Aion (Open Beta, Launch Day Info too!)

[Morfiend]

Interesting. I guess them being a bit hard-core about population caps on launch is paying off. Or maybe since one side can't really attack the enemies home-town it's just less of an issue.

Until the expansion when you can assault cities :)

Not really.

Does the vision include custom Aion logo jeans?

[Shatter]

Hey dont ruin my dream of stepping into a capital city and laying waste to all the sale spamming bots

[Threash]

Hey dont ruin my dream of stepping into a capital city and laying waste to all the sale spamming bots

You'll be greeted as a liberator.

[Triforcer]

What am I missing when it comes to bot hunting?  I understand that in terms of item farming (and private tells) its pretty hard to instantly locate and nuke, and that a bit of research and detective work is required.

But capital city sellers?  Why couldn't they hire three 22 year old guys at slave wages to take 8 hour shifts of patrolling every US server's capital cities and nuking gold sellers?  You could sweep both capital cities within a few minutes and just constantly rotate servers.

That would solve the problem within days. 

[Shatter]

What am I missing when it comes to bot hunting?  I understand that in terms of item farming (and private tells) its pretty hard to instantly locate and nuke, and that a bit of research and detective work is required.

But capital city sellers?  Why couldn't they hire three 22 year old guys at slave wages to take 8 hour shifts of patrolling every US server's capital cities and nuking gold sellers?  You could sweep both capital cities within a few minutes and just constantly rotate servers.

That would solve the problem within days. 

I would assume they are coming up with a way to deal with the private store spamming bots, but in the meantime they are focusing more heavily on the actual BOT's who are playing and destroying the economy and ruining the gameplay first.  Agreed, it shouldnt take much to once a day sweep major cities and hubs of spam bots.  Must say though its been nice to not have to compete with bots for the past 2 weeks or so. 

[damijin]

What am I missing when it comes to bot hunting?  I understand that in terms of item farming (and private tells) its pretty hard to instantly locate and nuke, and that a bit of research and detective work is required.

But capital city sellers?  Why couldn't they hire three 22 year old guys at slave wages to take 8 hour shifts of patrolling every US server's capital cities and nuking gold sellers?  You could sweep both capital cities within a few minutes and just constantly rotate servers.

That would solve the problem within days. 

They need more procedural methods of removing farmers/bots, not pure manual labor. There's simple too many of them and not enough humans to take care of it without spending huge amounts of money by hiring so many employees that fighting the bot problem ends up costing more than if they ignored it. At the end of the day it's a business, and if the business makes more money removing bots, they'll remove bots. If they make more money allowing bots, they'll allow them. Of course I dont just mean short term, I mean long term as well -- if NCSoft had continued to be known as the company that makes half its revenue from bot accounts, they may have very poor launches in the future as legit players don't even bother.

So they have to figure out which of the two routes is the best in terms of money, or if there's some middle ground between hiring huge amounts of labor to destroy all bots/advertisers and completely ignoring the issue. I think they're trying to reach that middle ground right now.

[Triforcer]

I completely disagree that "algorithms" are the solution.  I repeat, at least as to the capital city and hub sellers, ONE intern with "ban from heaven" bound to his spacebar could check out every hub on every US server multiple times a day.  This doesn't take ten or a hundred guys. 

As I said before, the private tell bots and farming bots are different.  But there is zero reason that what I described wouldn't clear the cities within a day. 

[Redgiant]

Hey dont ruin my dream of stepping into a capital city and laying waste to all the sale spamming bots

Have those 22-year olds flag all detected bots as mobs, change their graphic to a vagrant with their pants pulled down to their ankles and make them drop decent kinah and give XP, and let the players wax them.

[Venkman]

I completely disagree that "algorithms" are the solution.  I repeat, at least as to the capital city and hub sellers, ONE intern with "ban from heaven" bound to his spacebar could check out every hub on every US server multiple times a day.  This doesn't take ten or a hundred guys. 

I agree with not relying on algorithms,  but for a different reason: legal.

Every account must first be assumed to be a paying account. You don't just decide who can stay and who can go arbitrarily. Some amount of research by a human needs to be done. Algorithms are great for elevating to human attention behaviors that warrant further investigation. But you can't just say "ban anyone with a name of all consonants" or "ban anyone spamming the same item-sales pitch in Pandaemonium" because there's a small chance there's legit people in them.

A counter argument is sometimes: well fine, if you ban too many, have the wrongly banned get their accounts fixed. That is risky though. How many borderline cases are there in Aion that would go back to WoW if given a good enough reason? You can expect people to call CSR back and argue for their accounts only after they've been invested in the game for long enough that there's a strong emotional bond. By this point you know your audience.

