You know, one good way to stop botters is if devs remove whatever the bot mines from its inventory. The bots continue to harvest but no good comes of it. A human would see their goods being removed and complain immediately while a robot would continue working for minutes or even hours. Hard to argue "I wasn't botting" and also that the devs stole 8,000 ore over three hours. Second benefit--no accidental bans against efficient players.

Ashes solved the bot problem by not having the game release. Bam no bot problem!

It's a tough one to solve. MMO'S with Active GMs have had bots. MMO'S with Anti Cheat have had bots. Basically any MMO that is remotely popular has had them historically.

Top shelf content as always, thank you. Like Narc says: "you're on the right track, keep going"

I used to run the market for Giant Eggs back in the day on WoW. I personally farmed the giant eggs; I played the market... and it all crashed when botters caught on and the place was flooded with them...

Thoughts on this idea, what if instead of just baning a character and it vanishes, how about in the town square you a gibbet with characters that were banned hanging there for all to see? Continual reminder to players that gold buyers are removed.

very optimistic with ashes' approach to rwt/botting

I’ve chewed through your whole library and loved every second! Keep crushing it. That intro…so good!

Another banger video Doc! I hate bots in games, they ruin it, period. Kinda cool having Narc comment on your stuff, he has been around for awhile now. and again, i love the animated intro LOL

The level of depth you go into your videos makes them very enjoyable to watch.Your videos actually have a lot of substances compare to other ashes of creations content creator. Thanks for elevating the space!

I'm not a bot, you're a bot!

For Ashes, they could make it where the first 2 tiers of collectable grindable goods are purchasable at any vendor so have next to nothing value, so that way a bot who's been on for 1-2 days has a higher chance of being kicked before it actually gets useful recourses.

The biggest issue is botters don't have time limits. If it takes 26 min for a caravan to make a large sum of ingame money, there will be bots that do just that. Some gather, some craft, more transport, some manage the Auction process, and other toons are used for the RMT transactions.

So basically, regarding banning the gold buyers instead of the gold sellers, it's the same as jailing the john instead of jailing the prostitute.

The way you passively call out New World on their shenanigans is... *chefs kiss*

He is correct you are going down the right path i love these vids man keep it up!

Its refreshing to hear a dev say they will combat RMT industry at a cost to their business model. In reality it's an industry at this point and will need more than just active GMs. Kernel Anti cheat, Automated Systems, Server side checks, Active GMs, Harsh Bans and Chain Bans, HWID Bans, IP Region Locks/License Locks. Honestly the first company that starts fining players based on TOS breaches might have better luck.

It is always about spread the fear of getting banned. The only thing which really works. Some notes on: * Corruption & drops doesn't prevent much, players won't go corrupt for kill a bot which will be back in minutes. We can expect you should probably lure aggresive mobs like within L2, but that fight cannot be win as botters can spawn just another one somewhere else. * Fixed spawn points helps optimize running routes, but it is also easier to detect botting (if developers want), random spawn points may make this harder, but only for more naive bots, client needs know where the resources are so server must send them over network, which means botters will know where are they. Best botting tools are standalone clients with no gui and no connection to original client, they read and write netcode communication directly so they understand every single information send there. * That clip from NW is just shows how much AGS does not care. These routes use fixed points which can be easilly detected by reverse analyse of behaviour (probably something like S. describes). Also one GM can just stand there a perma ban every single of them.

Really looking forward to this game! Also Happy there is an ashes focused channel that's not an obnoxious human being. I'm sure Narc isn't as bad in real life and it's probably just a show but man I cannot stand watching his videos, your actually chill and talk like a normal human! You got my sub man!!

You popped up in my feeds today as "something new to try" Like and Subbed bro... GL on your journey, wherever the roads may take you.

Ive always advocated for banning gold buyers rather than gold sellers. That has always been the key to cracking botting. There is no reason for people to bot and sell gold, if there is no one to sell to. A botter doesnt care if one of his hundreds of bots gets terminated, but a player will care if he loses his hardwork and effort put into an achievements and cosmetics. In my honest opinion, RMT shouldnt matter as long as it is acquired honestly. If I spend a few hours farming my ass off for something and someone wants to buy it off me for cash, I'm entitled to doing that. But when it's botted, suddenly the fairness element is gone and it should be an instant red flag.

