No Automated/Unintended Game-play.....

Well that is unattended gameplay too, lag piles are the worst.

That would not work. You would stop a couple people until they started using a dipping bird as suggested above or worse a 3rd party program.

Solutions that won't fix the problem just cause more problems.

Could you imagine you're camping a single every 20 minutes and your merc keeps suspending and pet keeps getting pocketed.

It might make me want to quit the game, that crap would be so annoying.

How often do you camp a single every twenty minutes? Kill one more mob a few minutes in and problem solved.

While working on hunter or RoS keys quite often for me. You're coming up with a solution that hurts real players more than afk killers honestly.

Use police scripts on all players to combat AFK players?

I suspected there might be more to Overseer than meets the eye. I am going to polish my tinfoil armor.

Realistically, Impact vs. Manpower vs. Money.

I picked the game back up during quarantine and had to pretty much start over from scratch and I did, unintentionally, find out that 3 mercs can pretty much keep you safe to around lvl 70/75. I gotta say, I rarely ever saw another player in any of the old zones I was in. After that, I found it way quicker to find a guild to help me lvl up. I've seen a few of the botters and thought it was both kinda cool and realized very quickly that I could either train them or come back later to get what I needed.

While I too am frustrated, the consensus in the guild I joined was that botters are paying likely paying for their armies - either consistently, or to max out their character lvl/aa's.... Considering the state of the game, i'm sure that DB needs every dollar they can muster to keep the servers online.

I mean, what would you do? risk losing one or two people that pay for an account or two? Or ban some neckbeard that's tossing hundreds of dollars or more at you each month?

it doesnt matter if you say "youre not allowed to do that" if you dont do anything about it when people do it anyway and have bot armies on every server...

its yet to be seen what these "visible GM's" will do on the new TLP's and if you will atleast police a server that is homeage to the creator's of everquests ranger character from bots and foul play

you know there are ways to play EQ ** kinda ** free, you can buy kronos from other players who sell them in game to pay for your subs , and you can even buy TOV expansion from players as well ( i didn't see any to sell lately tho, ),

and those who are cheating can get much more plats selling items than what you can earn ** legally **.

i would not even be surprise if the cheater's play eq for free , so no loss ( or few ) from DB imo, ( my 2 cents ).

and for DB to try to find and catch those cheater , if their 3rd party program let you reply to tells?? . GM ;s could have a very big illusion, that we can't miss, and be right in front of the cheater,, if they continue to pull / kill without seeing that big illusiion, good chance they are cheating ........

why not a server for cheaters , those being caught cheating could be sent there , no server transfer and kronos stays there in that server only,*** would be a populate server

If I was a GM I would totally do this, give my char the same name as all the other mobs, but the appearance of a hilariously out-of-context gigantic raid mob, and a gazillion HPs.
and just talk in /say and some funny emotes. Even the most sleepy player would notice something was up and give a response. Maybe even some "free hugs"...

Or maybe give away some gm-event ornaments to players who were "awake".

And yes i think a prison sever for cheaters is a great idea too.

There's an extremely thin line between exploit and strat sometimes. I remember some nonsense where a guild got in trouble for hiding around a corner from an AE years ago, which is ludicrous.

I also had some zealous person try to trade a coin with my shaman years ago, assuming I was practicing spells with automated key spam or something.

They must be very careful about taking a harsh stance on things so they don't hit people that shouldn't be hit. For Cactiikii, I'm pretty sure they were careful. I haven't heard from anyone that only got pulled into an exploit once by mistake for that get suspended. All that I knew of were repeat offenders.

A good example of when they should NOT do it, is with the Kael giants in ToV. I don't think it's unreasonable to fight alongside NPCs in a PvE setting. I never (intentionally) took advantage of that while the giants were strong helpers in Kael, but I support that they didn't hand out a bunch of suspensions over it because I don't view that as pure black and white. Obviously it was overboard there, but I like it when NPCs are incorporated. For raids The Defense of Lendiniara, Nomia, Lceanium, and now Velks are examples of that (and others I'm sure, but it's nice when NPCs are actually allies rather than liabilities). Now the Cactiikii loot exploit? That was obviously stupid, and I warned people not to do it.

