City's Lack of Bots (of the script kind)

[kwsapphire]

I have always wondered, why did City of Heroes never suffer from the Bots problem? In this case I mean Real-Money-Transaction (RMT) sellers running a a script to level up a character or farm for resources. Is it because...

 

1. City of Heroes never had a large enough player base to attract botters?

2. City of Heroes code made/makes botting impossible?

3. The box price and monthly subscription fee made botting unrewarding?

4. Farming resources is relatively easy enough for players that there's no market for RMT?

 

In my experience, even games that have monthly subscription fees have bots (Neverwinter, WoW, FFXIV)

 

I'm so curious because it seems to me, if companies really wanted to get rid of botters, surely they could, right? They pretend to combat the botters just enough to make the rest of the community think they're trying to do something, all while happily accepting botters' sub fees and market purchases. 

 

Why is this an issue we never had to deal with in this game?

Edited March 25, 2022 by kwsapphire

[Apparition]

1.  By far 1.  Compare the populations of WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Neverwinter to the population of CoH circa 2006.  Night and day.  CoH’s population on live was tiny in comparison.

 

Another reason though is that INF in City of Heroes is just not as valuable as the currencies in WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Neverwinter.

[The_Warpact]

We had gold spammers back on Live, the devs quickly squashed them though.

[kwsapphire]

9 minutes ago, The_Warpact said:

We had gold spammers back on Live, the devs quickly squashed them though.

 

I remember them, but I assumed they were real people, not bots. I also remember people advertizing to PL toons using some mission in PI, not sure which one though. I always laughed and wondered who would pay inf to be PLed. 😄

(Edit) Laughed because I couldn't afford their astronomical prices. I remember how hard the XP slog was. 😉

 

 

10 minutes ago, Apparition said:

1.  By far 1.  Compare the populations of WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Neverwinter to the population of CoH circa 2006.  Night and day.  CoH’s population on live was tiny in comparison.

 

Another reason though is that INF in City of Heroes is just not as valuable as the currencies in WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Neverwinter.

 

Got it, thank you. 🙂 So I can't point to CoH and say "See! THEY didn't have a botters problem, surely you guys can figure this out!" Because that isn't really fair. That's what I was hoping to find out. 

Edited March 25, 2022 by kwsapphire

[Oubliette_Red]

Another reason is that the majority of CoH occurs in instances rather than open world, unlike most other MMO's then or now.

 

[kwsapphire]

14 minutes ago, Oubliette_Red said:

Another reason is that the majority of CoH occurs in instances rather than open world, unlike most other MMO's then or now.

 

 

How does that affect botters, if I may ask? Does that fall under "code made botting difficult" because it's hard for scripts to interact with doors?

[Chrono-Bot]

3 minutes ago, kwsapphire said:

How does that affect botters, if I may ask?

Botters in open world tend to be after a specific loot a wild mob gives - but given that almost everything drops the (sameish) look in city of heroes, it's more rewarding to be inside a mission hunting mobs than it is to be street sweeping. So if there were bots, we never saw them because they were inside and out of sight.

[kwsapphire]

2 minutes ago, Chrono-Bot said:

Botters in open world tend to be after a specific loot a wild mob gives - but given that almost everything drops the (sameish) look in city of heroes, it's more rewarding to be inside a mission hunting mobs than it is to be street sweeping. So if there were bots, we never saw them because they were inside and out of sight.

 

They'd still have to run back and forth to the contact and trainers though, right? They'd presumably have been obvious with their default generic costume and a name of random characters, crowding around each other as they all interact with the same contact. The only time we saw generic heroes was when someone had rolled a copywrited character. 😉 

[ZorkNemesis]

55 minutes ago, kwsapphire said:

I also remember people advertizing to PL toons using some mission in PI, not sure which one though

 

Find the Scanner from Maria Jenkins, prior to the aggro cap implementation and ED.  A fire tanker could easily herd all the enemies into a corner and kill them all with Burn.

[Chrono-Bot]

9 minutes ago, kwsapphire said:

They'd still have to run back and forth to the contact and trainers though, right?

No? They would be resetting the missions. And the costumes would probably just be randoms - impossible to tell from a regular bad costume.

[Luminara]

The NPCs in this game shit their brains out of their ears when they encounter a single stair step.  Even using external scripting tools, I can't imagine bots being any more competent at navigating through the complex terrain of the cities, in Co*.  You can only buff stupid so much.

[Clave Dark 5]

We had gold sellers back in the day, for a long time.  I used to bump into those villains broadcasting from near the black market in Cap au Diable... which... isn't too surprising, really.  But as to if they'd farmed via bot or not to get that gold to sell, I dunno.  I never checked into it, but I believe the usual was they'd direct you to a website to enter CC info (the gullibility of some folks!  I mean, you're in Cap au Diable!!) to buy the Inf, so that broadcaster themselves might have been a bot so to speak.

[Greycat]

"Population" is... meh. WOW was an aberration with the "millions of players." COH had what would otherwise have been considered a healthy population for quite a while. Pays the bills, allowed development.

 

As far as why we didn't have the HUGE influx of gold sellers? What would we have bought it for? There isn't/wasn't a constant gear grind, you don't have to pay to level when you go see a trainer (that is, frankly, one of the most ANNOYING mechanics I've run into in other games. "Oh, you know punch hard II? Punch hard III will cost 1.3m gold to learn. Oh, you want to learn ANOTHER power too?..." )  We didn't even start with a market - or anything but TO/DO/SOs, Titan-Os and Hamis. Inventions came in, they dropped, salvage dropped, there wasn't really a *grind* to avoid. And content wise, they're not really needed. Sure, even the rare stuff (purples, PVP IOs) got pricy, but they were "nice to haves," not "you must have this to progress."

