Originally posted by Torak As some of you might know, I am a big fan of Lineage 2.
Yesterday NCSoft opened a new server (Franz). After logging onto the server ALL of the starter areas where flooded with bots. (no surprise, right?) It was disgraceful.
There are many fans and good players of this game. Many of us do the right thing. We do not bot, we do not buy currency, and we treat our fellow players with respect. NCSoft has let us down. They allow blatant violations of their own rules and punish us that speak out.
I'm not appealing for the support of L2 as I know some of you hate the game, but as fellow MMORPGers. These activities exist in all MMO's. Help us at least be heard.
MMORPG.com please, I ask with all due humble respect, help give us a voice against this despicable situation. Look for yourselves, run an editorial...anything.
Our threads are locked and deleted on the official boards while hundreds of bots (thousands game wide) are free to do as they wish.
Help us find a voice. I'm not asking you like the game or play it. Help us get a message to NCSoft. I have already cancelled. I can not tolerate this blatant disreguard and disrespect for the legit players any longer.
When the game first came out, MMOrpg and several other sites gave it average and below average reviews based on bots , MASSIVE farming like no other game ever played , and exploiting /griefing. NCsoft will do nothing more than they are already doing. They are either incapable of solving the problem or just plain dont care.
Originally posted by Torak Would L2 suffer if the bots where eliminated? Sure.
No, they would not. They would actually benefit.
Blizzard figured out a long time ago while running Battle.net that by banning users that cheated they usually saw those same users plop down retail again for the box and give it another go. This cycle repeated rather constantly.
Dedicated farmers, the ones using bots, are going to buy another license key and start their operation again. They will go undetected for a period of time until they're caught again and repeat this cycle until the costs outweigh the profits.
For the company, in this case NCSoft, this means a new windfall of retail profit and more licensing.
Every time you see these companies announce their "crackdown" on cheaters, keep this is mind. While I do believe most of these companies want people to play "by the rules", they have no qualms killing an account that they know will reincarnate again.
Im just going to appoint you my offical spokesman.
+-+-+-+-+-+ "MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol" http://purepwnage.com -+-+-+-+-+-+ "Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
Originally posted by Razorback Originally posted by ianubisi
Originally posted by Torak Would L2 suffer if the bots where eliminated? Sure.
No, they would not. They would actually benefit.
Blizzard figured out a long time ago while running Battle.net that by banning users that cheated they usually saw those same users plop down retail again for the box and give it another go. This cycle repeated rather constantly.
Dedicated farmers, the ones using bots, are going to buy another license key and start their operation again. They will go undetected for a period of time until they're caught again and repeat this cycle until the costs outweigh the profits.
For the company, in this case NCSoft, this means a new windfall of retail profit and more licensing.
Every time you see these companies announce their "crackdown" on cheaters, keep this is mind. While I do believe most of these companies want people to play "by the rules", they have no qualms killing an account that they know will reincarnate again.
Im just going to appoint you my offical spokesman.
NCSoft does neither what you nor I suggest. The easiest solution in their eyes is silence the noisy legit players.
Anyway, I just got my contest prize from mmorpg.com (thanks for that) So thats 2 betas Im in right now. To bad the first one Im in is total garbage. Can you say "kill task" go kill 10 rats? Geez, more proof MMO developers are learning their leason.
I hope my new one puts a little more effort into designing a game rather then just copying EQ with new pretty pictures
On a sidenote: On the cheater boards there are a few posts about people getting banned. Seems the players being upset about the 1:20 player to bot ration at least helped a little.
Several reports of people getting banned for no reason also occured but likely always those might not be true.
I would link there but I am not sure if it's okay to link to different forums?
Also funny that they seem to warn botters (in this case a Teon ex hero) now:
the swan
|| Languages for gamers: http://gamerslingo.com /where God ERROR: Target could not be found /target Believer /skill science You missed your target since Believer ignores science /skill logic You missed your target since Believer traded all his INT for faith.
about 5 mintues playtime in beta and most people realized how bad it was there.
so did everyone who still plays, they just played anyway.
OB was heaven compared to today. They had some cheaters, some unfixed exploits and nobody risked money getting banned. But it's nothing like today.
crappy game without bots, unbearable with them. you chose to play, deal with it now.
