What has been done to stop the bots from ruining EA-land?

[MrMiagi]

I've seen talk of people using 25 or more accounts to make money on money machines, to be honest the number of simoleans to be made if you run that many accounts 24/7 is quite huge, with the easily found bot programs that can do this for you what is to stop the economy from becoming out of whack? The way i've figured it out, if you do an activity such as jamming for 24 hours non stop you will make enough simoleans to pay for your subscription fee assuming when they add the option to sell back simoleans you can sell them back for almost as much as you buy them for (1 USD for 1000 sims).

 

[Guest]

I think this is partially the reason they haven't introduced cash-out yet.

They are working on it, but as of now I don't think anything has been introduced that eliminates the problem, not that it will be a visible change when it is implemented.

[Edit: Also, I'm sure when it is introduced cash-out will be significantly lower than cash-in]

 

[MrMiagi]

Well they should be careful about how low they make it, when you could just play Second Life, i'm pretty sure second life allow you to cash in and out at basically the same value? Same goes for project entropia?

Even if they made the cash out value 10 times less than you buy them for (so you'd only get 10 cents per 1000 simoleans sold) it would STILL be profitable for people to bot 24/7 on money machines.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

I've seen talk of people using 25 or more accounts to make money on money machines, to be honest the number of simoleans to be made if you run that many accounts 24/7 is quite huge, with the easily found bot programs that can do this for you what is to stop the economy from becoming out of whack? The way i've figured it out, if you do an activity such as jamming for 24 hours non stop you will make enough simoleans to pay for your subscription fee assuming when they add the option to sell back simoleans you can sell them back for almost as much as you buy them for (1 USD for 1000 sims).

[/ QUOTE ]

You can do 25 single jobs without a bot, you just end up sitting at your system clicking like mad to do it though. As for bots, they do from what I understand up to 12 accounts on one machine and can do it 24/7. The guys that use them do it on many more than just one machine, restricted by their internet access only. Meaning they could do it on dozens of machines if they wanted.
As for what the devs are doing about it, I think their plans were to make the payouts so low it wouldn't be worth their time. I tried to tell them that wouldn't work. What they plan to do now who knows, I don't think even they do.

 

[Guest]

I'm pretty sure they know. I"m pretty sure they are not going to tell us.


It would be silly for them to let us and the bot users know their game plan.

 

[Guest]

they are paying 250 a month to play this game? they should just buy 250,000 simoleons instead! save a lot of time and effort

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

Well they should be careful about how low they make it, when you could just play Second Life, i'm pretty sure second life allow you to cash in and out at basically the same value?

[/ QUOTE ]

The difference is that Linden Lab don't provide "game money" (apart from a weekly 'pocket money' for premium accounts as part of the package). You can't "make money" from them in an equivalent to jam or pizza.

To get money in SL, you basically have to either buy it from Lindex (their money exchange) or sell products/services to another player (who, in turn, will have got their money in the same way).

When you 'cash out', you aren't actually selling to Linden Lab - you're putting it on the exchange, which another player can buy from you, and Linden Lab credit your account with the amount of US$ equivalent (minus their 3.5% transaction fee).

The only exception is "Supply Linden", where Linden Lab basically print money to sell on the exchange, in a way to stabilise the economy (there are money drains like listing fees and texture uploads). It never buys money back, however.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

they are paying 250 a month to play this game? they should just buy 250,000 simoleons instead! save a lot of time and effort

[/ QUOTE ]

As was said in another thread, they could make that 250,000 easy in a couple of days.
They could then go on and make say another 2,500,000 simoleans in the rest of the month. Quite a nice little profit if they can sell it back to EA for real cash.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

I'm pretty sure they know. I"m pretty sure they are not going to tell us.


It would be silly for them to let us and the bot users know their game plan.

[/ QUOTE ]
Agreed. They could have spent days on a mega-advanced anti-bot program, able to do the dishes WHILE blocking bots. But, if tell us, the Bot-Makers (Not the Factory Workers) will scramble and cover their tracks and hide or find a way to evade it.


And, unless YOU are a botter, YOU don't know.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

<blockquote><hr>

Well they should be careful about how low they make it, when you could just play Second Life, i'm pretty sure second life allow you to cash in and out at basically the same value?

[/ QUOTE ]

The difference is that Linden Lab don't provide "game money" (apart from a weekly 'pocket money' for premium accounts as part of the package). You can't "make money" from them in an equivalent to jam or pizza.

To get money in SL, you basically have to either buy it from Lindex (their money exchange) or sell products/services to another player (who, in turn, will have got their money in the same way).

When you 'cash out', you aren't actually selling to Linden Lab - you're putting it on the exchange, which another player can buy from you, and Linden Lab credit your account with the amount of US$ equivalent (minus their 3.5% transaction fee).

The only exception is "Supply Linden", where Linden Lab basically print money to sell on the exchange, in a way to stabilise the economy (there are money drains like listing fees and texture uploads). It never buys money back, however.

[/ QUOTE ]
Why don't you just sell t-shirts?