 

Frankly, there was (and is) no real market for their "services."

[Yomo Kimyata]

On 3/25/2022 at 1:46 PM, Apparition said:

 

Another reason though is that INF in City of Heroes is just not as valuable as the currencies in WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, and Neverwinter.

 

I would never consider selling inf for a real world currency, but I suspect that if there were an actual market for it, it would be a lot faster to make money by putting a dollar in a savings account and waiting for interest to accrue.  In a million years, I'll be rich, RICH!

[ChzBoi]

3 hours ago, Greycat said:

.....that is, frankly, one of the most ANNOYING mechanics I've run into in other games. .......

...as I never played WOW, you are saying that when you leveled and would go to their trainer-equivalent, in order to get new skills you had to have some level of currency? (gold, I will assume)....interesting......so characters could get 'power-locked' if they did well gaining experience but poorly at finding currency?

[Black Zot]

1 hour ago, ChzBoi said:

...as I never played WOW, you are saying that when you leveled and would go to their trainer-equivalent, in order to get new skills you had to have some level of currency? (gold, I will assume)....interesting......so characters could get 'power-locked' if they did well gaining experience but poorly at finding currency?

 

Originally, yes.  This was dropped after a few years as the devs realized what a boneheaded design it was.

[tidge]

17 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

We had gold sellers back in the day, for a long time.  I used to bump into those villains broadcasting from near the black market in Cap au Diable... which... isn't too surprising, really.  But as to if they'd farmed via bot or not to get that gold to sell, I dunno.  I never checked into it, but I believe the usual was they'd direct you to a website to enter CC info (the gullibility of some folks!  I mean, you're in Cap au Diable!!) to buy the Inf, so that broadcaster themselves might have been a bot so to speak.

 

I definitely remember the "gold sellers" back in the day, and for whatever reason I always seemed to run into them in the CoV zones (St. Martial is where i was when I felt they were the most aggressive).

[Turric]

4 hours ago, Krimson said:

 

Unai Kemen arc is basically the old school farm arc.

 

Good times!

[Clave Dark 5]

14 hours ago, Greycat said:

one of the most ANNOYING mechanics I've run into in other games. "Oh, you know punch hard II? Punch hard III will cost 1.3m gold to learn." ) 

Sooo, just like how my recent T3 Incarnate power is going to cost me all those components as well as 26 million Inf?  Yeah, I hate that in other games.  😃

[Greycat]

5 hours ago, Clave Dark 5 said:

Sooo, just like how my recent T3 Incarnate power is going to cost me all those components as well as 26 million Inf?  Yeah, I hate that in other games.  😃

 

You don't have to deal with it from level 1, though. And it's not like you're in competition with everyone else to try to farm the one world boss that spawns once an hour to get the component.

 

I'm *directly* thinking of how TOR (Pay just to learn the next level of each ability, even if it's basically "swing a lightsaber a little harder) or Aion (Oh, you want to be able to develop a basic ability required in the game - flight - so you can stay in the air a few seconds later? GRIND for that gold...) are. We don't have that in COH. You level, you go to a trainer, say "ooh, that's available, ok, I'll take that" and go on your way.

[Greycat]

16 hours ago, ChzBoi said:

...as I never played WOW, you are saying that when you leveled and would go to their trainer-equivalent, in order to get new skills you had to have some level of currency? (gold, I will assume)....interesting......so characters could get 'power-locked' if they did well gaining experience but poorly at finding currency?

 

WOW, The Old Republic (part of why I stopped playing,) Aion, quite a few others, yeah.

[Coyotedancer]

Yep. In Aion if you want a new skill (or to upgrade an old one to the higher-powered version) you have to "buy books" to do it. And at higher levels that can get pricey.

 

Once in a while you'd get some skill book or other as a loot drop (I used to get Spiritmaster summoning tomes pretty regularly, for instance... On my Sorcerer and Templar.  <_<), but for the most part? Nope. Grind that kinah! Dodge those Gunner bots running around killing every mob in sight the second it spawns! (Gunner bots who typically outnumbered human players by a fair margin in some areas,  especially on the non-PVP leveling/rookie shards. Low population never seemed to slow them down.)

 

 

  

Edited March 27, 2022 by Coyotedancer

[Kaika]

Yeah it really comes down to there not really being a market for that sort of thing here. Influ was rarely necessary and farming was easy and incredibly optional, even way back in the day people would regularly hand out millions of influ to new players. Inventions made it so there might have been a small market for it but considering the games population and much tighter nitt community, my guess was they rarely got any bites. On top of that I recall the dev's being pretty on the ball with stopping it (or at least appearing to be).

 

All and all it just wasn't worth the time and resources for the gold farmers.

Edited March 27, 2022 by Riot Siren

[TheZag]

Only story i have is some inf sellers tried to get established with some stupid prices.  Like $50 for 10 million.  I guess they didnt know how to generate inf and the players laughed them off the server.  I never saw another inf seller.

[Shred Monkey]

5.  Before IOs, there wasn't anything to spend money on so there wasn't any market for gold sellers.   

6.  After IOs, there wasn't much market because players who cared about being powerful and having the greatest stuff also know how to make money.  But this was the point in history where we had a few gold sellers.

7.  After AE, making money and leveling up because mega-super-sonic-stupid-easy... it took several nerfs and iterations before it got to to the stupid-easy level we have now.