Insane amount of bots farming low level area's, please do something.

A possible solution to this would be to charge a small fee for a new account. It wouldn't go against GGG's pay2win policy and may make it unprofitable for some bots. Fans of the game wouldn't complain too much if they knew it was good for them. I wouldn't because what good is a ruined economy and an empty shell of a game? None.

Having said that, D3 charged a fee for every copy of the game and bots ruined their economy as well. Looks like the battle against bots is a losing one.

My rationale behind the suggestion is that it really really doesn't matter if GGG ban TEN thousand bot accounts per month; it doesn't cost the botters anything but 5 minutes creating a new email and a new account.

There are a few things that can be done:
1. Have vendors move around in town a bit.

2. Gather PoE statistics. Time played in act, time played at a certain level, time played at zone, total time played. This should be done to ensure good and well designed game flow anyways. It will tell you how long people take on average to progress a level, how long an act takes to clear, how long it takes to traverse "sewers" or how much ledge farm or docks farm occurs and put the late/ end game act3 farm up against map runs.

This will teach you that certain zones are interesting, that some game content is very difficult and people have to grind up. You might be happy with this, or you might like people to progress faster and change the difficulty. It beats waiting out for player feedback, which might not always be the right.

What this also will show are extremes, such as over-leveled bots running the same instance over and over, with a lot of play hours in a specific zone and act. I imagine that within 3 days of a new bot you already see its statistics deviating from the norm. The game is of such difficulty that you won't see these bots run bosses or higher difficult content, they will deviate from the norm.

What makes it hard is to say at what point are you sure that it is a bot, if it deviates 2 times, 3 times or 4 times from the norm? If you're only sure of their behavior after 4 or 5 days, the bots probably more than payed off and finding one deleted and having probably a process to automatically remake one won't raise their hairs.

2.5 Account creation. Probably the bots operate from a limited IP range, so keeping on eye on that IP range could crush new accounts faster. Redo the account creation system, make it a lot harder (more info, more steps to go through, more confirmation steps, perhaps a fee).

3. Change the game/ player needs. Probably there always will be demand for real money trade, to shorten your game time, but still progress. You can adjust the game to minimize this impact however. One thing to grind for are the endgame levels, which give little reward. You might consider upping the amount of sp rewarded or upping the level bonus at the end game for each level. This makes levels more rewarding and levels can't be botted for you "directly."

One way to level and to progress is through obtaining gear and playing maps. Items can be gotten from maps, but maps require a lot of orb currency to get worthwhile exp and items from and to continue the map cycle. The needs at endgame cannot be sustained by maps alone and unrewarding content has to be played to get back into action. That or you do some RMT-ing. I gave up on the maps system a long time ago. I hit 80 and stopped playing that boring and frustrating bit of the game. If I wouldn't be interested in re-running new characters that would have been 1 less permanent player for PoE (btw 1st game, that manages to interest me in trying out new builds).

I've got quite some gear stashed away, but I add less gear and have less use of stash tabs that I use to have. This is because items are generally more worthless, due to the new mod rolls. With a bad luck streak on a new toon I've rolled out. Only flavor builds, with a bit less gear requirement do ok. Now I am farming items and currency to support the progress of my alts with my high level toon, this is the first time that gear progression has been an issue to me, imagine trying the game out with a fresh toon?

The more this game hangs on orbs to progress characters, the more bots you will see, but also the less people you will see going through endgame (unless you're buddy list is hooked with buddies always full on stock).

Just my take on these things and when all that is beaten or to labor intensive to keep up, they might be back again still.

EDIT:

Point 3 is something they are working on, with maps focused on item gain and the rest of the game for lvl-ing.

"

Mivvi wrote:

A possible solution to this would be to charge a small fee for a new account. It wouldn't go against GGG's pay2win policy and may make it unprofitable for some bots. Fans of the game wouldn't complain too much if they knew it was good for them. I wouldn't because what good is a ruined economy and an empty shell of a game? None.

Having said that, D3 charged a fee for every copy of the game and bots ruined their economy as well. Looks like the battle against bots is a losing one.

My rationale behind the suggestion is that it really really doesn't matter if GGG ban TEN thousand bot accounts per month; it doesn't cost the botters anything but 5 minutes creating a new email and a new account.

What a great idea!
Say $5-10. It adds up.

The only issue is they are going to use stolen cc info though. But this would happen in subscription mmos anyway. Woe to the original owner then, hopefully he'll notice something amiss.

