PLEASE, change the starter town goblins' loot tables before the start of EE!

[Kero]

I'm not an experienced MMO-gamer and maybe this is old news to most of you here, but I found something quite disconcerting, and frankly somewhat economy-breaking, yesterday.

Namely, auto-farming the starter-town goblins. I have no experience whatsoever in programming macros, but I got a gaming mouse for christmas that came with a simple way to program its buttons to send repetitive keyboard commands to the computer.

So I tried this out yesterday, made a brand-new character, equipped him with the free shortbow (and a little later a dropped pot-steel plate armor) marched him near a few starter town goblins and set the mouse to spam basic attacks. With the goblins aggroing on me (and thereby becoming auto-targeted by me), I could basically kill one after the other everytime they respawned. This was so effective that I decided to let this run while I was afk and went to work. About 12 hours later I've just returned and found my guy has managed to kill around 1800(!) goblins before being disconnected (by my internet provider, which does that once per day around 4am; I was working the night shift).

Amongst the loot is, besides a whole lot of starter gear, some stuff that could have actual economical value that imho should not be THAT easy to get (and that would harm the budding economy if they were to remain this easy to get):

- almost 2000 copper pieces
- around 40 recipes (Tier 1 only)
- a few spells/maneuvers
- around 10-25 of each of the goblinoid bag of xyz stuff.
- about 40 each of goblin armor scraps and broken weapons

If this stuff is available more or less effortlessly, I can see the economy having real trouble getting off the ground. Where is the incentive to try to EARN copper, if you can get this much automatically? Hunt for recipes or stock:green - no thanks, there's enough for everyone here...

The game certainly didn't seem to have a way to detect and/or prevent this automated goblin-farming and I don't know if this behaviour is frowned upon (I would assume so). But as long as this is not prevented, I'm sure that people will do this. And I can only imagine what someone with actual knowledge how to write macros could do, this took a complete newbie about 5 mins to set up and less than half an hour to optimize. The only way to stop my guy from doing this atm would actually be to kill him and take the rep-hit while I was afk.

What could be done to prevent this?
- Some form of detection/prevention of automated / "bot" characters
- require manual looting of goblin corpes instead of auto-loot
- slow the re-spawn rate or have more random respawn locations for the starter goblins.

All these would work, but are likely somewhat difficult to introduce on such a short notice.

The easiest and most efficient way imho would be to simply remove everything that could have actual value (i.e. copper, spells, salvageable resources) from the starter town goblin's loot tables. Leave them with only starter gear (and maybe recipes of below level 3, sort of "crafter's starting gear"); if people want better loot, they need to be active and go outside to kill stuff. And I'd strongly recommend to do this before the start of EE, once the loot (and the recipes in particular) are out there, it'll be difficult to repair, imho.

[<Kabal> Kradlum]

I have mentioned this before. The best place to farm low level recipes is newbie goblins.

They definitely need to fix the loot table so that they drop only starter gear.

[Kero]

I've manually slaughtered quite a few starter town goblins, too. And I wasn't really too concerned about the loot they dropped breaking the economy. If I had to grind for 12 hours to get the above loot, I'd probably find something better to do quickly. But due to the fact that they
- are relatively easy to kill
- respawn very quickly
- always respawn in exactly the same place
- unlike escalation encounters even respawn when within sight
automated farming becomes a real issue. If I run this little scheme everytime I'm afk for work or doing something else, AND can then return to play what I actually enjoy doing, I'll get rich too easy (unless everyone else is doing it, in which case everything looted here looses all value quickly, which imho will be bad for the economy). And from the distribution of the goblins around the starter towns, there's probably room for 12-15 people running this around the clock per starter town.

There's all the rare stuff, i.e. green, weak adhesive, beast pelts and copper basically available for free in unlimited quantities here. That cannot be intentional or good for the game.

I'm definitely hoping for them to change the loot tables before starting EE. This is just way too easy to exploit.

[Thod]

Kero

Thanks for bringing this up. I think this poses a dilemma where there isn't any golden bullet solution

The starter goblins have been introduced to help new players and the loot should be interesting enough to make it worthwhile. Off course this allows to use it in excess.

So lets look at it from different angles:

I can see at least 3 other solutions to this problem apart of taking out the nerf hammer

1) Follow the game as intended

Terms of Service wrote:

Dont cheat.

