Check Brother's Island for AFK *BOT* group on your server.

My lord, why has this not happened yet. It's like quagmire discovering interweb naughties.

naah just sick of folks wining guess its true folks never grow up they only grow old and still winey lil babys they were as teens

yeah but now you are sorta whining about whining........

AFKers won't react to anything you do. They're either going to be standing there doing nothing, or maybe autofiring a F8+pet attack key. They're not going to hunt down any mobs you pull past or away from them. They're also probably not killing a current expansion named. If you want/need some mobs that they're killing, you can easily work around them or even move in on top of them.

AFKers used to just be doing it for some crappy while they slept/worked. Now with advanced looting, they can make some plat in addition to the crappy exp. Everything they're doing is provided by the game, and maybe a stuck key.

Automated players aren't that easy to work around. They will actively engage targets, 'fight' you for them, and search for more. They camp and block access to current expansion named. Plus they are just straight up cheating.

A nice alternative to action in-game might be to organize a DDoS attack on the website for The Program That Shall Not Be Named. Mess up their forums, at least. I'm sure there's sympathy out there, even in the dark corners of the Internets.

Hah, call the guild "Norrathian Railways, Inc"

Pretty sure you start DDoS attacking a hacking website and you're just asking for trouble.

Yeah tiger by the tail and all that.

1) This is wrong, even if its against a site that hosts a hacking program.

2) DDOS fights never work. They are like getting into feuds with your neighbor. No one wins.

There are botters on Xegony. I watched for quite some time over the course of a few days. Their tank has a behavior that is always instantaneous, which is something that is impossible for a player to do. I observed a few things.

1) When a mob is pulled into camp, the tank will be facing one direction, and immediately flip the exact amount of degrees to face the mob, and run up to it, and immediately stop without having to correct itself. So if their tank is sitting down, facing north, and a mob comes in from the southwest, it will turn 135 degrees to the left, and run to the mob. It stops precisely where the mob is, and doesn't need to adjust itself in case you run too far. You know how if you are tanking something being pulled, game lag might display the mob running to you a certain distance away, but when you catch up to the server, it turns out you're now a couple feet behind the mob? This botting program does not account for that.

2) When adds come, the tank will again instantly turn directly towards the add to gain enough hate. The tank does not take time to turn with movement keys or mouse movement. In a fraction of a moment, it will go from facing one direction to the other.

I decided to do some more testing. I sat near their mob, and pulled myself a gorilla to kill. Once it got into its botting range, or whatever you want to call it, the entire bot group was on it. The tank, with its superhuman reaction time, grabbed my gorilla and proceeded to kill it. Once the gorilla was dead, most of its group would path back to their campfire, and sit. I tried this again, this time pulling two mobs. It would display the same behavior as I described in points 1 and 2. It is plain as day to tell the difference between a player tanking and a bot tanking - no one can face exactly the direction they want to without having to actually move your field of view with your mouse or keyboard. I can say, with 100% certainty, that this group was botting.

This particular bot group on Xegony camps at the bottom of the hill that leads up to the quest NPCs on Brother Isle. They have been there, at the exact spot, with this exact same behavior, for a few days now. Their names are:

Casten <Evolution Dawns>
Jutaisu <Smuffy's Heroes>
Beafcake <Iratus Lepus>
Acedesxx
Wishdoctah <Iratus Lepus>
Tecmmo <Iratus Lepus>

If they are still there, go and watch what a botting group looks like. I repeatedly tried to communicate with them for a few days, and they did not respond to me, or to anyone else. The only interaction you can get is if you fight a mob near them - they will take your mob, since their program thinks they pulled it.

I will have to take a look. Smart how they aren't all from one guild though.

Cause all the of fun of training is lost when an unattended bot is doing it. What kind of reward are you going to get when you check on Trainbot after it's been running for 16 hours? Some text recaps of deaths, fades, and evacs?

If you're just after <thing> to sell, using an automated bot skips you to the rewarding part of selling it. Checking on an automated farmer after 16 hours gives you some bags of stuff to look through and sell for plat to buy kronos to pay for your automated bot crew to farm more things.

The Program That Shall Not Be Named is open source, are you gonna ddos github?

A mod please close this thread, before it gets out of hand...

That happened 5 pages ago.

Apparently the mod-action on these forums is beyond bizarre now. Arbitrary things will get deleted or locked in an hour and on weekends and then you have exploits or argument threads last for a week and then... 'oops... we're locking this now!'

I like the <Super Storage> bot farming guild on Bristlebane. Clever name! Guess they aren't as smart though, the whole team is in the one guild.

Genius. Next time I spot a bot group, I'm posting it. Great idea.

DDoS are illegal, if they caught you being the doing it, you'd lose in court, with up to 10 years in prison and/or fined

I seriosly doubt people WHO doing some bad will stand out in the open with a sign on them saying I am doing something bad.

As more people seeing them, the bigger chance is that somebody will report them. which they should be.

I once was a gm on some other game, with a bunch of other gms. We had placed a secret into the game, which gave a nice item.
For 2 years, nobody found out about it. Then 1 person found out about it, and within 1 day it was public knowledge.

The same thing will be if a person is botting in some "open public" place, then 1 person see it, and it will be fast public knowledge too.

For the owners of EQ, the solution is hard, do you want to kick the botters away and lose the customer, or what do you do.
Remember, EQ IS business, 1 person away is less income

Huh. I'd call the middle of The Grounds, Shard's Landing or Brother's Island pretty damn public.

This makes me think there's a new meta game to be played in EQ if you're done questiing for the moment. Bot-hunting!

Run around looking for bot groups and disrupt them. I think I'll try that this weekend!

I dont see the need for the thread to be closed. Well I do and I dont.... not sure naming bot crews is a good idea or not. Especially if someone is wrong. On the other hand I do want to see one of these bot crews in action.