Here's a brief summary of the video because it's terrible to go through the entire thing.
- Farms using 100 accounts - Writes scripts for his own bots, and manages the accounts to run them - Each account can be on America and EU at the same time, doubling each accounts effectiveness - Approx. 300k gold for each account per hour - Gold prices: $12 US for 1 million - Inflation is going to start getting outrageous if Blizzard does nothing to curb him and his kind - Blizzard needs to raise money sink prices to compensate - Approx. 10,000 accounts currently in use farming gold - Bots run 24h a day - Accounts are never banned, Warden cannot see the bots and likely will not for 3-4 months he figures - People (farmers) are saving up tons and tons of gold for the day RMAH comes in ("people will sells billions of gold, undercutting, especially the Chinese") - If the farmer can't make enough money to live off of, then the game has failed in his eyes, because then the game has been ruined for everyone because of inflation - Saving money for RMAH with a few others, selling some gold on grey market for little bits of money ( at this point the retarded interviewer's CELL PHONE RINGS WTF ) - Approx. $6000 gold investment for the accounts - Some farmers, but not him and his guys, use hacked and phished accounts ("very illegal") - "mostly hacking and carding" keep your PAYPAL AND EMAIL SAFE WITH DIFFERENT PASSWORDS FROM ANYTHING - bug in Blizzard store for EU - accounts are bought with stolen credit card #'s often (he only buys fresh CD keys however) - account hacking on Blizzard forum that was big issue a week or so ago - your computers are not being hacked, they hack FANSITES AND TEST ALL EMAIL AND PASS WORD COMBOS IN GAME (keep your D3 pass different than anything) - process is called 'comboing' - programs can create 'combo lists' with data that is hacked from other sites - 10 million email/passwords - only 1-10% may actually log in, but that is still a great number of accounts targeted sites: Diablo fan websites, Blizzard-related sites such as MMO-Champ "it's easy" - forums are being compromised OVER AND OVER AGAIN - Paypal, banks, Facebook accounts may be in risk because of this behavior, people with combo lists (see above) will attempt to gain access to a wide swath of sites - Cannot get anything out of the Blizzard website "they are bulletproof, logically" - what Blizz can do - "increase sinks and prevent botters" "fix farming spots and exploits" - Blizz is aware of all exploits and farming locations "it's all over Youtube!" - what if you get banned - "if we made profit, just buy new accounts and fix the problems [that got us banned]" - reiterates that there are idiots who will get caught by Warden, but at the moment he is undetectable with a new method that Warden cannot see at the moment
- account hacking on Blizzard forum that was big issue a week or so ago - your computers are not being hacked, they hack FANSITES AND TEST ALL EMAIL AND PASSWORD COMBOS IN GAME (keep your D3 pass different than anything)
this has been my assumption since session spoofing was debunked
On June 08 2012 05:03 johnnywup wrote: lol he spent $6000 to do this. sad imo ><
Ive done this kind of goldfarming, not in Diablo 3 but in another game. I had to spend some money to get it running, computer (shitty one), monthly fees on multiple accounts, spend some time making scripts... And i can tell you it was worth it. I only made like 50 euros per day but the effort I put in was pretty much 2 hours per week.
On June 08 2012 05:03 johnnywup wrote: lol he spent $6000 to do this. sad imo ><
It's not sad. I've legitimately sold off 1000 dollars in gold (could be close to 2000 if I sold the rest of my stuff; I'm not a gold farmer/botter, though, just a guy with a lot of extra money). I can only imagine how much he can get through 100 different accounts. They probably pay for themselves in a week.
However, a gold sink won't stop the farmers, it'll only stop inflation slightly, but botters will still be profiting greatly off it. For others to compete they'll either need to buy gold or bot themselves. Imo they should just nerf gold finding since I'm assuming that's what he does since it's safe and easy and doesn't require much gear. Botting through killing elites is significantly more difficult.
lol and all those conspiracy theories about session spoofing go up in smoke.
Also if you think blizzard should just "fix" this remember that there are zero online games (with a money component) that are bot-free. They would love nothing more than to get rid of them, because the RMAH is going to be a major headache for them if they don't. It's not in any way a simple problem to fix.
On June 08 2012 05:03 johnnywup wrote: lol he spent $6000 to do this. sad imo ><
It's not sad. I've legitimately sold off 1000 dollars in gold (could be close to 2000 if I sold the rest of my stuff; I'm not a gold farmer/botter, though, just a guy with a lot of extra money). I can only imagine how much he can get through 100 different accounts. They probably pay for themselves in a week.
However, a gold sink won't stop the farmers, it'll only stop inflation slightly, but botters will still be profiting greatly off it. For others to compete they'll either need to buy gold or bot themselves. Imo they should just nerf gold finding since I'm assuming that's what he does since it's safe and easy and doesn't require much gear. Botting through killing elites is significantly more difficult.
Gold sink is still necessary though, because inflation will be something thats highly damaging to gameplay, and its easier to implement than fixing all the farming.
Nerfing gold finding also wont work because the only difference between farmers and gamers is that the farmers have more time, nerfing gold finding will just make gamers rage and increase demand for buying gold. What you need to do is limit the time accounts can stay logged in and playing, either by enforcing a limit or using some sort of captcha in game to keep you logged in. Maybe every 4 hours you play the next time you enter a map you enter a captcha, it has low impact to players but will significantly hinder people with 100 accounts logged in simultaneously.
There is no practical way to stop these things I think. Any gold sink or whatever will hurt the real players more then it does bots. Somehow indentifying accounts that are botting doesn't seem feasible either as it's just so hard to detect. This stuff only bothers a minority of the players anyway so I don't see them ever adding something silly as captcha's to prevent this problem as the casual gamer couldn't care less about it. I think it will most likely just result in a huge inflation that farming without bots will be very inefficient (isn't it always?) and items will cost a lot of virtual gold. Paying for stuff with real money should be super cheap though because of all the botters trying to undercut eachother. You find stuff yourself, trade items or buy with real money eventually I think. With all the botters it will be very unlikely that your own gold from finding or selling lower level items will be enough to afford higher level items.
On June 08 2012 05:03 johnnywup wrote: lol he spent $6000 to do this. sad imo ><
It's not sad. I've legitimately sold off 1000 dollars in gold (could be close to 2000 if I sold the rest of my stuff; I'm not a gold farmer/botter, though, just a guy with a lot of extra money). I can only imagine how much he can get through 100 different accounts. They probably pay for themselves in a week.
However, a gold sink won't stop the farmers, it'll only stop inflation slightly, but botters will still be profiting greatly off it. For others to compete they'll either need to buy gold or bot themselves. Imo they should just nerf gold finding since I'm assuming that's what he does since it's safe and easy and doesn't require much gear. Botting through killing elites is significantly more difficult.
Gold sink is still necessary though, because inflation will be something thats highly damaging to gameplay, and its easier to implement than fixing all the farming.
Nerfing gold finding also wont work because the only difference between farmers and gamers is that the farmers have more time, nerfing gold finding will just make gamers rage and increase demand for buying gold. What you need to do is limit the time accounts can stay logged in and playing, either by enforcing a limit or using some sort of captcha in game to keep you logged in. Maybe every 4 hours you play the next time you enter a map you enter a captcha, it has low impact to players but will significantly hinder people with 100 accounts logged in simultaneously.
gold finding can be nerfed in a tolerable way
make gold find not work on inanimate objects (pot breaking), but allow gold find to work when killing monsters
On June 08 2012 05:03 johnnywup wrote: lol he spent $6000 to do this. sad imo ><
It's not sad. I've legitimately sold off 1000 dollars in gold (could be close to 2000 if I sold the rest of my stuff; I'm not a gold farmer/botter, though, just a guy with a lot of extra money). I can only imagine how much he can get through 100 different accounts. They probably pay for themselves in a week.
However, a gold sink won't stop the farmers, it'll only stop inflation slightly, but botters will still be profiting greatly off it. For others to compete they'll either need to buy gold or bot themselves. Imo they should just nerf gold finding since I'm assuming that's what he does since it's safe and easy and doesn't require much gear. Botting through killing elites is significantly more difficult.