If you find some condition, combination of actions, location, or feature that is broken or provides you an advantage you should not have due to a bug, don't do that thing. Report it.

As I said - thanks for reporting as this is what you should do. Others copying this behaviour could be regarded as breaking terms of service with whatever follows and GW would be in the right to stop that.

2) Is the macro IA really good enough?

How do you avoid hitting other players?

Is your macro 'save' enough to ensure you never attack other players? Right now it might not be an issue with low populations. But if your macro can't distinguish goblins from other players close by then this will make a stop to it sooner rather then later.

It seems to have worked for several hours - but as I said - it might not work any more as soon as it is busy after EE

3) The community

The community won't look kindly on such behavior. For a starter - knowing that someone in my settlement would do that would lead me to ban him from my settlement.
And then there are options to stop it. Again - how foolsave is the AI of the macro. I can always walk close - hit you once - and then let me get killed. Do this a few times and it might be you who will end up with -7500 rep.
If that doesn't work I'm sure there are other ways to stop it - worst as you said - take a rep hit to get it stopped.

In summary:

1) THANKS for reporting it. There is no way that GW can have closed all loopholes. The behaviour of you makes this game better
2) I think there are enough options to stop such behaviour in the game right now.

As community we need to look out for such behaviour early on. Now is the time with EE starting that we set a moral standard what is/isn't acceptable in game in the name of optimization.
I won't be foolproof, there will be players looking for an advantage. But as community we can try to minimize it and not cheer it on / copy it / perfect it.

[psyphey]

It doesn't take a bot for it to be very efficient early-game. I also don't see any reason for them to be so efficient, just for starting quests such numbers/respawns/loot tables is an overkill. Imho simply lowering their numbers and scattering spawns would solve the problem.

[Thod]

psyphey wrote:

It doesn't take a bot for it to be very efficient early-game. I also don't see any reason for them to be so efficient, just for starting quests such numbers/respawns/loot tables is an overkill. Imho simply lowering their numbers and scattering spawns would solve the problem.

Agreed - dialing down the respawn numbers is another options

[Kero]

Let me start by saying that I'm posting this here because I think this exploit harms the game and I have no intention of using it. I more or less stumbled on it playing around with my new toy in alpha, and was shocked by its effectiveness. If I had planned on using this in game, I'd probably have kept it to myself. Just to clarify :).

Thod wrote:

1) Follow the game as intended

Terms of Service wrote:

Dont cheat.

If you find some condition, combination of actions, location, or feature that is broken or provides you an advantage you should not have due to a bug, don't do that thing. Report it.

As I said - thanks for reporting as this is what you should do. Others copying this behaviour could be regarded as breaking terms of service with whatever follows and GW would be in the right to stop that.

While I basically agree, technically, this isn't exploiting a bug. How much automatisation constitutes cheating is probably up for debate, but if I were to just stand there and manually spam basic attacks, is that cheating, too? It's exploiting a deliberate design choice in the starter town goblins, not something "due to a bug" as the ToS stipulate.

Thod wrote:

2) Is the macro IA really good enough?

How do you avoid hitting other players?

Is your macro 'save' enough to ensure you never attack other players? Right now it might not be an issue with low populations. But if your macro can't distinguish goblins from other players close by then this will make a stop to it sooner rather then later.

It seems to have worked for several hours - but as I said - it might not work any more as soon as it is busy after EE

As I said, it's a very basic macro, think of it as more of a proof-of-concept. It could certainly be much improved by people with more than a few minutes of experience in these things, but even the basic form is bad enough to warrant an intervention imho. Basically, it would originally just spam '1' (i.e. basic attack) several times per second. Goblins take about 3-4 hits from this to die. Two problems appeared after a while (both of those due to minor bugs in the game, I think), which led to the inclusion of the occasional '4' (i.e. basic exploit) and an 'Esc' (i.e. drop target) every 5 seconds or so. It doesn't actually actively target anything, it depends entirely on being attacked by the goblins first and on the game auto-targeting your attacker if you don't have a current target. Players just passing by should not seriously interupt the process (other than luring the occasional goblin away), only players attacking me, and even then, they'd have to do this repeatedly due to the included "drop target". I'm not sure if I'd take a rep hit for killing someone who attacked me first, but if that were so, it wouldn't feel right, irrespective of this particular situation.

