Hello.

 

A while ago, I posted a video with a player apparently multiboxing in GSF match, The thread was removed and I got a warning.

Today, I have seen the same behavior. People openly admitted that they are 'farming' and asked us to leave (possibly to end the match faster). Then 4 of them they began to selfdestruct repeatedly.

If you protect the cheaters, they will go bolder and bolder, as it can be seen; honest players have a clear disadvantage.

 

Unless you want it this way, and let the 'cunning' win. But if it is the case, please state so clearly so people will know what to expect.

 

Regards.

B.

They are not protecting them. File a ticket, and send the video to Musco as well and they will look at it. They have a general "no naming & shaming" rule on the forums, and for good reason to be honest, as 90% of the time when someone complains about cheating, it is simply because the person complaining doesn't understand the game as well as they should.

Seeing lots of Bots in pvp at the moment with names like djfnfurjemyt, each match they run a set path. If they die and respawn they run the same script.

 

Yesterday one kept popping into matches and we had to vote to kick it out. The problem with that is you need to do it before it enters combat. You also need most of the team to vote to, which most don't or even know how. So for the first part of the game people are asking others to vote the bot out and trying to explain how. Then it enters combat and the system deletes the votes, so you have to start again.

Bioware you need some system in place besides reporting through the current system. This bot was around for the 6 hours I played and someone said it had been around for many hours before I logged in.

 

I would also like to know exactly how many people need to vote to kick before the bot is removed. Is it 3,4,5,6 or 7. What if we have 2 bots which I saw the other day.

 

For those who don't know how to vote to kick bots in pvp. This is what you do and you can do it from anywhere in the map, BUT only after the match starts.

Click on their name in the operations box so they are in your target box. Then right click their portrait and go down to vote to kick. It's that simple,

But if they enter content you will get a chat msg that says all votes are cleared and you need to do it again. The best time to do it is when the WZ start screen drops. But if they enter combat I usually watch for when they die and they are waiting in the respawn, then it's easy to get them out.

 

So guys, keep an eye out for these bots. They are pretty simple to spot by the name, but some do have real names, so check chat and if someone says they're a bot, mark them and watch for a few mins if you can. If you see a scripted pattern to their behaviour and movements, then 99% of the time they are a bot.

 

Make sure you vote to kick all bots.

 

😐

Edited March 12, 2017 by Icykill_

Any ideas how to kicks bots on enemy team?

 

And seriously, only 'action' I am seeing is deleting forum threads because of 'no-naming'.

I once faced a few bots on Guild Wars 2. It completely ruined the PvP experience and made the whole match impossible to play. Staff decided to ignore the tickets over there.

 

Let's hope the same doesn't happen to SWTOR.

Any ideas how to kicks bots on enemy team?

 

And seriously, only 'action' I am seeing is deleting forum threads because of 'no-naming'.

 

If you see bots on the enemy team it sucks for them. They need to take steps to kick them and it's not your responsibility.

But what you could do if you identify one is let them know in the gen/say chat channel. Then target mark them yourself and farm the crap out of it because it's an easy kill. This is extremely helpful in Hypergates where every kill gives your side points. 😉

I once faced a few bots on Guild Wars 2. It completely ruined the PvP experience and made the whole match impossible to play. Staff decided to ignore the tickets over there.

 

Let's hope the same doesn't happen to SWTOR.

 

They will ignore them. The only way they will be able to tell if it's a bot is if you record it and send it to Eric Musco.

Heck, it'd be nice if they stopped the farm trolls too.

 

Had a death match recently where at the start one player announced they would be suiciding to "accelerate our component farming." I think they managed something like 17 deaths.

 

Sad thing is, with the whole team raging at him, and even after someone explained in chat how to vote kick, we couldn't get enough votes in to kick him during the windows when he was down.

 

I had a fairly exceptional game, stuck with a battlescout the whole time, and we did end up winning by a margin of about 10 points.

 

I think it's safe to say though, that given the fast pace of GSF combat, and the way the UI interface works, that the vote kick system in GSF is too unwieldy to work adequately in practice.

 

There was almost as much frustration in chat about the inability to kick the troll as there was about the deliberate attempt to throw the match.

It's been nice to have more incentives for people to play GSF lately, but unfortunately it has come with it's drawbacks as well. Perhaps if we can get the devs to address the cheaters, they may actually give GSF some attention while they're at it (hey, I can dream right?).

