79447-mass-bothack-bans-round-1-page-6

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which is exactly what makes me extra pissed at the teleport hackers. I'm fairly certain that Wildstar uses a client-side position reporting (if I'm wrong anyone who knows please correct me) which would only make it easier for them to fiddle with their packets, making detection of the tools the most prudent method of catching them but also the most difficult because of how easy it is for them (the hackers) to adapt to.


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First issue, close together nodes and various travel abilities. Explorer speed flags and powers like Gate would make your first suggestion impractical at best. Second issue, similarly to the first, various travel speed buffs combined with mobile attacks from classes like the spellslinger would make this an impractical fix especially when considering the teleport hacker's prime target; plants. The suggestions you made cannot be automated and would only be useful as suggestions for ways to identify a hacker after the fact, not during or at a rapid pace and only after the hacker has been reported to bring them to the devs' attention in the first place.


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So why not cross-reference "lagging appearance" with high harvest amounts, and send that information to GMs to invisibly spectate the players, and ban them as necessary? Or players who grind for long periods of time. (Longer than players tend to, anyway). So someone who is "lagging" and vendoring wood/ore/whatever by the thousands... is pretty easy to just ban until they get an authenticator, or someone who farms for 48 hours straight. Then once that stops working, you can lower the bar until it starts commonly reporting false-positives- meaning that the bots are no more effective than a regular player? Lagging around is one thing, but lagging around for great periods of time while harvesting, is one of the huge issues.


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I appreciate your responses and giving some hope to this dreadful problem. But my main question now is, do you really except for people like myself whos free months subscription that's about to run out to actually pay for another month? Or are you going to give us another month free to see the progress you guys are making or are you just gonna push us away for good. With Everquest next and WoD coming out you guys have alot of competition. I personally really enjoy this game, but after spending 70 something dollars already and having a hard time making gold because of the bots taking all my ore and not being able to craft I'm not going to be able to buy a credd. And with the game in its current state I find it hard to believe most people that actually care about the economy/trade skills will renew.


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Comparing WoW in 2004 to Wildstar in 2014 based on GMs/support is pretty silly. In 2004 RMT was almost non existent and WoW wasn't getting annihilated by bots/hacks. Of course support would be better because the entire playerbase wasn't flooding them with bot/hack reports over and over. Its also funny that you say blizzard does whatever it takes to stop bots. If that was true they wouldn't do "scroll of resurrection" promotions and sell max level characters. Bots farming raids/dungeons have been a huge plague thanks to those two things. I guess all is well though if they are making enough money off the legit people using those services.


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I think there are a few points to bring up here. First of all, "soon" is as good an answer as you can really get without giving something away. Kind of like whatever fix they dropped that stopped a lot of the goldseller spam, you want to interrupt them, give them as little information as possible, and make them start frantically digging around in the client or rattling at the proverbial shutters trying to figure out WTF just happened. There's also a point to bring up here that there is no "end-date" on this operation; they can reduce the amount of bots and hopefully make it harder for them to operate, but bots and hacks will never be "gone", they never are. The best they can do is to say, generally sometime after the fact, that they did some non-specific things to try to fight it to keep us as "up to date" as they can. I think the Target analogy is completely relevant to the topic, especially since having people look and see "theft" is a completely unreliable way to prevent all asset loss. First of all, they can't see even a bit of the problem. Second of all, passive security measures have proven to be more effective than posting some guy at the door because guys at the door are easy to avoid (you just take the people you see into account). Target doesn't allow people to steal by any stretch of the imagination, but there's a lot more theft at Target than hacks in the game. I was working at Target when the meth craze kicked up and they started stealing the Sudafed. And I mean all the Sudafed. As in, we literally had none left in the region at one point; you could not buy Sudafed from a Target in central Ohio for about a week as we tried to adjust our inventory. It was insane. What you're recommending is that we stand someone at the Sudafed and stare at people as they approach it to see if they look like they're going to steal it and somehow monitor every single person that picks up a Sudafed through the camera system to make sure they aren't stealing it. In the end, we tried that, and even THAT didn't work. The only thing that eventually worked was when they locked the Sudafed up behind the desk and started tracking driver's license number. Which people bitched about and were calling managers over to scream at for weeks (heh, most of whom you could tell were definitely the kind of person who would steal Sudafed). The issues are exactly the same. You can't assume everyone that looks like a thief is a thief, it's expensive and inefficient to use real people posted at the object and look for signs, and the most efficient and effective measures you can use are preventative. Now, after Sudafed, obviously, they moved on to stealing other stuff (thieves don't often steal things for personal use, they steal things for resale, so they steal whatever is trendy that they can hawk on the street for the highest dollar value). People didn't suddenly stop trying to find the next gap because one was plugged up. Nobody thanked assets protection when they had more Sudafed for sale again, they complained about the hoops and hurdles they now had to jump to get it for legitimate purposes. They just had to move on. I can't see blaming Carbine because their massive, 8-year project had some kind of movement vulnerability that was exploited at launch and is hard to stop people from exploiting without hurting their game experience or increasing the amount of people banned for no reason. For hackers, this is just about finding a sliver of vulnerability and exploiting it as much as possible until it's plugged, players like you be damned. For Carbine, they have to make sure it's plugged thoroughly so it's not re-exploited by simply changing some script (the way they'd suddenly start just looking for ores with people standing unmoving near them and avoid them) but so that the hackers literally go away and have to try something much less blatant. They have to make sure they don't sweep up their legit customers in the net. They have to make sure there are no incentives for people to personally hack and they have to make judgement calls on what accounts are compromised and uncompromised. Most importantly, they have to do all of this without adversely affecting their gameplay. That's a little more complex than "they should have known better and if they'd stand in the world with me, they'd be able to see the bots and ban them." While it sounds like a good idea and may calm the sheep, that's the least effective and most expensive solution. It'd be easy to write scripts to avoid, it doesn't do anything to address the root vulnerability, it takes a lot of manpower and expense to execute as well as needing tools for them to use to ban through the mod game client, and most importantly it largely bans a quickly accruing resource (hacked accounts) that is easily replaced. This is the one way it isn't like Target security that I can see. If you arrest someone for theft, they go to jail. They are done until they get out again. In Carbine's case, if they ban someone for botting, the person isn't done. They hop to a different account and keep going, because they paid next to nothing for the list of accounts they are using. Preventative measures are then going to be the most important and only effective way this gets resolved to the customer's eventual satisfaction. I can only imagine how people would feel seeing mods in the game banning botters and the problem still not being solved, but that's what would happen.


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No but they have PLENTY of money to hire REAL LIVE PEOPLE called GMs to be online 24/7 for the next few months to ACTIVELY catch the bots in the act, ban their sorry azzes ... rinse repeat. You can't just expect to write code to fix everything now a days. Some things have to be fixed the good old fashioned way. WORK! Live customer service. Real people doing their job. How hard is it for NCSOFT to hire some GMs who do nothing but ban reported bots all day long?! SERIOUSLY? HOW HARD CAN THIS BE?!!!!!


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