Developers, there is an increasing and concerning trend of Bot Clubs. Are you aware of this issue? Is anything being done to either shut them down or combat their spread? I have reported nearly 100 of these clubs and yet I still see notifications in campus about them (the same clubs I reported weeks prior) initiating parties.
This definitely needs a reply. I have also reported multiple obvious bot accounts and clubs. They do nothing but wreck the economy and leaderboards for events. This needs to be addressed asap.
I also have reported bot clubs where it is fairly obvious who the main is. But nothing happens. It takes away any reason to really try anymore. The misc stat situation is so out of control. This pvp hunt has really made it obvious. I’ve been testing and there are accounts too small for me to get points from that I lose to 80% of the time. Because they either bot or have bought misc items.
The amount of bots in PIMD are overlooked & highly concerning. We shouldn’t have to unadd bots when we say 1 thing in CC, it’s absurd. ATA knows it yet sits back & does nothing but make more money.
Those single account clubs aren't as big of a problem as these ones: https://ibb.co/KVMkxZG https://ibb.co/k8z72hn https://ibb.co/Ny5m9RB https://ibb.co/cQZYhGY https://ibb.co/xgNVBdn https://ibb.co/YhhCmHW (In case the embedded images are not loading) There are literally thousands of these clubs filled with 50-100 obvious alts, and their sole objective is to complete parties for hunt drops, and then sell all the items for real money. They're the real reason behind the game economy going to shit.
It's crazy that they used to ban us for using an android emulator back then but won't do anything about bots. At least, I'm pretty sure they did.
Honestly this needs to be looked into seriously, the bots and there mains need to banned. All they do is collect misc, lite boxes for furni and sell it off for real money making it harder for the genuine players, forcing them to either spend more or buy the black market bentos to compete with those who buy black market misc farmed by these bots
If I found all these in a span of like 20 minutes, just imagine how many there actually must be. These are literally thousands of alts. And just banning them once won't solve anything. We need a more permanent solution. Maybe create a post where we as a community can report all the alt clubs we find and ATA can take action on them.
How to detect alt clubs? Inspect clubs when you see the "The club X has started the party Y" notification on global chat. Or go to the Campus Buzz section and inspect clubs from there. Keep an eye out for these factors during your investigation: Club members are mostly empty accounts: (BIGGEST INDICATOR) Stat items missing from their showcase which should be there according to their hunt drops (they might have a couple of items from the latest hunt since those haven't been traded yet) No expensive furniture like 999, 499, 299, 199 in showcase or dorm rooms apart from the non-tradeable ones No chibis/bentos in showcase Basically there won't be any items in their showcase which they are selling on the black market Club members have no outside interaction: (SECOND BIGGEST INDICATOR) Empty walls No friends/followers Either no RS, or RS is from the same club or another club they control Club members have no status messages or have a similar looking status Club description is empty or short/unusual Join policy is usually 'Open on request' but you'll never hear a response from them if you try to join or wall/gift any of the members Member IGNs look very similar or unlike regular players Member avatars and stats are very similar Usually 40-50+ members in club Most of these clubs are operated by indian/filipino players. It's sometimes difficult to tell these clubs apart from genuine newbie clubs, but if you've looked for the above factors and your gut says "this has to be an alt club", you should report it to ATA and they could check their IPs and device info to figure it out for sure. But like @DrBearz said, to properly tackle this problem, it's important for ATA to ban not just the clubs, but also follows their gifts/trades trail to figure out the main accounts and ban those as well. Otherwise, the items they collected will remain safe to be sold for real money, and they'll just keep creating new clubs and there'd be no real impact on their operations 🤷
Yes, I remember having to walk on egg shells for this. Also linking/unlinking accounts was risky. Couldn't do that too much of you'd be banned.
Yeah Please do something about it ATA its getting out of hand.Two factor authentication failed miserably I guess because these alts/ bots are still around.It's making value of every item in pimd go to 💩. The major alt/bot owners are from 'Gujrat' in india and Philippines so pls loook into it and ban them to restore pimd furni and misc market to its original place😔
Hopefully Ata actually starts caring about these types of issues or it's gonna keep spiraling out of control
I personally think the 2FA wasn't introduced to tackle alts, it was introduced to increase the revenue from the game. How? Let me explain, to login into the account you will need the 2FA code, but to login to the pimd web store you don't need any code and all you can do in the store is buy stuff. So in a way ATA made it easy for people to share there login details with others to buy stuff for them without risking the account getting stolen. And if you notice both 2FA and webstore were introduced close to each other. The 2FA code is sent only when you enter the email and password to login and no alt/bot farmer is doing that, they just make the account on cloneapp or emulators (they don't even link it with email) and play so how is it gonna tackle with the bot issue? That's just my 2 cents
I thought 2FA was put in to be annoying just like every other app that decides to use it. I have heard many players claim their accounts were hacked in the past, too. So 2FA could have been implemented to help them... BUT If your account "got hacked", you were probably account sharing/piloting. I know what you described wasn't exactly account sharing/piloting but I think it's the same crowd. Account sharers. They don't need the protection.