Gold sink is still necessary though, because inflation will be something thats highly damaging to gameplay, and its easier to implement than fixing all the farming.
Nerfing gold finding also wont work because the only difference between farmers and gamers is that the farmers have more time, nerfing gold finding will just make gamers rage and increase demand for buying gold. What you need to do is limit the time accounts can stay logged in and playing, either by enforcing a limit or using some sort of captcha in game to keep you logged in. Maybe every 4 hours you play the next time you enter a map you enter a captcha, it has low impact to players but will significantly hinder people with 100 accounts logged in simultaneously.
My point was never to get rid of bot farming, but make it more difficult for bots/programs so that inflation doesn't get out of control. Writing a script for breaking pots is probably really easy, but trying to go through act 1 inferno in mediocre gear with several different affix mobs? That would only be available to a few elite people. And nerfing gold finding certainly would help inflation. People find less gold, gold starts to become worth more. Of course, this doesn't really hurt gold sellers, but my original point was to make earning gold through multiple accounts difficult.
Botting is hard work yo. Since I don't play or have any connections to Ragnarok Online anymore, I can say that I botted before too on iRO Loki server, I must have set up over 100 accounts over the years that I played (many of them were eventually banned) and made over 10M zeny (currency for the game) per day. Even the setup and coding of the programs to make them more efficient or avoiding the GameMasters took hours to do. Eventually when I quit, I sold my main account for over $1000. People will always pay.
This will draw so much hate, but I think that putting a captcha whenever you start a new game is the way to go. AFAIK, computers can't figure out how to fill in captchas... yet. Benefits: it'll frustrate the hell out of legitimate chest farmers.
well, in d2 the gold was useless. And d2 had the best trading system in my opinion, Items for items. So my suggestion is just make gold useless again. was working in d2
blizzard said they want us players to farm bosses and elite/champion packs with NV. They try to make it more efficient than just farming one spot over and over again(like goblins/chests). If they can manage to make this happen, they have to make it happen for both types of farming: gear and gold. I doubt that this will be the final solution for that problem but to write a bot that can kill champions and bosses is way harder than one site long script that lets your bot destroy vases.
But i think most of the damage has already been done. Together with the people who used all the bug/exploits in the first week and the bots farming until some patches( and might keep on going after them) raised prices and brought massive inflation into the game. Its almost impossible to take out money from the game without punishing the players more than the bot user/hacker whatever.
On June 08 2012 07:12 HivMagnus wrote: well, in d2 the gold was useless. And d2 had the best trading system in my opinion, Items for items. So my suggestion is just make gold useless again. was working in d2
item for item trading was for poor people in D2
rich people (dupers/botters) traded in runes/SoJs to use as currency (D3 gold)
They try to make it more efficient than just farming one spot over and over again(like goblins/chests).
just stick an elite pack where ever a goblin or chest spawns
players will have risk/reward now instead of just reward assuming they can tolerate the monotony of remaking games and checking for spawns
On June 08 2012 07:10 Heh_ wrote: This will draw so much hate, but I think that putting a captcha whenever you start a new game is the way to go. AFAIK, computers can't figure out how to fill in captchas... yet. Benefits: it'll frustrate the hell out of legitimate chest farmers.
Not a horrible idea, although I'd rather it be a 30% chance to have a captcha instead. A 5 stack boss run takes at least 10 minutes for most people so 10 seconds every 30+ minutes won't hurt legitimate people. The people/bots though who constantly do farm runs every 1-2 minutes though are going to feel the pain.
Jesus Christ do not put captcha into the game, what would that help anyways? Game asks for captcha? Well have someone manually enter it. Done. Yeh it gets a bit more annoying and the heavy botters would require some more "employees" but it's something that will annoy millions of people, not just these botters. So that's something that's never ever going to happen.
In the end little can be done against bots, a certain percentages can be banned but that only slows them down a bit. A drop on a hot stone probably. Blizzard also can't make the game impossible to farm for bots, that's just not possible. Especially not without hurting real players.
You take away vases and stuff due to gold farming? Well let's have a bot with Inferno gear just run through this nightmare/hell area and pick up the money.
So how do you stop that?
In the end you get a long chain of cat and mice were the legitimate players end up suffers, as the game is completely designed about preventing bots instead of being a good game.
Maybe disallow the transfer of gold when you open the trade box? Means you can no longer do deals outside the auction house. So then botters would be stuck with useless gold that they can't get out of their accounts. They also won't be able to consolidate the money from all 100 accounts either.
On June 08 2012 07:53 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote: Jesus Christ do not put captcha into the game, what would that help anyways? Game asks for captcha? Well have someone manually enter it. Done. Yeh it gets a bit more annoying and the heavy botters would require some more "employees" but it's something that will annoy millions of people, not just these botters. So that's something that's never ever going to happen.
That doesn't make the least bit of sense. Captcha, even 20% of time, would be a major obstacle given the level of automation of these multiaccount farm bots.
On June 08 2012 07:53 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote: Jesus Christ do not put captcha into the game, what would that help anyways? Game asks for captcha? Well have someone manually enter it. Done. Yeh it gets a bit more annoying and the heavy botters would require some more "employees" but it's something that will annoy millions of people, not just these botters. So that's something that's never ever going to happen.
That doesn't make the least bit of sense. Captcha, even 20% of time, would be a major obstacle given the level of automation of these multiaccount farm bots.
Maybe if you had over a hundred, but most of these farmers probably have like 20. For 20 accounts that's not such a huge deal.
Let's say it takes one person 10 sec to move over to a machine and beat a captcha. If each run takes 1 min, a single botter could support only 7 instances running in perfect harmony assuming there is a captcha per game.
Not only that, answering captchas for hours on end is mind-numbingly intolerable, so even if people still bot, I'll take pleasure in their sheer amount of effort they put in.
And finally, it'd almost wholly stop all 'casual' botters who leave scripts running when they go to school/work, and come home a few mil richer.
But then you piss off a million other people who have nothing to do with the captcha being implemented who get angry at blizzard for not being able to stop the botters without affecting them. It'd be a completely stupid decision by blizzard to implement anything like that. The amount of people who would be angry about it far outnumber those who are affected by botters, or at least directly affected. I for one would be annoyed by it as well. So like what happens? A random popup when you're fighting an elite only to die?
I'd also go as far to say that the botters isn't even the primary reason for the failure of the economy. There's multiple flaws that I've found, and although botters are a part of it, they aren't the main reason at all.
I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
On June 08 2012 08:39 J_Slim wrote: As long as there are players dumb enough to pay real money for video game gold/items/xp, exploiters like this will continue to exist and ruin games.
Can't really blame them for being opportunists and using their skills, as long as they do it legally, right? Obviously if they're hacking, that's another problem entirely.
blizzard should just put a cap on how much gold you can get per day/week/month. that will do something to curb these bots. i am sure that 99% of the people playing are below a certain amount (maybe a million a day) and the rest are bots. i see the markets getting flooded with gold and then AH just being stupid for people who dont want to shell out money.
On June 08 2012 08:39 J_Slim wrote: As long as there are players dumb enough to pay real money for video game gold/items/xp, exploiters like this will continue to exist and ruin games.
Can't really blame them for being opportunists and using their skills, as long as they do it legally, right? Obviously if they're hacking, that's another problem entirely.
Eh. Not surprised that people take advantage of opportunities, but can still blame them and call them game ruiners. Besides the mass-hacking and bot-accounts purchased with stolen credit cards, I'm pretty sure they also break the game's user agreements.
On June 08 2012 08:40 Phael wrote: I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
your last point is incredibly unfeasible...what is stopping people from just mass creating games and getting 100K every time? it's going to inflate prices to unimaginable levels
On June 08 2012 08:44 dAPhREAk wrote: blizzard should just put a cap on how much gold you can get per day/week/month. that will do something to curb these bots. i am sure that 99% of the people playing are below a certain amount (maybe a million a day) and the rest are bots. i see the markets getting flooded with gold and then AH just being stupid for people who dont want to shell out money.