The point is that this is so bad (on AB at least) real players are leaving. Not a dramatic mass exodus, but folk drifting away because it's just not fun any more. These are all either couples (so at least 2 accs) or folk with 2-6 accs - in other words, not a trivial loss of revenue. You can't finish quests or achievements; you can't be at the nicest camps etc. At time of writing the bot army has been at one camp consistently for more than 3 full days, and that's not atypical

It's beyond me why this is allowed to go on. It's *so* blatant

Suspending mercs and pocketing pets after some minutes of inactivity won't fix anything.
In fact, it'll hurt mainly casual players who play with their mercs, sometimes AFKing in lobby or around Teek brothers to catch some MGBs before their short game sessions.

The real botters won't be affected at all because most of the time, they don't even use mercs.
Mercs are not reliable, their IA is stupid, and it's not efficient.
These people won't go AFK, they're using programs, scripts or various tools to keep their characters «awake»

I won't even talk about AFK killing with mercs, because frankly, it sucks, and after level 80 or so, it's over.

So in the end, it'll hurt casual players, while the others will continue their business stuff, laughing out loud.

All the time, well it might be 2 or 3. If I want to farm say an aug I will often kill the minimum amount of mobs and watch youtube or a movie, have the laptop on the couch. Sure I could get more out of killing more mobs, plat items and tradeskill junk but yes I like very boring camps sometimes.

Yeah I heard about being able to send tells when not at the computer. That is why GMs need to conduct a player field sobriety test.

The player must walk a straight line then perform some actions randomly chosen by the GM.

There probably should be some guidelines in communicating with players which the players should know. I have heard GMS may use tells but not sure how looks at tells when off by themselves in a camp. Its a bit of a catch 22 as the GMs are trying to see if the player is really at the keyboard. That is why I suggest the gm have the player do some random things and change the wording from time to time so people can't program canned responses.

If a GM is asking a player to do emotes jump duck sit what not it should become clear if they are an autobot or not.

Just have to account for people boxing so the GM is sure to get a hold of the toon the person is pulling on. But GMs could easily pick a bunch of random things for the person to do to ensure they are at least at the keyboard while the GM is there.

Actualy I am just making a suggestion open for discussion and we are discussing it. Besides as I say it would be easy for you to just add a second mob and then have no problem at all. If you disagree explain why and we will discuss more .

I could only see it getting irritating if you are actually AFK killing. Once every 20 minutes putting your merc on whatever setting or unsuspending your pet really doesn't sound like a hardship to me. I mean once every 20 minutes is that bad? And you must do this a lot for it to be that irritating I would guess...

Or do you mean you want to be able to sit there and press no keys at all and let your merc or pet kill things while you watch tv? Granted you would be at the keyboard but pressing no keys sounds like it might be over the line.. have to get Daybreak to comment on that.

If you are actually doing the killing though I dont see how it would be a problem. But hey maybe I am missing something maybe you can explain more of what the issue is or is it just having to press anything to kill your mob every 20 minutes? And is this the usual way your gameplay goes? Or its it an occasional thing?

I guess you're really sold on the idea because you keep pushing for it even when it is pointed out how useless it is.

Are you talking to me? You didn't hit reply . Just enjoying the discussion actually and so far haven't seen anyone point out that it would be useless.

And which idea a GM getting folks to do something to show they are at the computer or suspending pets and changing mercs to passive?

How many times will people come back and not know they were gone for a second over the new pull limit and end up with their healer out of the fight causing them to die?

How many afk bot groups that everyone is having issues with press no buttons in 20 minutes?

The number of afk merc killers are so low and never really gotten in my way because I can just camp there and they never engage the mobs.

'Our' killstealers on AB don't use mercs - never seen them with mercs. They do make extensive use of pets. Without the pets their dps would be less and, I suspect, they would die more
(we just had a lovely 24 hours without them in a couple of zones, sadly just ended and they're back with a vengeance - cue exit of 3 groups of actual players from the zone)