Crappy without bots? I know lots of people that enjoyed it and that still would. Lineage 2 has annoying grind, true. But it's only too boring if you are not able to make it interessting, maybe because you got carebear genes or something? (;
War some alliance, have a few 100 enemies and grinding is fun. Sure you die sometimes and it's a drawback since you loose xp but what's wrong with paying for losses?
I like freedom of play in games. I like a player driven economy. I love the anime style. I like castle sieges and open pvp while RvR or WoW duels are my biggest nightmare. And I didn't find a game that even compares slighty with L2 when it comes to these things and I tested a lot of titles.
So just say YOU don't like the game. And don't complain about us being annoyed at NcSoft stopping to care. It wasn't so bad in OB, not in C1 and not even in C2. But now the servers are full of bot trains and reporting them to NcSoft is a waste of time.
seriously, it reminds me of my whiney brother. he moved to alaska with a buddy and constantly bitches because its cold. no shit sherlock
Yeah we already know you never liked the game. But for us the problem is NcSoft, not the game. So just stop bitching about the topic if you really got nothing to say aside of that you didn't like it in general.
the swan
|| Languages for gamers: http://gamerslingo.com /where God ERROR: Target could not be found /target Believer /skill science You missed your target since Believer ignores science /skill logic You missed your target since Believer traded all his INT for faith.
Does Lineage 2 have the mine like things that I've seen atleast one other korean based MMO have?
What the mines do is, you can buy one, then place it around the area that the person is botting. When the botter targets the mine to hit it, it blows up and insta kills the farmer.
Originally posted by binary_0011 the bot pay their monthly subscription. if they are going to ban 10,000 bots, you know how much ncsoft is lossing?there are more bots than normal players. bots are their rice bowl.they cant affort to ban them all :P :P
Scroll up and read my theory on why banning botters is not a bad thing for a company.
Originally posted by binary_0011 the bot pay their monthly subscription. if they are going to ban 10,000 bots, you know how much ncsoft is lossing?there are more bots than normal players. bots are their rice bowl.they cant affort to ban them all :P :P
Scroll up and read my theory on why banning botters is not a bad thing for a company.
You are right on your theory ianubisi, we've beaten this horse long and hard on the L2 forums. What is puzzling is why NCSoft allows it to go on unchecked in L2 but in any other NCSoft game they are much more aggressive. Most MMO's have no problems with banning.
I was looking around last night and started looking at "cheater" sites. There are a huge amount of these sites dedicated to ALL MMO's. You can get bots, exploits, dups......anything on hundreds of sites for ANY game. Right now L2 is hot because of the patch and the new upgrades. WoW is over the top with the amount of info out there need a bot? no problem, need anything for any game? Its out there. I guess I've been pretty naive about it. Judging from some of these replies, I see alot of people are actually very indifferent to it. I guess I've been the fool playing all of these MMO's and not using cheats. The MMO community is a lot more excepting and tolerant of this then I ever imagined.
The nerve some of these people have for critizing games that sell items and currency legit. From what I can see, most of the players are doing it anyway. A good exa,ple was Archlord, I was all against it but screw it, they are just doing what everyone wants anyway.
My point is, its the COMPANY who doesn't give a shit, not the players. We do our part. We report. We complain. (we kill the bots to) Thats what the agreement is. We play by the rules and in return NCSoft administers the game and enforces its OWN rules. Thats the agreement everyone who plays MMO's clicks on everytime they log into a game. You agree to the rules of play. I Pay my monthly service fee and I expect some degree of competant customer service.
Hm, i played City of Heroes/Villains on the US and EU servers and never had problems with the support team. Offensive characternames were changed, bots disappared, petitions were answered quickly. Same goes for Guild Wars, bots are banned on a regular basis and all mentioned games are supported by NCsoft to my knowledge. I have to admit though i havent played L2 since beta but i cant complain about NCsoft support on a general level. Generally speaking, i agree with you that bots are a pain in the butt and should be banned, regardless of the game.
I've been playing L2 for a week now. I started a new character on the Hindemith server and have had some fun, though there are some aspects of the game that I found lacking. One issue was the complete lack of other players in the newbie areas. I maybe saw 2 or 3 other players max at any given time. So when the new server, Franz, opened, I created a new character there, thinking I could level up with some fellow players and get to know some people. And maybe finally get in a group, lol.