Thod wrote:

3) The community

The community won't look kindly on such behavior. For a starter - knowing that someone in my settlement would do that would lead me to ban him from my settlement.
And then there are options to stop it. Again - how foolsave is the AI of the macro. I can always walk close - hit you once - and then let me get killed. Do this a few times and it might be you who will end up with -7500 rep.
If that doesn't work I'm sure there are other ways to stop it - worst as you said - take a rep hit to get it stopped.

Again, I'm not sure about the rep loss for killing someone (basically, in self-defense) who attacked me first, but if that's the case, it's a bad design choice imho and should be changed. Other than someone attacking me first, while I have no target, this macro could not cause an attack on another player, and even then would drop that player as a target after no more than 5 seconds.

My own group TEO would (I think) disapprove of players using such an exploit as well, but I doubt everyone does. And would you refuse a recipe for those much-needed Basic Strips +2 or Steel Plates +2 if the market is flooded with cheap recipes? Sure, the community could keep killing everyone killing loads of goblins while standing still (again, there's room for about a dozen people exploiting this simultaneously per settlement...). But it only takes a newly-made character without noticable expenditure of XP to do this. You might not even know that it's my alt who's secretly feeding the recipes to me when noone's around.

I don't think this is something the communitiy can effectively counter. I say, remove the valuable stuff from the starter goblins. That way, they're still useful for newbies to get starter gear from but not worthy as the target of an exploit.

[Kero]

Thod wrote:

Agreed - dialing down the respawn numbers is another option

Another one would be ammo consumption for ranged attacks. Relying on melee weapons would make this a bit more difficult and a lot less effective.

Still, all other solutions seem to be more difficult to program in the one day remaining before EE launch than merely changing a few numbers to 0 in the loot tables of starter goblins.

If it were up to me, in about two weeks or so, I'd probably completely remove the starter goblins and allow the player economy to provide the neccessary starter gear for any newcomers.

[Thod]

@Kero

I brought up the 'Cheating' part of the terms of service as this is the part GW could use. It isn't up to you but to GW to interpret it. I was banned from a game once where I felt I was an innocent victim. You agree yourself it is a feature that is broken (if used automatically).

The other aspects I would have to check - for example about who gets the reputation loss.

But that brings up something else that occured to me. Will the macro carry on once you get killed? Because you will spawn inside the next settlement and then start attacking Thornguards - and we know how that will turn out.

I just don't want to have this banned for starter players killing some (10-20) goblins. Farming them will be an issue I agree.

But I would only like to see the nuclear option as a last resort.

[Takasi]

I say don't change ANYTHING before EE.

The last change to gathering tables wasn't fixed for weeks.

It's been working for Alpha like this for months. Even if you could harvest every possible Tier 1 recipe outside of town and get all of your achievements a few days into the game, so what?

Let them fix it later, and preferably after some type of test server is setup where players can check these types of changes.

[<kabal> Bunibuni]

Well, I don't know how to set up such a macro and probably wouldn't be interested in it if I could set it up. I'm going to farm starter goblins until I get bored and then I'm going to go out into the world and explore and start working on supporting my village [Join Stoneroot Glade Village - all the cool companies do!]

If it floats your boat to do something like that and you somehow find enjoyment in not actually playing the game but automatically farm, that's fine for you. You get bored with all those low level recipes, sell them, I might buy them if you go to a town where I would look for them but you have to go to someplace to sell them. And just because you have gotten all that copper, what do you do with it if no one has bothered to go out into the world to gather stuff and then actually make stuff?

And ammo consumption will be part of the game eventually. So farming for hours and hours and hours automatically won't work unless you have so many arrows that you can barely move. And who made those arrows?

And what was your encumbrance like after you did your auto-farming, Kero? All that armor you picked up must have really added to your encumbrance.

[Kero]

Thod wrote:

But that brings up something else that occured to me. Will the macro carry on once you get killed? Because you will spawn inside the next settlement and then start attacking Thornguards - and we know how that will turn out.

It will carry on. All it does is repeatedly send a few key strokes, with no feedback from the game, whatsoever, going into it. Since it doesn't actively target anyone, it would only attack Thornguards if attacked by them first, however, and if that were to ever happen, it won't matter much, anyway..

<kabal> Bunibuni wrote:

And what was your encumbrance like after you did your auto-farming, Kero? All that armor you picked up must have really added to your encumbrance.

