[Discussion] The unbanable botter (detection prevention)

[Blyad]

about 3 months ago, i finally got caught/perma banned for botting. it has just come to my attention that the Ex-Frogster GM who banned me is now giving botting advice on this forum, so i figured it would be an appropriate time to discuss our prefered methods of ban evasion and hopefully said Ex-GM would be so inclined to come pick us apart ^_^


heres my current method, i would like anyone who see's a flaw in this plan to speak up.

Currently my "Main" account participates in no illegal activity.

i have 14 netbooks capable of running 4 golden egg bots or two open world/instance farming clients at a time.

each netbook has changed it's MAC address and I.P. runs through well known proxies frogster chooses to keep open so players in the middle east can evade a block to RoM in there country (or so that's the reason explained to me)

each character that is made stays logged in and bots to level 12 before going into millers ( to avoid any auto-matic system that detects newly spam made accounts)

at which point i bot those accounts 24/7 for a month each or however long it takes to get 12,000 golden eggs (if they get detected or banned oh well. 'explained later in the post')

at which point if the accounts are NOT banned i will add that character to a scrub guild i host (on another legitimate account) and deposit all 12k golden eggs into the guild vault. (multiple guilds will probly be needed at this level)

i will lock that page of the guild vault for about 7 days and stack furniture (probly just a giant fountain or two) over the access panel of said guild vault so no legitimate guildies will see the eggs.

after that 7 or so days i will then put another alt into the guild. and wander into the guild castle (as most new guildies do when joining a guild)

and i will 'discover' all these golden eggs, and ramble in guild chat about it, and pull out about 9k of the stacks and leave the rest for various legitimate guildies to pillage (im a nice guy, and it seems more legitimate that way)

at which point i will mail the golden eggs to my legit main that plays on the same I.P. address as the alt that 'found' the golden egg reserve.

worst case, the golden eggs bots get caught and banned, but because they have no chat, no guild, no mail, and no other account is associated to there I.P. mac address they can't catch me,

and if i do this a few times and the GM's wise up and dont ban the bot but check where the golden eggs go , storing them in the Guild vault is a safe gaurd and worst case that legit guild leader on a different IP gets banned for placing the fountains.

and if a GM is clever enough to wait out to see who takes them out of a guild, the scrubbie new guy who just found the vault for the first time and TOLD everyone about them before pulling them out wouldnt be the slightest bit conspicuous, it's dumb luck that i stumbled into a botter/duper guild!

as for mailing it to my main, i think many many people join guilds on alts and would do the exact same thing.

30 days later all "botting" accounts are deleted, mac/IP address's are changed i disband my scrub recuiting guild, make a new "legit" guild leader character and spam invite lowbies again. and then repeat the process. and being SO long, the chances of a GM ever looking back in the records THAT far are slim to none, and as i said, my main account is legitimate so there would be no reason to investigate it anyways.

so the break down: 14 laptops*4accounts each*10,000 golden eggs each=560,000 egs total times 6000 gold each (current rate on my server=3,360,000,000 gold. i estimate this to be a 5 month cycle.




Thoughts? concerns? i dont know about you, but i can live off 3.3billion gold for 5 months. even paying the inflated prices for dias.

im allso intrested to hear what measures you all take to stay unbanned, i personally botting for damn near 3 years and was open and honest about it, even joked with GM's about it in world chat, however i made my own bots to avoid that whole "3rd party" catch in the EuLa im being more cautious.

would love to hear what you all thought.

[Budzer]

Well probably this would be somewhere near impossible to detect...

As for me it would be much simpler, to lunch those accounts for farming gold CL/KS/PS. As it goes for detection, well.... You have said 5eggs/h *6k each*4accs - means something about 3M/day tops/each machine..... So you level up your char (takes some time but will be worth it). During lvling up buy honor PT certificate, to speed up farming later. Each made bot equals round 1M/h (you can easily achieve 1,5M). Running 6-9h/day shouldn't be suspicious, especially making brakes you only have to put "end" button sometimes. This mean 6M/day each machine (minimum). Few problem is that lvling char will take some time and resources for overpowered farmer you would spend something about 100M (concluding from my serv. prices). So whole operation would required 1,5G gold and much time (of course if you already have resources, than you can speed lvling proces, to something about 2-3h/char...).

The botting acc, should be not banned ever, their detection wouldn't be easy anyway. There was time when I was farming KS 6h/day for few days in a row, so normal person would farm like this to and there could be only suspicions no hard evidence of botting. So all the costs should be just one time. Even if one acc get banned, there still be 13 up and running. You can even reduce farm time to 3h and only sometimes extend it do 6.... As for profits 3h/day would give you 1,2G gold/month 14acc only (1 per machine). But you can extend it, to 10-12h and with good waypoint brakes etc. that shouldn't be much problem and would allow you to make something like 7G/month (pure gold - so no AH or finding buyer any other way).