Anyway, after creating the new human character and logging in, I couldn't do anything. Nothing. There were so many bot trains that I could barely pick out the newbie guide to get the first quest (kill gremlins to find a blue gemstone). I finally managed to click on the guide and get the quest. What had taken me about 30 seconds on the Hindemith server, where I was alone in the newbie area, took me 2 WHOLE NIGHTS to complete on Franz because of the massive swarm of bots. By the time a gremlin spawned, it had been killed by a bot train. I finally took the strategy of standing in one place and waiting for a gremlin to spawn right in front of me and clicking and casting on it as quickly as I could. This still took some time, since not every gremlin drops a blue gem and since even with this strategy I only managed to claim a few of the gremlins as my own kill.
I have never ever seen anything like it. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I've played mmorpgs for over 3 years (WoW, SWG, CoH/CoV, EVE, EQ2) and never ever never experienced anything like that. I've seen bots, I've been annoyed by gold farmers, but until L2 I've never had the experience of being unable to play because of a massive, locust-like swarm of bots.
I finally put in a petition to a GM and received a canned response saying that they would investigate and if they could prove it was a bot they would take action.
PROVE it? You can just log into the starting zone and see it! There's nothing to prove, fer cyring out loud. Besides, this is not a court of law. There's no "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "preponderance of the evidence". Ban them!
Anyway, suffice to say I doubt I will continue to play past my first free 30 days. I just don't see a future in the game for someone like me. I don't buy in-game currency from eBay, I don't run bots myself. I actually, shocking as it may sound, play my character by sitting at my computer and using my mouse and keyboard to run quests, kill mobs and interact with other players. Call it old-fashioned if you will.
Whats worse, if you go on the offical forums and say anything you will get beaten with this.......
While the bots are free to do as they wish........
So I went here to relearn what I forgot (DAoC)
Its not as flashy as L2, and its WAYYY slower paced...but WTF, who cares. Under the hood they all run the same anyway. Grind, level, do the preprogrammed endgame.
I did think about posting on the official forums, but had seen people in-game on the Franz server commenting that they had posted about the problem and gotten banned from the forums. So I didn't bother. And that just really makes it worse, imho. Because then you are faced with a serious gameplay issue and nowhere to turn to get help with it. Sigh...
I think a more pro-active solution would be for NCSoft to make one official thread, make it sticky, and ask people to post the names of suspected botters there. Granted it would be a huge thread but anything might help. (The other problem would be getting the bot names correct-it's hard to right down 229kddlkj correctly!) Just something, anything, to show that they are on the side of the players, and are not ignoring/condoning the problem.
From what I've read though, they are not likely to change the way they are doing business. <shrug>
Originally posted by Torak What is puzzling is why NCSoft allows it to go on unchecked in L2 but in any other NCSoft game they are much more aggressive.
That is puzzling, overall. In that I don't play L2 and don't know enough about the state of the game I can't really give a credible theory for that. But I would have to only speculate that the problem is rampant enough that they have simply given up.
You have to surmise something along these lines, really. What else can you do? You probably could theorize that they're profiting from it through direct participation, and other similar consipiracies. Why not? If you're going to rage against their machine, you might as well pull out the bigger rhetorical guns.
Originally posted by Torak Most MMO's have no problems with banning.
Nope, they have no problem with making a few press releases to announce some paltry banning of a couple hundred accounts (from their base of tens or even hundreds of thousands of accounts) so as to seem in charge of the situation. The partisans rejoice, the botters alt-tab and continue, and everythign returns to normal. It's propaganda.
NCsoft admit in writing they know someone has been botting and what do they do.... re-activate the account.
I bet Jorev has some incomprehensible spin about how this isnt NCsofts fault, its somehow all the fault of MMORPG.com and others so far down the chain of this problem that they are barely involved....
The responsibility to stop bots and secure gameworlds rests with 3 groups of people only
The company that made the game
The company that made the game
The company that made the game
Attacking opportunists is only ever goin to bandaid the problem. Opportunists need opportunity to flourish and thats all bot farmers are.... opportunists....
