Bots and Botting

Well, regarding gold as a currency, it's just like others have said. There needs to be a good reason to spend gold. One thing that I thought was pretty clever about TL2 is that there are enchanter NPCs that you can only get via gold. The enchantments are randomized, and you can pay the enchanter to wipe an item clean, so there's a fair amount of gold that can go into the system. If you're satisfied with any buff, take the first thing you get. If you want something more specific, re-roll until you get what you're looking for. I can see something like this sustaining a gold based economy.

That being said, I kind of like barter based economies more. It makes it so that there are a variety of ways to accumulate wealth, rather than a static break down into "how much gold per minute does this make me?"



Anyway, I found this thread by searching "bot" because I was curious about the outlook on the issue for PoE. For me, the concern isnt just botting, but illegal activities in general. In a free to play game, how can they possible shut down players that use illegal mods and hacks? The game is free, so getting banned isnt much of a deterrent, and IP addresses can be changed quite easily by someone who knows what they're doing.

Just a concern that popped up for me.

You can't stop botting.

What you can do however is simply remove the incentive for
botting. Make the game not based on grind.

It really is that simple.

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sweatypalm wrote:

You can't stop botting.

What you can do however is simply remove the incentive for
botting. Make the game not based on grind.

It really is that simple.

A farm bot is just as possible as a grind bot, and can essentially function as both.

Because this is a F2P, yes, the concern of botting is immense. GGG cannot take reactive steps to botting. They must make proactive design decisions to make botting impossible. By keeping game complexity high - through the use of passive and active skill combinations and through making looting a complex operation (there's tons of loot spewing from monsters), bots need to be difficult to craft and wield. They can't hope to ban and attack botters.

Chris has stated that he wants 'illegal farmers' to have to play POE in order to farm it. If farmers are players like everyone else, who need to participate in the economy to farm, then they arne't really doing any harm. If botters have to build characters up in order to bot, they'll have to participate in the economy to bot. Eventaully, botters will be caught and banned, making the process of farming a bot up to the point where it can bot well challenging.

Wow people are pretty naive if they think the lack of gold means no bots, people will just bot for orbs instead. And suggesting capchas or questions as a way of defeating them is a terrible idea - bots can easily get around them so all they would serve to do is piss legit players off.

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anubite wrote:

If botters have to build characters up in order to bot, they'll have to participate in the economy to bot. Eventaully, botters will be caught and banned, making the process of farming a bot up to the point where it can bot well challenging.

Really? Given that all orbs can drop in normal what's to stop low level bots simply farming and resetting the first few zones over and over?

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SqueakyToyOfTerror wrote:

"

sweatypalm wrote:

You can't stop botting.

What you can do however is simply remove the incentive for
botting. Make the game not based on grind.

It really is that simple.

A farm bot is just as possible as a grind bot, and can essentially function as both.

Farming is grinding

TL 2 has a great anti-bot system: The console. ^^

"

Sickness wrote:

TL 2 has a great anti-bot system: The console. ^^

I am so jelly every time Chris spawns a great item in 5 seconds during the weekly build videos.

I'm pretty sure the assumption of many guys here, that botting killed D3 is totally wrong. D3 failed because it's gameplay is crap. Normal to Hell is very easy, Inferno is really hard. That makes the game boring in the beginning and frustrating in the end. There is no champion customization, nothing like complex character building (combination of weapons, passives, and so on), the best skill combos are obvious.

If you compare D3 to D2, there are a lot players that still have fun with D2. These are guys who don't play public, trade or anything like this. They have about 20 friends in D2, playing with them, creating new champions and still have fun 10 years after release. One of these guys is my insane father :D I can't convince him trying PoE cause "D2 was too addictive back then" ^^

The bad gameplay of D3 ruined it. Inflation is a logic result of D3's game design. It would have happened in any case. With Bots or without. The fact that the game is so boring in most cases just makes bots more attractive. The fact that there is an auctionhouse makes it more attractive to professional botters. Still the botting only makes inflation faster.

Why would there be inflation with or without bots?
Because everything you find in the beginning is worthless. As game progresses everything found before is just useless. The amount of gold you can find in 1 hour on Normal is ridiculous low if you can get to hell. The same applies if you can get to inferno of course. In PoE it is different, playing a char from 1 is interesting because you can find GCP straight from the beginning. You won't find good rares but at least the currency items will be dropped at a good rate.
Another reason is D3 is only about having higher values. All decisions are linear. There are almost no nonlinear decisions. This means you always know which item is the best. This leads to the effect that items get worthless very fast if enough better items hit the market. In PoE this is different because there are many builds, that have totally different needs. This leads to the effect, that for someone a specific item is uninteresting but for someone else it is very valuable. The whole gameplay of D3 focuses on Inflation. Maybe it is intended, maybe not. It surely creates a high pressure on players to use the auction house but maybe it frustrates players very much, so Blizzard didn't intend it and the designers are just plain stupid.

I'm very sure D3 is not ruined by bots. It is a big pile of shit by itself and botting only poops a small pile on top. If PoE continues to be such a good game, Bots can't ruin it. Bots will maybe ruin public trading but the game is too awesome to ruin it in general. Nobody forces you to feed the bots. One thing is for sure, there will always be players who want to pay real money for making the game getting boring faster. As long as there are guys like this, there will be professional botters. You can't stop them. But you can prevent botters ruining the game for other players and PoE is doing a very good job at this atm.

You can't stop botting, you can merely hope to minimize it. If people are willing to pay real money for in game items, there will be botters, or some guy in a third world country who hires a room full of locals for $30 a month each to farm for him 12 hours a day, six and a half days a week.