A Controversial Post

Good afternoon all,

This post may go against the grain a little, but as a player who is currently banned for the use of a bot, I would like to thank BigPoint for taking action.

As a disclaimer this is not a plea, a sarcastic sly jab or an attempt to reduce my ban. I have been banned for a completely valid reason and there is no reason this should be reduced.

Some of you may have seen, and some may not, that I have requested this action of temporarily banning bots to deter the use without losing the majority of the game (and therefore income) for quite some time, fully knowing the consequence it would have for me. I would rather be able to compete with other players without having to use a bot at all than be forced to use one (and benefit greatly myself admittedly) to stay relevant with the majority of the server. The mindset of myself and I am sure many other players in the same situation is that we bot/botted because so many others did, no action was taken, and so it seemed an unethical albeit easy way to keep up with the rest of the players. It's a snowball effect essentially and I tip my hat to those that have had the will power and faith to stay clean and protest the epidemic we created.

But where am I going with this? Well I thought this would be a good time to address to BigPoint some reasons why we botters have done this and ways that BigPoint can work to deter the use of these programs in the future.

BigPoint, there are two major issues that botting helped players resolve that cannot be feasibly fulfilled otherwise if you do not either have a large amount of money to blow or are young/retired/unemployed etc and have the time to spend 6 hours on this game most days. The first of these are the prices. I appreciate botting never helped anybody gain many Doomhammers which are the main money grabbers, but when you look at the prices of the items players can get for free it becomes apparent. Let's take Pearls for example. 2,250,000 Pearls on a Mega Happy Hour will set a player back £180. Through the use of the most common botting program, this is around 2 years of use for the same price. If a player were to spent this time in the Commonwealth Raid for example then, making lets say 1,500,000 profit per day as a strong player could easily do this works out as a total of 1,095,000,000 Pearls. This is 486x the value of buying the pearls outright. When the prices are that steep for items you can get for free, I hope you understand why many players have chosen the way we did.

Time is another factor here that personally was the main reason for me. In this game now there are too many updates you need to keep on top of. Just from my current memory this includes: Pet Trainers, Scroll HPs, Scroll Damages, Queen's Legacy, Premium, Voodoo Deck, Buffs, League Rankings, Daily quests for levels, events and reputation (e.g Vovoi), Voodoo Priest and Commonwealth Officers. This is a lot of work for any player to keep on top of and seeing that a huge amount of this needs to be done on a daily basis, it requires a lot of time. Now to keep the time down a lot of players (basically everybody) use pearl ammunition to complete this apart from scrolls, which starts to add up and you could well be looking at 1-2m pearls worth of ammo every month just to keep up with this. Now to add into this that players require to farm for pearls and crowns that also takes a lot of time, this doesn't leave much time for fighting, the main focus of the game. Therefore some of you may understand why the use of bots that could fulfil all of these roles 24/7 became a very common resolution. They allowed us to play the only part of the game that is truly fun, fighting, without the constant hassle of the daily grind. A game shouldn't be so demanding that a player working the 9 to 5 can't hop on now and then and have fun like you can in almost any other game.

I don't think its fair to place the blame solely on BigPoint here as it was of course the choice of the palyers to create and use the programs knowingly against the Terms & Conditions of the game, however I do think BigPoint have never addressed the issue well. It has been about 6 years since botting started to increase heavily and that is partially due to BigPoint's lack of concern for the bots until it had blown out of proportion. This also ties in to a variety of questionable updates BigPoint have released that glorify those that use said programs. Major examples of this would be the League system as well as the Cauldron of Aruba update that made throwing pearls into the Cauldron profitable from the scrolls you received.

Although I accept we players that have wronged are currently removed from the game for the right reasons, I do think this is the time for BigPoint to co-operate here. It is important for BigPoint to understand how their actions have helped the botting community to strive and it is time we worked together to provide feedback as to ways BigPoint could reduce the benefit of bots, therefore removing players desire to use them. Only one botting program was targetted recently and although that has caught a large number of players, it is still only a scratch in the surface. Players will continue to develop new programs and new methods to do this until BigPoint find a way to remove the benefit, not just punish the players.

Please comment below with your suggestions as to what BigPoint could do to reduce the benefit of bots, as opposed to trying to fight an uphill battle against and ever evolving group of programmers.

My Suggestions:
- Reduce the presence of time-based buffs.
- Don't let players profit from throwing pearls in the cauldron. Reduce the scroll parts you receive.

