I have never seen a bot in this game. Ever.

Either you don't know what to look for in a bot or you aren't exploring very much. I guarantee you'll find them in the Heroic areas on Hoth and above, or at the mailboxes on the starter planets. These in particular have nonsense names. How about the spammers on the fleet? Those are technically bots as well.

I will personally assure you that they do exist and are a growing problem in this game.

I've noticed recently that a bot hits several slicing nodes on Rishi. They appear, hit the node, vanish, reapear at the next node and so on. I followed it for a minute the other day, not sure how he is vanishing and re-appearing.

 

Wish I could mess up its flow.

It's a teleportation hack, in some ways similar to a speed hack... Bios systems can't detect it because they also run an anti detection program to fool Bio's security measures... Occasionally we come across players using them in PVP... The only way Bio even know it's happening is if players report them... Even then, they are rarely banned or if they are its for 24hours to a week...

If you see this sort of behaviour, report it to Bio... You need to list the player name, server, planet, time, describe what is happening and hope someone actually reads it

I have never seen a bot in this game. Ever.

Came across a lvling Bot a few months ago... 4 of the same class, all the same weird name with one letter different, all standing in the same spot and not moving... When the mobs near them respawned they all did the same ranged attack instantaneously... As soon as the mobs died they all healed at the same time, even if they didn't need too... It was obvious it was a multi box setup too...

Anyway I was able to get in touch with someone at Bio who came to where I was to see this in person... After observing this for about 20 mins they thanked me for bringing it to their attention... Next thing the Bot player got booted off line... A week later Bio announced they had broken a credit spamming ring... I don't know if this botter was in any way connected to that... But it sure was satisfying seeing a Bio representative boot that bot

But it sure was satisfying seeing a Bio representative boot that bot

Nice, but it would be better if they had something like the in-game banhammer in Guild Wars 1.

When an account is online and in the world playing at the moment it is suspended or banned, Dhuum, the (deposed) evil god of Death, arrives and slays the logged-in character.

Imagine a figure ten to fifteen metres high that swirls up out of the ground, reaps the character with a correspondingly large scythe, then swirls back into the ground. Imagine that happening on Fleet!

(I saw this happen exactly once in GW, in the Great Temple of Balthazar, a sort of PvP hub. It was fun, although the actual offender was hidden behind another character.)

Came upon a farming bot on Rishi (harbinger) and immediately contacted CS. Received a reply within a couple hours. From characters level, name and gearing definitely a farmer for credit selling.

Was strange cause I was on Rishi for over an hour and never came across a slicing node. Then when I finally came upon one it just disappeared. Toon appeared then disappeared. Was doing sort of a teleport hop from node to node.

Came upon a farming bot on Rishi (harbinger) and immediately contacted CS. Received a reply within a couple hours. From characters level, name and gearing definitely a farmer for credit selling.

 

Was strange cause I was on Rishi for over an hour and never came across a slicing node. Then when I finally came upon one it just disappeared. Toon appeared then disappeared. Was doing sort of a teleport hop from node to node.

Probably not teleporting. Probably just one bot per node that logs in when it knows the node will respawn, then logs out. A random variation in respawn interval would help reduce this kind of bot.

I witnessed today a merc 50 level bot on Rishi literally coming from thin air and moving towards the slicing box and disappearing. He was not logging off because I had him targeted and he was moving away according to my tooltip. Very fast. I watched a tv show on my other monitor and saw it happen at least 6 times. I took the box first of course.

The OP is useful, but bots seem to get smarter now... somehow. I can't add them to the friend list at all. Right clicking doesn't give me an option and /friend says character doesn't exist. /who doesn't show him at ALL even if I am in front of him. I am sure I got the name right too. I reported him anyway, but I doubt that will do anything.

Came across a lvling Bot a few months ago... 4 of the same class, all the same weird name with one letter different, all standing in the same spot and not moving... When the mobs near them respawned they all did the same ranged attack instantaneously... As soon as the mobs died they all healed at the same time, even if they didn't need too... It was obvious it was a multi box setup too...