Yes, waaaaaay over-encumbered. But the entire farming was done at range while standing still. In the end (after being either killed by the goblins after losing connection or after reconnecting and being killed by the goblins in the process) I was teleported to the shrine, where an alt e.g. could have just aproached to trade whatever I wanted to keep and trash the rest. Or even just trash all the relatively worthless armor, etc. and just keep as many of the recipes, coins and resources as possible to slowly slide to the bank.

<kabal> Bunibuni wrote:

If it floats your boat to do something like that and you somehow find enjoyment in not actually playing the game but automatically farm, that's fine for you. You get bored with all those low level recipes, sell them, I might buy them if you go to a town where I would look for them but you have to go to someplace to sell them. And just because you have gotten all that copper, what do you do with it if no one has bothered to go out into the world to gather stuff and then actually make stuff?

Where you got the impression that this somehow "floats my boat", I don't know. It doesn't, in fact I rather worry that it'll sink the game economy and my boat with it. Some of these resources and coins are meant to be rare, the economy somewhat depends on that scarcity to encourage lively trade. That won't work at all, if they are readily available because they can be easily farmed. Because if they can be, people will do it. It won't be me, but I'm probably not the only one who can figure something like this out. And like you, until yesterday I also had no clue how to program a macro - apparently, it's not that hard...

Just as an aside, this auto-farming could be done in addition to playing, not instead of playing.

[Takasi]

Kero I think the tone of this post is a bit alarmist.

This has been a known option for months now. Tier 1 recipes are not that 'rare' or valuable. Let the economy grow during EE.

What people need are characters with XP to buy the crafting skills to use the recipes. The actual rare items are the gathered materials you cannot farm off the starter goblins.

And yeah if I see someone standing in one spot in one of the four starter areas farming goblins I will personally kill them and their macro will autotarget the Thornguards and ruin their character permanently. Isn't that an acceptable safeguard?

When EE starts I think there's won't be ENOUGH starter goblins. If anything I'd like to see them in player made settlements too.

[Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co.]

I did this all through Alpha, and I fully intend to do it as much as possible into EE as well.

Why? Because killing 5,000 goblins while "playing" is really boring.

Which is why I find this assertion pretty bizarre:

"somehow find enjoyment in not actually playing the game but automatically farm, that's fine for you."

I am able to enjoy more of a proportion of my playing time in game when I have to do less things that aren't enjoyable.

The real solution to this "problem", is to not create inherent conditions that require or subtly coerce players into doing things that aren't fun.

[Takasi]

Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co. wrote:

The real solution to this "problem", is to not create inherent conditions that require or subtly coerce players into doing things that aren't fun.

I find the loot collection RNG fun. Skinner box slot machine fun, but fun nonetheless. The question here is whether starter goblin loot is 'economy breaking'. I don't think it's worth that much.

[Takasi]

Also I'm sure Haagen and Atheory will be fighting each other over those starter goblins.

[Urman]

Takasi wrote:

And yeah if I see someone standing in one spot in one of the four starter areas farming goblins I will personally kill them and their macro will autotarget the Thornguards and ruin their character permanently. Isn't that an acceptable safeguard?

The way he explained the macro set-up, the character doesn't choose targets and attack them. It autotargets whatever attacks it - and the Thornguards won't attack him unless he's super low rep.

It would be curious to see though - I think you might be able to atttack it once, then set out of range until you are no longer a flagged attacker. Then step back into range and let him kill you for rep loss. But he's got an [ESC] in the sequence - so he might not remember targets for 2 minutes.

[Takasi]

Urman wrote:

The way he explained the macro set-up, the character doesn't choose targets and attack them. It autotargets whatever attacks it - and the Thornguards won't attack him unless he's super low rep.

Another 'sandbox' player driven solution: Just cast something with knockback on him until he's out of range of the goblin's aggro.

[Junior Halfling]

Alternatively, now that we're used to encumbrance, there could be a limit to how much stuff you acquire while looting; after you've reached that limit, nothing more could be added to your inventory. Then your macro would either have to sort your inventory and drop stuff or periodically drive you to the bank and back (before you're rooted).

I agree that GW can't fix all of these holes but, like Kero, I hope there is something easy they can do with this one. And I'm super happy that Kero brought it up and that our community sees it for an exploit.

Looking forward to tomorrow!!

