145423-an-in-depth-analysis-on-how-to-fix-the-bots-problem

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Disclaimer: This post is entirely subjective, everything I say here is only my opinion. Do take it with a grain of salt.
 
This thread is meant as an open discussion regarding the problem related to bots in Wildstar. Everyone is free to post their opinion on the matter but please, do stay respectful of others and avoid derailing the subject as much as possible.
 
An in depth analysis on how to fix the "bots problem"
 
Introduction
While browsing the forums, I've noticed a lot of threads about "bots" and how they "ruin" the game.
After reading several of those threads, I realized that a lot of people seems to be unaware about the scope of the problem, ignoring its roots as well as misunderstanding the complexity behind it.
Simply said, I don't think people understand that fixing the "bots problem" isn't quite as simple as they think it to be.
 
Why are there bots in Wildstar?
This is the first question we need to ask ourselves before even thinking about how to solve the problem.
The answer is quite obvious really, but it require more than just a simple answer to really define what the actual problem is and how to fix it.
Money.
That is the simple answer. Someone somewhere is making money out of the usage of bots in Wildstar.
Of course, there is also the independent bots ran by some players for a more personal purpose, but those are much less problematic and rampant than the biggest offenders, the gold and account sellers.
 
So, what do we need to add to this answer to define what the actual problem is? Well, let's look at what we have first.
We have the Developer, Carbine, and the players, us.
Carbine offers us their game and we provide Carbine with an income to keep the game alive.
Much like how a baker bake cakes and the customers pay the baker for its cakes.
Then come the third party, the gold/account sellers.
Using the same baker example, we can see it as a thief who steal the baker's cake and sell it to the customers at a cheaper price.
 
This cause one major issue known as "vicious cycle".
Using my legendary MsPaint skillz, I have drawn the vicious cycle that would come from my baker example:
If we look at the problem of bots in Wildstar, the resulting "vicious cycle" or "cascade failure" from it would be much more complex than just the simple cycle from my baker example. Bots are affecting more than just income and quality of the product, it is also affecting the in game economy, the in game content, the players satisfaction, etc. There is a lot at stake here and I believe it's in the benefit of everyone to be aware of this problematic situation so we can find a way to diminish or even negate it entirely.
 
The roots of the problem
But really... what is the actual cause that lead to the problem of bots in Wildstar?
Well... The players and Carbine of course!
Before any of you start throwing insults at me for blaming the victims, let me reiterate what I explained so far.
I said that money was the reason why gold/account sellers were botting in Wildstar. This problem cause a vicious cycle or cascade failure because the botters are acting as a third party between the developer and the players.
But that's what gold/account sellers are. A third party, an alternative. The word alternative here is important because who uses that alternative? That's right. The players.
So the players are at fault. Not all of us of course. Very few of us even. But there are people who buy gold and people who buy accounts that give a reason to the gold/account sellers to come to Wildstar.
What about Carbine though? Why do I consider them as the root of this problem? Well, because they also have their part in this too. After all, Wildstar is their game, it is up to them to protect it against anything that would degrade it.
 
This being said, actions must be taken in order to get rid of the bots or at the very least, diminish their presence in Wildstar, that much is certain. Blaming anyone for this isn't productive and I shall leave it at that.
 
So, what CAN be done to prevent bots?
There are many ways to prevent bots in a game, but in the end, all of them lead to the same solution:
Reducing how profitable and worth it is for gold/account sellers to bot in the first place.
 
So how can this be done exactly?
Well, I can't give definite suggestions on how to fix the issue, but I can tell where we could focus our attention.
 
1. Desensitise players to buying gold or account from gold/account sellers.
Pretty self explanatory. The less players buy from them, the less profitable it is for them, and the more likely we are to see a reduction in bots in the game as, just like in any economy, the demands will be much lower than the supply, forcing a reduction in supply for the market of gold/account selling to be profitable.
 
How can we desensitise players you ask?
With an iron fist I say.
Ban the players that deal with gold/account sellers.
Sure this may sound a little rough, but banning accounts that were sold or involved in buying gold from a gold seller is a great way to desensitise the players to dealing with gold/account sellers in the first place. Nobody wants their account banned and even less their money wasted because of it.
 
