Originally posted by UNH0LYEV1L

If your talking about creating a progrma to monitor what is said in chat channels and to detect bot controlled charecters, I can tell you as an amature programmer that it is difficult mostly because of the randomness of the messsages being generated.

It is difficult to take into account all aspects of a message to determine if its gold spam or not.  For example they cant just ban www.website.com links because what happens if someone that isnt gold spaming posts a link?  They would get banned as well.  Creating a smart bit of code to check if a message is spam or not is tedious work.  And just when the developers think they get it right the damn gold botters take advantage of the website ban by doing something like this www(dot)website(dot)com.  Or maybe leaving off www is enough to confuse the code.  This is just one of the examples that must be taken in to account and I hope you can understand why it can be difficult.

Determining every case of whats spam and whats not is a tough issue to resolve with creating a monitoring program.

In terms of stopping botters from leveling charecters that is a different story.  Most bots exploit the game using the same or near the same game vulnerabilities.  It can be done though and many games have successful anti-cheat/bot systems.

Most of the simple bots that are easy to spot are ones that emmulate the use of a keyboard virtually.  In other words you have to put your skills in certain slots and the program knows which skill is which and monitors certain data in the game like your health mana and the mobs mana and presses the corresponding key virtually in game.  Often times these are easy to spot.  More advanced bots constantly re-evaluate situations, scan for enemies to fight, etc.

In my opinion a solid GM crew to handle responses, ban spammers, etc is a great way to clear up the servers but remember the big thing is NCSoft would likely have to pay these people wages.

Every spammer and bot in the damn game all have names like Sdfdsd, aweswea, FrUiurf, GhjjH, VbncV, JHYu, Dsdf, Ghjfhfg, Dfedfe, Boooooooooo, Doodoodoo, or even Billbobjohnjacob. So tell me how are those hard to spot?

Oh and not to mention when they spam chat channels they use large colorful emote characters to decorate thier chat with tHAT REAL PLAYERS ARE NOT EVEN ABLE TO USE!!! Give me a break ban all that crap and either the farmers will have to start making regular sounding names. At least makes it harde for em to do. The way it is now it seems NC doesn't even care for the most part. Oh and you can't communicate with them in any way, can''t duel em, whisper em, invite em. I can spot em a mile away!

There are some areas of the game that is so infested with the obvious botters that you can't even go into, they know where mobs are gonna spawn before YOU will even see me and claim the kills.  IF you could like pull several mobs to a bot and let them kill you it would be worth it if instead of running back to thier spawn points they would turn on the botter and kill it . Other games has done that why not Aion? AT least that would be ..something.

from a: software engineer/web programmer

Here's the problem, any type of gameguard/ process checking program in a game can only legally check processes that are running with the game. They can not dive into and look around elsewhere.

This can only work to a certain point, a smart programmer that builds these bots be it what ever method will make it easy to change the process name or cloak it to be MS Paint or some normal app.

Beyond this I won't say all but 90% of gold farmers that advertise (not the ones that actually do the collecting/trading) are created by a keygen and within hours they can detect this delete the account which costs the gold farming company not a damn penny. They just open a new account. Ever wonder why they always have names like askhkhf? This is the exact reason it's illegal accounts that get canned fast.

Now then you'd say why can't they just find the ip and block it? The problem to that is the smart farming companies have proxies/ip cloakers that will ping around all over the world many times and would take forever(or some high tech software that NCSoft would not have) to trace to it's actual source. Blocking an ip also means that if the ip gets reset that someone else who is legitimately trying to play could get blocked if they managed to be in the area and get that ip when the box is reset or the isp resets the ips.

As far as the chat goes you can check www. etc. but you no the idiots will go www|whatever|com and there is no way of blocking that because what if a legitment player is chatting something out similar such as player1|roll for item or something like that. The point is you need to keep in mind that blocking the chat for bots could be blocking your players and that's why the chat is not touched more than it is.

In closing the only real way of getting rid of the bots that know how to get around everything but the actual game playing for them is a GM squad that watches areas. This costs money and development time and since it just launched not too long ago they may not have the resources or the crew to tackle this yet.

Hopefully they will do something about it, but the problem of the game isn't the bots it's the bore factor. That's why they already lost my subscription.

Anyway hopefully that answers some of your questions.

Originally posted by Hashbrick

from a: software engineer/web programmer

Here's the problem, any type of gameguard/ process checking program in a game can only legally check processes that are running with the game. They can not dive into and look around elsewhere.

This can only work to a certain point, a smart programmer that builds these bots be it what ever method will make it easy to change the process name or cloak it to be MS Paint or some normal app.

