[OT] Logitech Gaming Keyboard + WoW = Ban

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Originally Posted by Sylow

Simply: a small number of bot-users manage to gain a massive advantage. A huge number of players notice that the small number gained the advantage, feels that they can't compete, are frustrated and leave.

Now you have lost a large portion of your playerbase, instead of a small one.

Additionally, bot-using (as well as exploiting and abusing) gets people ahead very fast, making them loose out much content and leaving them with a "finished" game in very little time. Since the bot also didn't make friends, what is there to keep them in the game? Probably not much, so they will move on to another game. (Even faster if they realize that there are other bot-users who did the same and theiy whole great "achievement" is nothing special...)

Thus, throwing those out also makes sense from a pure business point of view and even more sense from a honest players or gameleaders point of view. You loose a few months of subscription of a small part of your playerbase while the players who could be pissed off by the abuse is much larger and is likely to also still stay for much longer.



And it even makes good sense. Would the KK employees _not_ take a look at other MMORPGs around, i would consider them ignorant and / or incompetent.

And to the topic again, it is incredibly easy to detect such stuff. As already mentioned, there are among others:
- not reacting to tells (i would dare to assume, he got and missed more than one.)
- not reacting in a "sentient" way to happenings in his surroundings. (Removing or stealing his monster and still seeing him issue the attack commands, spawning an absolutely terrible monster and see his reaction, etc... If he reacts and curses, you appologize for the mistake, resurrect him, give him a few gold coins and he's happy again.)
- absolutely fixed timing of commands. (And i even dare to assume, the guy had the weapon switch on a timer, too... let the char train one weapon for 15 minutes, switch to the next. After an hour, take a look on how skills are, adjust the bot/keyboard accordingly to train for the next hour...)

Might sound harsh, i don't have any love for WoW (left of boredom and disappointment of massive design flaws after two months) but i think that Blizzard is doing the right thing by directly punishing any exploiter and not giving in to begging and nagging. [Though, if i was them, i would get rid of their macro-system. At least while i played, it was a direct and open invitation to abuse and exploit without using any tools outside of the game.]

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Ehh your forgettin most macroers aren't actually people that want anything but cold hard cash from the game, most macroing takes place for the purpose of selling ingame cash/rare items and is done by people that operate a large number of accounts simulataniously or by sweat shop style gamers where people are paid a wage to sit there and farm, all day long.

As for easy detection you do realise that some of the macroscripts out there exchange hands for upto a thousand euros because they can easily make that cash back in no time.

These kind of people are willing to invest cash to get around what would be seen as the more common ways of detecting scripts.

Casting times, been too regular easily avoided whack one of the few million pseudo random algorithms and unless you start hocking major resources just towards fighting macro's most will slip under the radar.

Other tools in the bag of tricks include onscreen object recognition and character regonition, with a slight of programming knowledge these are open to most everyone, and can defeat thing such as stealing monsters and unexpected changes.

The biggest problem is with games is they operate in a limited enviroment of possibilities and because of the constraints of coding things to work quickly and efficiently alot of similarities occur in the game world. This works to the advantage of the macroers as they only have to account for a certain limited set of actions and consequences. And in reality you can't have someone sit there and monitor every single suspected macroer because, mistakes will happen often, jealous players will accuse other players without reason etc etc, it takes resources away from other places, if you want to do real life comparisons its like blackmarket trading, as long as theres people out there wanting to buy gold or rare items to get ahead in game, people will generate it to supply that demand if they can make profit, the second it becomes unprofitable they'll move on. And tbh there are alot of people out there that either don't want to or don't have the ability to invest large ammounts of time into a MMO to get high up there. As MMO move into the more mainstream area of entertainment this problem will increase not decrease and I wouldn't besuprised if in a few years the majority of mmo producers began organising forces of people or taking players onto its payroll to police games soley for macro's. Its a side effect of modeling games on real world dynamics of economy and social status(ranking) people want to be the richest and most powerful as fast as possible and as there no real major come back in mmo's they'll feel confortable doing the immoral thing.

*** Disclaimer: boters are the scum of the earth and outa be beaten over the face repeatedly with a piece of heavy mining equipment tbh This is not a troll more of a devils advocate thingy to pass the time at work ***

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sylow

Simply: a small number of bot-users manage to gain a massive advantage. A huge number of players notice that the small number gained the advantage, feels that they can't compete, are frustrated and leave.

Now you have lost a large portion of your playerbase, instead of a small one.

Additionally, bot-using (as well as exploiting and abusing) gets people ahead very fast, making them loose out much content and leaving them with a "finished" game in very little time.

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Thats really semantics tbh, the bot is still running in a world with rules, its merely doing the work rather than the human. But anything a bot can do a human can do as well, provided the bot is not using any information that the human would not normally be able to know.

If one ran a bot 24hours a day he would surly be noticed, so there is down time, perhaps not as much as a normal player but still... Seems like the race to the finnish mentality that prevades in most mmos is what really causes the problems with boting. Keep in mind with mmos were talking about a service nothing more. People are paying for the service of playing in a world, yet mmos are about the most restrictive service, in terms of how you use it available imho. I have a digital video recorder, that gives me an advantage over the guys with just normal digital cable, do you see them canceling?

What puzzles me is what advantage does the boter have over everyone else? How is that any different than a power gamers advantage over a casual gamer? How is it any different from letting ones brother or spouse play for a hour or so on your system, where your character reaps the rewards even though your not playing? Is it not just a perceived advantage because they didn't invest the time actually playing personally the game as you did, though you both payed the same, and your characters would likely have to invest the same amount of total time in-game to achieve the goal?