+-+-+-+-+-+ "MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol" http://purepwnage.com -+-+-+-+-+-+ "Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
i see bots every day in eq2, and soe doesnt do anything about them either, its even the same ones, so i know they arent banning them. even if i report them they do not care, i get the response. we are looking into the issue, due to blah blah blah, we cannot tell you the actions taken against this players account. the next day...there they are, right back at it.
Originally posted by jayheld90 i see bots every day in eq2, and soe doesnt do anything about them either, its even the same ones, so i know they arent banning them. even if i report them they do not care, i get the response. we are looking into the issue, due to blah blah blah, we cannot tell you the actions taken against this players account. the next day...there they are, right back at it.
Precisely what I have been saying on this topic for years.
Anyone who has a character in ANY MMO beyond mid level, could take a dev or admin out to an area and show them bot farmers, farming away at ANY TIME! same old same old....
+-+-+-+-+-+ "MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol" http://purepwnage.com -+-+-+-+-+-+ "Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
People cheat to get a higher "status" in life in so many different ways, this is just another of them.
You are not understanding the scope. Im not complaining about a few running around on the landscape. I'm talking literally hundreds in one spot. Gamestopping. Directly effecting gameplay. You can not play normally uniterupted or interfered with.
TheAnomaly
Who really cares? Lineage II sucks.
The people who do play, thanks. This isn't about your opinion of L2, its about the community wide problem of bots which are in all games, oh by the way. Thanks for taking the time to read and analyze the intention of the post.
ianubisi
But I would have to only speculate that the problem is rampant enough that they have simply given up.
Thats a strong possibility
Nope, they have no problem with making a few press releases to announce some paltry banning of a couple hundred accounts
You would think that NCSoft could grab a massive headline given the history if they simply looked at Franz and just banned all the bots. Imagine the goodwill that would create in their community. I don't think anyone expects bots to be totally eliminated but at least send a message that the company is at least acting on blattent open botting. I know I would "feel" better knowing that if I reported a bot it would acted on sometime in the future and not get banned for my trouble.
Razorback
The responsibility to stop bots and secure gameworlds rests with 3 groups of people only
The company that made the game
The company that made the game
The company that made the game
Disagree. The company does not carry the entire burden. It is also the communities. The bots/farmers are the end result. The community BUYS the currency in all games. The third party currency industry is HUGE. I'm willing to bet based on what I've been looking at the past few days, more then HALF of this community has purchased ingame currency, used exploits or bots. Its to big of a market to deny. Of course no one will admit it, its easier to say its the games fault.
Originally posted by Torak Its not the legit players who "don't give a shit" we would elimate them today if we could. But we are powerless. Our reports are ignored and not acted on. Our complaints are deleted and our accounts banned for making the post.
You clearly don't care about it much, since you keep paying money for the game. If the 'legitimate' players really considered this unacceptable, you'd see people leaving in droves and NCsoft would see subscription numbers plummet. But instead, you sit around, complain, and keep handing the green over to NCsoft. Why should they do anything if pretty much everyone is willing to pay for the game despite the bots?
Originally posted by Metzger Not sure who is responsible for this, mmorpg admins, or the web hosters, but Im honestly sick off all these adds at mmorpg.com that refer to gold sellers and leveling services. Its just disgusting, Im writing a post like this while there is a big red banner advertising the same things I trying to fight on the left side of my screen.
I'm sure they'll be willing to drop ads that you don't like when you're willing to make up the advertising revenues out of your own pocket.
Comments
No, they would not. They would actually benefit.
Blizzard figured out a long time ago while running Battle.net that by banning users that cheated they usually saw those same users plop down retail again for the box and give it another go. This cycle repeated rather constantly.
Dedicated farmers, the ones using bots, are going to buy another license key and start their operation again. They will go undetected for a period of time until they're caught again and repeat this cycle until the costs outweigh the profits.
For the company, in this case NCSoft, this means a new windfall of retail profit and more licensing.
Every time you see these companies announce their "crackdown" on cheaters, keep this is mind. While I do believe most of these companies want people to play "by the rules", they have no qualms killing an account that they know will reincarnate again.
Im just going to appoint you my offical spokesman.
+-+-+-+-+-+
"MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol"
http://purepwnage.com
-+-+-+-+-+-+
"Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
No, they would not. They would actually benefit.