Beyond this I won't say all but 90% of gold farmers that advertise (not the ones that actually do the collecting/trading) are created by a keygen and within hours they can detect this delete the account which costs the gold farming company not a damn penny. They just open a new account. Ever wonder why they always have names like askhkhf? This is the exact reason it's illegal accounts that get canned fast.

Now then you'd say why can't they just find the ip and block it? The problem to that is the smart farming companies have proxies/ip cloakers that will ping around all over the world many times and would take forever(or some high tech software that NCSoft would not have) to trace to it's actual source. Blocking an ip also means that if the ip gets reset that someone else who is legitimately trying to play could get blocked if they managed to be in the area and get that ip when the box is reset or the isp resets the ips.

As far as the chat goes you can check www. etc. but you no the idiots will go www|whatever|com and there is no way of blocking that because what if a legitment player is chatting something out similar such as player1|roll for item or something like that. The point is you need to keep in mind that blocking the chat for bots could be blocking your players and that's why the chat is not touched more than it is.

In closing the only real way of getting rid of the bots that know how to get around everything but the actual game playing for them is a GM squad that watches areas. This costs money and development time and since it just launched not too long ago they may not have the resources or the crew to tackle this yet.

Hopefully they will do something about it, but the problem of the game isn't the bots it's the bore factor. That's why they already lost my subscription.

Anyway hopefully that answers some of your questions.

Insert Partial Post: Beyond this I won't say all but 90% of gold farmers that advertise (not the ones that actually do the collecting/trading) are created by a keygen and within hours they can detect this delete the account which costs the gold farming company not a damn penny. They just open a new account. Ever wonder why they always have names like askhkhf? This is the exact reason it's illegal accounts that get canned fast.

I have seen the same name (Askhkhf) Spamming chat and run into the "char" in the area "Botting" away. And log out and when I log back in the next day or two, there he is still in the same place doing the same thing only a few lvls higher than he was originally. AND EVEN USING THE EXACT SAME NAME!

Botting is so easy now... everyone does it.. in wow its insane.. i botted 3 sets of honor gear for my druid, and recently was making 5k+ a day mining titanium ore while i slept.. i know one guy that makes over 20k per day.  And the guys writing the "good" bots like pirox rake in cash.. it will never end, and there isn't anyway to stop it.. learn to live with it:)

---

Originally posted by Wrender

---

Originally posted by Hashbrick

from a: software engineer/web programmer
Here's the problem, any type of gameguard/ process checking program in a game can only legally check processes that are running with the game. They can not dive into and look around elsewhere.
This can only work to a certain point, a smart programmer that builds these bots be it what ever method will make it easy to change the process name or cloak it to be MS Paint or some normal app.
Beyond this I won't say all but 90% of gold farmers that advertise (not the ones that actually do the collecting/trading) are created by a keygen and within hours they can detect this delete the account which costs the gold farming company not a damn penny. They just open a new account. Ever wonder why they always have names like askhkhf? This is the exact reason it's illegal accounts that get canned fast.
Now then you'd say why can't they just find the ip and block it? The problem to that is the smart farming companies have proxies/ip cloakers that will ping around all over the world many times and would take forever(or some high tech software that NCSoft would not have) to trace to it's actual source. Blocking an ip also means that if the ip gets reset that someone else who is legitimately trying to play could get blocked if they managed to be in the area and get that ip when the box is reset or the isp resets the ips.
As far as the chat goes you can check www. etc. but you no the idiots will go www|whatever|com and there is no way of blocking that because what if a legitment player is chatting something out similar such as player1|roll for item or something like that. The point is you need to keep in mind that blocking the chat for bots could be blocking your players and that's why the chat is not touched more than it is.
In closing the only real way of getting rid of the bots that know how to get around everything but the actual game playing for them is a GM squad that watches areas. This costs money and development time and since it just launched not too long ago they may not have the resources or the crew to tackle this yet.
Hopefully they will do something about it, but the problem of the game isn't the bots it's the bore factor. That's why they already lost my subscription.
Anyway hopefully that answers some of your questions.

---

Insert Partial Post: Beyond this I won't say all but 90% of gold farmers that advertise (not the ones that actually do the collecting/trading) are created by a keygen and within hours they can detect this delete the account which costs the gold farming company not a damn penny. They just open a new account. Ever wonder why they always have names like askhkhf? This is the exact reason it's illegal accounts that get canned fast.
I have seen the same name (Askhkhf) Spamming chat and run into the "char" in the area "Botting" away. And log out and when I log back in the next day or two, there he is still in the same place doing the same thing only a few lvls higher than he was originally. AND EVEN USING THE EXACT SAME NAME!