2. Give greater value to money spent in the NStore.
This one, I can give a direct suggestion for it... change C.R.E.D.D. into an item that can be redeemed for NCoins and sell signature status on the store for NCoins as well as the current subscription model.
By making money spent on the game more valuable to players than money spent to gold sellers, it would reduce the profit a gold seller would make and, like I said on the first point, it would make the demand lower, forcing a reduction in supply (This means less bots).
The C.R.E.D.D. system is an amazing system. But right now, the benefit of buying a C.R.E.D.D. is just not worth it. It is currently the only way to gain gold by paying real money to Carbine and the demand for C.R.E.D.D. is lower than my grade was on my last chemistry exam (I suck at anything related to chemistry okay?).
 
3. Inform players of this issue and the direct correlation between buying from gold/account sellers and the deterioration of the game.
This probably won't do much, but some players may be convinced to avoid gold/account sellers if they are made aware of the problem and how dealing with them affect the game in such a negative way.
There isn't much to be said here, I doubt there is any effective way to make enough gold/account buyers sway from their urge to buy from gold/account sellers, but who knows? Maybe someone who was tempted to buy gold read this thread and changed their mind?
 
4. Beat the bots at their own game
This isn't exactly easy to do and actually extremely dangerous for Carbine as it is prone to leading to a high number of technical support tickets and cost a lot of time for them, but it is a possibility.
First and foremost, a human cannot beat a computer in terms of APM (Actions per minute). It is literally impossible for them to ban bots faster than they can be made.
So in order to beat the bots at their own game, Carbine would require to make an algorithm capable of banning them at a speed and precision great enough that it wouldn't be profitable enough for the gold/account sellers to even try botting in Wildstar.
Unfortunately, the gold/account sellers have the upperhand in this code battle because they, contrary to Carbine, do not have to worry about repercussions that their algorithm for making bots would cause.
Carbine has to deal with the fact that they may just ban a real player because they thought it was a bot.
 
As much as I'd like to believe this is a viable solution, it is the least likely to happen.
 
 
Now... I'm sure there are other ways to deal with the situation, but for now, this is all I can come up with. This is one reason I started this thread. I want others to give their opinion on it and I hope we can find more ways to deal with this situation.
 
Conclusion
To conclude, I'd like to remind everyone that the problem caused by bots cannot be fixed simply by throwing a developer at it for 20 minutes every day.
It require digging deep into the problem to deal with it at the root. But those roots are very deep and it is most likely very hard for Carbine to make it all by themselves. If we want this situation solved, us players need to help too by never dealing with gold/account sellers, no matter how tempting it may be, and making sure that every players do the same.
While some may say that it's rather irrelevant and anyone reading this is probably not going to buy from a gold/account seller in the first place (And I would tend to agree with that), there is still something we can do here to help Carbine.
We can discuss the situation and come up with solutions that Carbine may haven't thought about. But let's do it in a civilized, respectful and thoughtful manner so that all can contribute. Blaming won't get us anywhere.
 
So. Shall we talk?
What do you think of all of this? What do you think can be done to solve this problem?
 
Cheers,
Fluffy McNuggets.	
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			One way to spread awareness about bots/farmers and the dangers of giving accounts or CC info to these bot organisation is by making a server wide announcement every 5 min pop up and explain why giving and supporting them is bad and how it hurts the game and the community and the dangers of doing so.
			
				
	Edited October 26, 2015 by Zaneirth	
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			Your premise (why the bots are here) is flawed, and thus so are the conclusions.These days bots/gold sellers/etc don't show up at a game because there's a demand for a service. They're a tool of identity thieves, who go anywhere they perceive there are people, so they can steal personal information from anyone's account they can hack, and resell it. They're a brute force tool collecting names, probing for vulnerabilities in the game's social systems to try and get at player information. Anything to get enough to hack an account and then maybe get real life data that may lead them to financial information.In many ways, people don't even need to make the mistake of partaking of their 'services' sometimes the bots just take their name when they see them in chat or a battleground and find ways to use it as a name to then target to see if they can hack them. That means they're not here because we as players are weak, or Carbine is foolish. It's the same reason they tried to make use of the forums, not just the game. They wanted to try and get people to visit the site,There are only two ways they'll go away. If not enough people are playing to make it worth their time, or Carbine makes it take too much time to get at players. Carbine does an ok job at the latter, but it takes a bit of time. The bots are mainly just leveling right now, but I'm sure the people making use of them are hoping that getting characters higher leveled will allow them to use them in other ways. With any luck Carbine will put the brakes on the Battleground holes that are allowing them in, as well as whatever programs they're using to run the bots.Carbine has already done a good job negating most of the value behind gold selling with CREDD, and the value for money of things in the store isn't particularly relevant, since bots can't sell Omni-bits, or farm enough to compete with legitimate players who want to use their Omnibits to sell things they get in the the store.For the record, whenever anyone complains about why free accounts can't create guilds or RBG teams or Circles, this kind of attack is why. Whenever anyone complains about resource nodes being level locked, bot attacks are why. You may not like the solutions, but the bot problems we see now would be a lot worse if they weren't there.	
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{| class="blockquote"
One way to spread awareness about bots/farmers and the dangers of giving accounts or CC info to these bot organisation is by making a server wide announcement every 5 min pop up and explain why giving and supporting them is bad and how it hurts the game and the community and the dangers of doing so.
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{| class="blockquote"
Your premise (why the bots are here) is flawed, and thus so are the conclusions.
 