Thanks,

~Des

 

an option should be bought in to fast fullward scrolls essentially well still gaining the reward only you dont make profit for example a cancer to hollow takes around 4 hours what if there was an option to auto complete for 150k pearls no profit but still the chance of cancer hull queens legacy and cannon damage or an option where you could go in x10 speed while doing the scroll, another idea would be to bring into the client an option to do scrolls while afk many games have an auto play for things that are really time consuming for bigpoint i know they would want to include a price so my idea would be £40 for 6 months and you can go afk in scrolls however i know this wouldnt happen the best option they could bring out is an auto complete for pearls or maybe a small amount of crowns

 

Scrolls are definitely the most botted aspect of the game. I think rather than bring out what are essentially alternatives to botting as you've suggested, I think BigPoint need to just target heavily abused areas of the game, find out why they are botted, and use that research to come to decisions as to what to change.

One example would be scrolls definitely. So why do players bot scrolls? I would say for the League ranking where they are rewarded with extra damage buffs for botting the most, EP ranks and rare Gold badges awarded for EP/ELP that is received through scrolls (essentially glorifying the bots further), and reducing the number of scrolls received for the pearls you throw in. This would give players less scrolls to bot, and less incentive to bot them as they would only be benefitting on the slight pearl gain. The gain is not much. 1m pearls in, probably 1.2m back and it would take the best part of a week to do those scrolls so 200k profit a week is nothing to write home about. The point is that the profit means that it IS sustainable long-term, but most of the reasoning comes from the EP and Scroll HPs.

Perhaps removing ELP gained whilst in scrolls. This would even out the league and remove all the scroll botters. Another attractive aspect is that nobody can interfere. If you sat in 1 maps you could pop in and out and nobody would touch you, although now its become PvP I expect this to change. I know a lot of players that don't want to any more because they're scared of being chained between scrolls and made public.

Small steps!

~Des

 

The ban should have been permanent as I do not want to see u on the water or form...

 

I appreciate the thoughts you may have here and I can totally understand any player wanting botters to be permanently banned.

The issue with doing this is that banning the botters would negatively effect the game for all remaining players. By banning the players permanently (this would equate to around 75% of the game), you'll be lose 3/4 ships from the water. There will be no game left for those that remain. Major guilds would struggle to get 5 players online at a time as they'd only have a handful of players left. This would also mean that those left over that are legitimate would have to make up for the drop in revenue. Botters still spend large amount of money on this game. Gems, Cannons, all sorts of packs that come out... You remaining players would have to make up that revenue so that the game could continue to operate meaning that either they would be forced to shut the game down due to insufficient funding or make the average player need to spend 4x as much to make up for having only 1/4 of the players left.

I think once taking the consequences for all players into effect it is clear that this is not an option, and the only way forward is to stop the use of bots, not remove every botter from the game permanently.

~Des

 

Listen Destruction I have been a police officer almost all my working days..i am retired...I have heard this type of conversation daily and the crying..has not changed...its not about what you did...you should not even of tried that...in this form bp has given u a title of exceptional talent...someone to look up to for the players....all a big ly..your a cheat....lets face it...we honest players have spent thousands of dollars a year trying to keep up to you cheats...lets face it we are losing....because bp will not ban you permanently....Well if they don,t change..the cheaters can play with each other...lets see how long the game lasts...haha

 

This is pathetic in my mind, many times has Destruction posted silly comments about this game and commented on others posts in this forum when you were a cheat?lol
Wonder is right, you should be banned from forum aswell, your comments or opinions dont matter seeing as you could not handle this game and had to cheat to play it.
Thank you for ll your foolish posts, trying to make yourself sound so intelligent in this forum.
Cheaters are simple-minded people who couldnt play the game without cheating!!!!
Good Riddance to you, you have heled ruin what was once a great game.

My suggestions:
-Dont cheat!!!
-if u cant handle the game, find a new one lol

 

i agree with wonder.all us honest players put in time into the game unlike people with the use of bots.the bot system will never be out of the game permenantly.due to if one bot system goes down they make new ones.its a program and all programs can be redone.but i do agree if u play the game.play it.dont use bots.i have no sympathy for those banned.yes it may get rid of 3/4 of the game but guess what bots dont fight for the most part.so we need active players not bot players

 

BP Better not change pearls for mojo, the current rate of getting scrolls is fine. It's one of the good things about playing in 2018, that throwing pearls is profitable. Now that glitters are scarce, removing pearls for mojo would absolutely kill small boats. As if this update wasn't bad enough for them.

