GM Threats for paging on BoTs?

Riner

Yesterday on Great Lakes a Castle fell in Tram to IDOC. This prompted a large number of players to pull out their scripted house placement Bots. A friend and guild mate of mine decided to start reporting them. This is the course of action we are repeatably told to take. As the system will only allow for 3 names to be reported at a time he was forced to make multiple reports of various BoTs. This should have prompted at the very least a GM to respond by investigating and perhaps banning the accounts. Instead the GM decided that an easier course of action would be to threaten the complainer.

So my question is simple if you are going to threaten those who follow the direction they are given on how to deal with BoT'ers what should we do? Many of us just want an even playing field where the people who take our subscription money work to keep the game free of cheats.

Please look into this and explain why reporters are being threatened with account action instead of those breaking the rules? @Kyronix @Mesanna @Bleak

JackFlashUk

you are not clearly showing what the content of your report entailed,  were you swearing etc?  it can be very frustrating I know, however, I have also been told quite clearly that abusing language will not be tolerated, and it will detract form what you are trying to achieve......

This wold be my guess as to why you got this response.....

PaladinBob

I was not using language. Page said. " hidden players trying to script place castle" then typed on their names

Riner

Actually it wasn't me who made the report, but I just asked and no there was no language used which would be considered abusive. Nice thought and I agree that until everything is answered we might want to give the benefit of the doubt but this doesn't seem to be the case. Fortunately,I believe that @Mesanna in the very least would have a log of the reports and could clarify the appropriate action with the GM that handled this.

PaladinBob

Might have added things like "please help. " no I don't have screenshots of the pages because I saw no reason to need them and was not upset until I got that answer. Trying to do some good for the community

creampie

watch out what you want she already said next thing she will do about idocs is deleting them...i bet if this continue like this we idocs will be terminated in couple months....this is always the same little crew that control house placement and multibox idocs they already know who they are. They are making more money than the devs and the devs dont have any ego to stop them... you want to know another absurd shit...when someone is getting banned he can ask after a year to reactive account and during the suspension the house dont go idoc so people who got ban dont have any lost (house and stuff).

gay

"A large idoc is happening, my god there are a lot of people here for it. They must all be bots and I will report everyone."

"omg why am I being told that reporting everyone and everything that I perceive as a bot is abuse of the paging system? All these bots are going to take my loot "

PaladinBob

Didn't want the spot. Never tried placing.  Nor did I try and report the bunch of people there during looting. It was hidden generic named toons. Todd. Carl. Etc

creampie

gay said:

"A large idoc is happening, my god there are a lot of people here for it. They must all be bots and I will report everyone."

"omg why am I being told that reporting everyone and everything that I perceive as a bot is abuse of the paging system? All these bots are going to take my loot "

yeah he probably blink when the chessy castle fall yesterday and it was over :-p

Arnold7

Based on my last couple of interactions with GM’s, the response you got does not surprise me.  Not sure what they think their jobs entail but pretty sure it does not agree with the player’s expectations.  They respond quickly will give them that but seems like they want to be sure they don’t help too much.  Have never seen this attitude anywhere else when I have requested to chat with any other person whose job it is to answer questions of persons using their employers products but it prevails here.

Pawain

gay said:

"A large idoc is happening, my god there are a lot of people here for it. They must all be bots and I will report everyone."

"omg why am I being told that reporting everyone and everything that I perceive as a bot is abuse of the paging system? All these bots are going to take my loot "

Since there are definite times for an IDOC. There probably are no bots. They are attended scripters. You would have to learn more about what program or whatever they are using that is not legal and page on that, if the GM can detect it.

You could ask one of them. Some are very chatty and do not lie about what they are doing.

Oreogl

creampie said:

watch out what you want she already said next thing she will do about idocs is deleting them...i bet if this continue like this we idocs will be terminated in couple months....this is always the same little crew that control house placement and multibox idocs they already know who they are. They are making more money than the devs and the devs dont have any ego to stop them... you want to know another absurd shit...when someone is getting banned he can ask after a year to reactive account and during the suspension the house dont go idoc so people who got ban dont have any lost (house and stuff).

This doesn’t surprise me.  They shouldn’t have changed them to begin with.  However, Just because it wouldn’t drop items doesn’t mean there still wouldn’t be scripting for desirable spots for RMTs.

We currently have a Luna spot on Great Lakes that was probably scripted, and now just sits as a small custom plot because who knows?  Waiting for the right cash?  No clue.

Lord_Frodo

So A Llama reports hidden BOTs running house placement scrips and pages on multi hidden plays.
How do you know there were HIDDEN players running house placement scripts when they are HIDDEN, did you see them.
GM sees a char named A Llama and wonders is this a throw away account that is reporting BOTs in order to get them booted so their house scripters can get the spot.
I remember a Char named A Llama was a well known house placer so is this the same A Llama

Lord_Frodo

UO has enough storage that any account that has a house that goes IDOC should have the contents stored for their possible return.  

Oreogl

Lord_Frodo said:

So A Llama reports hidden BOTs running house placement scrips and pages on multi hidden plays.
How do you know there were HIDDEN players running house placement scripts when they are HIDDEN, did you see them.
GM sees a char named A Llama and wonders is this a throw away account that is reporting BOTs in order to get them booted so their house scripters can get the spot.
I remember a Char named A Llama was a well known house placer so is this the same A Llama

Judging from the post you’re not from Great Lakes and I’ve talked with / ran into A llama multiple times across the shard.  