Anyway I was able to get in touch with someone at Bio who came to where I was to see this in person... After observing this for about 20 mins they thanked me for bringing it to their attention... Next thing the Bot player got booted off line... A week later Bio announced they had broken a credit spamming ring... I don't know if this botter was in any way connected to that... But it sure was satisfying seeing a Bio representative boot that bot

Probably someone multiboxing rather than botting. It's not exactly forbidden if I recall correctly. It's not in WoW at least.

BioWare does seem to be apathetic towards the botting plight, even though I know they ban the spammers on the fleet rather frequently as well as the mail senders. The rest of them though? Nah. That's why I made this thread: I'm tired of waiting for BioWare to do something. It's time we did something.

Bioware bans them when they get reported.

It is impossible to ever fully get rid of them however, because there is real world money involved in credit farming. The banned folks just return with new accounts. Credit farming by bots will exist so long as there are people willing to spend real world money to purchase in game credits. For every person that reports a bot there are probably 10 other players alt-tabbing to go to their website to purchase credits.

There is a reason why they exist in every MMO and no company has ever been able to fully eliminate it from their games.

That isn't to say that people can't have fun breaking the bots, though. Some of the suggestions in this thread do sound amusing.

Personally instead of banning them I think Bioware should just flag them permanently for PVP, with the added bonus of any player killing them getting to loot whatever credits or items they've accumulated. Introduce a feature where you can credit farm bots through PVP.

Bioware bans them when they get reported.

 

It is impossible to ever fully get rid of them however, because there is real world money involved in credit farming. The banned folks just return with new accounts. Credit farming by bots will exist so long as there are people willing to spend real world money to purchase in game credits. For every person that reports a bot there are probably 10 other players alt-tabbing to go to their website to purchase credits.

 

There is a reason why they exist in every MMO and no company has ever been able to fully eliminate it from their games.

 

That isn't to say that people can't have fun breaking the bots, though. Some of the suggestions in this thread do sound amusing.

 

Personally instead of banning them I think Bioware should just flag them permanently for PVP, with the added bonus of any player killing them getting to loot whatever credits or items they've accumulated. Introduce a feature where you can credit farm bots through PVP.

This...I like this!

What about an option in the preference menu that allows a person to toggle whether mail is allowed from strangers or not? Examples of non-strangers would be guildies, people in your friends list, and your other characters. Would that work for the mail spammers?

I don't see why not. This would work as well and seriously undercut their advertising effort.

I've added an additional section to the Methods list that's called "General PvE tactics." This area is to help those on PvE servers deal with bots by providing some simple guidelines as to how to break them.

Cheers! And happy breaking

I wish there was a solid solution for all servers, this has become insane. I'm getting several mails a day on each alt, they clog up general chat, etc...The one bad thing about the game going f2p in my opinion. You never saw this kind of thing before.

I've been in and out of this game over the years so I don't know the answer to this: But have they ever explained why they can't just implement a simple email/chat spam filter? I mean these guys all rely on establishing pretty regular patterns of behavior that should be easily detectable. It's obvious there's nothing there now because these guys spamming general chat have the URL in their message in plain text. A spam filter would quickly learn that that is spam and automatically silence those messages.

I've been in and out of this game over the years so I don't know the answer to this: But have they ever explained why they can't just implement a simple email/chat spam filter? I mean these guys all rely on establishing pretty regular patterns of behavior that should be easily detectable. It's obvious there's nothing there now because these guys spamming general chat have the URL in their message in plain text. A spam filter would quickly learn that that is spam and automatically silence those messages.

They've never explained it to my knowledge, and that spam filter would do wonders. In many MMO's I've played, when the chat filter is implemented, it's almost impossible to decipher what the heck it is said spam bots are saying, effectively undermining their advertising campaigns.

Little steps like these go a looooooooong way.

Well, crap. With the new instance-switching system, it seems most of the bots have transferred over to the PvE instances on all servers...Some are still in PvP mode, but these are few. Now more than ever we will need additional PvE methods to help slow the bot menace.

If you have any, please post!