How to report bots farming nodes

[xordevoreaux]

I'm agreeing with some of the other posters in this thread, the narrative spun by the OP neither inspires a pitchfork rebellion by players wanting to squash bots nor apparently causes all that much stomach acid. At one point years back, yes, I also railed against the bots and Bioware's sometime-response to them, and often, but reality has changed since then, and that reality's reflected in the more casual reactions to the situation depicted here.

For all manner of reasons, bots just are simply no longer as horrid a problem as the OP would make them out to be.

[ToganHorr]

8 hours ago, Darkestmonty said:

Because EA/Bioware/Broadsword has more pressing issues than banning subscribers for automating sending companions out to gather resources. To be honest I don't really care that much considering crafting can still be very profitable and those bots are making resources cheaper for us crafters.

That's rich coming from a crafter, you profit most from bot-abusers dumping mats at huge discounts.

I'm curious what you think EA/Bioware/Broadsword issues are more pressing to address.

The GTN inflation is already out of control and bot-abusers only compound the matter.

At the end of day, what these abuser's do deserve to be banned; it breaks ToS.

[Darkestmonty]

11 hours ago, ToganHorr said:

That's rich coming from a crafter, you profit most from bot-abusers dumping mats at huge discounts.

I'm curious what you think EA/Bioware/Broadsword issues are more pressing to address.

The GTN inflation is already out of control and bot-abusers only compound the matter.

At the end of day, what these abuser's do deserve to be banned; it breaks ToS.

you can profit just as easily and I know for a fact that not all resource markets are saturated. If you were the least bit decent to people on this thread I may have helped you more but instead you can flounder around on your own for a few months figuring it out.

[Darev]

Just saw this thread, and OP, believe me, I understand your confusion, but what you see isn't neccessarily because of bots running around collecting nodes.  As others have mentioned, if someone were to automate anything about collecting mats (automation making play complete hands off being against the TOS) it wouldn't be to use 1 character, getting nodes in an area, WAITING for the node to respawn, HOPING no one else is doing it in that area as well.   

That's not a good use of time.

In the same amount of time as it takes to do 5 "circuits" of nodes, you can log 10 different alts, with 8 "lvl 50" companions, and send them off, for the same resources in much less time.

With 20 alts, that would double your return for not much extra time.

30 alts....and so on.

Yes, people have 30 alts.

I have 83 toons on star forge on just this account.

66 toons on star forge on my 2nd account.

If I wanted to break the TOS and automate this, I could make resources practically free by dumping so many on the gtn, between the two accounts, that the only thing other people would be able to do is buy them and hold on to them until I got bored and stopped (or got kicked off).

I could even play on my 3rd (f2p) account (using a 3rd computer) and play the game while everything was going on.

 

Automating a single toon for "manually" gathering nodes just isn't worth it anymore.

[TrixxieTriss]

On 8/13/2023 at 3:46 PM, ToganHorr said:

The GTN inflation is already out of control and bot-abusers only compound the matter.

I don’t think you understand how inflation in this game works. If someone was using bots & flooding the GTN with mats, it would actually reduce the mats costs because people would be undercutting more, which would cause deflation. 

[BatriX]

On 8/13/2023 at 5:46 PM, ToganHorr said:

That's rich coming from a crafter, you profit most from bot-abusers dumping mats at huge discounts.

I'm curious what you think EA/Bioware/Broadsword issues are more pressing to address.

The GTN inflation is already out of control and bot-abusers only compound the matter.

At the end of day, what these abuser's do deserve to be banned; it breaks ToS.

they dont care, they only care about the $$$

[Toraak]

On 8/10/2023 at 11:50 PM, ToganHorr said:

Companions missions for gathering mats, bio arch and scav only return premium grade mats.  To get prototype and better rakata artifact tier you need to actually gather the nodes yourself.  So how do you explain the hundreds of thousands rakata artifact grade mats flooding GTN on the cheap.

This is not true. Rich and Bountiful Grade 11 missions give blue and purple mats.

[alasamaya]

On 8/14/2023 at 1:01 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

I don’t think you understand how inflation in this game works. If someone was using bots & flooding the GTN with mats, it would actually reduce the mats costs because people would be undercutting more, which would cause deflation. 

