If you're an active resource farmer like myself, you may have seen a bot or two running around the zone taking resources. Spending my time farming in Bal Foyen, I've come across my fair share of bot players and decided to make a guide on how to identify one. Bots are concidered cheating and should be reported, so being able to tell if who you're seeing is a bot or not can help get rid of these resource grabbing cheaters from our game.

When you see a bot, you'll notice one of two things first; the way they move, or the way they look. Let's start with the way they move.

A bot's movement is very inhuman, making sharp turns, running straight, and making abrupt stops. The ones I've seen run in straight lines, never making wide turns or moving like you'd expect a player to, and never sprinting. They often 'bounce' between resource spawn points, going to one and picking it up or turning sharply to the next resource spawn. They don't always pick up the resources they 'bounce' to, oddly enough. I can't explain why. These bots tend to get trapped on rocks and foliage that get in their way and will pause briefly before running around them and continuing on. They also actively avoid fights and seem to ignore chests as well. Although this is all from personal experience so I could be wrong.

The way a bot looks differs from bot to bot, but they do follow a similar pattern to each other. Their race and appearance doesn't matter, but they tend to be fully garbed in soul shriven clothes, with or without a weapon equipped. I have only seen one bot so far that's broken this rule and wore low level armor, but that didn't hide the other clues pointing to their computerized existance. Bots seem to always be level 3, having not done quests or battles with their sole reason to exist being to collect resources. Bots don't have pets following them.

If you've found someone matching these descriptions but are not too sure about if they're a bot or not, trying whispering to them and asking if they're real. A bot won't reply, but a person might. If you're still not sure, a dead giveaway is the sharp turns they make, ones too sharp for a person to make consistantly. If you come across a bot, be sure to report them. We don't want cheaters in our game.

Edit 3/10/2017: I did come across a level 14 bot clothed in armor and fighting any enemies it happened to come across. They targeted resources, once again skipping some for whatever reason, and spammed only one ability during fights. While the fact that they fought made me briefly doubt that they were a bot, it didn't hide that they ran straight, never sprinted, turned sharply, had no pet, and got caught on a tree.

Recently, a came across a new type of bot player; combat bots. Bots apparently set to fight all nearby enemies. In my years of playing ESO, this is the only time I've come across one of these, so I'll detail what I saw.

They appeared like any other player, with gear you'd expect them to wear at their level range. They were somewhere in the level 10-13 zone, fighting the ghosts of the Starved Planes of Ebonheart. Their behavior wasn't out of the ordinary to me, until the ghost they were attacking happened to get itself imbedded in a rock. This isn't rare, by any means, I see it happen a lot. But this player kept trying to attack the ghost, spamming their basic attack nonstop and, every couple seconds, one of their abilities and their healing every time they were hit.

At first I thought it was just them being silly or still thinking they could kill it. I watched them for a little bit before running off to finish a quest I had been working on at the time. About ten minutes later, I happened across them at the same spot, still spamming their basic attacks and two abilities Now I knew no sane person would stand there for over ten minutes attempting to kill an enemy they couldn't even hit. I sent them a PM telling them they weren't going to kill it, and they just kept going. Not even a pause to consider what I just said.

So alongside resource farming bots, people have found ways to make bots specifically made for killing enemies. As this is the first time in my 4 years of playing seeing such a bot, that makes it much harder to tell them apart from other players. Especially if you're just running through to finish a quest. The only way I could say you might tell them apart is if they just spam their basic and one or two abilities over and over, remaining in the same area for a long length of time.

If I find any more ways to identifying a combat bot, I'll come back and post the information here.

Edit 3/10/2017: A pattern I have noticed in the bots that fight, are that they are Templars. The attack they seem to always spam is the first active ability under the Aedric Spear skill tree. I can only guess because of how it hits multiple times.