Actually, charging for a new account would be beyond P2W.. it would be P2Play. Majority of players in a F2P model never put a dime into the game. Every one of them would drop the game.

I know I would. I don't have the funds to pay for that.



And so that bot accounts would have to pay just a portion of their profits to do their thing. They probably don't even have to run stolen CCs to make it worthwhile(though they probably will since that makes the transaction free for them).


If GGG wants to charge, they should do it based on a payment model that will work out best for them. Attempting to establish a paywall just to stop bots would be like putting Securom to stop piracy.

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

Hey there,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are working steadfastly on removing these players and their access to the game. If you notice any of these players, please report their names to us at "Support@GrindingGear.com" immediately and we will take action against them.

answer like this should tell you people that they will do nothing about those bots and that they dont care and cant fight them

reasons are simple

why would they bother to tell you to report people that bot like this, when they can tell their janitor, if they have one, that he sits in front of pc for 2 out of his 8 hour shift and just ban all those people, because he probably have eyes

also they allow multiboxing and and multiple accounts on 1 pc

for me it seems that ggg have use from rmt scum, dunno what and why but for me it does

cause i cant understand how can they allow that those lvl 10 players have stacks of exalted orbs and mirrors

you dont have to ban those that bot that farm 24/7, just ban accounts where they are storing all farmed orbs with 20-30-50 mirrors, and hundreds of exalteds


TL;DR - dont bother with bots, they will allways be here, and only solution to have clean competitive league is self found league, everything else is just crap

"

Mivvi wrote:

A possible solution to this would be to charge a small fee for a new account. It wouldn't go against GGG's pay2win policy and may make it unprofitable for some bots. Fans of the game wouldn't complain too much if they knew it was good for them. I wouldn't because what good is a ruined economy and an empty shell of a game? None.

Having said that, D3 charged a fee for every copy of the game and bots ruined their economy as well. Looks like the battle against bots is a losing one.

My rationale behind the suggestion is that it really really doesn't matter if GGG ban TEN thousand bot accounts per month; it doesn't cost the botters anything but 5 minutes creating a new email and a new account.

Part of what has made PoE sucessful so far is the completely f2p aspect. And it has been advertised right from the very beginning as f2p. Take awythat and GGG will lose a majority of their playerbase.

Only way to win with bots is to make it unprofitable:

1. Players have to stop buyin orbs from RMT sites -> Not gonna happen, HELLO GAME RUINERS, THX TO YOU MANY LEFT.

2. Make botting soo hard that making bot will take huge amount of time.

I better stop making loads of low level characters and never using chat...
before I get a bot ban...

"

BoondockSaint wrote:

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

Hey there,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We are working steadfastly on removing these players and their access to the game. If you notice any of these players, please report their names to us at "Support@GrindingGear.com" immediately and we will take action against them.

answer like this should tell you people that they will do nothing about those bots and that they dont care and cant fight them

reasons are simple

why would they bother to tell you to report people that bot like this, when they can tell their janitor, if they have one, that he sits in front of pc for 2 out of his 8 hour shift and just ban all those people, because he probably have eyes

also they allow multiboxing and and multiple accounts on 1 pc

for me it seems that ggg have use from rmt scum, dunno what and why but for me it does

cause i cant understand how can they allow that those lvl 10 players have stacks of exalted orbs and mirrors

you dont have to ban those that bot that farm 24/7, just ban accounts where they are storing all farmed orbs with 20-30-50 mirrors, and hundreds of exalteds


TL;DR - dont bother with bots, they will allways be here, and only solution to have clean competitive league is self found league, everything else is just crap

They have banned a great number of bots, they ask you to content support because support are the ones who can handle this.

They allow multiple accounts on 1 pc or IP address, because the game is free. If three people in the same house want to have accounts, so be it.

Multilogging is not an offense - same reason to "allow it" as allowing multiple accounts from 1 IP. Using scripts/automating game processes - is prohibited.

You are right though, bots will never go away from PoE or any other online game.

Let me translate

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

Hey there,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention.

yeah thanks, we already know this

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

We are working steadfastly on removing these players and their access to the game.

not much we can do about it

"

Bex_GGG wrote:

If you notice any of these players, please report their names to us at "Support@GrindingGear.com" immediately and we will take action against them.

there's a chance we might consider thinking about taking action against their accounts, but since it costs nothing to setup a new account it wouldn't achieve much anyway.