Blizzard figured out a long time ago while running Battle.net that by banning users that cheated they usually saw those same users plop down retail again for the box and give it another go. This cycle repeated rather constantly.
Dedicated farmers, the ones using bots, are going to buy another license key and start their operation again. They will go undetected for a period of time until they're caught again and repeat this cycle until the costs outweigh the profits.
For the company, in this case NCSoft, this means a new windfall of retail profit and more licensing.
Every time you see these companies announce their "crackdown" on cheaters, keep this is mind. While I do believe most of these companies want people to play "by the rules", they have no qualms killing an account that they know will reincarnate again.
Im just going to appoint you my offical spokesman.
NCSoft does neither what you nor I suggest. The easiest solution in their eyes is silence the noisy legit players.
Anyway, I just got my contest prize from mmorpg.com (thanks for that) So thats 2 betas Im in right now. To bad the first one Im in is total garbage. Can you say "kill task" go kill 10 rats? Geez, more proof MMO developers are learning their leason.
I hope my new one puts a little more effort into designing a game rather then just copying EQ with new pretty pictures
On a sidenote: On the cheater boards there are a few posts about people getting banned. Seems the players being upset about the 1:20 player to bot ration at least helped a little.
Several reports of people getting banned for no reason also occured but likely always those might not be true.
I would link there but I am not sure if it's okay to link to different forums?
Also funny that they seem to warn botters (in this case a Teon ex hero) now:
the swan
|| Languages for gamers: http://gamerslingo.com
/where God
ERROR: Target could not be found
/target Believer
/skill science
You missed your target since Believer ignores science
/skill logic
You missed your target since Believer traded all his INT for faith.
Just an idea
about 5 mintues playtime in beta and most people realized how bad it was there.
so did everyone who still plays, they just played anyway.
crappy game without bots, unbearable with them. you chose to play, deal with it now.
seriously, it reminds me of my whiney brother. he moved to alaska with a buddy and constantly bitches because its cold. no shit sherlock
OB was heaven compared to today. They had some cheaters, some unfixed exploits and nobody risked money getting banned. But it's nothing like today.
Crappy without bots? I know lots of people that enjoyed it and that still would. Lineage 2 has annoying grind, true. But it's only too boring if you are not able to make it interessting, maybe because you got carebear genes or something? (;
War some alliance, have a few 100 enemies and grinding is fun. Sure you die sometimes and it's a drawback since you loose xp but what's wrong with paying for losses?
I like freedom of play in games. I like a player driven economy. I love the anime style. I like castle sieges and open pvp while RvR or WoW duels are my biggest nightmare. And I didn't find a game that even compares slighty with L2 when it comes to these things and I tested a lot of titles.
So just say YOU don't like the game. And don't complain about us being annoyed at NcSoft stopping to care. It wasn't so bad in OB, not in C1 and not even in C2. But now the servers are full of bot trains and reporting them to NcSoft is a waste of time.
Yeah we already know you never liked the game. But for us the problem is NcSoft, not the game. So just stop bitching about the topic if you really got nothing to say aside of that you didn't like it in general.
the swan
|| Languages for gamers: http://gamerslingo.com
/where God
ERROR: Target could not be found
/target Believer
/skill science
You missed your target since Believer ignores science
/skill logic
You missed your target since Believer traded all his INT for faith.
Does Lineage 2 have the mine like things that I've seen atleast one other korean based MMO have?
What the mines do is, you can buy one, then place it around the area that the person is botting. When the botter targets the mine to hit it, it blows up and insta kills the farmer.
I've always wished they'd add this in more MMOs.
I just say
Its life deal with it
People cheat to get a higher "status" in life in so many different ways, this is just another of them.
You would have more fun if u were playing ur games rather than complaning about all the cheaters in the game.
Thank you
Current: Puzzle Pirates
Waiting: SWTOR,Aion, CO
Played: AC, WoW, SB, EVE
there are more bots than normal players. bots are their rice bowl.
they cant affort to ban them all :P
:P
Which FF Character Are You?
Scroll up and read my theory on why banning botters is not a bad thing for a company.
Scroll up and read my theory on why banning botters is not a bad thing for a company.