These days bots/gold sellers/etc don't show up at a game because there's a demand for a service. They're a tool of identity thieves, who go anywhere they perceive there are people, so they can steal personal information from anyone's account they can hack, and resell it. They're a brute force tool collecting names, probing for vulnerabilities in the game's social systems to try and get at player information. Anything to get enough to hack an account and then maybe get real life data that may lead them to financial information.
 
In many ways, people don't even need to make the mistake of partaking of their 'services' sometimes the bots just take their name when they see them in chat or a battleground and find ways to use it as a name to then target to see if they can hack them. That means they're not here because we as players are weak, or Carbine is foolish. It's the same reason they tried to make use of the forums, not just the game. They wanted to try and get people to visit the site,
 
There are only two ways they'll go away. If not enough people are playing to make it worth their time, or Carbine makes it take too much time to get at players. Carbine does an ok job at the latter, but it takes a bit of time. The bots are mainly just leveling right now, but I'm sure the people making use of them are hoping that getting characters higher leveled will allow them to use them in other ways. With any luck Carbine will put the brakes on the Battleground holes that are allowing them in, as well as whatever programs they're using to run the bots.
 
Carbine has already done a good job negating most of the value behind gold selling with CREDD, and the value for money of things in the store isn't particularly relevant, since bots can't sell Omni-bits, or farm enough to compete with legitimate players who want to use their Omnibits to sell things they get in the the store.
 
For the record, whenever anyone complains about why free accounts can't create guilds or RBG teams or Circles, this kind of attack is why. Whenever anyone complains about resource nodes being level locked, bot attacks are why. You may not like the solutions, but the bot problems we see now would be a lot worse if they weren't there.
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			What if PvP didn't automatically reward players for competing in it. I think players  competing in pvp should see a running counter on xp-gold-rewards etc that they will recieve upon speaking to an npc after completing matches. The player could pvp as long as they wanted, always with the knowledge of where they stand on getting rewarded. Upon reaching thier goal, they would be required to speak to an npc to redeem their rewards. The npc would always be random and in different locations, so that a human would be responsible for locating the reward npc. For a little bit of extra security the npc would say something like, "Oh you have been to battle! What be your name, so I can look you up on the war roster". the player would then be prompted to type their name. 	
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Great thread! Thanks for taking the time to write it, it is definitely appreciated.
 
That said, I'd like to take yet another step back further away from the specific bot issue and talk about the role of player vs. developer because this thread brought up some important issues I see coming up a lot in MMO communities.
 
It's self-evident that Carbine knows a lot more about this than we do. It's also obvious that, while these conversations do a lot to keep us involved and feeling like we're "contributing", they most likely do absolutely nothing to solve the issue besides creating a critical mass that helps Carbine direct their efforts. It's their game, they're the experts, it's their job to make it live up to their standards.
 
Ok. So what about us? What's our role and why should we care?
 
Going back to the bakery analogy, we're just buying the bread. We have absolutely no control over how the bread is made. The only influence we have is to give the baker feedback if we think the bread could taste better, be cheaper, etc. or to take our business somewhere else. This is not the same as baking or selling it.
 
But even if this is in our interest as bread-lovers, in the end of the day, our role is that of customer. We go to the bakery of our choosing, buy some bread and that's about it. Everything else we do is extra. Any time and effort we put into the bakery is primarily benefiting the baker since they're collecting the profits and they are in complete control of how to bake their bread. The baker can simply choose to ignore our feedback and keep on baking the way they currently do. (Whether or not this is a good idea is another issue.)
 