 

[Guest]

I could be wrong, but I would think that anything that has to be kept so secret to stop the botters from getting around it will only be a temp fix.

 

[imported_Spacey]

There has got to be some way for EA to implement a bot of there own that measures suspected botters statistics. No one, unless a botter, cashes out at the same time EVERY time. There are fluctuations when it is a real person controlling that sim. Bots (I assume) are so rigid in timing that they are bound to be quite obvious. When they suspect one or get tipped off... just measure money earned per hour/length between cashouts/...or other patterns you can come across. There are bound to be differences.

 

[PoindeJ]

<blockquote><hr>

There has got to be some way for EA to implement a bot of there own that measures suspected botters statistics. No one, unless a botter, cashes out at the same time EVERY time. There are fluctuations when it is a real person controlling that sim. Bots (I assume) are so rigid in timing that they are bound to be quite obvious. When they suspect one or get tipped off... just measure money earned per hour/length between cashouts/...or other patterns you can come across. There are bound to be differences.

[/ QUOTE ]

In theory, yes. But I'm sure it's only a matter of time for bots to adopt and just re-program so that their time does fluctuate with a different pattern, or randomly, or something.

The only real way to stop botting now, I think, is to make it not worth it - either to take away the incentive, or to somehow apply an overwork penalty to single money objects or something (oh no, not the OWP debates again...).

As far as I'm concerned, the single money objects are way boring anyway - we need a new interactive game (like pizza, maze) to make money anyway. Or just make more jobs - if a bot got through a robot factory shift efficiently and without dying, I'd be pretty impressed. But I guess that solution's way farther in the future.

Didn't one of the devs on the blog suggest/hint at some way to stop bots that sounded good? I don't remember which post it was on, unfortunately...

 

[NightFlyer]

Personally I think the honest players have been punished enough.

And some of us players actually prefer single user money objects.

EA just needs to poop or get off the pot regarding botters with what ever device Luc stated they were implimenting that cut back on payouts was needed for and take care of this issue once and for all. Then give us back a decent payout.

If they can't even locate the botters I have to wonder how good this system is that (supposedly) alerts them to money influx spikes.

 

[imported_CherryBomb]

EA *could* set the cash-out rate at 10:1 or whatever, but it would quickly become as meaningless as the official exchange rate in Zimbabwe. Someone would immediately volunteer to arbitrage the diff.

CherryBomb

 

[Paulina]

<blockquote><hr>

I've seen talk of people using 25 or more accounts to make money on money machines, to be honest the number of simoleans to be made if you run that many accounts 24/7 is quite huge, with the easily found bot programs that can do this for you what is to stop the economy from becoming out of whack? The way i've figured it out, if you do an activity such as jamming for 24 hours non stop you will make enough simoleans to pay for your subscription fee assuming when they add the option to sell back simoleans you can sell them back for almost as much as you buy them for (1 USD for 1000 sims).

[/ QUOTE ]

Got stuck with a bot program in the robo factory. Oh that was a joy.
Buy back program, I think EA will shoot themselves in the foot with that. i think if they introduce that, we might as well hang it up playing TSO, because they will shut it down once it will drain more money out of them then actually make some. And it isn't due to the honest players out there, it is due to the ones that use the bot programs.
The actual question you should pose to Lee and the rest of the developers is, if they had a chance to get their hands on one of those programs, and find out what kind of code it uses to run like it is, and then see if they can introduce a code themselves that identifies it when it is being ran and shuts it down. So if Lee or anyone from the Dev team reads this post, maybe they can give us a answer to it.

 

[Guest]

the problem with bots can be solved easily if they are smart enough ^^
There are some anti hack software for games like nprotect etc ...
or they should make some Dll/.exe scanner that scanss your taskbar and should remove illegal files like the bots

they developed a game, so they should be able to make a scanner or something like that and then implement it into the game

 

[Guest]

Most other online games have 'anti cheat' protection against many of the common 'third party addons' that people use to gain unfair advantages, so why EA can't do that here I have never understood.

Most other games take cheating very seriously. There are several occasions where Blizzard has banned tens of thousands of World of Warcraft accounts that have been using 'bots', removing millions of gold (currency) from the economy. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone being banned from TSO for cheating.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

Most other online games have 'anti cheat' protection against many of the common 'third party addons' that people use to gain unfair advantages, so why EA can't do that here I have never understood.

Most other games take cheating very seriously. There are several occasions where Blizzard has banned tens of thousands of World of Warcraft accounts that have been using 'bots', removing millions of gold (currency) from the economy. I can't remember the last time I heard of someone being banned from TSO for cheating.

[/ QUOTE ]

yea i know

if they just make some simple protection and all probs with cheating is solved

and there are only a few who can bypass it, but the one who bypass will get caught sooner or later and the economy wont be [censored] up

 

[Guest]

if they just make some simple protection and all probs with cheating is solved

They could simply nicely ask the people using bots to stop using them. Then they could get back to more important things.

 

[Guest]

<blockquote><hr>

They could simply nicely ask the people using bots to stop using them.

[/ QUOTE ]They've been using that method for the last 5 years and look where it's got them.