You are right on your theory ianubisi, we've beaten this horse long and hard on the L2 forums. What is puzzling is why NCSoft allows it to go on unchecked in L2 but in any other NCSoft game they are much more aggressive. Most MMO's have no problems with banning.
I was looking around last night and started looking at "cheater" sites. There are a huge amount of these sites dedicated to ALL MMO's. You can get bots, exploits, dups......anything on hundreds of sites for ANY game. Right now L2 is hot because of the patch and the new upgrades. WoW is over the top with the amount of info out there need a bot? no problem, need anything for any game? Its out there. I guess I've been pretty naive about it. Judging from some of these replies, I see alot of people are actually very indifferent to it. I guess I've been the fool playing all of these MMO's and not using cheats.
The MMO community is a lot more excepting and tolerant of this then I ever imagined.
The nerve some of these people have for critizing games that sell items and currency legit. From what I can see, most of the players are doing it anyway. A good exa,ple was Archlord, I was all against it but screw it, they are just doing what everyone wants anyway.
My point is, its the COMPANY who doesn't give a shit, not the players. We do our part. We report. We complain. (we kill the bots to) Thats what the agreement is. We play by the rules and in return NCSoft administers the game and enforces its OWN rules. Thats the agreement everyone who plays MMO's clicks on everytime they log into a game. You agree to the rules of play. I Pay my monthly service fee and I expect some degree of competant customer service.
Hm, i played City of Heroes/Villains on the US and EU servers and never had problems with the support team. Offensive characternames were changed, bots disappared, petitions were answered quickly.
Same goes for Guild Wars, bots are banned on a regular basis and all mentioned games are supported by NCsoft to my knowledge.
I have to admit though i havent played L2 since beta but i cant complain about NCsoft support on a general level.
Generally speaking, i agree with you that bots are a pain in the butt and should be banned, regardless of the game.
I've been playing L2 for a week now. I started a new character on the Hindemith server and have had some fun, though there are some aspects of the game that I found lacking. One issue was the complete lack of other players in the newbie areas. I maybe saw 2 or 3 other players max at any given time. So when the new server, Franz, opened, I created a new character there, thinking I could level up with some fellow players and get to know some people. And maybe finally get in a group, lol.
Anyway, after creating the new human character and logging in, I couldn't do anything. Nothing. There were so many bot trains that I could barely pick out the newbie guide to get the first quest (kill gremlins to find a blue gemstone). I finally managed to click on the guide and get the quest. What had taken me about 30 seconds on the Hindemith server, where I was alone in the newbie area, took me 2 WHOLE NIGHTS to complete on Franz because of the massive swarm of bots. By the time a gremlin spawned, it had been killed by a bot train. I finally took the strategy of standing in one place and waiting for a gremlin to spawn right in front of me and clicking and casting on it as quickly as I could. This still took some time, since not every gremlin drops a blue gem and since even with this strategy I only managed to claim a few of the gremlins as my own kill.
I have never ever seen anything like it. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. I've played mmorpgs for over 3 years (WoW, SWG, CoH/CoV, EVE, EQ2) and never ever never experienced anything like that. I've seen bots, I've been annoyed by gold farmers, but until L2 I've never had the experience of being unable to play because of a massive, locust-like swarm of bots.
I finally put in a petition to a GM and received a canned response saying that they would investigate and if they could prove it was a bot they would take action.
PROVE it? You can just log into the starting zone and see it! There's nothing to prove, fer cyring out loud. Besides, this is not a court of law. There's no "beyond a reasonable doubt" or "preponderance of the evidence". Ban them!
Anyway, suffice to say I doubt I will continue to play past my first free 30 days. I just don't see a future in the game for someone like me. I don't buy in-game currency from eBay, I don't run bots myself. I actually, shocking as it may sound, play my character by sitting at my computer and using my mouse and keyboard to run quests, kill mobs and interact with other players. Call it old-fashioned if you will.
Hey elvigy,
Whats worse, if you go on the offical forums and say anything you will get beaten with this.......
While the bots are free to do as they wish........
So I went here to relearn what I forgot (DAoC)
Its not as flashy as L2, and its WAYYY slower paced...but WTF, who cares. Under the hood they all run the same anyway. Grind, level, do the preprogrammed endgame.
lol-funny picture!