If the bots are farming slicing nodes, for example, thats money that get into the system, and causes inflation. It all depends on how the bot user configures them, but either way, farming nodes or sending missions out, is an unfair advantage over the common player and should be banned regardless

[DreadtechSavant]

On 8/10/2023 at 9:53 PM, TrixxieTriss said:

It’s not bots doing it. You can deconstruct items for materials that you can swap at the JAWA vendors. Others also buy the mats cheaper on the GTN when there is a price drop. I know this because I used to do it myself. 

Yes, this is true. 

The introduction of the Jawa venders which you can buy mats will have a impact on the GTN, in both cost and supply, which in turn deconstruction only added to this. So yes fully agree on this.

 

To the OP. BW did try to address this by changing the cost of mats from the Jawa's. At the start it was 1 metal per mat, which later changed to amount per craft level. A fair trade of after a while. I say after a while due to the fact that A lot of us had large amount from cartel packs, which greatly devalued them for which players had paid real money for. Long term though it probably was better for the game. Once you know the value, you add this factor into buying the packs, which is fine after the fact, before the fact, not so much.

 

As for your accrual question on how do you report bots? Well that is a fair question as at present time it's long winded, it not easily done for most players unless you can record the game to send evidence off with your report to one of the staff. The standard reporting of player(s) does not cover reporting bots. So unfortunately only a answer by Broadsword will address this.

We can all give opinions but that's all it is, opinions.  

Still I do think that a quick easy way should be added in game to address this. However personally I have not seen a bot in some time. Sure they must still be there but maybe I just not overly bothered by what other players are doing, so just don't notice anymore. 

[TrixxieTriss]

14 minutes ago, DreadtechSavant said:

Still I do think that a quick easy way should be added in game to address this. However personally I have not seen a bot in some time. Sure they must still be there but maybe I just not overly bothered by what other players are doing, so just don't notice anymore

The in game reporting system needs an overhaul. It’s very long winded & some of the reporting features are broken. This should include reporting people AFKing to grief players or cheating in PvP.

Unfortunately I have seen farming bots recently on the new SV server. And if it’s not bots, it was definitely someone multiboxing. I don’t usually have an issue with people MB’ing as long as they aren’t doing it in PvP as a pre-made. Because it’s nearly always a loss if you have them on your team. But I think the MB’ing I saw was farming credits.

I tried reporting them, I wrote a big essay to describe it. Then when I hit send, the report system said error & wiped my essay. That’s what needs fixing. It’s why I rarely report anymore because it’s broken. 

Edited January 20 by TrixxieTriss

[TrixxieTriss]

17 hours ago, alasamaya said:

If the bots are farming slicing nodes, for example, thats money that get into the system, and causes inflation. It all depends on how the bot user configures them, but either way, farming nodes or sending missions out, is an unfair advantage over the common player and should be banned regardless

Sending missions out actually costs more credits than you receive. It’s actually a great credit sink in the game. So anyone using a bot system to do that will be crunching through those credits fast. 

As for farming slicing nodes. They received a massive nerf a few years ago.  They don’t give out much more credits than say killing 1 mob. In most cases, it’s actually better to stay in an area farming mobs for credits than farming slicing nodes because of the distance you have to travel to get the nodes. 

[alasamaya]

5 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Sending missions out actually costs more credits than you receive. It’s actually a great credit sink in the game. So anyone using a bot system to do that will be crunching through those credits fast. 

As for farming slicing nodes. They received a massive nerf a few years ago.  They don’t give out much more credits than say killing 1 mob. In most cases, it’s actually better to stay in an area farming mobs for credits than farming slicing nodes because of the distance you have to travel to get the nodes. 

This is not accurate at all. The lockbox mission from Slicing, when it crits, can give you 3 lockboxes plus a special mission. And farming slicing nodes is not bad at all, I just did a circuit doing slicing nodes and got 20 k from it, and didnt took more than 5 minutes. For other servers that might not be much, but in Shae Vizla is a lot if you consider that some people are using bots to do both. 

Nobody is talking about PVP so dont bring that into this topic.