Not really. I can make 10 million a day and I work a job atm (unless you mean gold dropped on the ground) . Also, these bots aren't on single accounts, they're all separate accounts and the amount of gold each earn isn't that much compared to each person, it's just that there's a lot of accounts, and they, as a person, don't put effort beyond making the script.
On June 08 2012 08:47 NotSorry wrote: 1mil a day is way to low, you can legit vase farm for 600-700k an hour
i read in the other thread that this was limited recently. not sure that was true though. regardless, breaking vases for an hour is stupid.
It was limited awhile ago, but is still by far the best means in the game to farm gold. It's fucking stupid but until blizz changes the game to not make it the most efficient means of farming people will continue to do it, either legit or with scripts. The 600-700k is post nerfs.
I'd be very interested in knowing what the ratio is between "gold sold that was farmed" and "gold sold that was stolen from account compromise". But I don't think anyone actually has or could even reasonably speculate on that data..
Simple fixes, buff elite pack drops, buff boss drops, buff NV stacks, remove chests/mass vase spots that are within 20-30sec of a wp/check point. Of course it will still be bottable, but at least writing a combat bot takes a hell of a lot more work than the current half page script that is the best farming in the game.
On June 08 2012 08:52 NotSorry wrote: Simple fixes, buff elite pack drops, buff boss drops, buff NV stacks, remove chests/mass vase spots that are within 20-30sec of a wp/check point.
They've already announced buffs to both elite pack drops and boss drops with 5 stacks of NV for 1.03, and they've been consistently nerfing farming spots shortly after they become popular.
It's not really a suggestion if you just list the things they're doing, after they've begun doing them.
On June 08 2012 08:52 NotSorry wrote: Simple fixes, buff elite pack drops, buff boss drops, buff NV stacks, remove chests/mass vase spots that are within 20-30sec of a wp/check point.
They've already announced buffs to both elite pack drops and boss drops with 5 stacks of NV for 1.03, and they've been consistently nerfing farming spots shortly after they become popular.
It's not really a suggestion if you just list the things they're doing, after they've begun doing them.
no they buffing nv with relation to elite packs, they are further nerfing boss drops and still have yet to touch many of the most popular farming spots. 1 extra rare per elite pack after 5stacks is nothing that going to come close to making it more efficient than vase/chest farming, so they need a big nerf on that end as well.
On June 08 2012 08:54 trinxified wrote: Which vases are we talking about? Royal crypts? That gives me about 5-6k gold in under 2 minutes only.... kinda sucks. That's with gold find gear too.
i got 8k last night with no gf gear on. just seeing what the fuss was about. was bored out of my mind and went back to siegebreaker runs.
On June 08 2012 08:40 Phael wrote: I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
your last point is incredibly unfeasible...what is stopping people from just mass creating games and getting 100K every time? it's going to inflate prices to unimaginable levels
I didn't clarify myself.
Current situation: (no captcha) you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and make 500k gold in addition to items. We're going to ignore the items here since the botters don't farm items.
You look at a helm that you want on the AH. Because of massive gold injection from botting, it costs 1.5 mil.
With captcha: you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and pick up 500k, again. You check the AH for that exact same helm, and it's now going for 500k instead because the amount of gold in the economy is vastly reduced.
By answering that captcha 10 times, you've effectively increased the buying power of your earnings by 1 mil. See why I say answering that captcha is worth 100k?
Obviously numbers are rough, but I'm fairly sure I'm not off to a significant degree.
On June 08 2012 08:40 Phael wrote: I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
your last point is incredibly unfeasible...what is stopping people from just mass creating games and getting 100K every time? it's going to inflate prices to unimaginable levels
I hope that it was an exaggeration. My interpretation is that if you farm an entire act instead of a single chest, you make about 100k.
Captchas: if they implement it, sure it'll cause a shitstorm. Blizzard has done many things in the past which have caused a shitstorm, why not do it again, as long as they explain their reasons well. Surely people aren't gonna quit a game just because they implemented a captcha -_-
On June 08 2012 08:10 W2 wrote: Maybe disallow the transfer of gold when you open the trade box? Means you can no longer do deals outside the auction house. So then botters would be stuck with useless gold that they can't get out of their accounts. They also won't be able to consolidate the money from all 100 accounts either.
This is the best idea in the thread so far. If Blizzard removed this (which I didn't even know you could do), the only thing botters would be able to do is sell random accounts with XX gold in their stash.
Edit: Also, captchas are a terrible idea. Also also, it's looking more and more like the RMAH itself is a terrible idea.
On June 08 2012 08:40 Phael wrote: I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
your last point is incredibly unfeasible...what is stopping people from just mass creating games and getting 100K every time? it's going to inflate prices to unimaginable levels
I didn't clarify myself.
Current situation: (no captcha) you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and make 500k gold in addition to items. We're going to ignore the items here since the botters don't farm items.
You look at a helm that you want on the AH. Because of massive gold injection from botting, it costs 1.5 mil.
With captcha: you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and pick up 500k, again. You check the AH for that exact same helm, and it's now going for 500k instead because the amount of gold in the economy is vastly reduced.
By answering that captcha 10 times, you've effectively increased the buying power of your earnings by 1 mil. See why I say answering that captcha is worth 100k?
Obviously numbers are rough, but I'm fairly sure I'm not off to a significant degree.
You vastly overrate the effects of botting. Even though people with over hundreds of accounts exist, that still only makes up for maximum 20% of what everyone else is finding. A 1.5 mill item right now would never become so cheap. Also, upper mid tier items are actually beginning to be cheaper thanks to massive crafting. Only the items worth 5 mill+ or so are actually becoming more expensive.
On June 08 2012 08:54 trinxified wrote: Which vases are we talking about? Royal crypts? That gives me about 5-6k gold in under 2 minutes only.... kinda sucks. That's with gold find gear too.
i got 8k last night with no gf gear on. just seeing what the fuss was about. was bored out of my mind and went back to siegebreaker runs.
it's boring as fuck, that's why people write a 15line script to do it for them. To break 700k an hour you need a max 25% movespeed DH with high gold pick up range
On June 08 2012 08:52 NotSorry wrote: Simple fixes, buff elite pack drops, buff boss drops, buff NV stacks, remove chests/mass vase spots that are within 20-30sec of a wp/check point.
They've already announced buffs to both elite pack drops and boss drops with 5 stacks of NV for 1.03, and they've been consistently nerfing farming spots shortly after they become popular.
It's not really a suggestion if you just list the things they're doing, after they've begun doing them.
no they buffing nv with relation to elite packs, they are further nerfing boss drops and still have yet to touch many of the most popular farming spots. 1 extra rare per elite pack after 5stacks is nothing that going to come close to making it more efficient than vase/chest farming, so they need a big nerf on that end as well.
Yeah chest and vase farming both need nerfing (thought they nerfed vases already?). I'm hoping that in next patch, all resplendent chests will be locked and tied to a nearby elite pack and will not unlock until the pack is completely killed..
The problem isn't really with boss/elite drops, since those aren't currently bottable. The problem is with the exploitative, bottable techniques which need to be nerfed to the point where human farming elites is more efficient than botting the exploits.
they did 1 wave of nerfing vases, but it wasn't nearly enough and is still clearly the best farming in game
Boss are bottable up to hell(there is 4-5stack azmo and diablo bots, the stacks vary due to the randomness of spawns along the way), and with some gold find gear you can still make bank, but not on the level of vase/chest running. Which is going to get even worse in the next patch because they are buffing act 4 Hell drops to current Inferno act 1 levels.
On June 08 2012 08:10 W2 wrote: Maybe disallow the transfer of gold when you open the trade box? Means you can no longer do deals outside the auction house. So then botters would be stuck with useless gold that they can't get out of their accounts. They also won't be able to consolidate the money from all 100 accounts either.
