Well it isn’t is it? You just want to play. In the case of joystick users, a good amount of game time is also used in tweaking the controls, so having to sift through replays as well is more time away from actually playing the game.
I would see constant crashing of particular players from time-to-time in SB, and am now wondering if they were (rubbish) bots or just some poor sod trying to take off with mouse-joy. They were always very persistent, and must surely have lost more lions than they gained. Perhaps they were bot version 1.0. I think we’ve moved on a bit from there though as this was a year or so ago. As someone so rightly pointed out earlier, bots etc. are now an all too common annoyance in multi-player online games.
After the day I had yesterday (won 4 GRB games out of 22 due to passive behavior and bots), I’m thinking I might be investing too much these days. Ground RB is similar to Air for those of you who don’t play:
16 players spawn and all go to one cap point
They generally roll right through it and attempt to camp the enemy.
That leaves you attempting to cap points only to find them overrun by the enemy ignored during the base rush.
Campers get killed; don’t re-spawn.
You are now getting camped.
Your day is done in about 10 minutes tops. (A little longer if I’m playing USSR; a little shorter if I’m playing USA). No Ph.D needed to figure how much fun that is.
Final battle was lost to player who somehow gathered his 4,000+ points and nuked us, despite our control of the 2 to 3 caps through the entire game. And that wasn’t even the guy camped over our air spawn that shot my XC-30 down. He was a good 1,500 below the Nuker.
I’m sure there are “reasonable” explanations for these scenarios (no there aren’t), but experience is the best teacher and I know better.
Perhaps I should go back to protesting (a different reason) and let all of the bots continue to support the game? I’m starting to feel as foolish as I’m being told to feel.
Thanks to those of you who try to play fairly and make the reports, and try to fight for what’s right. You all are the only reason I keep coming back.
Fighting, losing and being ignored it seems, sadly. They need to invest much more in kicking the cheats out (but this doesn’t bring them in any money). The big problem is there is nothing to see for our efforts but a few supposedly banned names on a list.
I think the problem with FTP games is that because many have not invested money in them they don’t really care. Being here since 2013, I have invested a decent amount in WT, and I’m sure a lot of people that play properly (especially those that comment here) have done so too.
I invested because the game looks cracking (always has done) and although not a true flight sim it’s fun to play. Half the fun goes when you can’t communicate with your team mates properly though (bots or not).
Sadly I don’t think that enough players care (or even realise) that there’s a hell of a lot of it going on. I would think that by now if there was an easy solution Gaijin would have found it. I conclude that by the nature of it there isn’t (only harsher penalties, more people checking).
and I will say it again, you can easily disable EAC and work a bypass to bot in Ranked games, why does Gaijin allow the EAC to be disabled freely? only god will know.
Thats useless, I have seen banned people on the list still botting in game, I sent evidence but got banned from forums again, they dont care about the cheating
Just pointing out -shoti- was finally erased from the game en masse less than a week after this post of mine that got some mod attention. 100+ accounts banned on Sept 2.
I honestly would have liked to give Gaijin mucho credit for that when they did it, tbh; I waited a month to see if there’d be another “Fair Play” mentioning it, but since that hasn’t happened as of 2 Oct, I’ll just do it here. Good job, Gaijin. That squadron needed to die. You should have used its cancellation to send a message to other botters that you’re serious, but as it’s the first confirmed cancellation in a couple years of a pure naval RB bot (let alone an entire squadron of them), I’ll still take it.
dear gaijin, as we noticed that you removed all the spots from all the maps. I make a suggestion to you why you don’t make a flat map and let the players kill each other
sure, Gaijin got rid of -shoti- … finally. But how long did it take to get rid of THE most obvious and most visible group of bots that was so dumb to make bot account identification so much simpler by actually forming a 100+ strong bot squad?
There is huge disparity between crazy high number of bots players meet in battles all the time versus the incredibly tiny number of bot accounts that are (very silently) banned. In the end it still looks like bots can feel safe knowing that getting account banned can theoretically happen, but is about as likely as winning a lottery while at the same time being hit by a lightning.