Aion is still figuring that out.

[Lantyssa]

There's also an argument that, should there not be too many of them, making borderline cases go to another game both helps retention and saddles your competitor with a problematic subscriber.  (If you want to get MMOchiavellian.)

[Venkman]

So you want to export the bad guys? 

To me the borderline cases will be those deeply invested in another game. And statistically, the largest percentage of that small group is likely from WoW. Chasing four people back to AoC isn't going to break anyone. Chasing thousands back to WoW though, that could sting, especially if the result is less populated population centers and therefore the game-killing feeling of emptiness.

I'm overthinking it, because, well, this forums lets me do that. But it's a fun mental exercise anyway

[Nebu]

I look at it from a completely different vantage point.  If the bots aren't costing you many subscriptions, why not let them exist?  You're likely making more from bot subscriptions than you are losing in paid subscriptions.  If that's the case, it's a net financial gain.  If someone has looked at the long-term effects, then those data could be useful in allocating resources toward removing bots.  

The only reason that I can see for getting rid of paid bot accounts is that the mere existence of so many bots suggests that players are eager and willing to pay real money to bypass large portions of your gameplay.  You then have the option of removing them for marketing reasons or undercutting them with RMT of your own.  Either way, you've found a revenue stream.  


Edit: Yes, I have gotten that jaded.  MMO's are money making businesses.  When they started requiring millions to develop the shift moved from fun to profit.  I'm not saying that the shift is 100% on the profit side, but it's certainly has to be a significant part of the development decision making process.

[Venkman]

Nothing wrong with your logic, but I think it's more a propos once you have confidence that your playerbase isn't going anywhere for awhile. Spambots in Ironforge or Coronet years after launch are something people complain about but know already how to avoid. Spambots in the only two population centers in a young game though, that can annoy people almost as much as getting wrongly banned.

So I think it's good PR to be seen as doing something about it (mass bannings) even if all that really does is drive the practice underground.

And it doesn't do anything for the other types of botting that can actually impact other players rather than the mere annoyance that is chatlog spam.

[damijin]

I completely disagree that "algorithms" are the solution.  I repeat, at least as to the capital city and hub sellers, ONE intern with "ban from heaven" bound to his spacebar could check out every hub on every US server multiple times a day.  This doesn't take ten or a hundred guys. 

As I said before, the private tell bots and farming bots are different.  But there is zero reason that what I described wouldn't clear the cities within a day. 

Mm I didn't mean purely procedural would make sense. I meant, as we did at every website or game I worked for: Use algorithms to detect suspicious accounts, then go through those 1 by 1 and ban them as quickly as you can. I just know that the teams in charge of policing these issues are always going to be understaffed for the problem that they are tasked with fighting and that they don't really stand much of a chance at doing it any other way than by detecting suspicious accounts somehow and banning them with that.

As they've done recently though, they detected everyone using a certain bot in the game and ban hammered everyone who ever even logged in on the bot, including accounts that logged in with the bot but hadn't botted at all. That's pretty handy way of wiping people out if you can really find a way to identify the bot with 100% certainty. Requires a whole lot less manpower than investigating every bot report by hand.

[Furiously]

Sso the wife bought me this for my birthday. I'm not sure what to think so far. Seems a bit too much likeeverythi ng else so far.

[Lantyssa]

I look at it from a completely different vantage point.  If the bots aren't costing you many subscriptions, why not let them exist?  You're likely making more from bot subscriptions than you are losing in paid subscriptions.  If that's the case, it's a net financial gain.  If someone has looked at the long-term effects, then those data could be useful in allocating resources toward removing bots.

Were it only players trying to get past some tedium, then yes.  (Though if your game drives people to botting, you have other problems...)

When the bots are gold sellers and people who hack accounts and steal CC information to be able to keep their costs down, then welcoming all bots encourages more of that behavior.  That in turn will force the majority (of the very pathetically staffed) CSRs to deal with fraud cases and upset your customers, thus driving them away anyways.

If you want to sanction botting, it would be best to make a scripting language in game, and declare any account going outside those bounds is forfeit.

[Nebu]

When the bots are gold sellers and people who hack accounts and steal CC information to be able to keep their costs down, then welcoming all bots encourages more of that behavior.  That in turn will force the majority (of the very pathetically staffed) CSRs to deal with fraud cases and upset your customers, thus driving them away anyways.

I think it goes without saying that everyone is against behavior that blatently violates the EULA or worse, tries to steal from or defraud the playerbase.  I'm talking about bots as being accounts owned for the purpose of advertising, gold farming, power-leveling, etc.  If they are owned and operated according to the rules, then I don't see how it's a problem.  Well... beyond a marketing problem.

