Elder Scrolls Online Lead Dev Addresses Botting, Spammers, and Bugs

The Elder Scrolls Online lead developer Matt Firor has posted a State of the Union-type post on the game’s official forum, which notes how the studio is dealing with bots that swarm the boss monsters in public dungeons.

According to the developer, around 85% of service tickets are attributable to issues concerning these bots and spammers, which has in turn caused a delay in response times for the studio in addressing other issues players are facing.

“First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game,” wrote Firor. “I play the game every day; I see them too, and yes, they drive me crazy.”

He stated that the company has a daily running battle against the bots ever since the game launched, moving them from global chat, to in-game mail, to creating fake guilds and inviting players. The botters and spammers have many means at their disposal. 

“Most of the battle has been on the back end of the game – we regularly ban accounts involved in spam and bot activity – our teams are working on better systems to identify those accounts and characters that are doing black market activities, and we’re also working on some game feature refinement to make it harder for them to acquire gold in the first place. Fighting black market activity like gold selling spam and farming bots is a marathon, not a sprint, but we will do whatever we can to reduce their impact on the game.”

Firor also addressed the game’s recent duping bug, which saw an influx of massive amounts of gold into the game’s fledgling economy. In his post, Firor denies that the exploitation of the bug lead to a destabilization of the ESO economy. 

“Contrary to some reports, exploitation of this bug did not result in destabilizing the ESO economy in any way. We did turn off guild banks to limit the spread of the problem, but that was only until we put up a new version of the game that fixed the exploit later that evening.”

Firor also acknowledged that many players are facing “de-synch” bugs where zones and areas don’t spawn items and NPCs properly. It’s something they’re still working on, he said. 

When these issues will be addressed is anyone’s guess, but will it be too late for players who’ve already given up on the game?