Ban bots permanetly and keep the scrolls the way they are.

And if BP really want people to stop botting FIX PvP. The PvP in this game is so bad it's not even funny anymore. PvP has been totally screwed up within the period of 2014-2018...

 

Don't use bots . . seems a simple enough rule for everyone to follow. If caught using bots, you lose the right to play the game . . seems a simple enough punishment.
While there are things BP can do to make botting or script use less attractive, the punishment is quite clear, you cheated . . so, if fact you lost the right to put input into a project that might have benefited both BP and players.

 

Hi Wonder. You seem to be stressing a lot on the point of trying to "uncover" some true secret about what I've said. I've said very openly in there about what I have done and if you took the time to read the very first point I made you would see that I very openly say that I agree with the bans despite being a player that has been banned myself.

Of course, banning every botter would solve the cheat problem, I am not denying that. The point I was making in the response was that by doing that it wouldnt be like the problems were over. The fact remains undenyably that this would however cause other issues. You may be a police officer and I respect that. I work for a UK bank within a team specialising in business growth. This involves a lot of analysis on markets and tayloring business strategies to individual firms. However it doesn't take that level of knowledge to do the simple maths that if you remove the majority of your customers, you can expect to lose a similar portion of your income. That income needs to come from somewhere to sustain the game. That is income that the business needs for wages for the developers, maintenance costs, advertising, all sorts of expenses. If its got to come from somewhere, its going to be the remaining players.

I don't know you myself. You may be a big fighter in this game, you may be a smaller player that enjoys doing his own thing. I don't know that so I can't relate to how this would effect your own play style but I am sure many players would not want to see prices fly up by the amount they would have to to sustain this game should every cheater be banned.

I respect greatly that you seem to be a legitimate player, but this post isnt about me trying to cover any tracks, I am being open and honest and putting myself on the line here admitting to the rules I have broken publicly and potentially jeopardising both my account and my reputation in the process in an attempt to find a way that we can resolve the issues and reduce/mitigate the botting problem whilst not losing the majority of the few players this game still has.

One final point I will add, and I mean this in no disrespect, is regarding the "thousands a year" you spend to keep up with us. The difference between the money spent by a legitimate player and a cheater is much less than you may expect. Through cheats there is no way (that I have ever heard of at least) of getting anything other than free items for free. Okay there are slight exceptions like 15 Firestorm cannons for an event ranking for example, but the majority of what is gained freely is pearls, EP and ELP. Pearls nobody should need to buy regardless of their affiliation with cheaters, and EP and ELP are completely irrelevant to gameplay aside from visual effects and levelling up, which does not take much EP in the first place. League, yes, I totally agree with that, but cannons, gems, all the "payment items" still need buying.

Yes, I have posted many comments on the subject in this forum, and I still stand by all of them. I would have to be even more of a fool than you say to come here and expect people to respect me just because I've admitted to this. Banning me from the forum would not achieve anything as the quality and content of my forum posts are mutually exclusive from my actions on the water. I have not broken the forum rules.

Your suggestions are simple yes, and by players "not cheating" that would fix the problem, however its not that simple to fix an issue this big. Yes, I am/was a part of the issue, albeit just a drop in the ocean, but me coming forward about this is to try and bring this game back to one we can all enjoy. I have addressed a few sinmilar points to Wonder above, so if you would like to read that it should answer the other points you have made. We can either argue about the same things that are mentioned every day in the forum, or we can work constructively to find a way to help this game recover without making rash decisions that would leave negative consequences for the legitimate players who don't deserve them.

Yes, you put time and money into the game. Time is something I agree the botters do not spend much of at all, however money.. that is not strictly true. I personally know a player that spent upwards of £5000 towards acheiving a gold badge and they botted every moment of it. The vast majority of players I know that have spent thousands getting themselves to full Level 4 Doomhammer bot every day. I'm not trying to say that's okay, I'm just trying to show how the sterotype of botters not spending money is false for the most part, as many just look at the small boats shiny botting and base their assumptions from that.

