Bots are a plague that overrun pretty much every free-to-play MMO, especially one as grindy as Throne And Liberty. While Amazon and NCSoft have made moves to severely punish those who engage with RMT (real money transfers) for the in-game premium currency, there are still bots roaming the land in T&L, grinding mobs for longer than any human could possibly stomach. It’s a problem for sure, but the bots have now found their way into a much more important and frustrating part of Throne And Liberty: the dungeons.
A couple of weeks ago, NCSoft introduced a new way to earn Salvation Tokens – an important crafting currency needed to get your hands on good loot from dungeon chests – by completing dungeons via random matchmaking. This is mostly to encourage people to run different dungeons rather than just running the same one over and over, and to generally reward players who like to grind.
While this is a good idea on paper, the botters have managed to get their little minions into the random matchmaking – probably in the hopes that whoever they’ve matched with doesn’t realise they’re playing with a bot.
The Bots Get Smarter
Funnily enough, though, it’s pretty easy to recognise a bot. They’re bad at the game, have terrible weapons, and use weird weapon combinations. It used to be that their names would be a giveaway – just a random string of letters and numbers – but it seems like one group of botters have started calling their bots names that might pass as real. There was even a stage last week when all the bots had real names, like DwightJohnson or SamSmith. The bots come in waves, with Amazon likely banning thousands of accounts at a time.
It feels like a bit of an unwinnable war, however, and when it comes to random dungeon matchmaking, the process is already frustrating enough without having to kick multiple bots before completing a run. Players tend to cancel when it’s a dungeon they don’t feel like running, something like Butcher’s Canyon or Cursed Wasteland, because these dungeons require a level of coordination that can sometimes be hard to hit with randoms. That means queueing for a random dungeon can sometimes take several minutes, with a menu that pops up and closes repeatedly in the middle of your screen.
NCSoft will make changes to the random dungeon matchmaking system that will punish those who cancel during matchmaking – perhaps by inflicting a short cooldown penalty before they can queue again – but this won’t address the botting problem. I’ve talked before about the various methods that could be used to prevent bots, such as two-factor authentication, but these are probably viewed as barriers to entry for new players rather than doing anything to prevent the tide of bots in the game.
With the release of the next tier of dungeons on their way, it might be that we see the botting problem decrease. These dungeons require a higher gear score and will likely only be run with coordinated groups. However, I still feel bad for any new players jumping into the game only to be paired with bots in their first dungeons. Amazon needs to address this problem now before it becomes too demoralizing for newcomers.
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