Perhaps some whale bought from them or something, but I have never seen them being so noisy on ship 3. Two or three on main lobby pretty much taking ownership of all chat and one on shop area spamming nonstop and every 5 seconds. It's getting pretty bad. Blocking them through xbox live does nothing to stop their in game chat either.

Yeah your not the only one. As soon as the SG scratch came out and I went to check them out for like 1h-2h of just playing around I did see like 3x More bots spamming then usual.

They've been a lot more active on ship 2 as well. Who really spends $1 for one million meseta anyway?

I'm sure the people running the bots think that the SG rewards are tradable, and thus worth the currency to players. They don't actually play the game, so they have no idea.

@DeanLutz72 said in Bots are pretty active today.:

Who really spends $1 for one million meseta anyway?

I made myself that question but then i remember the spend habits of ppl on mobile games market lol

@Anarchy-Marine said in Bots are pretty active today.:

I'm sure the people running the bots think that the SG rewards are tradable, and thus worth the currency to players. They don't actually play the game, so they have no idea.

The increase in activity of the bots in my ship was previous to current SG so i think is more related to the fact that they act unchallenged by GMs; first there were only a bot or 2 jumping blocks in main lobby, then they added a bot jumping shoping plaza and finaly permanent bots to most popular blocks.

PS Just in case some genius comes saying "GMs cant go and sue GoldSellers blah blah" (yeah that happened to me) i mean INGAME when i say they act unchallenged by GMs

I remember reporting bot like a month ago and seeing GM pop up on block less than a minute later. I complimented him via whisper and posted in alliance chat how nice it is to see GMs so quick to response. Today I saw a perma bot in shopping mall on block 2 named like a website he is promoting just spamming that website on and on... I guess GMs gave up or something Maybe they wait on software upgrade for nProtect or even planning on changing to another product, who knows.

@Kapnobatai86 said in Bots are pretty active today.:

I remember reporting bot like a month ago and seeing GM pop up on block less than a minute later. I complimented him via whisper and posted in alliance chat how nice it is to see GMs so quick to response. Today I saw a perma bot in shopping mall on block 2 named like a website he is promoting just spamming that website on and on... I guess GMs gave up or something Maybe they wait on software upgrade for nProtect or even planning on changing to another product, who knows.

I don't know. If a GM's job is to ban those things, they shouldn't be giving up on it. I mean, that's part of their job while they have it. It would be like a firefighter giving up on putting out fires that are started in the same places.

@ZorokiHanuke said in Bots are pretty active today.:

@Kapnobatai86 said in Bots are pretty active today.:

I remember reporting bot like a month ago and seeing GM pop up on block less than a minute later. I complimented him via whisper and posted in alliance chat how nice it is to see GMs so quick to response. Today I saw a perma bot in shopping mall on block 2 named like a website he is promoting just spamming that website on and on... I guess GMs gave up or something Maybe they wait on software upgrade for nProtect or even planning on changing to another product, who knows.

I don't know. If a GM's job is to ban those things, they shouldn't be giving up on it. I mean, that's part of their job while they have it. It would be like a firefighter giving up on putting out fires that are started in the same places.

But if they are cooking something big that will ban them in large chunks or even perma ban them and it launches like in few weeks, then manually banning them now with very little effect is just waste of their time and energy.

@Kapnobatai86 said in Bots are pretty active today.:

@ZorokiHanuke said in Bots are pretty active today.:

@Kapnobatai86 said in Bots are pretty active today.:

I remember reporting bot like a month ago and seeing GM pop up on block less than a minute later. I complimented him via whisper and posted in alliance chat how nice it is to see GMs so quick to response. Today I saw a perma bot in shopping mall on block 2 named like a website he is promoting just spamming that website on and on... I guess GMs gave up or something Maybe they wait on software upgrade for nProtect or even planning on changing to another product, who knows.

I don't know. If a GM's job is to ban those things, they shouldn't be giving up on it. I mean, that's part of their job while they have it. It would be like a firefighter giving up on putting out fires that are started in the same places.

But if they are cooking something big that will ban them in large chunks or even perma ban them and it launches like in few weeks, then manually banning them now with very little effect is just waste of their time and energy.