The big problem would be transferring money.... First of all you will have to transfer money to the alts just for making them able to farm. They do not have to be full eq at this point, but even so you have to send something. Well you can be generous (as in your example) make guild, equip some rendoms+your chars (extends costs, but also make you clear). You can also teach newcomers how to farm CL/KS/PS, so some of them would farm them without botting. You can even start with egg bot as in your way (just changing last chars to another alts) and equip this newcomers by this character (will be much safer). The bigger problem would be transfer of gold opposite direction... The easiest would of course be simply transfer gold, but this will also be most dangerous. AH is also monitored, so it is not good way to send gold by there. Only one thing that stays is buy things with your alts, stat them, send to few others in some chain put on AH with cheep (or even ridiculously cheap - cutting zeros etc.) prices and buy them with main..... Probably once in a while you would have to not buy something, just to lower detection possibility. You can also try your method with guild, but than probably sooner or later you will be detected. Other method would probably be with using chests in alt house. Or simply buy diamonds from other players and send cash strait from alts.

And form my point of view ban is simply matter of luck. Probably any method not to contact directly alt and main would be good, but if you are to get banned you will be anyway..... For example a friend of mine is 24/7 farming in the open zone 3 accounts, same waypoint, different channel, same IP/Mac.. For half year now and still nothing...

Also forg in EU do nothing about bots...... There was situation when cerber bot was farming dailies 24/7 for weeks, being reported by 1/3 of the server and the first reaction was after huge forum topic and intervention of CM.... No comment on that. After a while I meet this person and the main is still "clear" - no ban at all...

[Blyad]

personally on MY server (no idea about anyone elses) we have and OVERABUNDANCE of gold a stack of dogmeats is 3million gold, dias are 75k-125k gold each.

so in this particular instance im against kalin/clops item farming bots. as it 'generates' gold.

i would much prefer to cycle out the vast amounts of gold in rotation on my server.

i bot for personal gain (everyone does) but i do have a false narcissistic sense of righteousness, as my server is relatively low population and i can single handly provide the entire server dailies/production runes at an affordable price. however i never want my personal gain to have a negative impact on the community as a whole. i feel botting all these annoying redundant things allows other players to do more enjoyable activitys rather than the endless grind.


but i digress,

my point in this is. that i believe that this method a GM could LITTERALLY have my botting character on follow, and in the end would have insufficent evidence to even Suspect my primary accounts of botting and 100% worst case senario the GM would apologise to me and inform me the golden eggs were illegally obtained and take them back.

[MiesterMan]

Wow, that's a lot of effort. Am I wrong for not doing anything to prevent banning and not getting banned?

[Administrator]

Wow, that's a lot of effort. Am I wrong for not doing anything to prevent banning and not getting banned?

Unless you are being reported by other players often or are doing something stupid (like being logged in 24 hours a day, putting up a ton of eggs in the auction house, and things like that), you're unlikely to get looked at. Best thing is just to avoid being reported. Do that by checking on any running bots constantly. If you find any players around you that try talking to you, seem to be following you, or are trying to grind in the same area (botting or legitimately playing), then move to a new location.

[Budzer]

Well I was generally against botting, but as frogster is doing nothing about goldsellers, evident holes in their security etc. I simply started optimizing my gains. Even with 50 bots running KS 24/7 I wouldn't get prices as high as goldsellers with their hacks, so I simply no more care, but I get your point of view.

[onewhoknows]

lol budzer you answered my own question - How can you be a matter of luck not to be banned, if EU doesn't even go after botters to begin with? lol


Man Blyad - I had no idea how bad you were lol. Oh, and the 3rd party app part of the TOS would still be used against you. For the purposes of the TOS, 3rd party is any thing not written by the developers/Frogster lol



The GM staff for FAI was not impressed with EU. Main reason why I'm still hanging around the RoM forums is to see how bad EU support really is.

I don't hold that position with the Cm staff - I have always been impressed with how open the CM's were on the EU forums and its great to see them doing the same on the RoM forums.

But over all, we all but hated EU..


There probably is very low chance of ever completely nailing every botting account one has. it could be done if some one wanted to take the time to sort through all the logs.

And like Administrator said, most bans are the result of being reported. Very few reports come in about botters in Instances because no one else can just stumble in on you. Egg botters get reported due to their advertising in world chat or selling in the AH.


You could have 100 guys botting RS and you would never get caught if all you did was sell to a vendor, or pace your self in the AH because no red flags would be raised.