This is the best idea in the thread so far. If Blizzard removed this (which I didn't even know you could do), the only thing botters would be able to do is sell random accounts with XX gold in their stash.
Edit: Also, captchas are a terrible idea. Also also, it's looking more and more like the RMAH itself is a terrible idea.
Botters can still transfer gold using the AH by putting a worthless level 1 item up for like a 200 million buyout. The solution needs to hit the supply line (whether that be the bots themselves, stopping account compromises, or whatever).
On June 08 2012 08:10 W2 wrote: Maybe disallow the transfer of gold when you open the trade box? Means you can no longer do deals outside the auction house. So then botters would be stuck with useless gold that they can't get out of their accounts. They also won't be able to consolidate the money from all 100 accounts either.
This is the best idea in the thread so far. If Blizzard removed this (which I didn't even know you could do), the only thing botters would be able to do is sell random accounts with XX gold in their stash.
Edit: Also, captchas are a terrible idea. Also also, it's looking more and more like the RMAH itself is a terrible idea.
Botters can still transfer gold using the AH by putting a worthless level 1 item up for like a 200 million buyout. The solution needs to hit the supply line (whether that be the bots themselves, stopping account compromises, or whatever).
Which would never happen unless they force the authenticator onto people. Honestly don't see why they don't though. Pay 7 dollars to play any blizzard related game 1 time fee sounds somewhat reasonable to me and would also take a lot of load off of their GMs.
On June 08 2012 08:40 Phael wrote: I'm in favor of a captcha every time you create a game. (Very) slight annoyance for legitimate players - is 10 sec every half hour+ really going to annoy you that much? And gives my gold significantly more buying power. As in there is no way I'd earn more buying power in those 10 sec every 30 min I answer a captcha.
Edit: think of it this way - if, every time you created a game, a captcha popped up and by answering it correctly, you are gifted with 100,000 gold. Would you not want that?
your last point is incredibly unfeasible...what is stopping people from just mass creating games and getting 100K every time? it's going to inflate prices to unimaginable levels
I didn't clarify myself.
Current situation: (no captcha) you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and make 500k gold in addition to items. We're going to ignore the items here since the botters don't farm items.
You look at a helm that you want on the AH. Because of massive gold injection from botting, it costs 1.5 mil.
With captcha: you make 10 games, farm siegebreaker 10 times and pick up 500k, again. You check the AH for that exact same helm, and it's now going for 500k instead because the amount of gold in the economy is vastly reduced.
By answering that captcha 10 times, you've effectively increased the buying power of your earnings by 1 mil. See why I say answering that captcha is worth 100k?
Obviously numbers are rough, but I'm fairly sure I'm not off to a significant degree.
You vastly overrate the effects of botting. Even though people with over hundreds of accounts exist, that still only makes up for maximum 20% of what everyone else is finding. A 1.5 mill item right now would never become so cheap. Also, upper mid tier items are actually beginning to be cheaper thanks to massive crafting. Only the items worth 5 mill+ or so are actually becoming more expensive.
I don't think I'm wrong by that much - I just got the picked up 5 mil gold achievement yesterday and yet I've made close to 50 mil selling stuff I've found only. But let's say you are right, and that 500k helm is only inflated 20% to 600k. 10 captchas would then be worth 100k. A single captcha is worth 10k.
Is that still not appealing? I don't know about you, but I haven't found a way to make 10k in 10 sec otherwise.
And to the guy above - you can trade money on the AH, just put up a useless item for 10 mil. Blizz takes 15% but still, it's a transfer.
On June 08 2012 08:10 W2 wrote: Maybe disallow the transfer of gold when you open the trade box? Means you can no longer do deals outside the auction house. So then botters would be stuck with useless gold that they can't get out of their accounts. They also won't be able to consolidate the money from all 100 accounts either.
This is the best idea in the thread so far. If Blizzard removed this (which I didn't even know you could do), the only thing botters would be able to do is sell random accounts with XX gold in their stash.
Edit: Also, captchas are a terrible idea. Also also, it's looking more and more like the RMAH itself is a terrible idea.
They could always transfer gold by selling/buying crap items... You can't stop botting really without hurting the casual community too much. The best they can do is making botting far less efficient, ie make long sessions and difficult creeps the best for farming gold AND items by far by nerfing vases etc. That way botting becomes very hard or inefficient which would probably suffice to prevent massive inflation.
I don't think blizz will really have to worry about botters though. Inflated virtual gold economy means RMAH gets used more and thus they get a bigger cut. All they have to worry about is the problem getting too big so players will massively stop playing because of it but I doubt that will happen
If you use the same email/username and pass for fansites/forums as you do for your account, you are truly stupid and honestly deserve to be hacked.
That is like a form of internet darwin award. Holy crap I can't believe that many people are that dumb. Well, I guess I can.
Edit: I know they said they probably weren't going to do it, but they are probably going to have to go back to the ladder system. I don't see how else they will keep this game afloat currently.
That won't stop gold farmers, but it will make them generally less profitable, especially if they can actually start shutting down some bots.
Either that or gold inflates so badly that it becomes like 3 dollars for a million gold and people don't care to bot for a living now. But then that'd just mean people who just hit 60 are forced into buying gold because any item they find in act 1 is near worthless by that point.
gold is already down to 6-7$/mil on most (botter) forums so 3$ isn't too far off, but hey if I got 100+ accounts making $3 each every ~2hours in a country like china then I'm still doing very good.
On June 08 2012 09:22 Phael wrote: $150 an hour is good in any country ...
even more so if it's 24/7 and you're free to do other things, you can see why people will do things like this
I was part of a very small operation in d2/wow for a few years, was able to support a wife and 3 kids (in California) while training MMA/Boxing full time.
Blizz likes to wait and do massive ban waves a few months between so they get the most people using the current set of bots before the new wave comes out that are undetected to the current blizz checks, this gives you plenty of time to make large profits to cover the losses of the bans. Who cares that your $60 just got banned when that account has already given you $1k+ in profits.
On June 08 2012 09:31 dAPhREAk wrote: $3/mil is very tempting. i can save myself a week of mindless drivel and be able to afford some awesome weapons.
Thats the thing, you can go do 8hours of work and buy what would have taken you a week or more of boring ass grinding(if you're not abusing the system yourself), and instead just jump right in and have some fun killing everything in sight.
Honestly I would imagine it'll drop down even further. I'm thinking 25 cents a mil, if that. Even at that price, botting as it exists today is still wildly profitable for next to zero effort.
This is becoming a very huge problem and I expect some huge changes in the near future. If there's a gold flood when the RMAH finally is implemented and gold is basically nothing worth anymore (like 1$/mil) people will gear themselves VERY VERY FAST. Even now, without the inferno nerf, you can defeat the game with good gear relatively easily. You may have to skip a champion pack here and there but it's doable for gear which is worth under 10mil. Now if the system remains unchanged you can buy good gear by spending like 5-10$, thus allowing everyone to complete Inferno with ease. If there is no challenge anymore, they will quickly quit the game.
On June 08 2012 10:00 toemn wrote: This is becoming a very huge problem and I expect some huge changes in the near future. If there's a gold flood when the RMAH finally is implemented and gold is basically nothing worth anymore (like 1$/mil) people will gear themselves VERY VERY FAST. Even now, without the inferno nerf, you can defeat the game with good gear relatively easily. You may have to skip a champion pack here and there but it's doable for gear which is worth under 10mil. Now if the system remains unchanged you can buy good gear by spending like 5-10$, thus allowing everyone to complete Inferno with ease. If there is no challenge anymore, they will quickly quit the game.
You realize items will just increase in price right.. rofl. $10 will get you like a single piece of good gear maybe.
I still think it was a bad idea to have gold drop at all. They keep saying the game is about the item hunt, but they created a means of avoiding item hunting altogether. Gold is fine as a currency, but they could have balanced the sale price of items so that you didn't actually need to have gold dropping at all.