This is a big problem in GSF atm. You see almost entire teams of bots just spinning in circles or suiciding and then the players doing it sit around their capital ships and you cant attack them

For the time beeing you can ignore these players, so gf will not team up with them.

 

But no bots, no match also and even with bots (or any other kind of these), you can farm some cxp for you

Eric, if you don't mind giving a clarification I'd like to know what official policy is at the moment.

 

The EULA and TOS got changed from a SWTOR specific set to the generic EA EULA and TOS.

 

I like very much that they are now much shorter, and much more comprehensible. Whoever wrote them could probably be nominated for a brevity and clarity award of some sort when you compare to most software terms and license documents.

 

However, with the changes, it's no longer as clear that things like deliberate suicides, or running multiple clients so that you can park a ship in one place and farm yourself with another character is actually against the rules. Especially if you take the trouble to have multiple computers running and do the dummy-target characters' movements by hand rather than with some sort of macro (or use hardware where a single wireless keyboard is giving input to multiple computers, which technically isn't any use of forbidden software).

 

Is that sort of thing still considered an actionable exploit?

 

Just wondering because if I were arguing this in front of an arbitrator with the current EULA and TOS I think it'd be easier to argue the, "this is allowed on a technicality even if the player is clearly being an antisocial jerk," position than it would be to argue for, "actionable exploit."

 

Not that I have much problem with things like multiboxing for things like open world PvE (it tends to sort of weaken the multiboxer compared to doing something with an equivalent number of similarly competent players, so for those purposes there's already a built in penalty of sorts), but it's really unpleasant in PvP(including GSF) when you find that half your team is working to lose, and in a way that doesn't even really benefit their farming character's team. It's a lose-lose situation for everyone except the person farming themselves.

 

Sorry, that got longer than I wanted, but clarification would be great.

Edited March 13, 2017 by Ramalina

This really is a great question, it is one that gets complex quickly. I think ultimately the answer is a bit of a "it depends." I would say err on the side of being overly judicious and let the Terms of Service team work it out. That is, if you think something is exploitive or against the rules, report it. Then the team can investigate and look at if it really is against the rules or not.

 

The same is true of private reports made to me. I would always prefer you err on the side of being overly critical and let me figure out if it needs to be escalated. I will always try to respond and let people know instances where they are far off the mark on something being against the rules as I know that can be a grey space sometimes.

 

-eric

 

Case study time, multiple people over the course of a ~year have sent you reports both here on forum as well as via support tickets about a person using bots in GSF and Warzones. The player has yet to be banned or punished (as far as we know, since he continues to do the same stuff with the same account). Would that mean that what that person is doing is not against the ToS as you would have gotten all information about the possible "exploits" and not followed up on the reports?

Edited March 13, 2017 by RikuvonDrake

Going to go out on a limb for some, but being crappy at playing certain aspects of the game isn't against the ToS.

 

There are some things I completely suck at doing in the game. GSF is one of them. I can fire away and couldn't hit the broadside of a barn or wind up having my dog jump up on me and throw me into an asteroid. Given that GSF pops maybe once an hour during the times I play (if even that - sometimes just once a night or never that night), it isn't like they developed some PvE practice modules for GSF to get familiar with the controls. I figured GSF was abandoned myself given the lack of support it has gotten over the years (like rail ship combat, seeker droids, macro binoculars, story mode per class, reputation systems, and strongholds).

 

Blak

This really is a great question, it is one that gets complex quickly. I think ultimately the answer is a bit of a "it depends." I would say err on the side of being overly judicious and let the Terms of Service team work it out. That is, if you think something is exploitive or against the rules, report it. Then the team can investigate and look at if it really is against the rules or not.

 

The same is true of private reports made to me. I would always prefer you err on the side of being overly critical and let me figure out if it needs to be escalated. I will always try to respond and let people know instances where they are far off the mark on something being against the rules as I know that can be a grey space sometimes.

 

-eric

 

ERIC'S RESPONSE DECODED:

 

Bioware generally does not care if you do those sorts of things. They will only step in and care/ban if people are complaining about you on the forums, and/or some evidence on you has been reported. Otherwise, if no one knows, or is upset, then feel free to carry on in your activities.