This is your year, Dr. Bucky!! I’m gonna throw out a cheeky little prediction of your channel blowing up and hitting 10K after Alpha 2 begins, before the year ends…

I'm sceptical if their plans will work in the long run. Many of these tactics have been attempted in some form in the past and failed to stop cheaters. I'll be brutally honest: I expect the preventive measures to a) cause unforseen issues and b) be overcome by RMTs after a while and then it will lead to c) the company reducing GM staff when the game does not create as much revenue anymore as it does around the initial launch hype.

LMAO great intro!

Great stuff, per usual!

Great video Burnsy can’t wait till we play this game!

Sure. We will see when my grandkids get to play this on release.

Warcraft had to make their GMs invisible and stop them from interacting with players, because some GMs started showboating (messing around), while others were stuck doing actual work. It created a pretty bad work environment. There's a KZfaq video about this, I think the title was something like "what happened to wow GMs".

Glad to see that Ashes of Creation is going to actively deal with bots and gold sellers. Back when Star Wars Galaxies was still a live game (yes I know about the freeshards and have played on them), they instituted the "Warden" system. This was selected volunteer players who were granted some special abilities in the game. There were a few per server. I was a Warden on one of those servers (Starsider I think). As a Warden if I encountered someone who was spamming Gold sellers spam in game, I could find them, target them and use a command to squash their ability to broadcast messages entirely. This also reported the character to the CS staff so they could investigate and ban them automatically. The system would take the chatlog of that character and automatically add the last 20 mins or so of their chat records to the report sent to CS staff. If I screwed up and reported someone incorrectly it would impact me as well, so I had to be careful about squashing someone. This meant it couldn't be abused by someone maliciously. I loved the system honestly speaking as it gave me some agency to help improve the gameplay on the server by fighting the Gold Sellers. I believe I could also report gold farming behaviour although its been many years. I would hope that AoC volunteer system takes something from this sort of abuse management. Great video by the way :)

Holy crap that intro was glorious!

I like the idea of killing bots. Unless they have 100 multi box rangers stacked ready to insta headshot anyone that comes into range. Groups of bots could be nasty. You could have a main and then 7 support bots or something. Bards, summoners, clerics, etc.

My plan is to seek employment as a GM, if remote work is allowed. I have experience as a GM on quite a few EMU servers, my own game servers, and way back when as a Counselor in Ultima Online. I am retiring soon, so if I can play on one server and GM on another, that works for everyone.

Well, main worry in MMO is nevertheless the need of 40 cedar planks, 20 oak planks, 40 liter of varnish to craft a fork

An absolute gem of a video. Incredibly well done

Everyone I have been showing your videos to are loving it Burnsy! Keep it up homie and see you in Ashes! ~Magicpipe

Honestly man, you're videos are far better than Narc's. also i love your outro ahhahh. gets me every time XD

nice video keep it up bro and I like that first cut scene you made is so amazing and high quality GOOD JOB!

cool video, but "SOLVED Botting" is quite a overstatment of a game that doesn't exist yet. Hopefully they will deal with bots, but time will tell to say "SOLVED"

50 seconds in and had to stop the video to comment on the intro. It's amazing! Freaking hilarious!

The plans they have really are great. Hopefully they will be able to implement them all. The GM one will be tricky.

Really good stuff, glad I found your channel

Resistance is futile... You will be assimilated. Also, we'll pick all of the flowers.

Wait they solved botting by the game not being playble?

This was so interesting! Also that clip of Margaret 😂

The only way a game can keep bots away if that game is non profitable to the bot farmers. If that happens the game is more than likely dead in the water for the most part.

aka Steven being an absolute gigachad dev for 14 minutes

The best part is if all you have to do is kill what you suspect to be a bot to get a bunch of mats in an instant than wouldn’t a bunch of bots be programmed to do that and effectively set bots against each other?

This video gave me the idea that my alt account is going to be a bot killer assassin. Maybe with a name that references bot killing i will be left alone by bounty hunters 😂

Make nodes instanced, the way guild wars 2 does it, so that every node can be farmed by multiple people in the area and not "first come first serve". Then make their spawn locations random. It's really that simple.

have no in game tradeable currency. Make professions actually play a massive role. Make bossing or dungeons very difficult with strong rewards based on the level on content. Boom, botting solved.

It is the dance of Loot vs Setting. Those who want loot shall program the bots to move the best route to gain the most resources. The dance of setting plays between what it costs the developers for counter measures and what it costs the community for these counter measures. Some settings have a thriving PVP community that solves the issue by violence while others have their community ruined by grief builds cutting out new players. The dance shall be sung and made and it is only through the interaction do we see the difference between profit and cost. Is it cheaper to claim this shall fix a problem or shall new problems be made because of this fix?

