TRAFFIC BOTS are they gone yet ?????

I was so happy to read Jack's blog about LL getting rid of traffic bots.
Clearly they are a menace to the economy, honest business and excellence.

Traffic bots encourage the lazy and the mediocre - the last thing we need.

So anyone heard anything ?
When are they going ?
ARE THEY GONE YET ?

Just checked and nope, they are still with us !!

This will take a while to clean out. Has anyone had any luck reporting people who still are using land bots?

Land bots have not been banned, and LL does not want bot ARs.

The system is supposed to be changed later on so that land bots as they exist now wouldn't work.

The problem is if LL gets rid of them then the number of ppl OL will get lower and then SL will not look as popular as it is . Maybe LL should make a sim for them to they donthave to go just move

LOL I know its traffic bots, not land bots. I knew someone would correct me...first response even...that's why I didn't even bother changing it.

thanks.

I know they don't want bot AR's but they are doing nothing so far to get rid of the traffic bots, so has anyone had any luck ARing them?

That isn't how Jack works. ARs on this will simply be ignored, they are contacting people directly. Please don't clog the AR system with useless reports, it works badly enough with the existing overflow.

Agreed.

No.


Hey! We need another traffic bot thread!

I was going to add this on to mine, but it seems to have finally died.

Reposted from Wired.com

Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom


By Nate Ralph

Paranoia has gripped the streets amid a government crackdown that’s trampling due process and blurring the line between the innocent and the guilty.

It’s not Myanmar, but Paragon City, the hub of the massively multiplayer online game City of Heroes, where a bizarre McCarthy-like crisis has broken out among the virtual populace. Handed new tools to create their own missions, many of the metropolis’ caped crusaders have rushed to exploit loopholes that allow them to rack up massive experience points with minimal effort. In a desperate bid to restore balance, the game’s creators have threatened to revoke experience points and ban players for abuse without explanation, unleashing a furor of protest.

The future of a world may hang in the balance.

The face-off underscores an iron law of MMO play: Give participants the tools to mold a game into an ideal form, and they’ll quickly use them to generate so-called min-max exploits that produce the fastest possible experience or in-game wealth for the least effort possible.

Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early.

“It may seem sad that giving the players what they want is detrimental to the player’s overall length of enjoyment of the game, but that’s the truth,” says Eric Heimburg, the lead engineer and producer on Asheron’s Call, and as the systems designer for the Star Trek Online MMO, while it was being developed at Perpetual Entertainment. “Once you reached that top of the hill, if there’s nothing left to do or see, players are likely to move on. Length of enjoyment (equals) amount of money earned, so developers have a strong incentive to keep players from gaining power and levels too quickly.”

As more and more game developers allow players to create their own levels, users are harnessing this power to game the system. In Sony’s LittleBigPlanet, for example, players unleashed “trophy farms” — hundreds of user-generated levels that exist only to rack up a player’s PlayStation 3 achievement list with minimal effort.

City of Heroes was originally released in 2004, but its current woes started with the Mission Architect feature released in April. Suddenly, players could design their own missions, and a new class of villain quickly vaulted to power: the Farmer.

With the Mission Architect, players are able to create quests that offer rewards in parity with the standard, developer-created content. Once they’ve played a user-generated mission, they can rate it.

Mission creators with popular levels receive Architect Tickets, which can be cashed in for rewards. This gives architects incentives to crank out the sorts of missions their peers are likely to enjoy. Some gamers want engaging stories, while others want fun challenges.

But the Farmer has something a bit different in mind: laying out hordes of powerful, reward-laden enemies with glaring weaknesses, packed like sheep for the slaughter. Weeks’ worth of tedious labor for experience points could now be completed in mere hours, and the unscrupulous Farmers grew fat off their misdeeds.

“I don’t think any developer should be surprised that people who enjoy these sorts of quests would be drawn to the fastest power-gathering mechanism available,” Heimburg says. “I don’t blame the players one bit for abusing the system.”

Not so the developers at Paragon Studios. Klaxons wailing, they sprang into action, striking down “exploitative” quests and threatening to do the same to players who abused the newly implemented system.

“In order to keep the game fair, balanced, and challenging, we have to maintain a risk/reward ratio,” City of Heroes lead designer Matt “Positron” Miller explained in a missive to the players.

But while the developer is removing missions it deems exploitative, there hasn’t been much information on what constitutes breaking the rules. In fact, according to Miller, such transparency is not likely to be effective and could even backfire.

“If we say that the definition (of abuse) is ‘you gained 4 levels in under 30 minutes’, then someone will make sure that they gain 4 levels in 31 minutes, so they can claim they were within the allowed limits and not abusing,” he wrote.

That’s left players sitting on pins and needles. Says City of Heroes player TaintedAngel: “If you could look at the servers and see 10 percent of people had been spanked somehow, a whole lot of people would be letting out a long-held breath.”




As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/misson_architect_abuse




While it is a different game and different circumstances, the behavior pattern is the same.

Yup.

"But while the developer is removing missions it deems exploitative, there hasn’t been much information on what constitutes breaking the rules."
“If we say that the definition (of abuse) is ‘you gained 4 levels in under 30 minutes’, then someone will make sure that they gain 4 levels in 31 minutes, so they can claim they were within the allowed limits and not abusing,”



Some people have that attitude that anything that does not explicitly break the letter of a TOS is OK to do.
Someone who gets spanked for gaining 4 levels in 30 minutes and 0.00000005 of second will scream unfair / arbitraty / totally freaking unpredictable . unjust, etc.
More will pile in to say that doing it in 0.00000005 of second over the limit is perfectly "legitimate" because Wikiwhatzit defines..... and how dare anyone call it "cheating" becauzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.





“City of Heroes’ decision to punish players for infractions the players cannot predict is rather unusual,....”
I'm all for the "rather unusual". Whacking the small percentage who abuse ( Oh noooooesssss! WikiWhatzit defines "abuse" as .... and so it's not abuse ) the system only pisses off the few perps but gives a better game for the majority.


The 'fixed it for ya' on
"“City of Heroes’ decision to punish players for infractions the players cannot predict is rather unusual,....” "
is
“City of Heroes’ decision to punish players for infractions that only the abusive players cannot predict due to their lack of soul is rather sensible,....”

People find different things fun.

Some people playing an MMORPG think it's fun to build an efficient killing machine.

Some people think it's fun roleplaying storylines.

One set of rules will not effectively cater to everyone who experiences a different kind of fun.

The people who think the killing machine is fun spend their time going the quickest route to making the killing machine. The roleplayers find this unfair, because the killing machines reach the highest levels in far less total playing time. So the roleplayers want a constraint on how quickly someone can advance. The killing machines will find that unfair, because they pay the same money to play as the roleplayers, but because they might have two hours a day to play rather than eight hours a day, the do not get to experience the higher levels as everyone else.

This would be just a reflection of the simple fact that some people have more fun playing a particular game than others.

The silly problems start when the players start assigning moral imperatives to what other players find fun. The killing machines become cheaters and the roleplayers become whiners. The game is no longer a fun game about a pretend struggle between good and evil; the players try to transform it into actual, real struggle between good and evil.

And whaddya know... the latest blog on the topic
points to LL going after "gaming"



"unfairly" is left open.

Q."Hey! Paying people to walk around in my parcel isn't against the TOS! They're not on camping chairs. They're not bots. WTF???"
A. Who do you think you're kidding? - besides yourself?

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/05/misson_architect_abuse

Isablan : regarding the Wired article, thank you for re-posting that from Wired.com. Really interesting, learnt a lot

Traffic bots. Have they gone yet ????
Nope !