While there’s not much we can do about the bots other than page, it’s be naive to assume these weren’t bots/or that there are not bots at a castle idoc on one of the more populated shards.

PaladinBob

Lord_Frodo said:

So A Llama reports hidden BOTs running house placement scrips and pages on multi hidden plays.
How do you know there were HIDDEN players running house placement scripts when they are HIDDEN, did you see them.
GM sees a char named A Llama and wonders is this a throw away account that is reporting BOTs in order to get them booted so their house scripters can get the spot.
I remember a Char named A Llama was a well known house placer so is this the same A Llama

Tracking ?

Oreogl

PaladinBob said:

Lord_Frodo said:

So A Llama reports hidden BOTs running house placement scrips and pages on multi hidden plays.
How do you know there were HIDDEN players running house placement scripts when they are HIDDEN, did you see them.
GM sees a char named A Llama and wonders is this a throw away account that is reporting BOTs in order to get them booted so their house scripters can get the spot.
I remember a Char named A Llama was a well known house placer so is this the same A Llama

Tracking ?

I’m assuming he was smart enough to know this.

I assumed he meant how do you know the hidden people were scripting.

I mean 25 years of game experience should tell
us what those are.

PaladinBob

Yah I know. I thought me explaining that were hidden toons with generic names made sense. To me that's a scripting red flag

Oreogl

PaladinBob said:

Yah I know. I thought me explaining that were hidden toons with generic names made sense. To me that's a scripting red flag

Yeah, generally it is.  I completely missed that idoc too, what a shame.  Died a couple times at the fel yew one though.  Good times.

PaladinBob

Our job to report shady behavior. And theirs to investigate it right ? 

Oreogl

PaladinBob said:

Our job to report shady behavior. And theirs to investigate it right ? 

That’s how it supposed to go.

However after this long, I don’t expect it to do
much.  This late in the game and we are still having to have this conversation about scripting and bots. 

Riner

To be honest I think the biggest problem with all this is that instead of investigating in any way, the GM decided it was appropriate to threaten the person who made the report. How does this improve the game? How does this encourage other players to report things when they witness something which may be illegal? It’s not the role of the player to prove that the person is acting against the terms of service, rather if they suspect something we have been told report it and the GMs will investigate. This just demonstrates how little support we are getting. 

Grimbeard

While the gm could have asked why so many I'd hardly consider this threatening the player 

Oreogl

Grimbeard said:

While the gm could have asked why so many I'd hardly consider this threatening the player 

I mean, threatening to action an account is about as threatening as they can get.  Poor way to address this, instead of coming to investigate.

Pawain

You will never know if they investigated.

They probably checked on the first group that were paged on, they all answered the GM, so why do they need to continue, most of the ones paged on were probably the same account owners.

Oreogl

Pawain said:

You will never know if they investigated.

They probably checked on the first group that were paged on, they all answered the GM, so why do they need to continue, most of the ones paged on were probably the same account owners.

I don’t think this entirely true.  Sometimes they show up, or even provide the canned we will look into this response.  Maybe they sent the canned response first and then sent that?  No idea.  

Pawain

They only show themselves if you have a game issue that they need to talk to you about.
They can fix some issues if you are offline, you will get an in game message that you have to close when this is done.
They do not tell you the results of an investigation involving another player in any way.

Like they say in the Email they send you:
Thank you for your violation report, ticket number 936XXX8.

We will investigate the account you have reported and we will take action if warranted; this will take some time, so please be patient. Please understand that you will not be contacted with the results of our investigation, or any actions taken as a result of said investigation, due to our Privacy Policy.

Thank you for your vigilance and dedication to keeping Ultima Online a safe and fair environment.

Ultima Online In-game Customer Support

Broadsword Online Games

Lord_Frodo

PaladinBob said:

Yah I know. I thought me explaining that were hidden toons with generic names made sense. To me that's a scripting red flag

And you do not think A Llama is a generic to a GM.  I am looking at it from the GM side of it also.  Is A Llama a paid account?  A Llama used to be one of those IDOC Scripting accounts so I am sure if the GM has been here for awhile he/she may remember that also.

PaladinBob

Paid account. 1 toon of 5 on that account. Look I was paging from what I thought was something shady going on as I'm the unfortunate person who thinks the game could be great if there wasn't cheats out there. Might be to little to late 

Lord_Frodo

PaladinBob said:

Paid account. 1 toon of 5 on that account. Look I was paging from what I thought was something shady going on as I'm the unfortunate person who thinks the game could be great if there wasn't cheats out there. Might be to little to late 

I totally agree and wish that all players were honest and did not cheat, kind of funny when you think about it the I don't really know what to call it but when you have to cheat at a video game it is perty pathetic when you think about it.  Sure I would love to use some of the other stuff for the quality of life aspects of it just so I didn't need to use as many keystrokes to do things out in the field but I can't bring myself to doing it so I limit my playtime accordingly.

Acid_Rain

PaladinBob said:

...as I'm one of the unfortunate persons who thinks the game could be great if there wasn't cheats out there. 

Edited ur comment for inclusion of a handful of others that agree, like myself.