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There is a simple way of combating bots but It can possibly be abused. If us sims had our OWN police force or FBI in game we could police our own cities for this type of unscrupulous activity. Its simple, get enough people to complain about a bot-house and have it shut down. Allow agents to enter if nobody responds OR just able to monitor their activity.
Its simple but i doubt they would do it. Realistically its the ONLY way to stop
many many bots.
self governance is key since players outnumber cheaters and observe the cities 23-7. if EA is not willing to combat this type of activity players and users of TSO should push for regulation of online games such as TSO to force companies to enforce their EULA.
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I have to disagree with this. There is no way that we can prove that someone is botting. Plain and simple, we can't see the server side to see the data that the devs see. Not only that, with the age restrictions on this game, your self serving militia would be a group of friends <u>could</u> possibly just be out to get someone they don't like. It's a teenage thing. We all know how that works.
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I see your point, but I think Evanerick was talking about enabling the group of players he's talking about TO be able to see a portion of what only the devs can see now, but obviously keep them from being able to tweak any data. Read-only vs. writable files comes to mind as a comparison. And definitely your fear of a group of friends getting together to ban a person who's not doing anything wrong is valid, but that happens now....when you report a person, most of the time the complaint is completely ignored, but sure as gun's iron alot of the complaints that they do take seriously are against playes who really are innocent. Having a 'militia' might make that more of a possibility, but as far as I am concerned it would be a 1 strike and you're out kind of thing. If you participated in trying to get a person banned, and there was evidence that it was just a revenge/retribution thing rather than a valid case of botting with proof to back it up, then sorry bud, you lose your 'deputy badge', and the person that got banned could have their account restored by EA.
Folks we've gotta do something. I'm with Roger....his post was rather 'rough around the edges' as far as not being very diplomatic in wording, but he's 100% right. It would make alot of us more warm and fuzzy to have *some* kind of idea which direction they plan on going, especially if what the person who said Lee said this was a low priority is true. How low is low, as far as a timeframe. Every day they delay a fix is another day that this economy is gonna get in just as much of a pickle as it is now. To me that makes it at least a midline priority if not top priority. In fact, I'd like to see something done before the merges even take place, so that the sims that are botting in the production cities now can't come into EA Land and repeat it, even though the simoleans they got from botting will be gone unless they went out and bought a bunch of rares, which is highly likely, but nobody has enough money in EA Land for rares yet, so that's not much of a biggie