After taking a couple years off I find myself back into the habit of testing upcoming games. Before you go public make sure you implement these items:
1. Ingame bug/suggestion reporting
2. Only include fully functional missions/contacts
3. Map-wide enemy distribution
4. At least three options for each element of character creation
5. At least one fully functional contact for missions/quests
6. At least four (five is better) fully functional missions/quests
7. At least one fully functional merchant
Without these elements ingame and functioning, there is really nothing to playtest. I have done hundreds of public game tests at this point in my life. Those games which succeeded always had all seven of these features in place and functional before they went to public testing (even before they went to Family and Friends testing!). Every game I have tested which lacked one of these features prior to public testing inevitably failed because the lack of features clearly demonstrates two things: the developers cannot plan ahead, the developers have a flawed concept of player expectations.
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I would even include in that listing a [b]Report Spammer[/b] function, so as to get the testing for that out of the way, since it WILL BE NECESSARY.
I worked Customer Service for [i]The Elder Scrolls Online[/i] beginning just before head start week and the job lasted 6 months (at which point the company I was working for lost the contract and we were all laid off). When my class of trainees were still in training, I asked the Head Trainer if ESO had a Report Spammer function built into it yet. The answer I got back was literally unbelievable.
The Head Trainer(!) told me that they expected to NOT have any trouble with Gold Farmers and Gold Spammers because they figured it would be excessively difficult to "monetize" any kind of Gold Farming for a profit.
So no ... they didn't have anything better than an ad hoc "jump through SEVERAL hoops" method of reporting either Farmers or Spammers. And why? Because there was a sense that this sort of thing [b]WOULD NOT BE A PROBLEM[/b] when the game launched.
So I was there for Launch Week ... and within HOURS the game was almost completely overrun by gold spammers and bots. Very quickly, the botters developed Speed Hacks that allowed them to run pre-programmed routes between nodes at CHEAT speed, and they would be left unmolested for HOURS at a time. I personally reported dozens upon dozens of bots that I encountered while playing, and I never once saw ANY action get taken. It was extremely dispiriting to report a Speed Hacker Bot early in the morning, and then half a day later see them STILL running the same route, harvesting every node along their pre-programmed path, FLAGRANTLY cheating ... completely unmolested.
And then the game hackers got excessively clever, because the GM Commands were so insecurely held, and they started running their routes UNDERGROUND where they couldn't be observed (and thus, reported!) and using "fly" hacks to prevent themselves from falling through the world, and so on. In other words, the game "leaked" like a cheap sieve and caught hardly any of cheaters.
Then they started swinging the Mass Banhammer ... using an automated system (because PAYING a human to recognize the patterns was too expensive, or something) ... and oh man the FALSE POSITIVES that this method turned up created even more damage than the Gold Farmers did! I personally handled a ticket from a Player who, needless to say was never going to play ESO ever again, who had been Account Banned, for Gold Farming ... because the first character on their virgin account had received ... literally ... 1 gold ... at Level 2 ... in the Tutorial. And it wasn't just this one player ... it was him and his wife ... and "we" had just pre-emptively burned any and all bridges with this couple.
Can you say ... FIASCO?
So ESO got overrun (and I mean LITERALLY overrun!) by bots and cheats and scammers pretty much from Head Start (they didn't even wait until Launch) and there was really no PLAN or intentionally designed course of action to do anything about the situation. Within a month, the Conventional Wisdom had hardened that the Devs not only weren't going to do anything about the situation, but were for all intents and purposes POWERLESS to prevent the kinds of exploits and hacking that were running rampant throughout the game in just about every single zone. In some zones, the density of bots was so high that it was actually RARE to be able to harvest a resource node out in the open! Heck, it took ESO a couple of MONTHS to even devise anything approximating a Policy for how to deal with the situation.