You are not alone in saying "if you play the game play it, don't use bots" and you would be surprised how many of the botters themselves, just like me, agree with how bots are immoral. I will explain a little more as to why I used a bot for a long time. I work a 9-5 job, and have around 2-3 hours each evening free to do as I wish. If i wanted to keep my boat at a competitive level I would have to be playing all that time which would not be healthy or fun. What this would then mean though is if I did not play then my account would get quickly outdated and I would not be able to log in once or twice a week and just enjoy fights as I would not be able to compete with the other players. I am not trying to say that what I did is therefore acceptable, but more stressing the point that the game shouldn't be like this in the first place. There shouldn't be 10+ hours of farming needed every week just to stay relevant. I would much prefer that these issues that cause players like me to play like this were addressed so that we're not in a position where we need to use bots to still enjoy the fights we play for.

Thanks all, I'm sorry if this has offended people. My intentions are not to benefit myself through this post as there is no way really that I would achieve that, but more to help the game by composing some constructive criticism that the developers can then take away.

Thanks,

~Des

 

Here again....All that above is just smoke...I have not heard what I would like to hear from you(no will not tell you} and please no more smoke....Be honest and no crying...one part you did not address...What will the game be like with cheaters vs cheaters , no honest players to pay the bill and how long will the games last..

 

Hi Bill,

As I said to the others, simply saying "Dont use bots" doesn't help anybody as it's not going to change anything. With all due respect, as a player who has used these programs for a long time I have good knowledge of why players do it, what they actually achieve and what could be done to deter the use. You say I do not have the right to input into my own project which I find ammusing, although it's not important where the ideas come from, what matters is that they work.

Des

 

lmao so many players whining about bots and most people who are whining about bots are noobs who don't use money in game and spend their time in bonus or whining about bots who would want to waste time in bonus when bot could do bonus and you could go fight or do anything u want and they banned only some botters and some are botting now 24/7 and i think most people who were banned will just start botting again when bans end so bigpoint only lost money by banning botters

 

Hi there Wonder,

I can guess what you are hoping to hear, and so I apologise for my actions and the effect they have had on the game, and I am sorry I had not said that earlier. What I have written is not smoke. It is my honest feelings. You here calling me out and trying to argue with what I'm saying isn't benefitting anyone, if anything you are just trying to silence somebody trying to help the cause. I appreciate that is not your intent, but the argument is not benefitting anybody. What will the gam be like as cheaters vs cheaters? It would be awful I agree, but as I've said, although banning all the cheaters would fix this, it wouldnt leave enough players behind to keep the game stable financially.

I would genuinely like to help, hence why I created this forum post. If you don't believe me then you don't believe me. If you'd like to come to Teamspeak at some point and we can have a more in-depth conversation about it then you are more than welcome to

Des

 

Thank you for seeing this point. Just banning them doesnt make them do it any less. People create baby ships, they buy ships, they do all sorts. All a ban would do is bring the population of the game down considerably. Yes these would be fair players, but these players would then have to pay god knows how much as BigPoint would need to raise prices drastically to make up for the money they lost.

Des

 

not wanting 2 say much but i never expected such a thing from you
i always enjoyed your posts and was always looking up your post for info on getting stronger sinds i am a free player
not nice to know u was a cheat but i will not jugde,u get ban and i think u deserved it well
hope when u return u learned your lesson
best regards Sjahnice

 

Hi Sjahnice,

I totally understand your views. I know there are many people that this has surprised, and there are many people on UK server who have known for a long time seeing as I was hardly subtle about it. I hadn't admitted to it in the forums because that's just asking for a ban, but now I've been banned I'm more open to sharing my experiences, seeing as it is alrerady out in the open. You are totally right that I deserved it, and anybody that has been banned and tries to say they didn't deserve it are wrong.

Des

 

all i can say to all of this is although its against the rules and its not at all right the botters still do pay money into the game i know that bigpoint will see after this month that the amount of money they made compared to usual will drop around 60% now imagine permanently banning the botters they would just recall payments now imagine all honest players if des recalls £5000+ thats a huge dent in bigpoints balance now imagine if 60% of the players did that bigpoint would have to close the server because there would be hundreds if not millions recalled then seafight is no more

 

Hi there,

Thank you for seeing the point I am trying to make. Banning the cheats is an option, but those players make up a huge part of this games income. This £5000 was an extreme case but yeah, not only will BigPoint will lose turnover but there will be players who go straight to PayPal and request their money back. Then who's left to make up the difference? The players saying to ban the cheats permanently.

Des