in eliminating adena sellers at this moment is that they are cheaper then the Nc coins items to get you 100% droprate.
If they would change those packs to like 250 % droprate or more, then they would have success, for now they are pretty useless to the general population and especially to the casual players, those packs are useless.
The only "guaranteed" way to catch them all is to have live GM's looking at the servers 24/7 to put a stop to things. They could certainly do better with automated tools than they do now, but that's mostly for the afk bots, not the more complicated PvP assist programs.
Agree with you that is how Guildwars and most bot-free games do it, most of those bot-free games have ingame money trading gold for real money.
Wich proves my theory
NC soft needs to start selling adena for Nc coins.
There is nothing more you can do against the bots then they are already doing.
Thousands of accounts have been banned in the past month, any system they try to implement will be bypassed in time.
What we really need is an influx of real players. I have said it before and I will say it again, the game needs to adapt and modernize its approach to the western market. Until they do this, the game will either die or for ever be in the control of adena sellers/bots.
Agree with you that is how Guildwars and most bot-free games do it, most of those bot-free games have ingame money trading gold for real money.
Wich proves my theory
NC soft needs to start selling adena for Nc coins.
Some people really should cover their tracks a little better,"TheQQMaster". Tell us what YOU would do to combat the bots since you seem to have a lot of input on the other forum.