And then a couple of months after ESO launched, along came Wildstar ... and almost all of the Gold Farmers, Bots and Scammers migrated to the NEW shiny game on the market, and ESO began to stabilize. The sad thing was that ESO didn't so much "kick" the Bots out, so much as the Farmers "left" for greener pastures elsewhere. It was kind of obvious that Gold Farming in ESO was trending towards being unsustainable/unprofitable for quite a while, since the "price of gold" kept getting more and more favorable for the "buyers" (ie. the marks) in the advertising. But in the end, the worst of the Scammers didn't get "pushed" out so much as they just "walked away" after having milked ESO dry and done a tremendous amount of "damage" to the game's reputation in the process.
Hence my believe that [b]ANY GAME[/b] that doesn't build for, expect and have policies in place to thwart and defeat Gold Farmers, Bots and Scammers BEFORE LAUNCH is one that is pre-destined to be literally overrun by ... Gold Farmers, Bots and Scammers ... pretty much from the first minute the game goes Live. It's basically a Land Rush sort of scenario, and they will do anything and everything to [b]parasitically extract as much VALUE out of the game[/b] as INhumanly possible.
Thus, I very strongly believe that developing the tools and policies necessary to [b]FIGHT[/b] against this sort of known and entirely predictable HUMAN behavior needs to not only be in place, but also thoroughly tested and vetted BEFORE City of Titans goes into Launch. Indeed, I would exhort and strongly urge making such features a mandatory goal of Beta Testing! Why? Because you don't get that many opportunities to make a GOOD First Impression.
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Yeah speaking about ESO I was hyped about it. Join Beta, and what Redlynne said. I'm a little tempted to sign back up, thought really don't want to pay to pitch a new camp tent till CoT or VO goes live.
The Gold farming was talked about way back when I was active on the project. So Red I can say for sure they expect Gold Farmers and have plans to counter the spam.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
How do these Bots work?
Do they work like the Auto-Hotkey macro recorders do?
ex video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS-ycdoOyj8
AutoHotkey is definitely a method of doing it, although it can also be down to the game engine that gets used as to what techniques are better than others.
I know that one of the mining bots for Eve Online utilised AutoHotkey with its pixel color matching facility and a specific layout for the UI to automate things. It was quite funny knocking those mining ships out of position, and seeing things go awry because the inputs were no longer doing what they were intended to do, because its timers were messed up.
Now other bots can use memory reading to inject new locations for the player, so that they warp from A to B.
They now *rarely* (if ever) use "macro recording" as the video you linked to does. That is not to say that players themselves *don't* use AHK for some tasks themselves (ie posting a message to chat with a macro or something like that).. or to actually have some similar facility to gaming keyboards without actually buying one...
And considering how powerful the software is, banning it outright would be a bad move... especially if you are going the route of trying to be accessible for disabled players... some of the modified controllers/keyboards for them utilize AHK as the basis of their software.
I would expect that having reporting functions for all sorts of problems, both technical and social (and rules-of-use-related) will be a priority for any sort of test environment (e.g. beta testing), if only because lacking it means we can't gather the very information the test is designed to harvest.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Well, as far as Gold Farming is concerned, the easiest "test" I can come up with for that is a deliberate "This is a SPAM message. Please report it as such." message generation that could then be used to produce some metrics. For one thing, unless the population is absurdly low, you're never going to get a 100% reporting rate ... but you could check to see what kind of social dynamics the tests will yield. How fast the spam gets reported, do people report the spam multiple times, does the Ignore function of the Spam Report work as advertised, and so on. You can then use that information to start building metrics to decide on reporting thresholds and the like for what needs to be considered actionable ... and what those actions ought to be.
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And to be honest, I know across various games that some people just outright ignored the person instead of always reporting them. If it happened in one channel 99% of the time, the players might just remove the channel to avoid the problem of always "right click report" a load of players and just carry on with their lives.
I rarely saw spam in World of Warcraft... then I realised that I had removed the trade channel from my chat tabs. In fact I do this automatically in *every* game that I log into... change my chat tab setup so that all zone wide chats are in one tab/section, guild/pms/custom channels in another, team/raid stuff in another.