GM's don't (or at least didn't) have a tool that we could look at and see the top 100 players who have remained logged in for hours. Though we could look at instance lists and see how many times a day a character vists. That would be a red flag.

If I had coded the tools, there would be such a thing. The tools and the general development of RoM stinks. I am amazed at how well RoM actually performs when I think of all the basic stuff that are missing.


It all boils down to the GM's wanting to do their job properly. Some thing that when it comes to botters I have only ever seen 3 gm's do, all of which are no longer GM's lol.

EU does not seem to care about botters. Thus you will be able to bot almost risk free. Just hope they don't start caring

[Blyad]

lol, you probly didnt know i was in dragonlance either, but when phone calls starting going to your office i stripped my character, changed my IP, and mailed everything i could off before the ban wave hit the guild harder than Fudgebus.

after you caught me and explained how you were tracking everything down to how many accounts were clicking within 7ms of each other i realised that all it will take is one EU GM that hasnt had his coffee yet getting a ticket complaining my bots have locked down dogmeats to bring my entire botting empire down to its knees again.

i wanted a fullproof method to obtain gold in which if a GM was following the eggbot from millers to the guild vault wouldnt beable to prove within a reasonable doubt that the character that eventually obtains the eggs is guilty of anything other than raiding a vault.


any suggestions?

[MiesterMan]

lol, you probly didnt know i was in dragonlance either, but when phone calls starting going to your office i stripped my character, changed my IP, and mailed everything i could off before the ban wave hit the guild harder than Fudgebus.

after you caught me and explained how you were tracking everything down to how many accounts were clicking within 7ms of each other i realised that all it will take is one EU GM that hasnt had his coffee yet getting a ticket complaining my bots have locked down dogmeats to bring my entire botting empire down to its knees again.

i wanted a fullproof method to obtain gold in which if a GM was following the eggbot from millers to the guild vault wouldnt beable to prove within a reasonable doubt that the character that eventually obtains the eggs is guilty of anything other than raiding a vault.


any suggestions?

I'm not sure exactly how it was supposed to be handled but what I was told in game is that it didn't matter if you meant to benefit from the botter or not, you're guilty. I'd hear horror stories of how people who buy from known botters off the AH are punished (never saw it) so I'd imagine the same imaginary punishment would goto your unsuspecting vault raiders. Hypothetically speaking of course.

[Blyad]

i feel the likely hood of THAT happening is about as likely as GM's deleted every endgamers pet because there's no such thing as legitimate golden eggs.

[onewhoknows]

I'm not sure exactly how it was supposed to be handled but what I was told in game is that it didn't matter if you meant to benefit from the botter or not, you're guilty. I'd hear horror stories of how people who buy from known botters off the AH are punished (never saw it) so I'd imagine the same imaginary punishment would goto your unsuspecting vault raiders. Hypothetically speaking of course.

This was never done for people buying from botters - it was done for those who bought T4 mana stones from the stone sellers as most of the time that was literally stolen property. And gold sellers. Items were removed from players who bought gold from a gold seller and then turned around and bought something with that gold.


It would be to hard to remove items sold by botters from players - at least manually. A server side script could do it...

I wouldn't be for removing the items from botters - the way I looked at it was it was Frogsters/Runewakers fault for not taking better steps to stop the botters - if some one happens to benifit from the botter then so be it. Most players don't care that they buy from botters - even though they do report them lol.


And I'm guilty of it as a player - I have probably purchased my share of botted material - never golden eggs though, never got into the pet system.

[volkovy]

dear onewhoknows, i only have a simple question

if no one reports me for botting or doing something illegal, what's my chances of getting caught?

before, i had 2 banned clients. both were running at the daily quest area, where people saw it, and reported. even those ran for 2-3 weeks before ban.

a couple of months ago, i was running egg farming, in big time, making lots of gold, and that account is still alive.

[Blyad]

i botted this game for allmost 3 years. openly admitted it in trade chat, zone chat, even joked with the GM staff of the US servers about it. and i only recently started getting suspensions in the last 8 months or so.

with the new EU staff, i do not know how much they care about there redheaded step-child they recently fostered, but ive had two dogmeats bots running 24/7 on grimdal sense the 75% bonus exp came up and nothings being done about it. dispite 12-20 "reports" a day.

[rubenr]

Thing is, like i've read here, boting keep the players playing.
Since gold buy diamonds, and there are people who buy diamonds to sell them, there's no problem.


To avoid ban, you must keep yourself out of crowded areas. Dog meats is seriously not recommended unless you make a huge waypoint to make it look you're on dailies. KS is the most recommended since not many players spend 2 or 3 hours in KS to see you making the same path over and over.