The upcoming MMO with sandbox elements ArcheAge is struggling with bots and gold sellers just like before The Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar. The special thing about ArcheAge is that it is still in alpha and access costs 135 euros.
ArcheAge: Even in Alpha, you struggle with bot infestation
16,000 accounts have been banned for illegally using bots or disturbing their fellow players with gold spam, even during the alpha. Some may wonder: “16,000 accounts at an entry fee of 135 euros, have the botters spent 2.2 million euros just to be banned now? And can Trion Worlds really afford to lose such an amount?”
It’s not that simple. Trion Worlds has stated that the botters gained access to the alpha through ” ill-gotten funds,” meaning they acquired funds illegally. This means that players are not losing 2 million euros; it is likely that the transfer requests or credit cards the botters used to “pay” for their accounts were already declined.
The Elder Scrolls Online: That’s why there were bot trains in Kalthafen
Especially The Elder Scrolls Online has been struggling with real bot trains in recent months. First, they were in the caves, then in the cities, then in the in-game mail system, and finally even in the official forum of Zenimax. The game masters decided to take a public step, personally removing bots from the caves where they hunted cave bosses.
Here as well, the developers are in a constant battle with gold sellers and botters. In a recent forum post, a user explained what is happening behind the scenes. The “bot trains” of level 3 players in the city of Kargstein, which is usually reserved for endgame, can be explained by the existence of an introductory quest that rewarded 300 gold. Many botters exploited this to their advantage and teleported directly from the starting area to a level 3 bot friend on site.
One of the changes from the last patch affected the botters subtly: From now on, you can only delete 3 characters per day (so with a full account, you can only create three new ones).
WildStar: The botters on the paths of Monty Python
In the new MMO WildStar, it has been martially announced that the botters will be crushed in the best “Games of Thrones” style. Due to clever mechanics, gold spammers have now been banned from the capitals. However, this does not prevent the gold sellers from approaching players in other and more intimate ways. For a while, they used invites to arena teams, then the in-game mail system. At first, they pretended to be a dear friend “Dear Friend!”; then they posed as the auction house “You won an auction!” and now they are sending Protostar rations, which means sandwiches, along with spam mail.
And somehow, this brings us full circle. The English word “spam” once only meant a type of ham in our youth. In a sketch by the cult comedians Monty Python, this word was repeated more than 120 times in a few minutes, which is how it gained its new meaning.
Who would have thought that ham would one day smell so bad to us MMO players.