---

You will because the same name can be used once the illegal key is found and deleted because that name opens. What they really need to do is not allow names like akjfakslfj although where does that end. When they start using normal names they can't just ban those names as well. It's a losing war because of technology the only real way to fight is hard worked man hours.

Meh, it can only be minimized, rarely can it be fully stopped, because someone always finds a loophole. NCSOFT on the other hand, just doesn't seem to care. They seem to be doing the same thing they did with Lineage 2. I'm going to give it some time, at least get to max level and hang around for a bit. If nothing is done to minimize the incessant gold spam and botting I'll cancel my sub and turn my sights fully towards FFXIV.

Originally posted by mrw0lf

Bots pay subs

incentive to prevent bots = 0

this. NCSoft does RMT games. No big mystery here. It's just too easy, for any dev that wants to, to make RMT unprofitable. If it's in the game, it's becuase the devs want it there.

This is what you get when you have a fail anti-cheat that is nothing more then  a process scanner & root-kit.

It's the same anti-cheat as alot of leagues in CS:S use, and their horrible.

alot of bot programs, use , crypters, / maskers.

crypters make it so it can't be seen on the processes, nor on the memory. Because half the time, the bot uses little or no memory. Also, since it only scans processes, all you got to do is rename the bot to ventrilo.exe or some program, and you won't get banned.

for an Anti-Cheat to be good, it has to be updated twice a week, with new coding and everything. so then all the bot programmers, have to re-crypt and redo the code.

 To help curve this problem all the Devs/Programmers/GM's/Whoever have to do is create in game characters. When they see people gold spamming in chat they get banned...When someone whispers to them.

All it takes is a little effort by the team to after the spammers. Since subscribers already pay for the game, most don't want spammers hounding them for MORE money. I'm glad I never purchased it, because in its current condition it has fail written all over it.

Its not just NCSoft fighting the bots and spammers, most major games are and have been for years.  Its just more noticable right now in AION because of the sheer number of gold sellers flooding itno a new game.  NC coujld ban 1000 accounts a day and it still wouldnt put a dent into the problem. 

There is really only one TRUE way to stop them..and thats to simply not by game gold no matter how tempting it is..cause once you place that first order...you will get hooked on it...the thrill of risking it all for that massively overpriced weapon or armor set....greed and instant gradification trhills is what supports these companies.  And no mater how many laws are made against them, their simply no way to enforce those laws enough to shut them down.

The only real deterrant and soluttion is you...dont support them no matter how tempting it is...this includes game time cards and cd codes which most of those gold sites now offer.

Originally posted by mrw0lf

Bots pay subs

incentive to prevent bots = 0

Also a player who just bought gold would less likely quit his subscription than a player who

-is constantly broke

-don't want to spend his 2-3hrs of gaming each evening with grinding gold only

Originally posted by UNH0LYEV1L

If your talking about creating a progrma to monitor what is said in chat channels and to detect bot controlled charecters, I can tell you as an amature programmer that it is difficult mostly because of the randomness of the messsages being generated.

It is difficult to take into account all aspects of a message to determine if its gold spam or not.  For example they cant just ban www.website.com links because what happens if someone that isnt gold spaming posts a link?  They would get banned as well.  Creating a smart bit of code to check if a message is spam or not is tedious work.  And just when the developers think they get it right the damn gold botters take advantage of the website ban by doing something like this www(dot)website(dot)com.  Or maybe leaving off www is enough to confuse the code.  This is just one of the examples that must be taken in to account and I hope you can understand why it can be difficult.

Determining every case of whats spam and whats not is a tough issue to resolve with creating a monitoring program.

In terms of stopping botters from leveling charecters that is a different story.  Most bots exploit the game using the same or near the same game vulnerabilities.  It can be done though and many games have successful anti-cheat/bot systems.

Most of the simple bots that are easy to spot are ones that emmulate the use of a keyboard virtually.  In other words you have to put your skills in certain slots and the program knows which skill is which and monitors certain data in the game like your health mana and the mobs mana and presses the corresponding key virtually in game.  Often times these are easy to spot.  More advanced bots constantly re-evaluate situations, scan for enemies to fight, etc.

In my opinion a solid GM crew to handle responses, ban spammers, etc is a great way to clear up the servers but remember the big thing is NCSoft would likely have to pay these people wages.

A single guy in his spare time can create a spam filter that filters 99 out of 100 messages.

RMT means money for companies, they won't stop it.

And if they are lazy to create a spam filter imagine with bots.

Go go money.