Tag: bots

Steam Cleaned: One Wish Gets Farmed For Cards


Today’s Steam Cleaned topic is One Wish, the latest game to be targeted by card farming bots because Steam allows this sort of thing.

One Wish is by all means a completely forgettable title owing to the simple fact that it came and went without a whole lot of fanfare. The game launched back in June 2018 and probably performed just fine for a low budget game. One Wish also has trading cards, and appears to have been the subject of a mass botting campaign that took place this week.

Despite the fact that One Wish has had two forum threads and less reviews than would fill up a Battlefield server, the game experienced a 24 hour peak of over eight thousand players. Keep in mind this is a game that previously had long periods where nobody was playing at all. Eight thousand concurrent players yet nobody is discussing it in the forums and nobody is leaving reviews. It’s almost as if those accounts don’t have a real person at the helm. Almost.

And 24 hours later, the swarm is gone. Like an antelope devoured by a swarm of piranha, One Wish is back to having 0 concurrent logins.

I wanted to see if One Wish was by its lonesome, so I did a quick look at the other titles listed by developer GD Nomad, and wouldn’t you know it? I found more. GD Nomad also developed My Bones which experienced a similar but nowhere near as large spike in users over the past couple of days. My Bones has a “mostly negative” 25% positive rating on Steam, not exactly the kind of game to jump up 2,500 players for no reason. It averages one or two reviews per month, if even that. It does have trading cards.

Wooden House has trading cards, and wouldn’t you know it. My Bones hasn’t had a single post on its forums in nearly two years and one review since October.

GD Nomad’s library is chock full of games that have sudden inexplicable leaps in popularity only for that popularity to immediately die the following day.

Now none of this is meant to imply misconduct on the developer/publisher’s part, nor is it conclusive evidence that the games are being farmed for cards (although it’s pretty clear). The games could have been swept up by bot farms given that they are 1.) cheap and 2.) have trading cards. That’s all you need. These games are literally a dime in some currencies, and it’s also possible that some keys got dumped off on one of those grey market Russian websites that like to buy these games in bulk from the dev to use in bot farms. Not a bad return for games that most people seemed to hate.

More Steam reports as they appear.

Not Massive: Postal Goes Free On Steam, Gets Mass Botted For Trading Cards


(Update 12/21: That didn’t take long. It looks like Valve has killed trading card drops for Postal as of this morning)

Postal is free on Steam, and if you keep track of the top played Steam games you might be wondering how this little shooter from 1997 managed to amass more than four hundred thousand concurrent players on Steam. I mean, it’s good. It’s not that good.

Well the answer is fraud, but not on the part of developer Running With Scissors or Valve. Postal has trading cards; five normal and five foil, which makes the game an easy target for bots seeking to farm the cards and basically launder money on the black market. The cards were initially added back in 2014.

The good news for players is that if you’re looking to max out that Postal badge, doing so will assuredly be as cheap as it’s going to get. You’ll just have to swallow the possibility of your thirty cents going toward a criminal Russian mafia operation. The bad side is that Valve has a history of outright disabling card trading for free games that become the target of botting, so if you’re going to buy those badges do so now before the hammer of justice swings down. There are five badge levels until you max out, plus one foil badge level.

Check it out.

Source: Postal, Steam Charts

Kritika: Reboot Announces Server Bans, Trade Restrictions, New Class


Kritika: Reboot has been quite busy these last few days. To start off the news, publisher ALLM Co. has announced several waves of bans due to illegal trading of in-game currency. The ban list of names can be found on the Steam news page. Secondly, in order to combat fraudulent trading of items, the company has sent out warnings by in-game mail to those who purchased in-game goods illegally. In addition to the warnings, Kritika has implemented trade restrictions on all characters under level 20.

And now some good news. Kritika players will be happy to know that it is now possible to reserve a character slot for the upcoming release of Kritika’s next character class. The HongRyoung is an archer class that uses bows and arrows and according to Kritika’s charts ranks at very high combat power with mid-tier difficulty and survivability ratings. Players can create a character and reserve a level that will present them with a celebration box for achieving. The class is not yet available to play.

Neverwinter’s Gateway Is Going Away


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Neverwinter’s Gateway has always been a problem for Perfect World Entertainment. On its face, it is an amazingly useful tool where players can manage their inventories, buy and sell goods, level up skills, and play Sword Coast Adventures. It wasn’t available for the PS4 or Xbox, but those on PC managed to get quite a bit of use out of it. On the developer side, however, it was a nightmare. To put it short: Gateway was far too easy for bots to abuse.