You also need to differentiate the farming interests who naval botted on and off these last two years from the individual players who buy a bot script to use with a premium, but play other modes (same is also true for Air botting). In the latter case the botters make their money off the sale of scripts rather than the market sale of vehicles or account resales.
-shoti- was uniquely awful, but in some ways it seemed less a farm-type effort than some single person’s effort to mess with the system as far as they could. (This would seem to be indicated by the way in July the lead beneficiary jumped from a squadron to one they made themselves, took all their bots with them and then added a bunch more when they were on their own.) I get the sense what we’re seeing this event is more individuals looking to profit than any “farm” concerns.
Farm concerns going for resale or event vehicles have to work up an account from nothing to make money, or at least only the starter rank I naval premium you get from a new naval account. That’s why we had a lot of bot Kerches at one time during event runups. We didn’t see that this time. (I suspect in part because opening up Air SB to be used as a mode on events has siphoned them over there to do what they do a different way.)
Those using Frank Knoxes, or Moffetts, or Scharnhorsts, on the other hand, are probably individuals buying bot scripts, as shown by the large number with pre-existing clan tags. Individuals are also harder to shut down than farms, because they have almost always paid some money to Gaijin and are in a sense, a real customer that needs to be handled respectfully unless they’ve gone completely over the top the way shoti guy did.
That’s why I would have been much more public about closing them down so the players who bot know Gaijin will actually do something to you, you don’t have to be a bot farmer or bot maker yourself, or at least they will if you make yourself impossible to ignore like the shoti guy did. And a price was paid… that was at least $800 worth of Frank Knoxes gone overnight. Also why I think it’s in Gaijin’s best interest to be playing up the shutting down of -shoti- too. They did good! We need to make sure people know so it has maximum impact!
bwahaha, there’s a work around for bpreport.exe, they know that gaijin is trying to find them via the crash report, they even decrypted the logs to see what is being collected. You should just flag accounts that play with EAC disabled at this point.
Account created on September 15th (so account 20 days old)
stage 1: bought F-4S and only played that one vehicle nonstop, managed to play 2663 air RB battles until Sep 29th (8 battles per hour nonstop for two weeks)
stage 2: took one 10 hour pause & then switched to playing Helena on Sep 29th and has been playing that ever since … 543 battles in 6 days
stage 3 prediction … given his RP gains + recent naval progression changes (rank difference penalty for rank6 research) he’ll need roughly 1500 battles (and 10-12 days to get there) to finish entire US naval tech tree. Then … M1 KVT pack, or rank7 aircraft pack for next nation. Well, not that difficult to predict, there are metric butt-ton of accounts behaving in exactly the same way.
So far that’s 100+ USD spent on premium vehicles. So, will any action be taken, or is Gaijin salivating at the chance of selling him yet another 65USD pack first? And a few more after that? Really not much point celebrating Gaijin banning 100+ -shoti- members with combined Frank Knox value of some 800GJN when that is easily replaced by just 8 mr goldenspirit clones (or just 5 after he buys his next premium pack) … and we can easily see how many of new carbon-copies of these “totally legit players” appear, thanks to Gaijin pretty much shouting the data directly in our faces.
And all this (how many of these accounts there are + how many new keep appearing + how many premium vehicles they buy + how incredibly reluctant Gaijin is to deal with them) is why I called these accounts massive revenue stream for Gaijin … backed entirely by data provided by Gaijin (thanks!).
If those rumors are correct (premium buys with stolen credit card data) i see massive legal problems. Sooner or later we will see if those rumors are correct or not - if credit card companies are able to identify patterns confirming this, they might find a way to avoid this in the future.
Btw - not all bots are bad.
I saw today an F4F bot (one of gaijins own bots to fill small lobbies) turnfighting with a 4.0 Fw 190 and a SM 91, not bad. He spawned after 2 minutes and went straight for enemies…
Saw too late it was a bot, otherwise i would have not interfered - he killed the 190 in a headon (190 crashed later with dead engine)…replay link