Besides which the game, in this case wow, dynamics are as such that its ripe for boting. If your game is boring enough that someone was willing to code for hours to avoid the bore than what do you expect tbh. :D Take his money and be done with it. Better yet let them have a boter flag, but open them up to pk, that way those people who think bots are a piece of piss can vent by ganking the guy while his player is off watching the queer eye, sodomizing their cat, or whatever it is boters do with their, thanks to the bot, free time...

-A

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Originally Posted by Androth

*** Disclaimer: boters are the scum of the earth and outa be beaten over the face repeatedly with a piece of heavy mining equipment tbh This is not a troll more of a devils advocate thingy to pass the time at work ***



Thats really semantics tbh, the bot is still running in a world with rules, its merely doing the work rather than the human. But anything a bot can do a human can do as well, provided the bot is not using any information that the human would not normally be able to know.

If one ran a bot 24hours a day he would surly be noticed, so there is down time, perhaps not as much as a normal player but still... Seems like the race to the finnish mentality that prevades in most mmos is what really causes the problems with boting. Keep in mind with mmos were talking about a service nothing more. People are paying for the service of playing in a world, yet mmos are about the most restrictive service, in terms of how you use it available imho. I have a digital video recorder, that gives me an advantage over the guys with just normal digital cable, do you see them canceling?

What puzzles me is what advantage does the boter have over everyone else? How is that any different than a power gamers advantage over a casual gamer? How is it any different from letting ones brother or spouse play for a hour or so on your system, where your character reaps the rewards even though your not playing? Is it not just a perceived advantage because they didn't invest the time actually playing personally the game as you did, though you both payed the same, and your characters would likely have to invest the same amount of total time in-game to achieve the goal?

Besides which the game, in this case wow, dynamics are as such that its ripe for boting. If your game is boring enough that someone was willing to code for hours to avoid the bore than what do you expect tbh. :D Take his money and be done with it. Better yet let them have a boter flag, but open them up to pk, that way those people who think bots are a piece of piss can vent by ganking the guy while his player is off watching the queer eye, sodomizing their cat, or whatever it is boters do with their, thanks to the bot, free time...

-A

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Completely missing the point there, most botters not in it for actually using the highly capped char, they capp it they sell it on they start another one, this again is done by large groups of people together rather than the odd lone player. Just browse through ebay or gold selling sites you'll see quite alot of sales of gold, high level chars, rare items etc.

And tbh the problem is mmo are typically sposed to be fair ground based only on one thing, the time you have invested to make your character. If people find ways around that constraint ie gettin other people to do the job for them botting unbalances the playing feild its allows people with excesses of real world cash to buy high level char's it allows people with the knowledge to code the bot to get around the constraint, not everyone has these real world advantages so not everyone can have them in game. Which is against the ethos of the game. It would go along way to help the problem if mmo companies setup a fixed exchange rate for real world cash to ingame cash and allowed people to trade ingame cash for real cash and visa versa. Though this adds the problems of adding the economy of a small country into the world market place. It means botters would have to undercut the mmo companies providing the cash for sale, and if that value is less than the cost of taking the time to produce that cash using a bot they'll evaporate.

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Originally Posted by Skusty

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U STOLE MY IDEA

Theres no chance ill get banned if I use G15 in Neocron then?

i would doubt it...you cant really macro a gun shooting a specific enemy in a MMORPGFPS...and the processor moves around in NC (annoying but a good feature) so you cant bot it... it would be highly useful for PA swapping setups...

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Originally Posted by Apocalypsox

i would doubt it...you cant really macro a gun shooting a specific enemy in a MMORPGFPS...and the processor moves around in NC (annoying but a good feature) so you cant bot it... it would be highly useful for PA swapping setups...

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[ edited ], one of the biggest advantages NC has and one of the most ingenious anti macro devices in game is the fact it forces cursor referencing to a fixed point.

The guy got banned because of "botting". He was AFK while his priest leveled his mace skills. He blamed the Linux environment and to the last, he blamed his Logitec keyboard because of the macros. The keyboard itself is NOT against any rules of conduct in WoW but he abused it's powers to make a looping macro with a third party software.

Later on he said he was sitting infront of the PC but just watching television, he lied. Actually, I emailed him and we talked and I got a reply back and he said: "Funny thiing is.. my TV is next to my computer screen. I guess I should've mentioned that."

I replied back with some evidence from one of his buddies, that said he was not infront of the computer at that time, quote from his friend: "Sure, he was playing afk. That's wrong.".

Being AFK and let the keyboard, by the help of a third party software, do all the hard work is botting, even if he was sitting there.

I never got a reply back, I wonder why...

Blizzard have also said themselves that they have no plans to ban the keyboard as it's not harmful at all, sure it has macros but so does WoW have as well and binding a key to execute several macros is like combining several macros into one big macro.



The guy deserved a ban btw, it's sad he doesn't realize what he was banned for though.

One person has received a forum temp ban and two people's game accounts have been reported for possible exploiting based on posts made in this thread so far. The use of macros in Neocron is just as prohibited as WoW and the penalty can be just as severe, so posting your macro exploits isn't such a hot idea.

Please remember that any discussion on the subject of exploiting in Neocron is not permitted.

N

forgive me if i seem seem slow but is getting banned from WoW meant to be a bad thing.....am i missing something?