[Urman]

Takasi wrote:

Another 'sandbox' player driven solution: Just cast something with knockback on him until he's out of range of the goblin's aggro.

Heh. Now I'm going to have to get an attack with a knockback and go looking for Doc. ;)

[Kero]

Takasi wrote:

Urman wrote:

The way he explained the macro set-up, the character doesn't choose targets and attack them. It autotargets whatever attacks it - and the Thornguards won't attack him unless he's super low rep.

Another 'sandbox' player driven solution: Just cast something with knockback on him until he's out of range of the goblin's aggro.

Knockback is a nice thought, that should work well, disabling this particular farmer until manually repositioned. Someone with far better knowledge of programming macros might be able to counter that, I certainly wouldn't.

[Takasi]

This is also a good opportunity for Goblinworks to test their ban hammers. Get the cheaters out of the game early while they're centrally located, easy to spot and obviously breaking the rules.

[<Kabal> Daeglin]

This is valuable to point out. What is possible to do, will be done. If not for loot then simply the coin by gold sellers. The starter goblins were placed in alpha when people complained it was hard to find 3 goblins to complete the intro quest due to competition/low spawn rates. They don't have to leave them there as loot piñatas.

Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co. wrote:

I did this all through Alpha, and I fully intend to do it as much as possible into EE as well...

lol I wondered about that. I used to watch you and do jumping dances around you sometimes.

[Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co.]

Quote:

"Heh. Now I'm going to have to get an attack with a knockback and go looking for Doc. ;)"

I may have to branch out from Rathglen then! :D

Seriously though. I work from home, I have 3 computers on my desk right here, and will often have a game up and running on one. Often times, I was "afk" farming in PFO while not really *away* from my desk, but just glancing over every 15 minutes or so to make sure my health wasn't too low.

I suppose I can just glance over to look at chat to see if somebody is messing with my char.

What is the solution now?

What if a player is actually farming in the same spot for 4-6 hour stretches, and is not actually "afk"?

Your only recourse then is to trim the loot table for starter goblins of anything useful past a certain level of advancement, or remove them entirely. But consider this, you can remove recipes from goblins and I will still farm them for Goblinoid Armor and Weapon scraps to use in crafting.

[Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co.]

Quote:

"lol I wondered about that. I used to watch you and do jumping dances around you sometimes."

In alpha I mainly did it to try and get recipes so I could try out crafting different armors and to get spells and maneuvers to test out.

[Kero]

Takasi wrote:

Kero I think the tone of this post is a bit alarmist.

This has been a known option for months now. Tier 1 recipes are not that 'rare' or valuable. Let the economy grow during EE.

What people need are characters with XP to buy the crafting skills to use the recipes. The actual rare items are the gathered materials you cannot farm off the starter goblins.

And yeah if I see someone standing in one spot in one of the four starter areas farming goblins I will personally kill them and their macro will autotarget the Thornguards and ruin their character permanently. Isn't that an acceptable safeguard?

When EE starts I think there's won't be ENOUGH starter goblins. If anything I'd like to see them in player made settlements too.

Maybe if it comes across as alarmist, it's because I was unaware of this possibility until very recently, and I was quite alarmed to find out just how effective it is. Tier 1 recipes may not be the rarest things in Alpha now, but think back to the first few weeks of Alpha 8(?), after the last complete wipe. The start of EE will be similar to that, and what's the entire point in having uncommon recipes that need to be obtained first, when you then provide an endless source of these to be auto-farmed?!

The rare T1 resources in alpha have been green, beast pelts, weak adhesive, amongst a few others. Substitutes for these three come from goblin loot. They'll not be the decisive thing in a few months, but at the very start, they (and their uneven distribution and relative scarcity) are of vital importance to developing an economy. If everyone just has access to everything easily, there will be no trade.

That leads us to the next critical issue, coins. These are in the game in order to enable trade other than bartering. That is a good thing. However, if it's easier to get coin-rich by auto-farming goblins than by doing anything that someone is willing to pay for, coins will never be used for trade and the auction houses will remain in their current sorry state. That's 2000 copper coins for about 9 hours of not actually being in the game or even at home! Earning money in your sleep may be a dream for some, but this is pure inflation. It will destroy the use of copper coins as money for the foreseeable future.

The question of Thornguards (not) attacking me has been addressed above.

