look i dislike it as much as the next guy but. Sega, you need to step up your anti-dishonest acts game because denouncing them only made it worse. they can automate the entire process of account creation, character creation, logging into a ship and block hopping spamming these messages and some have resorted to using the shouting bubbles, making it super obnoxious.

color me a ranter/complainer if you will but if you're going to toot your horn about it being a bad thing and post numbers on how many cases you're going through you should probably do more than remind folk.

@Vivianite said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

they can automate the entire process of account creation, character creation, logging into a ship and block hopping spamming these messages and some have resorted to using the shouting bubbles

And yet you want them to do........what exactly? Find out who the botters are, where they live and send the Men In Black there?

It's a F2P game, these bots will ALWAYS exist in them as long as suckers exist that buy from them.

This has literally been a plague since the dawn of MMO games. Honestly at this point unless severe changes are made to general online usage on a global scale you are probably going to get a resolution faster by trying to convince world governments that the people performing these activities are funding terrorism and criminal activities.

Yah but there are ways to at least lessen the issue. I mean look at Runescape, bots were rampant years ago but Jagex took measure to combat them. Are they still around? Yah but there's far less of them. Sega could just as easily figure out how to stamp out a good chunk of them.

I can't speak for Runescape specifically, but I'm assuming that game had players more spread out in the world, and didn't have everyone standing around in essentially the beginner area where all the free accounts get dumped out like PSO2.

PSO2 is in kind of an unfortunate area as far as "absolute" solutions to the bot problem go, because there's so little differentiating a bot from a real player that's just starting the game and intends to play it through. FF14 solved its problem by blocking most social features for free trials (limiting bots to main cities where most of the population isn't), but it only managed that because at its heart it's a subscription game. I doubt PSO2 wants to lock chat behind premium, when being F2P is its whole model.

They could be quicker about blacklisting specific key phrases, but bots would just find different ways to say the same thing, they could blacklist all the key phrases and then the bots could make symbol art detailing their URLs. Once they enter that territory, there really isn't any way to automatically block them, besides blocking specific reported hashes for symbol arts, but they could easily just have each bot place a random shape in the art's background to randomize the hash to get around that, too.

The only real solution I can see that'd work is having more human employees constantly monitoring the situation, which depending on how many you have, SEGA might not care enough to put that extra expense in.

@Akonyl said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

because there's so little differentiating a bot from a real player that's just starting the game and intends to play it through

Other than the fact most are 1 letter or gibberish, along with the fact they iimmediately start screaming the copypasta about the site they belong to.

@Ephemiel said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

@Akonyl said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

because there's so little differentiating a bot from a real player that's just starting the game and intends to play it through

Other than the fact most are 1 letter or gibberish, along with the fact they iimmediately start screaming the copypasta about the site they belong to.

I feel like you must've ignored the rest of the post or something. My point was that all of these things they do are things that they can easily change once they realize that it's "detectable" behavior, and that there isn't a final steadfast way to differentiate between a bot account and a newbie player to solve the problem one-and-for all, like most people saying "just solve the problem, SEGA" want. But if you wanna cherry-pick one sentence and throw the rest out, sure.

I don't play anymore. But I can not imagine the hell that must go on when these bots use the shout function every five seconds.

@Akonyl said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

I feel like you must've ignored the rest of the post or something. My point was that all of these things they do are things that they can easily change once they realize that it's "detectable" behavior

I feel like you must've never seen bots before.

They WANT to be detected by everyone, even if it means getting caught by the GMs. Hell, in WoW, they had tons of bots do dying animations that spelled out the website with their bodies. Their behavior has NEVER changed.

If you want to keep talking while being uninformed, then be my guess.

@Ephemiel said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

@Akonyl said in "dishonest acts" denoucement made the bost angrier:

I feel like you must've ignored the rest of the post or something. My point was that all of these things they do are things that they can easily change once they realize that it's "detectable" behavior

I feel like you must've never seen bots before.

They WANT to be detected by everyone, even if it means getting caught by the GMs. Hell, in WoW, they had tons of bots do dying animations that spelled out the website with their bodies. Their behavior has NEVER changed.

If you want to keep talking while being uninformed, then be my guess.

I thought it was pretty clear when I called it "detectable behavior" in that quote that I meant in the vein of automatic detection systems (especially since the sentence was about ways to avoid auto-bans), which no, they don't want to be detected. When talking about players noticing bots, the behavior they do want, nobody calls it "detecting" them.

Also, in regards to the dead bodies in orgrimmar, they did that to avoid auto-detection, when chat-based methods were getting banned more swiftly, it wasn't just to be more noticeable to players. It's essentially the WoW equivalent of my hypothetical scenario where bots switch to using symbolarts to spell out words that a system wouldn't be able to immediately identify as prohibited text, because it's a lot harder for a computer to realize that bodies are intentionally spelling out letters than it is to figure out that a string of text is spelling out a site name with a few gibberish characters thrown in.

as i have visited several sites with "out of stock" meseta....its confirmed that people exist who really buy meseta for real money....please dear god show those guys the right path of AC scratch wich not only helps the community to grab more fashion but also the seller himself to earn meseta (sometimes even more than what youll get from meseta seller)...and yes as long as they exist SEGA cant do anything...you can only prevent the bot spamer from being annoying with a thought through chat filter thats all