I wouldn't think so. Seeing GMs at work constantly has an effect on player morale. That's exactly what prompted me to make this thread. You know, usually the bad stuff tends to take a greater impact in these cases. I mean, if GMs were banning all those bots previously, we most likely wouldn't see it. But if they stopped and the bot population exploded, we'd notice it (as we just did) and be agitated about it. So I feel, and this is just my opinion, that if they are cooking something bigger, they should still leave a GM or two doing ground duty.

Then again, I really doubt there's a real solution to these. RMT people will always find a way to get their profit. The human drive to do illegal things to advance themselves knows no bounds. And as long as there's demand, they will always be willing to take people's dollars, while also probably infecting their PCs at the checkout screen with all kinds of malware to profit off them even more...

RMT cant be fully stopped but it can be greatly mitigated and i hav seen GMs having some success in that regard but thats mostly in subscription based games, apparently the money of customers in free to play games is not worth the same level of dedication and yes i know this is not exclusive to PSO2 but that dnst make it any better, in fact seeing PSO getting the same BS treatment as some low quality game publised by nexon or aeria makes it worse for me...

@ZorokiHanuke I agree with u Zoro GMs cant just give up and @Kapnobatai86 they hav nothing to do with the development of nProtect which is, if im not mistaken, mostly a barrier against scrypt kiddies using Auto task and cheat engines so i doubt theres something being cooked.

nProtect is, to my understanding, a sort of "off the self" program game makers buy and install into their game builds (it's also a rootkit that logs your key presses, so when gaming, dedicate yourself only to the game and don't access any sensitive info on your PC). Of course, there may be a level of customization for game makers to use, but for the most part, the bulk of the program cannot be edited by the game makers. So anything big from nProtect should come from the program maker themselves. Any other specific edits per game, though, I assume those are under the game maker's control.

As I said before, nothing beats human intervention in these cases, and it is why it's important to have GMs on site, since bots may not be constantly human operated, but the humans behind them are always looking for better ways to deploy them and keep them running. It's, like with malware, a race between companies against those seeking to self profit off them, and off us.

I'm not saying that GMs have something to do with development of nProtect, I'm saying that maybe their boss/manager came to them and said something along the lines of: "Don't bother with bots for now, we are getting upgrade and that will sort them out." Also, considering how bad it is to navigate UI in this game, GM tools may also be complete mess.

That's all just my wishful thinking and optimism tho as it looks like game is going slowly down the drain

Well in the end, all we hope is to have this recent bot surge to end. For now I'm lurking on low population blocks, since bot are of course attracted to the masses.

Also, GMs should have a sort of announcement regarding this. A simple "We are working on it", as canned as it my sound to some, at least tells people they are aware of the problem. because even if they are aware as I assume, not telling it to the people drops morale even more since players will take it as if they don't care. So yeah, we need a bit more transparency and info from GMs. Maybe a dedicated community relations person to address that connection issue.

Why do you even allow fresh accounts with lvl 1 chars to spam the chat? Why not do it similar to any other mmo on the market and raise the cap to let's say lvl 25. You could even integrate hidden mechanics so people need to actually play the game in order to unlock the chat. This may take away a little bit of new players experience but they could still play with a friend and use discord or join literally any random game. I don't think I have used the chat in the first week at all. Outside of machine learning AI programs that scan the chat I don't think there's a perfect solution with no drawbacks. If I have learnt one thing from this game, it is that I feel like it doesn't acknowledge other mmo's existence. There are the same issues in any other game, so why not take a peek and try to copy the solution? Same with the quality of life in this game: Why do we lack a blocklist for gods sake? Every 20 year old mmo has one. And remember, this is technically an 8 year old game, so there are no excuses period. They also didn't improve the game at all in the last 10 weeks of pc release. MS store is still cancer and most of my friends cannot play or gave up. There are days with random disconnects all over the place. It's a pain to join any game with an existing party on a different block. I could write an essay about the things that this game does bad or does not support.

@GM-Deynger The devs really need to implement a proper block function. It's an MMO, a social environment, this should be a basic function. Reminds me of how those morons at Vidme didn't have one until I complained about it (when it came to YouTube "alternatives" Vidme's mismanagement was really the final straw, it could have been something so much better if it wasn't run by arrogant morons). Especially when there's always one or two people at the concerts keep spamming lewd SAs that I already blocked but show up anyway and ones I haven't blocked yet.