When will you do something about bots?

I'm getting spammed daily by bots that want to sell for real life money.
It starts to annoy big time.

If you get rid of the bots, you can't continue to pretend that people are actually playing and enjoying your game.

Any feedback on this? Im getting spammed daily at least 3 times.
Reporting them doesn't seem to ban them. After a while, they message me again.

You don't want to know how many bots I have put into my ignore list in the last week. Obviously, reporting them does nothing :(

In a game with unrestricted trade there will be bots forever. There is no way to get rid of them. No game has ever succeeded.

The bots are spamming me again...
I guess nobody cares?

-

"

Azimuthus#1135 wrote:

In a game with unrestricted trade there will be bots forever. There is no way to get rid of them. No game has ever succeeded.

I'm a SW developer. It is pretty easy to auto-ban bots.
I'm not talking about a 100% solution.

"

Tekvorian#7545 wrote:

"

Azimuthus#1135 wrote:

In a game with unrestricted trade there will be bots forever. There is no way to get rid of them. No game has ever succeeded.

I'm a SW developer. It is pretty easy to auto-ban bots.
I'm not talking about a 100% solution.

I raised the issue (I play on console) about bots on PC and found there are 3, I knew of 1 already.

1) the trade bots that scrape the Poe trade website and people believe an auction house will solve this one, it will not as we have an trade board (90% likely to be only auction house GGG will ever give Poe 1 or 2) and we still get this type of bots.

2) only possible on PC a program that pixel scans the screen and acts from what it sees to play the game without you, first of the ones my PC friend knew of and I didn’t. This again is possible to ban but ineffective as such a ‘player’ would just make another account to bot with.

3) only possible on PC a program that injects code into the Poe executable to let it play, GGG could 100% deal with these in less than 30 mins.

The main issue with bots isn’t actually the bots themselves, it’s the RMT that goes with them.
Back in my youth (I am 59 this year just for reference) I was a big PC World of Warcraft player that has always had bot protection from bot types 2 and 3 and it just doesn’t work for RMT players and only works for real players (who in that game for example left the bot to fish or farm herbs overnight whilst they slept).
The RMT crowd bot with disposable accounts and then send the loot they want to a ‘holding account’.

What GGG could so easily do (because I believe they have said every single item has a unique ID code) is let the bots keep going and in tv terms ‘just follow the money’ and ban those people. Could be done automatically on the backend server and then each flagged case manually verified by a real person to ensure it’s a seller or buyer, and not a person that received an item from a buyer)

I mean come on GGG it’s not rocket science, would need a small number of manhours to track the unique ID codes on the backend server for suspicious behaviour and then one employee (probably as a part time duty) to manually check the flagged results.

At the moment i dont think there is any reason to do somethign agaisnt bots.

For several reasons.

First one it creates work which cna be used elswewhere. Its early access. Bots are a non issue right now.

Second if you do something against bots the Cat and Mouse game starts. What i mean by that is if you ban Bots then the Botmakers find ways to trick the detection.


One example is from Old Times WoW. The first bots bakc then were running in a straight line. So what did the devs do. Put an obstacle in the way so bots stop there and you can ban them.

But later the Bots learned to run around Obstacles.

And the devs had to find new ways for detection.

The same would happen in Path of Exile if you start going against bots now. What you do is getting the System ready for launch and then get rid of all bots