I did think about posting on the official forums, but had seen people in-game on the Franz server commenting that they had posted about the problem and gotten banned from the forums. So I didn't bother. And that just really makes it worse, imho. Because then you are faced with a serious gameplay issue and nowhere to turn to get help with it. Sigh...
I think a more pro-active solution would be for NCSoft to make one official thread, make it sticky, and ask people to post the names of suspected botters there. Granted it would be a huge thread but anything might help. (The other problem would be getting the bot names correct-it's hard to right down 229kddlkj correctly!) Just something, anything, to show that they are on the side of the players, and are not ignoring/condoning the problem.
From what I've read though, they are not likely to change the way they are doing business. <shrug>
That is puzzling, overall. In that I don't play L2 and don't know enough about the state of the game I can't really give a credible theory for that. But I would have to only speculate that the problem is rampant enough that they have simply given up.
You have to surmise something along these lines, really. What else can you do? You probably could theorize that they're profiting from it through direct participation, and other similar consipiracies. Why not? If you're going to rage against their machine, you might as well pull out the bigger rhetorical guns.
Nope, they have no problem with making a few press releases to announce some paltry banning of a couple hundred accounts (from their base of tens or even hundreds of thousands of accounts) so as to seem in charge of the situation. The partisans rejoice, the botters alt-tab and continue, and everythign returns to normal. It's propaganda.
So there you have it in black and white...
NCsoft admit in writing they know someone has been botting and what do they do.... re-activate the account.
I bet Jorev has some incomprehensible spin about how this isnt NCsofts fault, its somehow all the fault of MMORPG.com and others so far down the chain of this problem that they are barely involved....
The responsibility to stop bots and secure gameworlds rests with 3 groups of people only
Attacking opportunists is only ever goin to bandaid the problem. Opportunists need opportunity to flourish and thats all bot farmers are.... opportunists....
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"MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol"
http://purepwnage.com
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"Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
Precisely what I have been saying on this topic for years.
Anyone who has a character in ANY MMO beyond mid level, could take a dev or admin out to an area and show them bot farmers, farming away at ANY TIME! same old same old....
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"MMOs, for people that like think chatting is like a skill or something, rotflol"
http://purepwnage.com
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"Far away across the field, the tolling of the iron bell, calls the faithful to their knees. To hear the softly spoken magic spell" Pink Floyd-Dark Side of the Moon
Refnu
Its life deal with it
People cheat to get a higher "status" in life in so many different ways, this is just another of them.
You are not understanding the scope. Im not complaining about a few running around on the landscape. I'm talking literally hundreds in one spot. Gamestopping. Directly effecting gameplay. You can not play normally uniterupted or interfered with.
TheAnomaly
Who really cares? Lineage II sucks.
The people who do play, thanks. This isn't about your opinion of L2, its about the community wide problem of bots which are in all games, oh by the way. Thanks for taking the time to read and analyze the intention of the post.
ianubisi
But I would have to only speculate that the problem is rampant enough that they have simply given up.
Thats a strong possibility
Nope, they have no problem with making a few press releases to announce some paltry banning of a couple hundred accounts
You would think that NCSoft could grab a massive headline given the history if they simply looked at Franz and just banned all the bots. Imagine the goodwill that would create in their community. I don't think anyone expects bots to be totally eliminated but at least send a message that the company is at least acting on blattent open botting. I know I would "feel" better knowing that if I reported a bot it would acted on sometime in the future and not get banned for my trouble.
Razorback
The responsibility to stop bots and secure gameworlds rests with 3 groups of people only
Disagree. The company does not carry the entire burden. It is also the communities. The bots/farmers are the end result. The community BUYS the currency in all games. The third party currency industry is HUGE. I'm willing to bet based on what I've been looking at the past few days, more then HALF of this community has purchased ingame currency, used exploits or bots. Its to big of a market to deny. Of course no one will admit it, its easier to say its the games fault.
You clearly don't care about it much, since you keep paying money for the game. If the 'legitimate' players really considered this unacceptable, you'd see people leaving in droves and NCsoft would see subscription numbers plummet. But instead, you sit around, complain, and keep handing the green over to NCsoft. Why should they do anything if pretty much everyone is willing to pay for the game despite the bots?
I'm sure they'll be willing to drop ads that you don't like when you're willing to make up the advertising revenues out of your own pocket.