It won't happen now, because gold find is an affix and also attached to at least one skill. But they bought themselves into a lot of this trouble by doing that in the first place. As has been said, it's a lot harder to design bots to farm items the way Blizzard intends players to, but no matter how attractive they try to make it, gold farming will always be an easier option.
Well, wasn't really going to become a gold seller but after searching though few sites realized that those 7$/m aren't actually bullshit like I thought. I can probably make like 3m on average/h on siegebreaker runs which put's me something like 20$/h by playing a game (For the past few days I've had at least 25m/day) and those >400$ just got from a reseller sure came handy.
On June 08 2012 11:16 Mammel wrote: Well, wasn't really going to become a gold seller but after searching though few sites realized that those 7$/m aren't actually bullshit like I thought. I can probably make like 3m on average/h on siegebreaker runs which put's me something like 20$/h by playing a game (For the past few days I've had at least 25m/day) and those >400$ just got from a reseller sure came handy.
You should have jumped on the bandwagon sooner little over a week ago it was $33/mil
Okay this is my view on it after reading the entire thread:
comparison to gold drops as they are now; - Vases, pots, chests etc drop 20% of max gold what it drops now - Vases, pots, chests etc have a 50% less chance to trigger a drop - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 5% chance of dropping Blues - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 1% chance of dropping Rares - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 0.05% chance of dropping Legendaries and Sets - Trash mobs drop 250% gold - Champion mobs drop 500% gold - elite mobs drop 750% gold - Bosses drop 1000% gold
See, now vase botters only get 10% of the gold they get now, legit players are rewarded for killing mobs, champs, elites and bosses with higher Gold Drops. It'll even out.
Legit players find more blues rares and legendaries, all which are useless to manage for botters and they will be left there.
Then they need some more gold sinks to flat out make gold worth more and thus reward players for actually playing the game. Repair costs are getting higher already so that's good. Also make crafting/jeweling twice as expensive?
Now you'll find botters at the short end of the stick.
Haven't bought diablo 3 yet, but currently debating between buying Guildwars 2 and playing that and pirating Diablo 3. If Blizzard ever return to their old ways I will buy it, until then, I rather suffer the emulated D3 server than playing legit. Also will buy Torchlight 2. The game looks legit too and the price is reasonable.
On June 08 2012 11:57 ddrddrddrddr wrote: Haven't bought diablo 3 yet, but currently debating between buying Guildwars 2 and playing that and pirating Diablo 3. If Blizzard ever return to their old ways I will buy it, until then, I rather suffer the emulated D3 server than playing legit. Also will buy Torchlight 2. The game looks legit too and the price is reasonable.
imo Diablo 3 is a fun game to play but the way it is now, it definitely does not have the longevity of Diablo 2
I think Blizzard can improve Diablo 3 and fix some glaring gameplay flaws over time but that will take a while
idk why they ever thought RMAH would work hahaaha. soon gold will be literally worthless, and inflation will literally destroy everything. (there will be lots of gold, LOTS of gold on the market, and the playerbase is only DECREASING)
On June 08 2012 11:57 ddrddrddrddr wrote: Haven't bought diablo 3 yet, but currently debating between buying Guildwars 2 and playing that and pirating Diablo 3. If Blizzard ever return to their old ways I will buy it, until then, I rather suffer the emulated D3 server than playing legit. Also will buy Torchlight 2. The game looks legit too and the price is reasonable.
On June 08 2012 12:59 mikell wrote: idk why they ever thought RMAH would work hahaaha. soon gold will be literally worthless, and inflation will literally destroy everything. (there will be lots of gold, LOTS of gold on the market, and the playerbase is only DECREASING)
I hope you know you're seriously undersizing how many people are playing and enjoying the game. Even if all you do is read the garbage on bnet forums that's barely touching the surface of how many people play the game. Most people don't even visit forums, and of those who do most only make posts to complain about something.
gold is insane. prices have gone up (for items) 5-10x as much in the past week...its crazy
On June 08 2012 07:26 K-Na wrote: thank god for the summary. the guy interviewing wasn't very good. "uhms" and "ahs" everywhere and he'd take like 5 minutes to ask a damn question.
i like marcus, he is pretty damn rich and has ran markeedragon (#1 WoW account trading/selling site ever created) for years until he gave it up (the trading/selling forums).
i thought the interview was fine
edit: now about half-way through, that farmer guy is right. i wonder how they are going to actually ban these accounts that are on 24hrs/day, because they KNOW they are farmers, and once the RMAH comes out? they're going to make a cut from every single deal that accounts makes...
The solution is easy ... they wear gold gear = almost no life make the stuff explode and pop minions, everytime a legendary drops make it get a shield and a elite pops. I wanna see them running scripts in killing those elites
I've seen the spamming bot on the trade channel got an error, and it was typed in chinese words. It was hilarious and pathetic lol. I knew there're mostly Chinese tho.
Blizz needs to do something about this man. They're ruining the game.
Is this the primary reason why the AH prices of items are going up significantly?
Shouldn't it be decreasing since technically more people have the items available, or more people have been farming for better items, thus overflowing the items?
On June 08 2012 11:57 NotSorry wrote: pre-2005 blizzard doesn't exist anymore and never will again
My time machine begs to differ!
Pre-2005 Adwodon doesn't exist any more either, I'd say it was a good thing, time moving forward and all that, things would be a bit weird otherwise.
More on topic though...
It's pretty daft that this has happened, however I'm not surprised it has, what I am surprised with is how its continuing. I hope that Blizzard does patch the farming spots pronto. So far duping has just been rumours, and I think beyond the odd AH lag glitch its not going to happen in any reliable sense which helps, which means that yes, gold is being over farmed by a small percentage of the population right now. However with appropriate action from Blizzard it can be appropriately curved.
What I genuinely don't understand though is the current pricing of gold selling, surely the people buying 1 million for $10-20 are not level 60 and inferno? Unless they are willing to throw $100+ away just to gear up for the next act... Personally wouldn't ever consider buying gold on the RMAH if it was more than $1-2 / million. I guess the game is new though so the econ is a mess.
On June 08 2012 20:56 trinxified wrote: Is this the primary reason why the AH prices of items are going up significantly?
Shouldn't it be decreasing since technically more people have the items available, or more people have been farming for better items, thus overflowing the items?
Why would it decrease? Bots farming for items would make items drop in value, but that's not what's happening. Bots farming for gold makes gold drop in value, and items stay the same, so their price in gold increases. It's like printing money.
On June 08 2012 11:40 frontliner2 wrote: Okay this is my view on it after reading the entire thread:
comparison to gold drops as they are now; - Vases, pots, chests etc drop 20% of max gold what it drops now - Vases, pots, chests etc have a 50% less chance to trigger a drop - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 5% chance of dropping Blues - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 1% chance of dropping Rares - Vases, pots, chests etc have an additional 0.05% chance of dropping Legendaries and Sets - Trash mobs drop 250% gold - Champion mobs drop 500% gold - elite mobs drop 750% gold - Bosses drop 1000% gold
See, now vase botters only get 10% of the gold they get now, legit players are rewarded for killing mobs, champs, elites and bosses with higher Gold Drops. It'll even out.
Legit players find more blues rares and legendaries, all which are useless to manage for botters and they will be left there.
Then they need some more gold sinks to flat out make gold worth more and thus reward players for actually playing the game. Repair costs are getting higher already so that's good. Also make crafting/jeweling twice as expensive?
Now you'll find botters at the short end of the stick.
Please tell me what you think.
*edited for spelling and minor tweaks*
Blizzard could start by changing that "+% extra gold gained form monsters" affects only mobs, like it says, and not breakable items.
For gold sink part. They should first make crafting worthy to do in the first place. But I dont really know if gold farmers will be doing that much money anyway once RMAH comes. Most if not all the best stuff is going to be sold in RMAH, and with lack of moneysinks in the game, what are you gonna do with gold?
Is this really such a huge problem? With inflation, if you find a good item you will be able to sell it for a very high cost, therefore the AH is still functional.