I do this inside of the first 5 minutes of playing the game. Its the way I play. And I know I am not alone in this... but I do know that a lot of other players just play with the standard chat tabs, and remove fully the channels that they don't need[1].
You cannot just automatically ban someone because they got a lot of ignores either. This will just lead to problems. I know of some CoX channel owners who got /ignored by a section of the player base due to their actions[2] in game. I would rather have the GM act on reports of the ignore towards this... but even so, I am actually against it working on the basic /ignore command. I would rather have a dedicated "report spammer" which then collates and sends it towards a GM to then review it later. Automation in this case will lead to problems later on
One last thing though, for any automation, make sure that your tools are foolproof. And have rules set up concerning naming and shaming policy (if any). And give the players a process to appeal this, just in case you were wrong.
There are two cases here that spring to mind. One was Guild Wars 2, where a simple developer pricing mistake made it easy for a section of the player base to generate money... Players complained about being banned, saying that they only did it "once or twice". ArenaNet then said that they would review the actions, and that if the player was ok with it, they would publicly post how many times the player had done the action.
One player went I only did it 10 or 20 times: Actual answer? over 700 times.... Players will lie when pressed about why they were banned. Very few will own up to admitting that they had done wrong as many times as they did.
Then there was a recent Wildstar bug, where some materials spawned back faster than intended, leading to quick and easy and fast currency generation. Wildstar put up an amnesty, where they basically said "If you think you did wrong abusing this, get in touch with us". Those who did, lost the money, and received a less stringent ban than those who didn't fess up.
Oh, and well known streamers... they sometimes get banned for perfectly legitimate reasons, such as being caught using AutoHotKey (or similar) to automate your gameplay....
[1] There isn't a wrong way or a right way to do this... it is totally personal preference.
[2] Harassing members of a different channel that you are not an admin/mod of will do that.
like this?
[img]http://i.imgur.com/LB4JZ0S.png[/img]
The neural network designer in me now wants to use such voting systems as a training signal on a neural network whose job is to identify potential spam. It would probably be best achieved in conjunction with a fuzzy logic system, for a neuro-fuzzy discriminator.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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That looks like a good start, Izzy. UI Details can be mucked about with, but the basic functionality of what we'd want is essentially right there. I also approve of the "Spam Shaming" functionality of displaying how many people have "voted" a message as being spam.
Ideally, once a spam message reaches a critical threshold of This Is Spam votes, the content of the message would get filed for reference and then any additional exact copies of that message would likewise be considered Spam, regardless of who posts it. That way the system isn't just watching Identities (ie. @spammer) but also recording what gets said and "voted" as being spam, so as to create a Weed Out process.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
Maybe with a warning for non Spam that falls into the SPAM filter system. "What you typed seems very much like spam to me. Do you really want to post -Speed Run to 50! PST for invite-?" The tags that it might pick up is the fast leveling comment.
At the same time the system could alert a GM asking "I think this is spam should I block it?" Letting a human give the final word.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
I think NW should be looked at for how not to do it, the number of \/\/ \/\/ \/\/ . xxxxx . ( () /\/\ type messages they get to evade the spam filter is amazing (if it's not clear, the W and M are composed of slashes and backslashes).
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I wouldn't mind an Advanced Filter Tab with a RegEx Chat Filter so i can update it. ;D
But that might not be for everyone. :/
Star Trek Online suffers from this pattern as well ... as did The Elder Scrolls Online while I was working customer support for them. STO however seems to have a "Not Our Problem" kind of attitude about the issue and apparently does "less than nothing" about it. I say this because there are multiple accounts all "saying" the exact same message on Robot Repeat, and I've been seeing basically the exact same message posted for [b]MONTHS[/b] now, and STO doesn't really *do* anything to stamp it out. Presumably Perfect World Entertainment, Arc Games and Cryptic look at the measures necessary to combat this problem is being Money Wasted ... rather than as being Money Well Spent.
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