So if my post sounds alarmist, that may be because there's reason to be alarmed. Doc has already said that he intends to exploit this as much as possible in early EE and there are very likely others, too, who are less open about it. I think this is cause for concern. And since starter town goblins, due to their very special circumstances, are the only mobs that can easily be farmed in that way, they are the ones that need to be modified.

[Takasi]

<Kabal> Daeglin wrote:

This is valuable to point out. What is possible to do, will be done. If not for loot then simply the coin by gold sellers. The starter goblins were placed in alpha when people complained it was hard to find 3 goblins to complete the intro quest due to competition/low spawn rates. They don't have to leave them there as loot piñatas.

The complaint will still be valid, and I don't see them as game breaking.

They haven't been an issue in Alpha.

I'll argue that loot piñatas are useful for stimulating the economy during the beginning of EE. When the auction houses fulfill Ryan's promise that 'everything we need will be for sale' then they should revisit loot drops like this.

Although I'm sure they might have plans to change it anyway, as the guides said that even the loot drops out in the wild are already overinflated compared to their long term plans. I see it as a benefit to early enrollment. We already have to deal with the MINIMUM viable product, at least let us have the basic tier 1 recipes easily accessible for those patient enough to fight over them outside starter settlements.

[Takasi]

Kero wrote:

The rare T1 resources in alpha have been green, beast pelts, weak adhesive, amongst a few others. Substitutes for these three come from goblin loot. They'll not be the decisive thing in a few months, but at the very start, they (and their uneven distribution and relative scarcity) are of vital importance to developing an economy. If everyone just has access to everything easily, there will be no trade.

And I disagree. I think the economy needs goods in people's hands first and removing the starter goblins will only make the economy even weaker.

Flood the market with tier 1 recipes and goods to begin with. As new players join the game this faucet will dry up quickly, and the veterans will be moving on to Tier 2 and 3. I don't think we need to worry too much about the state of the economy during the first few months when the game is going to radically change during that time.

[Kero]

Come to think of it, probably the best way to effectively get rid of someone autofarming like this is to make them respawn while over-encumbered and then (if possible) to somehow get them to attack you at the shrine until their reputation is low enough to be attacked by Thornguards. Those will never forget (unless that has changed?) even if rep eventually recovers, being over-encumbered he can't run away and being continuously in combat with the Thornguards prevents trashing stuff to ease encumberance. Perpetual imprisonment at the shrine.

[<kabal> Bunibuni]

If it floats your boat to do something like that and you somehow find enjoyment in not actually playing the game but automatically farm, that's fine for you. You get bored with all those low level recipes, sell them, I might buy them if you go to a town where I would look for them but you have to go to someplace to sell them. And just because you have gotten all that copper, what do you do with it if no one has bothered to go out into the world to gather stuff and then actually make stuff?
Where you got the impression that this somehow "floats my boat", I don't know. It doesn't, in fact I rather worry that it'll sink the game economy and my boat with it. Some of these resources and coins are meant to be rare, the economy somewhat depends on that scarcity to encourage lively trade. That won't work at all, if they are readily available because they can be easily farmed. Because if they can be, people will do it. It won't be me, but I'm probably not the only one who can figure something like this out. And like you, until yesterday I also had no clue how to program a macro - apparently, it's not that hard...

Sorry, didn't mean you personally. Meant a generic You who wants to do something like that. :-)

[<Kabal> Daeglin]

@Takasi
I worry I will never win an auction if my competitor bidders are auto farming 2000cp every night. This is an age old concern, I'm sure GW has thought about this already and will set a limit to what they decide is appropriate.

@Doc
I feel better now, the other possibility I considered at the time being you just didn't want to talk to me :)

[<kabal> Bunibuni]

Don't forget, ammunition is coming soon as well. After you shot your 5 or 10 or so starter arrows, then what? You are going to have to go out and farm some pine and some iron to make more arrows so you can farm again.

So I think this is a bit alarmist, unless ammunition is like 1 year or more away from being implemented.

[Kero]

Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co. wrote:

Your only recourse then is to trim the loot table for starter goblins of anything useful past a certain level of advancement, or remove them entirely. But consider this, you can remove recipes from goblins and I will still farm them for Goblinoid Armor and Weapon scraps to use in crafting.

Which is why I recommended to drop those from the loot table as well. Basically limit them to dropping starter armor, weapons, implements and lesser tokens. Beginners can fight them until they have obtained enough starter gear to feel safe enough to go out into the nearby wilderness and start attacking the local bandit (or goblin, or whatever) population and that's where they can get actual valuable loot.