Maybe increase the limit of acutions per account so people who are more interesting in making money wouldnt bot and instead use the AH. In WoW you could farm the shitout of AH and sell the gold to chinese and get goods that you sell for real money. Well I dunno if it would help proportually very much.
On June 08 2012 21:36 Gnarg wrote: Is this really such a huge problem? With inflation, if you find a good item you will be able to sell it for a very high cost, therefore the AH is still functional.
Or am I saying something very stupid? :D
The definition of Inflation: The rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising, and, subsequently, purchasing power is falling.
What this means within Diablo, is that the gold you get from the game itself will eventually become virtually useless - the only way you will be able to make enough gold to buy other items, is to sell your own items, virtually making the AH the only way players can have any purchasing power. And in order to have purchasing power, players are going to overprice their items on the AH - only leading to even more inflation.
D3 is having HUGE inflation right now. Last week, I bought my barb a full set of nice gear for ~750k on average per piece. These same pieces are now going for 3m+.
On June 08 2012 21:42 Ryndika wrote: Maybe increase the limit of acutions per account so people who are more interesting in making money wouldnt bot and instead use the AH. In WoW you could farm the shitout of AH and sell the gold to chinese and get goods that you sell for real money. Well I dunno if it would help proportually very much.
D3 is having HUGE inflation right now. Last week, I bought my barb a full set of nice gear for ~750k on average per piece. These same pieces are now going for 3m+.
Are you sure about that ? Or is it that more people realize you need all resist gear ? The prices for weapons seem to fall. A few days ago I could still sell like 800dps 1 hander.
But I agree with your post. If this vases thing continues, Gold will have the same value as in D2. New currency will be hard cash in the rmah or maybe other things people always need like gems.
I dont get it. They know about the vases and do nothing about it.
On June 08 2012 07:12 HivMagnus wrote: well, in d2 the gold was useless. And d2 had the best trading system in my opinion, Items for items. So my suggestion is just make gold useless again. was working in d2
item for item trading was for poor people in D2
rich people (dupers/botters) traded in runes/SoJs to use as currency (D3 gold)
The actual rich people traded mostly through d2jsp, and a lot of items were worth more than 40 SoJs/40 hr's.
In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
Are there actually any bots out there that can even kill elite mobs? I thought bots right now are either breaking pots or breaking into unprotected accounts.
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
Are there actually any bots out there that can even kill elite mobs? I thought bots right now are either breaking pots or breaking into unprotected accounts.
I thought that in D2 bots were playing better than any human.
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
Are there actually any bots out there that can even kill elite mobs? I thought bots right now are either breaking pots or breaking into unprotected accounts.
There are bots that can attack enemies, but I really doubt that they can kite them so you'd have to be very geared up to do NV botting.
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
Are there actually any bots out there that can even kill elite mobs? I thought bots right now are either breaking pots or breaking into unprotected accounts.
There are bots right now that can run 4-5NV stack Azmo and Diablo Hell. The stacks vary due to where the packs spawn on it's way towards the bosses. Not as a quick as players of course but they probably haven't spent as much time refining them either since straight gold farming is better atm. I would put bots as better players than probably 90% of the D3 population. Remember less than 2% have even beaten hell now.
On June 08 2012 07:10 Heh_ wrote: This will draw so much hate, but I think that putting a captcha whenever you start a new game is the way to go. AFAIK, computers can't figure out how to fill in captchas... yet. Benefits: it'll frustrate the hell out of legitimate chest farmers.
Thats not a bad idea, although it would get super annoying pretty quickly haha
On June 08 2012 07:12 HivMagnus wrote: well, in d2 the gold was useless. And d2 had the best trading system in my opinion, Items for items. So my suggestion is just make gold useless again. was working in d2
D2's trading system was awful, currency being runes from a certain level. You needed extreme luck to get one of those runes and then pay for something great to use. With gold being useful, you can buy stuff, even if you're not very lucky at finding items.
and thus blizzard's masterstroke is revealed: by perpetually promising a legal RMAH they curb the amount of gold being flooded into the game until the game reaches a point where most people no longer care and blizzard can leech anyway :D
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
Are there actually any bots out there that can even kill elite mobs? I thought bots right now are either breaking pots or breaking into unprotected accounts.
I thought that in D2 bots were playing better than any human.
D2 bots had access to Enigma (teleport) which made botting far easier and less dangerous
in D3, there is no teleport get out of jail free card and the best bot class to farm monsters with is probably DH but there are monster + affix combinations that I seriously doubt a bot could manage
however, the bot could just be made intelligent enough to read the affixes then make a decision to actually try to kill the elites, skip them, or make a new game
in terms of finding a place to farm mosnters, I think Whimsyshire is a pretty bottable place to kill mobs since everything is melee
On June 08 2012 21:36 Gnarg wrote: Is this really such a huge problem? With inflation, if you find a good item you will be able to sell it for a very high cost, therefore the AH is still functional.
Or am I saying something very stupid? :D
The definition of Inflation: The rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising, and, subsequently, purchasing power is falling.
What this means within Diablo, is that the gold you get from the game itself will eventually become virtually useless - the only way you will be able to make enough gold to buy other items, is to sell your own items, virtually making the AH the only way players can have any purchasing power. And in order to have purchasing power, players are going to overprice their items on the AH - only leading to even more inflation.
D3 is having HUGE inflation right now. Last week, I bought my barb a full set of nice gear for ~750k on average per piece. These same pieces are now going for 3m+.
On June 08 2012 21:42 Ryndika wrote: Maybe increase the limit of acutions per account so people who are more interesting in making money wouldnt bot and instead use the AH. In WoW you could farm the shitout of AH and sell the gold to chinese and get goods that you sell for real money. Well I dunno if it would help proportually very much.
This would only increase inflation, actually.
I think he was saying that since for most players who are farming inferno, their purchasing power is mostly in their items they sell on the AH, so their purchasing power overall is roughly the same (slightly less since the relatively small amount of gold they do collect is now worth less). This is completely different from a real world economy where the majority of people's purchasing power comes from their income (e.g. currency) from employment. So really, the only people are really hurt from high inflation are the people who are sitting on a large amount of gold or who make the majority of their income through gold farming (i.e. vase farming).
Now Blizz is actually in a weird situation, as they actually have a conflict of interest between stopping botting to appease their non-botting customer base, and the income generated from their cut for RMAH transactions. Of course it doesn't help them to have gold worthless as that hurts them on both fronts. I think it's pretty much a given that they will eventually nerf vase farming to oblivion given their approach to these types of things so far. Outside of that I don't really think they are going to do much else. And captcha's are a horrible idea, the sheer uproar from customers would completely drown out any positive gain from it.
1) Prices are inflating crazily at the moment. 2) Having huge inflation will make the auction house unuseable for the normal player (because you can't afford anything anymore with your fixed income of gold from the hours you play). Two choices now: 3a) Some players will start buying gold for real money, therefore increasing the demand of farmed gold, therefore increasing the price per unit of gold. 3b) Some players will think that it's ridiculous to pay real money for farmed gold and either beat the game fairly (without buying stuff in the AH) or if they can't they will stop playing.
The consequence of 3a) is that the number of farmers increases (because you can make better money with it!), therefore the price of farmed gold could possibly reach a steady value (what actually happened in world of warcraft is that the price went slowly but steadily down because the NEED of gold decreased after some time).
The consequence of 3b) is unfortunately that the player base will shrink and that should cause Blizzard to act.... maybe ^^
On June 09 2012 00:19 akatama wrote: In my eyes, there is only one course of action that can be done against botting.
Keep the game hard, so that bots can't succesfully kill most elite packs. Next, decrease the amount on mf/gf on gear by a lot, halve it even. Then make NV also increase the MF you get from your gear to offset for that nerf (example: reduce the mf/gf on gear by 50%, and make each stack of NV increase your mf/gf from gear by 20%, in addition to the current effect. So with 5 NV stacks you get an increase of 100% of your gear mf, and thus you offset the nerf). This way not only do you solve most bot problems, but also stupid things like goblin/chest farming. I mean you can still do them, but at a lower profit than right now.