Despite numerous attempts at curbing farmable resources, Perfect World Entertainment has been unable to keep the service useful while also preventing its use by bots. As a result, Gateway has shut down. Players who recently used the feature will receive a free companion.

(Source Neverwinter)

Black Desert Online Is Also Banning Cheaters


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Cheaters in Black Desert Online beware, Daum is following in the footsteps of other developers in reaffirming that players who break the rules will be dealt with swiftly and without prejudice. With complaints regularly being lobbied against the developer for failing to act on bots and hackers, Daum has announced that bans will now be conducted in waves, and will be permanent.

Greetings Adventurers,
While the vast majority of the community consists of honest players, some users did resort to cheating by using bots and hacking tools. This kind of behavior is a violation of our Terms of Use and not tolerated by us. After an investigation phase, where we made sure to collect all required details, we will now start banning those individuals on a bigger scale.
Starting today we will ban bot and cheating tool users in waves.
Banning waves will take place in regular intervals and we will continue banning as long as we find cheaters.
There is no coming back for convicted cheaters. Bans are permanent.

(Source: Black Desert Online)

Trion Worlds Declares Light On RNG, Tough on Crime


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To say that ArcheAge has had some controversies would be a gross misstatement somewhere on the level of placing a “watch your step” sign on an active minefield, but it looks like Trion Worlds may be willing to amend their ways to get back the good faith and credit of their community. In a post addressing player concerns, community manager Seraphina “Celestrata” Brennan revealed that Trion has been taking steps to alleviate the game of certain RNG mechanics.

While RNG systems won’t be going away completely, Trion wants to alter or completely get rid of high-failure-chance upgrades.

Will RNG ever completely disappear? Most likely no, as that’s not the type of game ArcheAge is. We want a level of challenge to remain, but we don’t want that challenge to be extremely high. Going forward, we want to continue to either remove or mitigate high failure mechanics by adding linear progression systems — I.E.: There should always be another way to get something.

In addition, Brennan points to a recent increase in bot bans thanks to “a renewed interest in reporting from the community itself,” with ban rates increasing by 300%.

(Source: ArcheAge)

[Video] World of Warcraft: Bots in Battlegrounds


Streamer ZybakTV posted the above video showing a Battleground game in World of Warcraft almost exclusively populated by bots.

Do you play World of Warcraft? Are bots in battlegrounds a common occurrence? Let us know in the comments.

[Community] First Impressions Are Everything


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Jbuck1984 over on Reddit wants RaiderZ developer MAIET Entertainment to know that it took him ten minutes to decide that the MMO wasn’t worth investing the time into. Simple: Upon entering the game, Jbuck1984 was immediately greeted by a spam bot that could not be blocked due to poor UI and an impossible to read name.

Would have loved to give it a shot, but there was a random gold spammer with the name llllllllll. In game I couldn’t differentiate the L’s from the I’s and I couldn’t click in the chat window to block him. The only next logical step for someone like me who gets annoyed very quickly was to uninstall the game. Thanks Raiderz for making the interface so horrible. If you couldn’t develop a functional chat window I can only imagine what the rest of the game is like.

Some of you will likely see uninstalling the game as a bit of an overreaction, but that doesn’t make Jbuck1984’s point any less true. Walking into an MMO and being presented with an environment like the one described is a bit like entering a nice restaurant and having solicitors start berating you from the entrance to your table to try and sell you stuff. The food might be of five star quality, and odds are a good few people with higher levels of patience will stick around long enough to eat it. There are, however, others who will just get up and go to a restaurant that doesn’t tolerate solicitors.

The post over at Reddit was deleted before this article was published, so you’ll have to excuse there not being a link to the original post. If you have a thought you would like to submit to Community Concerns about RaiderZ or any other MMO, throw us a comment below.

Guild Wars 2 Talks Bots, Gold Farmers, And Bans


As many players of Guild Wars 2 will tell you, a recent explosion in botting has blown into a serious problem for Arenanet and its community. In a post on the official forums, Security Coordinator Mike Lewis went on to discuss recent bans and action taken by Arenanet to curb the legion of bots currently taking up space in his game. Over the past week alone, Arenanet has banned over 1600 bots, and are currently tracking the most commonly used bots while gathering information on additional programs.

We are actively improving our means of detecting ‘bot’ activity in the game automatically. This includes tools for our customer support team to help them verify ‘botting’ reports and efficiently issue account terminations. Recently we have also hired a team of data specialists who will be helping us create more effective tools for analyzing reports of ‘botting.’

Sadly, many of the bots being used are likely through stolen accounts. Remember to practice safe surfing, kids. And if a bot approaches you on the street, don’t get into his van.

(Source: Guild Wars Forums)