Botter Raid

[Coldrain]

While cruising around Belulsan, I found this PACK of botters.  If only there was one Elyos around to keel them all!

http://www.coldrain-productions.com/ss/one.jpg
http://www.coldrain-productions.com/ss/two.jpg
http://www.coldrain-productions.com/ss/three.jpg
http://www.coldrain-productions.com/ss/four.jpg

They would run a little loop, killing everything in their path.

[oldblu]

wow full grp, havnt seen a full grp yet, (and yet why do i feel this is just the beginning?)

[Gagi]

Don't judge them.  They just want to play together.  Is that really so bad?

[Pedro]

Don't judge them.  They just want to play together.  Is that really so bad?

Sounds like they didn't let Gagi into their group 

[Gagi]

Didn't let me, I was leading them from the front, you just don't seem me in the pic cause im that good in hiding. 

[McCloude]

I've seen a different botter raid running around Bel as well.  I reported them all.

[Zyclos]

It's called multiboxing, where you have several
accounts set up using one character to control. Ie: your press a certain attack, the other accounts being
linked will use that same attacked. It's pretty affective
in pvp as a sorc Mage etc. I used to see it a lot in wow. Cool thing is it's not illegal, cause one person is really playing, but just has 4-5 others following. Hard to setup and difficult to maintain. Fun no doubt!!

[Pedro]

You use a KVM switch to link more than one PC to one monitor, mouse and keyboard, you set up each toon at a time to have the same attacks, spells and abilities bound to the same keys, then run them all at the same time.

I don't know if this was done in EQ1, but I saw it first in early DAoC with Team Wizzy, one guy running 5 pbaoe ice wizzies, usually ran with a minstrel and cleric friend for speed, buffs and heals.

[Zyclos]

ya all in all its not cheating... although it seems, its just one dude control 5 others.. haha pretty neat id do it if i could afford 5x 50$ + $14.99 per month on 5 accnt..

actually fuck that i wouldnt lol

[Dontaal]

Yeah, multiboxing seems to be a big gray area with MMOs right now. Most companies say as long as there is someone at the computer controlling the characters, its not against the terms of service. However, I very highly doubt that there is someone sitting there with these bots. I am sure they take the same concept, write the glider for all of the toons, then just let it go.

While I dont think anyone is sitting there playing these toons, they do appear to be monitored. Sev and I were killing the harpies outside Alsig last night, getting the kills over most of the bots out there. After about 30 min, a new 'bot' showed up that acted alot different from the others. It was trying to killsteal our mobs(and not succeeding very well), and moved differently than the other bots. It may have been an actual person playing that toon, trying to steal enough mobs to run us off or it may have been a bot programmed to killsteal, I am not sure. Either way, 4 Elyos showed up and wiped out the whole area.

[Gwyyn]

I have seen 2 different types of bots (well I consider them very different).
The first runs from mob to mob and kills BUT if the mob is already engaged it will turn off to another one.
The second time rund from mob to mob and kills and doesn't care if you already engaged it or not.

My guess is that the second type is a more basic version of the bot program that some places use, while the first type is a more complex program used by 'nicer' places. 

Either way there are ways to catch them, but they all pretty much would inconvenience the rest of us and most of them you can code around if you try hard enough.  The things they can do (that I'm certain they are not) is that if a bot is found they Cancel the account entirely.  Then they just have to look at it as a money making scheme -

Assume that if you close out the bots account he will make another one since he needs those bots to succeed.
One GM - paid about $50/hr (that's about 100k/year)
Find 5 bots an hour - that means the bot user needs to buy 5 new accounts or $200 worth of game product, so of that $200 at least $50 should be profit.  Wala, the GM's time was just paid for.  Finding more than 5 bots an hour should be easy as pie, so the rest of the money is pure profit, AND it makes the players happier.

Now if they would only figure this out.  We all know the places you find tons of bots, I'm sure any GM playing the game would know them as well, so it should be easy enough to do.

You want to find a bot it's easy - Talk to them. If you get no reply in any channel then they are a bot.  At worst it takes you maybe 2-3 minutes to know for certain.

[Dontaal]

Most of those bot companies probably aren't buying accounts legitimately. I would guess they use stolen credit cards and paypal accounts to buy the accounts. Also, I don't know what NC pays their GMs, but I doubt it is anywhere near $50/hr. Blizzard pays like $9/hr to their GMs. I agree, there needs to be something done about the bots. The autoreport thing isnt cutting it because I can report someone several times a day for a week and they are still out there farming it up. If NC started with the highest level bots then worked their way down, that would probably be the best option. Once they get any bot over level 20 banned, keep hitting the new ones that are created. That cuts down on how much kinah the bots can pull in by a huge amount.

[Guzler]

NCsoft will do nothing. This is just another nail in the coffin for this game in my opinion.

I had high hopes for Aion. Unfortunately the reality is far from what I anticipated.

[Gwyyn]

Whether are not they buy their accounts legitimately really makes no difference.  If NCSoft bans the account then a new one is bought and they make money.  Sure the botters may not lose any, but NCSoft making cash should be a good reason for them to ban the accounts.  Not that they will ever think of it...

But yeah I would say start with top levels and move down, even if just because I'd like to see those that put the most work into making the game miserable pay first.

[Dontaal]

If they are using stolen cards to create accounts, NC doesnt make any money and actually has to spend quite a bit because of it. Fraud accounts are going to be 'repaid' to the original card holder and NC is going to have to pay employees to sort through fraud accounts and take care of any legal issues that arise because of the fraud. The botters are the only ones NOT getting hurt by banned accounts. The legit card-holders and NC are both getting the shaft from that.

The only way to completely shut down botters would be a game-wide boycott of buying online currency, which wont happen. Too many lazy people in the Western culture would rather just spend the cash to buy their in-game money.

Either that or some game company needs to step up and work proactively with law enforcement to start nailing the people running these companies. Not that the Chinese government would let Western law enforcement do anything to their citizens if they were hit with the charges.

If you want my opinion for a fix, block all Chinese IPs and all proxy IPs. Doing this would almost completely shut down botters. Sure, you are gonna block some legit players, but that is the trade-off.