[DLRiley]

Botting and gold selling is pure nerd rage. There is no substance to saying that botting and gold selling is bad for the playerbase or game in general other than some forum warrior declaring its "WRONGG!@!G@" on a "moral" high ground. At best banning gold sellers and botters is a PR move for the forum community, most people don't give two shits. Hacking accounts and steal CC information being unique to gold selling/botting is just pure hyperbole.

[gryeyes]

 

[kondratti]

There is so much wrong in one single post..... 

[UnSub]

Botting and gold selling is pure nerd rage. There is no substance to saying that botting and gold selling is bad for the playerbase or game in general other than some forum warrior declaring its "WRONGG!@!G@" on a "moral" high ground. At best banning gold sellers and botters is a PR move for the forum community, most people don't give two shits. Hacking accounts and steal CC information being unique to gold selling/botting is just pure hyperbole.

From time to time I agree with you.

This isn't one of these times.

Botting and gold selling is bad for a MMO because of the kind of errant behaviour that comes with it. Credit card fraud raises the cost for developers while also making credit institutions flag MMOs as risky. Bots ruin in-game play and can screw up an in-game economy. Hacking accounts scares your players, which is a BAD THING when you are trying to attract them / retain them.

[DLRiley]

I think we have a misunderstanding. Credit Card fraud possible because of holes in your client/website. Really bad. Haccking accounts. Really bad. Bots/Gold Selling == Credit Card fraud and Hacking. Not convinced. If someone could exploit holes in the system they really don't need to be botting or gold selling to do either.

[Lantyssa]

Right.  Because someone whose livelihood is dependent upon not getting banned and forking over $50 per time it happens is going to happily eat the cost.  We already have a plethora of examples that things do not work the way you want them to.

If the game sanctions bots and selling, the incidence mightl be less.  No North American company is going to sanction it.  The closest you'll get is SOE's Exchange servers.  Given that, these things will happen.

[UnSub]

I think we have a misunderstanding. Credit Card fraud possible because of holes in your client/website. Really bad. Haccking accounts. Really bad. Bots/Gold Selling == Credit Card fraud and Hacking. Not convinced. If someone could exploit holes in the system they really don't need to be botting or gold selling to do either.

I have heard that argument that if you are into credit card fraud, why bother with gold selling; haven't seen anything definitive, but think it could be linked to a kind of money laundering. You use bad credit to get access to good money.

[Triforcer]

Ah, the ol "if there is botting/exploiting/etc., it means the players don't like something about your game and that's their way of telling you, so its really YOUR fault" argument.  Somewhere, Dr. Twista is smiling. 

[Nebu]

Ah, the ol "if there is botting/exploiting/etc., it means the players don't like something about your game and that's their way of telling you, so its really YOUR fault" argument.  Somewhere, Dr. Twista is smiling. 

Do you live in a completely binary world?  Seems like it some days. 

[Threash]

There is so much wrong in one single poster..... 

FIFY

[ghost]

Doesn't EvE sanction gold selling, sort of?  I mean you just go in and buy time cards and sell them to someone for ISK.

Edit:  I'm sure there's botting there, too, but I'm rather ignorant of the goings on of Eve other than the tutorial stuff.
  

[UnSub]

Doesn't EvE sanction gold selling, sort of?  I mean you just go in and buy time cards and sell them to someone for ISK.

Edit:  I'm sure there's botting there, too, but I'm rather ignorant of the goings on of Eve other than the tutorial stuff.
  

There's a difference between official gold-selling and unofficial gold selling. EvE lets players trade ISK for play time from other players - it's not a direct transfer of real money and is only good for EvE.

EvE might have botting, but botting outside of certain areas is a free kill.

[01101010]

http://na.aiononline.com/board/notices/view?articleID=175&page=

To aid you in your travels we will be implementing double experience weekends over the next three weeks. These bonus weekends will affect characters levels 1–35. This includes crafting and gathering experience as well. After the upcoming three weekends, we plan on hosting bonus experience weekends once or twice a month. We want to make it easier for you to experience what Aion has to offer for your characters after level 35.

The giving never ends with this game... levels 1 - 35 

[gryeyes]

Baby steps. Anyone from f13 hit the cap yet?

[Nebu]

Baby steps. Anyone from f13 willing to admit that they have hit the cap yet?

That fixed it. 

[Furiously]

I got to 15 and just hit the cancel button.

[Threash]

Baby steps. Anyone from f13 hit the cap yet?

I would have but i took a couple weeks off to play dragon age.  Actually i don't think i would have but i'd be a lot closer than 42.

[Shatter]

Ill admit Im level 48.  Go ahead, burn me at the stake