Botting discussion

[kabuto202]

Black Desert Online basically lets you bot + hire bot NPCs to do menial tasks/labors. It's part of the game.

Paying an in-game resource to passively gain other resources is very different from the bots here. Funny enough, BDO actually does have some actual bots (fishing bots and trading speedhack bots), but they detect them pretty easily. Coincidentally a good example of a game where botting is a non-issue outside of the short window with the mapping exploit. That was a clusterfuck.

[Sevenless]

Black Desert Online basically lets you bot + hire bot NPCs to do menial tasks/labors. It's part of the game.

Paying an in-game resource to passively gain other resources is very different from the bots here. Funny enough, BDO actually does have some actual bots (fishing bots and trading speedhack bots), but they detect them pretty easily. Coincidentally a good example of a game where botting is a non-issue outside of the short window with the mapping exploit. That was a clusterfuck.

PvP combats botting because the player base enjoys hunting them, which is also how EVE deals with it to a degree.

But unfortunately that's something the game naturally allows that isn't applicable to haven, but there are still definitely botters.

[TerraSleet]

Like to turn this on you: give an example of a commercially successful MMO whose community is constantly up in arms about bots like they are here?

As someone who's played a lot of Runescape (both RS3 and OSRS), I can safely tell you that their community is constantly ragging on Jagex (Runescape devs) about the rampant - and in OSRS's case, severe - botting. Like, the market prices of various items there is severely affected by how effective / numerous the bots farming them are.

There's a youtuber called SirPugger whose channel is dedicated to documenting and exposing OSRS bot farms and he finds A LOT of them. There's statistical proof of said farms severely deprecating the items they're farming too, even in a game with ~100K concurrent players at a time. The OSRS reddit regularly has anti-botting sentiment reach the top of the page, along with anger towards Jagex for "not doing enough" despite them having a dedicated anti-botting team.

I saw these bot farms on a regular basis while I played. If you want to see one of them for yourself too - make a free account, walk to the town Varrock, and check out the trees outside the Grand Exchange. I can guarantee that you'll find a train of suspiciously named accounts that do nothing but chop trees 24/7. Or just watch one of SirPugger's videos.

[KwonChiMin]

only one bot per IP address, not connecting from proxies/data-centers, only being active for limited hours, diversifying behavior, etc.

not applicable to a sandbox mmo.

And examples commercially successful MMOs that have achieved that standard? Basically all of them lol.

once again evading a simple answer.

Like to turn this on you: give an example of a commercially successful MMO whose community is constantly up in arms about bots like they are here?

eve online (its just one game, to show that i can answer your question and you cant cause all your tales are purely theoretical)

ah yes... and i suddenly remember how BDO is great example of a game that is not affected by bots (apart from the ones you named yourself ofc - and about those i heard lots of stuff how they are "not affecting" the game)
https://youtu.be/8K03OrCzmNI it is an old video from a 1st russian iteration of BDO, but i highly doubt that anything changed to the better

[iamahh]

modding and botting are strong advantages for haven

not many games have this feature

is best to embrace it and add macros/scripting/NPCs to default client, so any player can at least script or record macros

[Sevenless]

modding and botting are strong advantages for haven

not many games have this feature

is best to embrace it and add macros/scripting/NPCs to default client, so any player can at least script or record macros

It's a shame because I feel it goes against an important gameplay aspect, feeling immersed in a fantasy life, but at this point I'd agree that this makes the most sense.

"Officialize" it, then keep working at making bots either part of the UI (bulk harvest) or a less useful boost (curio study timers, hunger, etc).

[Apocoreo]

Runescape's relationship with bots is weird though.

I remember no one complaining about them back in the early 2000's. They did a ton of anti bot measures, like limiting trades to 30k difference in value. They said it was because Korean gangs were beign funded by it or something weird like that. These pissed off players and hurt the experience greatly. Sounds like it's come full circle and now the bots are a hassle. I remember hearing stories of before certain stuff was implemented like the wildy trench, is that a thing in OSRS? People would get wood to sell by dropping wood, which bots would go to pick up, lure the bot to the wildy, then murder them.

I think the moral of the story is the point is not to eliminate botting, but to change the game in such a way that the bots do not disturb the players.

[Sevenless]

The biggest offenders right (from what I know, have coded, and having access to some hand-me-down scripts) now are mining, smelting, steel making, silk making, farming and spawn/localized resource hunting. I don't think there are many people who use foraging bots these days past early world shenanigans, mostly due to how badly nerfed forageables have become compared to the effort for botting them (which is one of the harder bots). Probably missing treeplanter bots and fishing bots, but I've never found them super necessary.

Farming bots aren't that much better than human farmers these days, but they let you do more bulk. Smelting and silk making fall under the same umbrella of "we need bulk actions", but don't have good client support for them. Mining is actually interesting to many people (I genuinely enjoy it), but due to the critical nature it has for faction quality the amount needed far surpasses human attention span. Steel making is botted entirely because of the crucible burnout cancelling the process. That mechanic both makes steel valuable, and makes it a botting target because it's a pain in the ass. Spawn hunting can be quasi achieved by normal villages by spam logging naked alts. It's not hard at all, but the mental rhythm break annoys me (and that's using a second client/account even). Ditto for localized resource timing.

From a mechanics standpoint, spawn hunting and localized resources need an overhaul to get away from botting. Silking and smelting need a UI and/or mechanicrework to make them more palatable, but we can see there's *some* kind of smelting changes incoming from trailer. Mining and farming are imo sitting in a decent balance point in terms of how the mechanic works, but suffer from the volume of work per faction level player ratio the game mechanics encourage.

The chores are automated, but much of the game is still available. It's not black and white per se. Kinda want jorb/loftar to see this, but figure they're so inundated with posts atm that forcing it on them would be a bit much. Sides, probably others talking to them about it.

[Zampfeo]

Runescape's relationship with bots is weird though.

I remember no one complaining about them back in the early 2000's. They did a ton of anti bot measures, like limiting trades to 30k difference in value. They said it was because Korean gangs were beign funded by it or something weird like that. These pissed off players and hurt the experience greatly. Sounds like it's come full circle and now the bots are a hassle. I remember hearing stories of before certain stuff was implemented like the wildy trench, is that a thing in OSRS? People would get wood to sell by dropping wood, which bots would go to pick up, lure the bot to the wildy, then murder them.

I think the moral of the story is the point is not to eliminate botting, but to change the game in such a way that the bots do not disturb the players.

Bots have always been a problem in Runescape and hated by the community. There was a fatigue system that time-gated XP gain in classic which was replaced with the long-running random event system in RS2. Limiting trade came much later and was implemented in an attempt to stop RWT and credit card theft. Jagex was afraid of credit card merchants coming after them because credit card fraud was rampant in RS and Jagex was receiving constant chargebacks from people using stolen CCs to give their bots membership benefits that they'd then use to bot and RWT. This was at a time when Runescape was mainstream and merchants like Mastercard blacklisting them was a real concern for Jagex.

I played as early as 2002 and I remember bot hate always being a thing in the RS community.

Nowadays the quantity of bots are lower than they were, but the ones that don't get autobanned are very sophisticated.

[Burinn]

I can't even imagine how much people would bitch about the costs of items in OSRS if bots didn't inflate supply.