To combat bots.
Tag: gold farmer
XLGames: Goldfarming By Any Other Name
MMORPG.com recently conducted an interview with Yinzi Cheng of XLGames, creators of the MMO ArcheAge. The interview is based entirely around the game’s monetization format, which Cheng believes makes the game impervious to gold farmers. There are three currencies in ArcheAge: Gold, Arcs, and Crystals. Gold is the usual in-game gold, crystals are the real money currency, and Arcs are used to purchase many of the game’s premium goods. Gold and crystals are not tradeable, but arcs are. As Cheng says:
Gold that is earned from game contents is untradeable. Arcs could be earned by purchasing Crystals, by enjoying some contents such as catching boss monsters, or by trading with other users. So ‘gold farmers’ cannot produce gold illegally. Therefore, the ‘gold farmers’ easiest way to earn gold, which is auto playing, will no longer bring them profit.
I don’t think XLGames fully understands how gold farmers work. Don’t believe me? When Jagex introduced trade restrictions to RuneScape, players simply converted to a currency based in junk items, allowing them to bypass the system completely. Materials can be traded between players, so what’s to stop a gold farmer from botting millions of gold worth of materials and trading those materials to the buyer who then sells them to an NPC for gold? Arcs are open season for gold farmers to generate in-game, as they can be mined from bosses.
ArcheAge’s non-tradeable gold idea isn’t new, and XLGames should be aware that the process hasn’t done much to impede gold farming in the other titles, like ArcheAge, where despite a strong insistence that the process isn’t feasible, there is quite a variety of gold farming services with varying methods of delivery. The lesson here is that so long as there is a trade system, people will find a way to farm gold.
(Source: MMORPG.com)
RuneScape Bonds Eradicate Gold Farming
In September, Jagex introduced bonds, an item that players could buy with real money and either trade to other players for gold or redeem for membership, spins, and runecoins. In a press release sent out today, Jagex has revealed that since bonds have been introduced, the amount of illegal gold being injected into the economy has dropped 81% by their own metrics.
“While we anticipated that the launch of Bonds would impact the flow of illegal wealth into the game, we are thrilled the initiative has resulted in such a strong and immediate impact. This action lays the foundations for RuneScape to continue going from strength to strength in its second successful decade!”
RuneScape has historically had a large problem with gold farming and bots, due to the ease of access to the client and grind-focused nature of the game. Bonds are just another step in an ongoing process to rid the game of gold farmers.
(Source: Jagex press release)
Jagex Brings In The New Year With A Ban(g)
Arenanet isn’t the only one throwing cheaters overboard tied to a cement block. In a post released yesterday, the developer announced that users of a bot script would be logging in to find themselves permanently banned, among them long-time players:
As part of our ongoing war on botting, we continue to take action against those confirmed to be using a bot script. Just yesterday we banned a large number of bot users, including a number of maximum level players.
Additionally, in the same announcement Jagex detailed bans for an exploit in the recently released God Statues update which allowed players to generate a massive quantity of experience very quickly. Aside from banning the accounts that took part in the exploit, Jagex commented that they have also banned the alternate accounts of those same players.
(Source: RuneScape)
[Community] First Impressions Are Everything
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.
Brilliant! Aion Performs Weekly Sweep of Block List
Don’t you get tired of blocking people who are harassing you, only to later wonder if it is safe to remove them from your list? What about gold farmer accounts, how can you be sure that they haven’t been banned? They could be waiting just around the corner to surprise you with cheap gold at fast delivery speeds and customer satisfaction guaranteed. And no one needs that after a long day at the Pottery Barn picking out new bed sheets. Luckily, NCSoft has just the idea: Periodically sweeping banned accounts from everyone’s ignore list.
Starting with tomorrow’s maintenance, every week we will be clearing players’ block lists of permanently banned accounts! This means that banned accounts–including RMT spammers!–will no longer take up space in your block list! We will continue to perform this function every week.
(Source: NCSoft)
Bots Are Choking To Death In RuneScape
It must be Christmas. No, my calendar says September. This week (hopefully) marks the reveal of Botany Bay, and on Sunday Jagex announced that they would begin silently banning bots starting Monday. Well the bans aren’t exactly silent, as players are spotting (and video taping) bots spamming gold farming websites in key areas. The bots have been recorded spamming for several minutes, before inexplicably choking and dying, presumably being banned thereafter.
This month, Jagex announced a new method of detecting and banning bots, both collection and advertising, as well as a way for players to take part in the process and sentence bots to death in a Salem-esque trial. Why the flashy, and rather unnecessary, showmanship? When you spend most of your time banning bots, sometimes you want to have fun doing it, according to a recent Q&A. The alternative goal is to give the players instant feedback that the developer is indeed taking action against bots and gold farmers.
Most Surprising Act of 2011: Runescape Nukes Cheaters
Ever since Jagex’s inception, their fight against bots has been rather reactionary and ineffective. From 2001 with CAPTCHA codes and fatigue, to the random event system that probably claimed more players who had left the keyboard or lost connection than their intended targets, and so on. From 2005 onward, Jagex continued updates on an escalating basis to combat gold farmers who, despite massive bans and the shut down of Runescape classic to all but a few, continued growing at an even larger scale. In 2007, Jagex restricted trade to small imbalances, implemented the anonymous trading of the Grand Exchange. For over three years, Jagex implemented updates to soften those restrictions, and in 2011 all of that work went to waste when Jagex released the restrictions on trade and the gold farmers came back in an even greater force than they had four years prior.
So when Jagex launched the bot nuke and knocked the servers offline for the better part of the day, I joined a few other MMO journalists in awaiting the results, and were we ever surprised. Even after waiting for a couple of days, the bots hadn’t come back. The chatter on the cheat websites was of panic, and despite the attempt to keep their customers, the bot writers only seemed to be able to make big announcements of further upcoming announcements.
Bots still exist, don’t get confused, but those that continue on have nowhere near the complexity of their deceased brethren. Writing a bot that can click on specific sections of the screen in a specific order is easier to defeat than a bot that can fight dragons more efficiently than I can. So after years of telling myself that Jagex would never get rid of the bots due to a combination of incompetence and apathy, I can say that this year Jagex not only made me eat my shoe, but made me eat it dry.
Kudos to you, Jagex.
Aion: 1 Million Copies, CAPTCHA, Patches
The good news just keeps on rolling in for Aion, with NCsoft announcing that the title has reached nearly 1 million copies sold in North America and Europe. 600,000 of the copies come post release, we all remember Aion’s boasted four hundred thousand copies preordered. North America accounted for over half of the copies sold since Aion launched in September.
Where Aion has not excelled recently is in the most recent patch, whose community response can be summed up with a “…” Although experience rewards have been boosted in several areas, the community is lashing back against a new CAPTCHA system that randomly debuffs players during gathering that is removed by typing in a random word that displays on screen. The new system is set up to stop bots, an issue that has been plaguing Aion since launch. Players have also issued complaints that the patch did not address the main problems affecting the game.
So, good news this week for Aion and bad news as well.
MMO Fallout 