Best thing about that method is that you only need to tweak the numbers if bots or chest/goblin/vase farmers still have huge profits.
One issue this change might cause will be that players that can only play less than 1 hour a day might get the short end of the stick, since they don't have a lot of time to kill a lot of stuff with 5 stacks of NV. Then again here is where the RMAH comes in (people who play that little usually have jobs, so they migth be able to afford the odd item with perfect roll from time to time). Then again, out of those people only a few will bot or farm chests and the like.
On June 09 2012 01:52 necmon wrote: This is a pretty interesting cycle.
1) Prices are inflating crazily at the moment. 2) Having huge inflation will make the auction house unuseable for the normal player (because you can't afford anything anymore with your fixed income of gold from the hours you play). Two choices now: 3a) Some players will start buying gold for real money, therefore increasing the demand of farmed gold, therefore increasing the price per unit of gold. 3b) Some players will think that it's ridiculous to pay real money for farmed gold and either beat the game fairly (without buying stuff in the AH) or if they can't they will stop playing.
The consequence of 3a) is that the number of farmers increases (because you can make better money with it!), therefore the price of farmed gold could possibly reach a steady value (what actually happened in world of warcraft is that the price went slowly but steadily down because the NEED of gold decreased after some time).
The consequence of 3b) is unfortunately that the player base will shrink and that should cause Blizzard to act.... maybe ^^
You missed a few things.
1. A lot of people sell things on the AH, too, so the inflation will eventually make selling items on the AH better than farming gold. Even if it's only the legendaries, good rares, etc. that sell.
2. There is another option for those who refuse to pay for gold: hardcore. Inflation in hardcore is much less prevalent because there are fewer people and no farmers. In addition, whereas demand for certain types of items in softcore decreases over time (as people get the gear), hardcore players gear up again and again (because all hardcore characters die - accepting the things they have as temporary is like the first rule of playing HC), so things like lower level gear never really become valueless.
3. For many players, the idea that it takes time and effort to gear up a tune/spec/playstyle is a boon, not a detriment - and even if they don't say so overtly, or even complain about how long it takes to get the gear they won't, they won't stop playing, they will eventually get the gear they want, and they'll feel more accomplished for doing so when they get there (see: WoW vanilla).
4. WoW also had gold sinks like mounts and etc. that dominated the early economies. This game has no gold sink. It was supposed to be crafting... but as it turns out, crafting is pretty terrible. You can't create a system where you are allowed to farm gold as long as you want but the only use for gold is between players and then not expect inflation. This, not something weird about the demand for gold, is the reason inflation in Diablo 3 is so insane while inflation in WoW was fairly slow.
5. This is a free market system - gold farming can only have as much of an impact as people let it have. Some people will spend whatever real money they can to get the gear they want. But if there are not many of those people, the long term profitability of gold-farming will be null. The logical thing for farmers to do at this point is to exert pressure on the market by buying and reposting gear at high prices to artificially raise demand - effectively trying to hold the market hostage. But, this is assuming there are enough farmers to actually do that (there probably aren't), and that doing so will turn out to be profitable (it probably won't change people's minds about spending $$$ on gear - and they can always go back to the old SoJ trading system).
The problem isn't just bots, but the fact that some of the safest and easiest activities are also some of the most profitable. I killed belial for the first time yesterday and got 3 blues (0 stacks), that is worse than the average act 2 goblin. I really like blizzard's vision of an endgame of slaughtering champions and bosses with your friends, but the current rewards don't promote that.
Some suggestions: -Buff loot from elites/champions/bosses, buff NV. This one seems obvious and generally agreed upon. -Have passive loot sources drop commodities (gems, essences, some new consumable for reforging, etc) instead of gold. Botters are gonna bot, but at least this won't create massive inflation. -Introduce a mf/gf bonus for grouping. Enough to make people want to text their friends or join a public game. Edit: -Like the guy above said, introduce an effective gold sink, for example make crafting viable or introduce expensive dyes with particle effects (look at tf2 unusual hat prices).
Well, even if they CAN bot, they have to gear it out which is another investment. Throwing down a mill +? That's quite a bit. You'd probably have to go 3-5 mill to farm act 3 efficiently. It'll be pretty interesting once blizzard nerfs the acts and promotes group play. They'll probably set up all the bots in 1 game but don't know how hard that would be to program. Not only that, but then let's go into the fact that repair costs will go up. If the bots do it too poorly then that's a lot of repair fees. Also, taking out gold find they'll have to manually sell items off the AH or RMAH.
On June 08 2012 07:12 HivMagnus wrote: well, in d2 the gold was useless. And d2 had the best trading system in my opinion, Items for items. So my suggestion is just make gold useless again. was working in d2
item for item trading was for poor people in D2
rich people (dupers/botters) traded in runes/SoJs to use as currency (D3 gold)
On June 09 2012 04:48 el_dawg wrote: -Introduce a mf/gf bonus for grouping. Enough to make people want to text their friends or join a public game.
I think they should at least get rid of the averaging of mf/gf in a group. It's discouraging some people from grouping because other people will drag their mf down.
D3 is having HUGE inflation right now. Last week, I bought my barb a full set of nice gear for ~750k on average per piece. These same pieces are now going for 3m+.
Are you sure about that ? Or is it that more people realize you need all resist gear ? The prices for weapons seem to fall. A few days ago I could still sell like 800dps 1 hander.
But I agree with your post. If this vases thing continues, Gold will have the same value as in D2. New currency will be hard cash in the rmah or maybe other things people always need like gems.
I dont get it. They know about the vases and do nothing about it.
I bought a 1143DPS 20% atk speed bow for 1.4m last week on american server. go check out how much they are now. i did not snipe that, either
Assuming that most botters just farm gold (i.e. vases in royal cripts) or chests, and they do this for long periods of time ( >4 hours a day), by creating around 1-2 games per minute.
A popular suggestion to stop botting is to just have players input a captcha every time you create a game. The problem with this is that it affects all players across the board and probably won't be implemented for that reason.
However, if the captcha only triggers after a certain number of games created in a certain period of time (the numbers would have to be tweaked, but it could be after your 200th game in the last 4 hours for example, or they could also be random after a certain point to make it harder to circumvent). This way, people that play the game as it was intended will never see a captcha and only botters and farmers would be affected. Furthermore, this could be a simple bot detection technique (at least for the first couple of days, although probably efficient for the casual botters) because most people won't create 300 games in a row and then get stuck on the captcha screen.
There are of course ways for botters to get around this. They could just increase the number of accounts and set up their scripts to only run up to the minimum number of games to start seeing the captchas or have their bots actually play the game (this will be such a small minority it's probably not even worth fighting against). Regardless, this will make it a heck of a lot harder for the majority of people to bot efficiently and would have virtually no effect on regular players.
12 dollar for 1mill gold? And I thought prices on the AH was high. Must be pretty desperate for items if you are willing to pay for this kind of money for such a low amount of gold.
Im trying to understand the marked, how big is the interest in bying diablo gold? I could understand it in WoW, but not diablo to the same extent. People in WoW bought gold, cause many people only had time to raid, not to raid + make gold for repairs, pots etc. You dont have this in D3 I feel. You can still enjoy the game in Act4 hell if act1 inferno is too hard, and especially after 1.03 where you can get some act2 inferno gear in act4 hell.
It should not be that hard to detect a bot is it? This kind of behavior suggest you might be a bot 1 If you online for more than 18 hour\day 2 create more than 30 game per hour 3 log in from same ip with more than 50 account 4 breaking more than 2000 vase per hour.
This could narrow down a lot of account for bliz to be able to check. There could be a lot of smarter way to filter normal player from bot. They even know the combination of the skill from each player so detect a bot should not be hard
On June 09 2012 19:51 crappen wrote: 12 dollar for 1mill gold? And I thought prices on the AH was high. Must be pretty desperate for items if you are willing to pay for this kind of money for such a low amount of gold.