That way, the starter town goblins would serve a purpose of providing some initial PvE-training and su supply basic gear. But not as piñatas.

[TEO Cheatle]

Has anyone ever thought that this is the exact point of the super spawning, loot dropping goblins? They are a good way to give an uptick in the economy, including getting money, starter gear, and everything else out there.

Kero might be right, it might mess up the economy, and I agree we don't want people botting, but I don't see this as an issue day 1. I don't see this as in issue in the first week or two. If they change it by the next patch, it should be alright.

Not leaving a husk while carrying 40-100 encumbrance of stuff is also going to majorly affect the economy.

So far, in my mind, there is a decent amount of evidence that points to GW allowing for a more robust economic start.

Don't bot, unless you're at the computer, and knockback/kill anyone you have seen sitting there longer than two-three hours. It is a pretty simple fix for now, and hopefully GW fixes it in a reasonable time frame.

[Illililili]

IMHO opinion if GW removes the coins and the recipe drops from the gobs, but leaves the items, then all long term problems are fixed.

Easy coins from anywhere is a bad idea and creates mudflation. Tier 1 recipes are going to be valuable/useful for a month, after that if you are not in Tier 2 you will not be competitive in PvP.

Having an easy source of starter gear is always useful for new players.

Hmm. Thinking about it, after a month a would put all the Tier 1 recipes back on the gobs, so they are easy drops and that would give new players a chance to try out low level tradeskills to figure out what they would like their characters to do.

[Takasi]

Illililili wrote:

Hmm. Thinking about it, after a month a would put all the Tier 1 recipes back on the gobs, so they are easy drops and that would give new players a chance to try out low level tradeskills to figure out what they would like their characters to do.

Why not let us, who are playing the game in a very early state, also have this option when we start out? Let us have the same satisfaction.

The last time they tinkered with the gathering drop rates it tooks weeks to fix.

And who cares if someone farms 100,000 coppers in the first month. They can just change the drop rates later, for all monsters, to scale with the economy. They're going to need to do that anyway. Tweaking the value of copper is going to be an ongoing task for at least the first year or two. We'll be trading in gold and platinum then and all of this will seem silly.

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

At least part of this is a short term anomaly waiting on the growth of the system. In the long term, if you had done exactly as you did, you'd have gotten nothing for your time, because the eventual death would have left a husk behind and everything you harvested would be gone.

[Takasi]

Caldeathe Baequiannia wrote:

At least part of this is a short term anomaly waiting on the growth of the system. In the long term, if you had done exactly as you did, you'd have gotten nothing for your time, because the eventual death would have left a husk behind and everything you harvested would be gone.

Yes! Goblinworks, PLEASE put in husks and player looting. The sooner the better.

[Urman]

I think the goblins around the starter town have the same loot tables as goblins elsewhere. I'm not sure that we want all goblins, everywhere, to have their loot tables gutted. The problem with the starter-town goblins is the predictability of their location and the very rapid respawn rate. Having said that, I'm sure clever people will be able to bot them elsewhere.

[Bluddwolf]

I find it hard to believe that anyone is concerned about the T1 economy. That is common loot drop junk that will be left behind or discarded in most cases.

[<Kabal> Daeglin]

I'm not worried about this in the short term of EE. I'm not concerned about live farming for coin or gear. Bots are going to happen, if they're dying and taking durability damage or getting stuck occasionally I can live with that. But if I identify safe areas with essentially no risk of death and rapid respawn then I let GW know about it and they can decide if it's important. I regard it as a part of bug finding. There are some cliffs where this is possible but re spawn is so slow it's not worthwhile. I agree ammo limits could solve this once implemented.

[Kero]

True, ammo, husks and what not will eventually make this particular exploit useless (but I'm not sure if eventually is before the T1 economy mostly doesn't matter anymore). If switching that on at the start of EE were an option, I'd very much agree with that. But I expect that it isn't. Unlike Cheatle and others, I expect this particular type bot-farming to be a problem *especially* during the first few days, because recipes will be very much in demand. After this has been extensively done for a few weeks, recipes will no longer be an issue, as the market is saturated. Coins will have become useless by then, noone will be using them, and a trade economy will have a much more difficult time getting up and running, as we'll be reduced to bartering instead. The salvagable resources worry me the least, the quantities are not all that huge compared to the amounts needed for higher level refining.