Really good take. Hope to see more from you!

After watching this video and looking at your sub count, I would have thought you'd have had thousands of subs by now but nope, only 1k. I'm impressed by the quality and I'm going to love this game going forward, so you've earned another sub. Keep up the great work and I can't wait for more Ashes of Creation content.

Keep at it - posting here for posterity that I subscribed before 1k bc I know you'll be a mainstay in the community.

Really comes down to the punishment. Players need to be banned. End of story. You cannot stop the bots, or the farmers. Players need to be scared to buy.... But even Steven has admitted to buying gold. He blames the game for letting him get away with it. So hopefully he puts his money where his month is and just bans everyone on first offense.

how to Ashes of Creation avoid bots is simple, it was never released XD

hacker and cheater are always a step ahead of defences, but I really value the fact that they are trying that hard

What about an MMO like in the animes where PvP is always on and it's only safe in a village because the guards will swarm you if u pk XD -after thought- Mobs prioritizes PC's that are closets and have relatively less movement. So leading a mob results in them targeting the more stationary bot as you run past it

Thanks for the awesome info and great video!

New world could easily pick off some of the bots, so many lvl 60 bots just gathering non stop when the lvl cap with expansion is 65.

Love your content so much. Keep up the great work!

Love the Honey pot plan. If gold sellers have no customers, they will go to other games where they can make money.

Super good stuff as always!

Well, hope it works, seems like it could bring about some other issues for more casual players. But let's see how it goes.

never underestimate a botter lol

I subbed to Narc when he was 1.3k followers. I told Narc I could tell he was gana make it if he kept at it. Narc is right about you.

volintary gm is a huge idea. they could just pick people from the free gm list who are doing really good and pay them.

Where The Dented One goes, we follow.

I don’t know man… Albion Online already has actual player GMs, randomized mode spawns and perma bans but harvesting bots are still an issue… And even if you solve the gather bot issue then what about the other aspects of the job system? Refining and crafting? You can’t randomize crafting locations or storage chests… Trading and Resource Transporting Any time you have player based economy where things are valued differently in different auction houses then you have traders and transporters, unless the world is built in a way that the same roads cannot be used to go back and forth between cities every day then you will get bots that just transport things. Bots harvesting is just one of the most visible symptoms of this plague… once you realize it can infect nearly every aspect of the game you realize it’s an insanely hard problem to combat. Something like a post install hardware survey might mitigate it by checking for virtualized hardware. But that will still be able to be bypassed by the more technical botters… It’s a rough issue 😓

Your low subscriber number caught me by surprise. I thought for sure that I was watching a video by an established youtuber. Impressive for someone so new on the platform.

Devs need to make things actively accessible - with wow as an example mentioned - there is 0 chance blizzard doesnt know what people are spending gold on. Is it Potions? Cant make it so BiS raid pots are from a currency gained playing the game thats untradeable? Yes you can...just stop thinking aggressively. Make it 5 a raid reset for wow per potion per type per account. Just like farming Marks of honor/frost/w.e did in Wrath. That currency didnt take away from the fact you needed to raid to get raid gear from the token but it itself gave raid gear.

Great video. Regional pricing for subscriptions is not really anything I ever considered before.

The folks that bot. Challenge excepted.

I'll simple my original planned comment by a hundredfold : I hope their anti-bot stuff does not hurt legit players. Most games fail at this, and fail really HARD. If you can only farm "Mithril" on a full moon, on Fridays, if your character is female and not any mage classes - or the node does not spawn, you're just hurting regular players, especially casuals who might only have an hour a day, or like 5hrs on Sunday afternoons... (Also create issues with gated progressions and dailies taking 1h/day when you can play 5-6hrs on one day but no game time on every other days, but that's another matter) I hope they get it right, but no game has yet, let's hope for the best

I'm hyped to be within the first 1000 subs. This channel is going to explode with this game. $BUY$BUY$BUY$

Great video! Subbed

yeah we will see, most of these things you mention can be solved through enough work and pure scale of bots.

Thats why I bought so many xmog packs.. my favorite ones.. Ashes is going to be massive.

I think Bots cheesing the stock market is going to be a bigger problem then harvesting resources.