Im trying to understand the marked, how big is the interest in bying diablo gold? I could understand it in WoW, but not diablo to the same extent. People in WoW bought gold, cause many people only had time to raid, not to raid + make gold for repairs, pots etc. You dont have this in D3 I feel. You can still enjoy the game in Act4 hell if act1 inferno is too hard, and especially after 1.03 where you can get some act2 inferno gear in act4 hell.
gold will become literally worthless when rmah comes up.
any items people sell will be through real money, or at least that's what i would think. i guess it will ultimately depend on crafting.
Kind of sad but between stuff like this and the fact that D3 will not have ladder seasons followed by a wipe of the community with the introduction of a new season, I don't see D3 having a very long/satisfying longevity.
If the average player can't use the AH without having to pay $$$ for gold to buy items with, odds are he'll go to another game with a more sane economy.
On June 09 2012 20:32 pedduck wrote: It should not be that hard to detect a bot is it? This kind of behavior suggest you might be a bot 1 If you online for more than 18 hour\day 2 create more than 30 game per hour 3 log in from same ip with more than 50 account 4 breaking more than 2000 vase per hour.
This could narrow down a lot of account for bliz to be able to check. There could be a lot of smarter way to filter normal player from bot. They even know the combination of the skill from each player so detect a bot should not be hard
They did that in D2 (if you join games too quickly, or at too regular a time interval, you got DC'd). Not sure why they're not doing that in D3 - my guess is that they want to put an end to things like vase farming/goblin farming regardless of whether it's being done by bot or by human.
But by the time they do it the damage is already done. If there is already 100 trillion gold just waiting on bot accounts, prepared to flood the market when the RMAH launches, it doesn't matter if Blizzard fixes all their bad design ideas and farming spots at that point. The average player, playing x hours/week on hell/inferno difficulty simply won't have sufficient buying power in an economy like that without having to resort to buying obscene amounts of gold for cash or just not using gold at all as a trade currency and resort to only finding gear at that point and being ridiculously poorly equipped compared to the AH-using players.
When those money flood in to the system. Player who sell item will actually benefit from the inflation as they get more gold from selling item. The problem bliz have to find a way for player sink that gold such as better crafting result. Otherwise that extra money from selling will just go back in ah system.
On June 09 2012 20:32 pedduck wrote: It should not be that hard to detect a bot is it? This kind of behavior suggest you might be a bot 1 If you online for more than 18 hour\day 2 create more than 30 game per hour 3 log in from same ip with more than 50 account 4 breaking more than 2000 vase per hour.
This could narrow down a lot of account for bliz to be able to check. There could be a lot of smarter way to filter normal player from bot. They even know the combination of the skill from each player so detect a bot should not be hard
They did that in D2 (if you join games too quickly, or at too regular a time interval, you got DC'd). Not sure why they're not doing that in D3 - my guess is that they want to put an end to things like vase farming/goblin farming regardless of whether it's being done by bot or by human.
realm downs were a pain in the ass, because even if you joined and left a game while you were xfering items you would easily get dropped and not be able to join for 10 mins
On June 09 2012 22:27 pedduck wrote: When those money flood in to the system. Player who sell item will actually benefit from the inflation as they get more gold from selling item. The problem bliz have to find a way for player sink that gold such as better crafting result. Otherwise that extra money from selling will just go back in ah system.
the seller receives more gold because of inflation, but the value of say 20m gold when he sells it, is going to be nowhere near the value of 20m gold now. just like 20m gold a week ago is worth probably 1/4th of what it is today.
On June 09 2012 21:28 moopie wrote: Kind of sad but between stuff like this and the fact that D3 will not have ladder seasons followed by a wipe of the community with the introduction of a new season, I don't see D3 having a very long/satisfying longevity.
This.
Gold doesn't leave the gold pool very quickly, and good items don't leave the item pool at all. In order to maintain stability in this scenario you need to reset the gold/item pool at some infrequent interval.
On June 09 2012 21:41 moopie wrote: But by the time they do it the damage is already done. If there is already 100 trillion gold just waiting on bot accounts, prepared to flood the market when the RMAH launches, it doesn't matter if Blizzard fixes all their bad design ideas and farming spots at that point. The average player, playing x hours/week on hell/inferno difficulty simply won't have sufficient buying power in an economy like that without having to resort to buying obscene amounts of gold for cash or just not using gold at all as a trade currency and resort to only finding gear at that point and being ridiculously poorly equipped compared to the AH-using players.
Yup. The problem is that exploits have an irreversible effect on the economy. More so when gold sinks are insignificant and item sinks don't exist.
With THIS MANY exploits, the game needs a full-blown reset, but it won't happen because of the shitstorm it would cause. And not having ladder seasons makes it impossible for Blizz to do a partial reset (reset ladder, dump ladder characters onto main server, a la D2).
On June 09 2012 23:26 nanospartan wrote: Please explain how the Ladder system worked in D2 I didn't play it. How did it work? Did it just reset all characters when a new season started?
Any character you created could be ladder or non-Ladder. Ladder characters could only interact with other Ladder characters (similar to how HC and SC are split in D3 right now) and there were certain minor differences (supposedly enemy AI was better in ladder games). Infrequently, Blizzard would reset the ladder, and dump all ladder characters onto the normal server.
As it stands, the economy is totally fucked by all these exploits, but a total reset would cause an enormous shitstorm. The middle ground solution would be to implement Ladder so that those who want to experience a fresh economy and are willing to start over can, but Blizz said they don't want to implement a D2-style Ladder.
Its a shame--I think the game is great, but these exploits, coupled with the fact that Blizzard has implemented the economy in a way that they have a long-lasting impact really puts a damper on the longevity of the game.
Blizzard wants people to kill several bosspacks and then kill a big questboss and mabe even kill more bossgroups after that. So a captcha would be in line with their goals because such runs take like half an hour or more. I really don't mind one captcha every half hour.
D3 really needs need a ladder system and ladder resets for longevity but Blizzard has been quoted as saying they don't plan on doing anything like that in D3.
D3 also needs to remove the the level 60 hard cap and instead of put something in like each level past 60 requires double the experience of the past level. players will only get very minimal stat increases, but at least it gives the player something to progress with
I don't see how they don't eventually do resets though because it will be needed as gold and item supply increases to the point of ridiculousness
it'll be fun to be able to buy great items for cheap, but it won't be fun when there's no point to farming because the only items that have noticeable value require ridiculous modifier rolls
On June 09 2012 21:15 Heh_ wrote: Is it me or did the bot spam in general chat disappear? Did Blizzard hotfix (get rid of) it?
it did disappear. This is such a big problem. I'm sure blizz is discussing how to deal with this internally. They may even be aware of it and are going to ban in waves.
What I don't understand is why don't they just have a weekly update that randomizes memory addresses/encoding of variables, it would stop the scripts that warden can't find pretty quickly.
There is really only 2 main reason why the inflation as what it is:
1) Gold botter/ farmer
and
2) Lack of gold sink
If gold can be use effectively to craft/gamble for 6 affix items, then there will be a lot more supply of mid tier and top tier 6 affix items to fill the AH. This will help bring down the price and will probably increase the purchasing powe and gear of most players. But blizzard refuse to let crafting be a viable gold sink early. They force it to be useless untill the plans for the craft are found. This takes too long and as a result gold have no reliable sink.
If you guys think gold inflation is bad, wait until the RMAH come on live. Gold will become worthless, noone will want to sell to tier item in Gold AH. Even the supply of mid tier items will be limited.
The first thing Blizzard need to do is make crafting a reliable gold sink. The 2nd thing is to have a ban wave of botters. And if Blizzard did both of these, the game is still boring after you have beaten it. And they want to nerf inferno more.
Was the fact that he is Chinese really necessary in the title? I feel like its sort of used as a derogatory term and portrays Chinese people even more negatively than an already negative reputation.
Also, he isn't even Chinese apparently.
In his abridged video, markee states that he knows as a fact that the farmer is European but does not know why he said he was Chinese.
EPT
I didn't play it. How did it work? Did it just reset all characters when a new season started?