It occured to me as well that loot tables mught be the same for any goblins, but even so, I think cutting them down might still be the lesser of two evil. Better would be to create an independent class of starter goblins with their own, more limited loot table.

[Elorebaen]

Kero, kudos for bringing this experience out in the open!

My sense is that it is not crucial for most of the reasons already presented.

[Caldeathe Baequiannia]

Coins won't ever be useless. Someone will always want them, and there's no reason that a trade between characters can't involve coins in one direction.

[DeciusBrutus]

Tier 1 recipes need to have an infusion early on, and they need to be easy to get later on.

And there's and easy way to mess with the easy bot: attack it once during downtime, getting targeted, and then sit out of range until they die.

Out of curiosity, how encumbered were you after 12 hours?

[Kero]

Caldeathe Baequiannia wrote:

Coins won't ever be useless. Someone will always want them, and there's no reason that a trade between characters can't involve coins in one direction.

Well, a massive influx of coins into the economy for doing nothing is paramount to hyperinflation. And while that may not make coins entirely useless, you'll have to bring vast amounts to buy even little things. Bartering may well be more efficient. Real world examples are not really a good model of economic processes in an MMO, I guess, but have shown this many times over.

Anyway, most points have been made and while I still think that my original proposal solves this elegantly with very little problematic side effects, for now I'm hoping for someone from GW to chime in and let us know, if they think this is a problem and if they intend to do something about it.

[Kero]

DeciusBrutus wrote:

Tier 1 recipes need to have an infusion early on, and they need to be easy to get later on.

And there's and easy way to mess with the easy bot: attack it once during downtime, getting targeted, and then sit out of range until they die.

Out of curiosity, how encumbered were you after 12 hours?

If T1 recipes were meant to be easily universally available, why make them drops at all? They are one of the early reasons to engage in PvE, not to start bot-farming.

I'm not entirely sure how your getting targeted is meant to kill me, but my bot dropped its active target once every 5 seconds, because of a bug where sometimes it would not correctly lose targeting of a dead goblin until its body despawned about 30 sec later. This may cause me to sometimes have to take damage one extra time from a goblin, but was still survivable. The fact that this also makes it more difficult for other players to distract me for an extended period of time was an unintended side effect.

I was very much over-encumbered. I dropped all armor, weapons, implements, as well as some armor scraps, broken weapons and coins before I could move again.

[Nihimon]

DeciusBrutus wrote:

And there's and easy way to mess with the easy bot: attack it once during downtime, getting targeted, and then sit out of range until they die.

Very good idea. I would add one caveat: make sure your Aggressor Flag wears off before the bot character dies, otherwise you will lose Reputation. You should be able to spend the time waiting for the Aggressor Flag to drop by killing the Goblins around the bot Character.

[Edit]

Kero wrote:

... my bot dropped its active target once every 5 seconds...

Okay, maybe not that good an idea :)

[Doc || Allegiant Gemstone Co.]

Quote:

Out of curiosity, how encumbered were you after 12 hours?

Quite encumbered, but since I have multiple accounts that I can log into concurrently, it's really easy to transfer items between characters, mule-style.

[Kero]

Okay, just to clarify, my "bot" really only simulates me pressing the keys 1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,4,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,4,Esc in a five second intervall and infinitely repeats that loop, regardless of what happens. Then, when I stand within aggro range of a few goblins, the attack me, get automatically targeted and hit multiple times until killed, which should cause them to no longer be targeted. Rinse, repeat. In fact, this was still active when I tried to relog and I had to manually deactivate it to be able to type in my password again.

The reason for the Esc was explained above, the reason for the 4 is that sometimes, the virtual 1 button on the UI would get "stuck" somehow and become unresponsive until I pressed another button.

It took me less than half an hour to set up from scratch (never having been involved with an mmo before, nor with any botting/macro writing and without knowing what I was doing). It's simplistic, it's completely dumb, but it works. And it shouldn't, imho :).

Having bought hit points 1+2, heavy armor prof 1, and having equiped pot steel plate and a shortbow, this allowed me to handle 4 goblins one after the other and still regenerate back to full health after each round.

Anyway, I'm off to work again, I'm looking forward to seeing you all in game soon, regardless of whether or not anything is done about this!