Putting money towards a product is our way of saying "Hey, I don't want or don't have the expertise or time or resources to bake my own bread, so here's a share of my work-time (in the form of money) so we can trade." This, in theory, is how commerce works. The roles are pretty well defined.
 
What does that mean to us?
 
Well, I think we often need to be reminded that everything we do that is outside of the realm of playing the game is essentially free work. Yes, work. It's work we put into the game that primarily benefits the developer. Us getting a better product in the end is a very nice outcome, but every second we have to spend on forums reporting issues, or reporting players, or what have you, is ultimately free money we're giving away to the developer/publisher.
 
I personally think we can't lose sight of this. Fixing the game is not our job, nor should it be. In fact, even reporting players/bugs/etc. is outside of the scope of our role in this relationship. Any time/effort we put into improving the game should be looked at as a sort of favor or even a kind of gift from us to the developer. It's totally fine to do this and some of us even get enjoyment out of it, but it's not required.
 
That does not mean we're entitled to the product we want either. But since we traded our own time and effort (i.e. money) for this service, we are entitled to a functioning product (edible bread) as it was advertised and justified in being upset when it has flaws. Would you be OK with getting stale bread from the baker? Would you spend time trying to figure out how to ensure freshness or leave it to the baker? Would you get together with other customers and brainstorm new ways to keep bread fresh for longer?
 
Of course software development is totally different from baking. In this case it's an online service as well, and free-to-play now, so it's exponentially more complex to determine roles. But the above still applies: we're giving away free money when we put work into improving the game.
 
Let's not forget that when we tell each other to "stop whining" or "be patient" or "it's just a game." We're doing something cool for free and it's Carbine who benefits most from it. All we can do is hope that our interests and Carbine's align.
 
Yikes! Sorry for the wall of text.
 
tl;dr Carbine is the dev, we are players, so trying to help them solve problems is free work which is totally fine but let's not forget that.
			
				
	Edited October 27, 2015 by ManyWeAre	
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Players who need gold will still buy from gold sellers if its cheaper than other ingame options. it has been like this for decades, in many games.
you cant change the human nature to go the way of least resistence and to always go the easiest way even tho mid/longterm it would be better to go the other way.
Its up to carbine and in their interest to fix this.	
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			@ManyWeAre....you're bakery thinking is kinda off. As a PAYING customer at the Bakery (ie a subscriber) I totally can influence how/what goes into my bread I am paying for that bread. When I tell the baker "Hey that last loaf did you change something? It was <better/worse> than usual." that is called constructive criticism. People do it all the time. They want better products. I wouldn't call it free work so much as smarter money spending. This is why we report bugs/spammers ect.	
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			Make all PvP reward only the kills / assists / objectives you accumulate. Problem solved.	
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{| class="blockquote"
Make all PvP reward only the kills / assists / objectives you accumulate. Problem solved.
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{| class="blockquote"
What if PvP didn't automatically reward players for competing in it. I think players  competing in pvp should see a running counter on xp-gold-rewards etc that they will recieve upon speaking to an npc after completing matches. The player could pvp as long as they wanted, always with the knowledge of where they stand on getting rewarded. Upon reaching thier goal, they would be required to speak to an npc to redeem their rewards. The npc would always be random and in different locations, so that a human would be responsible for locating the reward npc. For a little bit of extra security the npc would say something like, "Oh you have been to battle! What be your name, so I can look you up on the war roster". the player would then be prompted to type their name. 
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One way some games limit PvP bots is this: rewards are only given in PvP "points", PvP "points" can only be spent on PvP armor/weapons, and such armor/weapons are bound to the character that redeems the "points". Of course characters can be sold by selling accounts outside the game (e.g. PayPal) but when the account suddenly changes IP addresses it can trigger a flag for monitoring.
 
And of course all IP addresses from China can be blocked...not saying that all the bots are coming from there of course BUT the money that can be made by botting is usually not worth the trouble in first world countries due to the high cost of living. Just saying. Because the number of purchasers of bottted gold and characters in game is probably fairly low now so really -- how much money can really be made right now by botting in Wildstar? I suspect not much.	
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And of course all IP addresses from China can be blocked...not saying that all the bots are coming from there...
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