Going to go out on a limb for some, but being crappy at playing certain aspects of the game isn't against the ToS.

 

There are some things I completely suck at doing in the game. GSF is one of them. I can fire away and couldn't hit the broadside of a barn or wind up having my dog jump up on me and throw me into an asteroid. Given that GSF pops maybe once an hour during the times I play (if even that - sometimes just once a night or never that night), it isn't like they developed some PvE practice modules for GSF to get familiar with the controls. I figured GSF was abandoned myself given the lack of support it has gotten over the years (like rail ship combat, seeker droids, macro binoculars, story mode per class, reputation systems, and strongholds).

 

Blak

GSF can be a disaster if you are personally experiencing consistent lag or lag spikes. It doesn't matter how good you can play if the ship in your sights is not really there anymore.

Everything is legitimate, until someone (many) says the opposite.

Everything is legitimate, until someone (many) says the opposite.

 

Atleast the people saying the opposite are the ones thinking.

Going to go out on a limb for some, but being crappy at playing certain aspects of the game isn't against the ToS.

 

There are some things I completely suck at doing in the game. GSF is one of them. I can fire away and couldn't hit the broadside of a barn or wind up having my dog jump up on me and throw me into an asteroid. Given that GSF pops maybe once an hour during the times I play (if even that - sometimes just once a night or never that night), it isn't like they developed some PvE practice modules for GSF to get familiar with the controls. I figured GSF was abandoned myself given the lack of support it has gotten over the years (like rail ship combat, seeker droids, macro binoculars, story mode per class, reputation systems, and strongholds).

 

Blak

 

Oh, anyone who's fairly good at GSF has been a noob and has seen a great many noobs. Lack of skill is quite readily distinguishable from things like suiciding on cooldown or having 4 ships that fly off to a far corner of a map to gently spin in unison in order to be farmed by a ship that boosted out to be in that far corner (with no ships or objectives) before the, "target drone," ships flew over to get farmed.

 

If you're playing badly, that's well tolerated except by a few people who happen at times to be rude jerks. It's very different from gaming the mechanics to get gear or achievements while doing everything possible to avoid as much as possible actual involvement in the activity that's supposed to grant the reward.

 

In this sort of case it means taking up four slots on a team that could be occupied by actual players and almost guaranteeing that the remaining 4 to 8 players on that team will lose due to the one person gaming the system.

On the team that human player is playing their farming character on it's not a handicap to winning, it's just a handicap to having a fun and interesting game. Really the best you can do is either try to snipe the farmer's kills out from under their nose to mess up their farming, or take a weak and ideally stock ship out to an open area to give the team saddled with 4 parasite ships some easy target practice to even up the game a bit.

 

There is a fairly lame tutorial level you can access by clicking on the ? in the upper right of the hangar interface, but a better option is to visit the GSF forums and look at the guides, tutorial videos, or to ask one of the several top level players to make efforts to teach newcomers to give you some help in-game.

 

GSF is semi-abandoned. They still fix crippling bugs if a major patch completely breaks GSF, they added CXP rewards, and after a brief absence they did bring back CM cosmetic items and ship skins. On the other hand existing bugs, erroneous tooltips, ship class balance, and new maps or modes all seem to be thoroughly dead on the development front.

We take cheating/exploiting seriously, but we also take everyone's safety and privacy seriously as well.

 

Send me any information you have.

 

-eric

Thats demonstrably a lie. People have been cheating for months, for over a year on my server. Especially in PVP. Videos have been made, tickets filed, forum posts to raise awareness. What happened? Nothing. Instead there is an increase in cheating because of the policy to not punish cheaters. Remember the uprising exploit? You announced PROUDLY to not ban the cheaters. So telling us here that you take cheating seriously is a kick to our faces because you EVIDENTLY dont care and admitted to let cheaters go free without consequences.

Eric, how often do you check your mail on site? Several people in my guild, myself included, sent you tons of evidence about a certain man, and he still roams free...

 

In addition, I have a hunch that the posts that were removed are still cashed somewhere. Whatever the case, you are being remiss to not read the post and see if there was something important in there.

If the threads really are cashed, please look through the last thread I have created (won't name it here since a name is included). You will find something very interesting in that thread: no one argues, no disproofs. Everyone agreed on something for a change, and each has shared his own proof.

Edited March 14, 2017 by Rafiknoll