I'm iffy on their decision to not outright ban the known gold sellers. Everything else though I agree on. The issue with the gold sellers is there may be players who might not know that's against the rules as this could be their very first mmo game. They would need to find a way to encourage players to fully read the ToS as from my own experience those are rarely ever read until an issue pops up. I think the idea itself is great for the players who know better, which is likely the majority but I feel they should give a 1 strike rule. If a player is found purchasing money from an RMT pull them into a GM jail room temporarily. Could be just long enough for a GM to speak with them or maybe lock them in there for a week or something so they would learn their lesson, then if they do it again completely ban them as they'd been warned before. In a since it's more like a 3 strike rule if you consider failing to read the ToS as a rule violation. Another thing they can do is make their own RMTs for the honey pot so that the other RMTs don't get to profit off their game as well.

this will be funny to revisit in a few years

NIce one! As the copium Lord says....Keep going!!

If they really do what they say they do like depleting ressources ... The economy is fucked. One game tried that and in 2 days the economy was so trashed down. No trees and no animals that they had to reset the servers. Also the ressources they collected like cow dung costed like 10 million gold because that item was unique and there was only 1 in the hole world like that. This will be a problem.

I have been botting in MMOs since UO back in 1997. With current AI tech devs are on the loosing side 100%. People with cheap, obvious and easy to track bots get banned. In under 5 years bots will look more alive compared to players themselves.

Great video mate! Subbed. Can't wait for ashes of creation

This is a great video. Im a first time watcher, i will definitely sub. On to the video, i think botting will struggle in AOC because of random resource spawns, and because of over farming. If something gets overfarmed Steven has said it will have negative impacts on the economy, and cause scarcity, cause slower respawn rates, less resouce gain. And thats gonna cause players to hunt bots for over farming

Client side kernel level anticheat or nothing. Intrepid is exactly the kind of developers to say "we're sorry, but we don't care about your privacy in this context". And I'm all for it I'd literally trade one of my fingers for a great MMO impervious to bots and I sure as heck ain't got nothing to hide.

I dont remember if it was early WoW or WAR... but we used to gank the guys from gold sellers. Back then, they were bots, and humans working shifts. Open world PvP ftw...

Bro if a human can do something a bot will be able to do it to the only question is if the market for rmt will be big enough to justify development cost...

Said that 2022 already. Force bots into pvp mode. Pvp folks are happy for the free kill

Other games also have variable resource location spawn and ban RMTers (including buyers). They still have bot problems and people that buy gold. Don't get me wrong, it's better than doing nothing. But it is not a one solution fits all

Can anyone tell this in short? How they will identify or ban bots?

Great vid, got yourself a new sub❣

This is a game I have been following for years, just waiting for a skin pack I liked before I "bought in".... still waiting... does anyone recall what the rotation time is, as the current pack doesn't really tickle my pink at all.

I believe when I see it.

Theyre giving the gold item-IDs?? - this is huge, theyre basically giving the gold serial numbers, and if theyre not legit, then theyl know- NICE!

Every game aware of bots. The length they will go to actually combat the bots is different. They can talk all they want lol

NO MATTER HOW hard they try to remove bots, gold sellers, they will never remove them completely, they can make it hard for them yes, but not impossible xD

Banning buyers will do nothing. FFXIV fights gold selling better than anyone, but their fight is constant, they ban gold buyers, then delete the accoubts of sellers, but those are mule accounts, and the buyers will also use mule characters that they will delete after the transaction, they transfer their money through the auction house to another account. Lol I had a bot in early Ragnarok Online, when you only got 0.000001% xp for a same level difficuly mob, and you don’t have months to gain a single level, you do what you got to do, but the programs were crap lol. When GMs finally started taking note, the bots then started teleporting when approached, and logging off when contacted by a GM. Botting in these newer games wont go away as long as anyone is buying gold or whatever currency. It will only evolve past the rules. Another thing to look at is player time played. If you limit things due to botters, you’re then punishing normal players, who can’t compete against botters in the first place.

One of my biggest concerns is the corruption system with bots. Because they will probably be set to not fight back which would give the negative consequence to the player. However, I am curious how setting bounties on bots or a reporting potential bots in order to get a pause on the corruption system might be options to circumvent the negative consequence for the player. In SoD you can go to SFK and see 20 naked rogue bots stuck in their pathing. The 80% open world will help for the reporting of suspicious players (one aspect that will hurt botting that you missed in this video).