The Trials and Tribulations of Automating 24 Necros on Mangler

The draw of TLP for way too many people is misguided nostalgia. They want the lively community but this isn't 1999.
The fact of the matter is that I had an acquaintance who was a big eBay seller back in '99 thru '02 and he ran a 6 box team with 6 real computers with KVM switches and other hardware to make sure his 6 wizard murder squad nuked nearly simultaneously. He went out of business after getting into tax trouble with the IRS.
Back in those days many people had no clue as to where different camps were like we do today so he had a lot less exposure to crowds of casuals wanting to camp the BIS gear, for that matter most people didn't even know what BIS gear was.
Trilogy Everquest was and is profoundly broken and I believe that's why they are having much less drama about it on Selo

I think you and I might be closer to agreeing than I originally thought I agree that game design is at fault here, not players. And I have been a vocal supporter of "private picks", so that people could play the game by themselves/with their friends whenever they want to.

I just don't think there is anything inherently wrong with playing a lot of accounts and I don't think anybody can reasonably accuse another player of using a ban-able piece of software just because the player is doing more than you are capable of.

I say hate the game, not the player. Focus your anger at the people who could enable private picks and let you play unharassed at any time, but instead choose to let you stew in an overpopulated, big-fish-takes-all world.

I wouldn't even say to focus our anger on the people who could "enable," because that implies the developer team and I honestly believe that their hands are tied on a lot of this. Prathun himself has always been very responsive to me, as have some of the other developers, and I can't sit here and honestly say that I know their minds, but I can honestly say that they seem to deeply care about the well-being of their overall player base.

But I do blame Daybreak policy makers, squarely, for allowing this kind of rampant abuse to continue, and I start directly at Holly Longdale with her "casuals shouldn't be allowed to see Nagafen" comment. Completely mean spirited, entirely unnecessary, and a sad display of complete apathy. I'll give them credit for backing off on that and allowing the developers to come up with raid instances, but they didn't go far enough.

The most heavily-contested classic camps should all have LDoN-style, repeatable but non-respawning, instances; instances where a group can go into a classic camp, clear it, and have a chance at spawning the rare named of that camp. Non-respawning instances would have less server impact than the pickzones of entire zones, and it would give players a fair chance at loot and experience without being constantly bullied or having the stress of being constantly on guard.

Nobody can argue that this method of OW + instanced content was wildly successful, with a far healthier server population and incredible array of raid-ready guilds lasting far into Phinigel. These servers have a large constituency of players that want to consume game content, not drama. The OW areas still exist for people that do crave competition. The communities are healthy and the players are happy.

I also agree with you that there isn't anything inherently wrong with a person playing a lot of accounts, I myself am an advocate of non-truebox AOC TLP servers. It's the mentality that is to blame, not the boxing. It doesn't take a boxer to harass or e-bully you, just a very specific kind of player.

What if they turned /anon and /role off and then turned off petitions for social issues.

/guildstatus

Honestly, most people that end up getting banned or suspended don't usually announce that they have. People that are suspended tend to "Gotta take a week off, family vacation/job acting up." And people that get banned tell a few close "friends" and disappear, and come back under "new" invites. Unless they are bold, which some are, will tell their entire guild about it.

Either way, the general populace most likely wouldn't know/realize that people have been banned or suspended.

No truer statement. Actually knew some Necros on Agnarr that did this, as well as rogues. They weren't even boxing. But they'd steal everyone's HGs, sit there for hours watching TV while sending their pet to attack the nearest HG. Personally, I think it's funny, only because at the moment people are complaining about boxers/botters, but HGs have always been camped by people. And when camped by a non-afk single box necro, people were still throwing tantrums over it.

Move on.

His 2-3 groups are still at Hill Giants, absolutely ridiculous.

What adds the cherry on top is trying to upload video footage to the online petition form is basically impossible because any clip longer than 5-10 seconds is evidently too large and takes too long to upload and returns an error "the upload took too long, connection was lost". This guy has been killing Hill Giants now for what? 36+ hours non-stop? I cannot imagine a more flagrant example of unattended, automated play. This guy is giving all of us the finger while he makes tens of thousands of plat and not a word from DBG.

pro tip: upload your video to youtube then put the link in your petition. provide play by play for them with timestamps for them to skip to in the video for obvious violations.

also post the video here because community outrage tends to get the ball rolling faster.

It's because you are recording the video in a way that makes small clips, very large in size.
Easiest way is to upload the videos to youtube and then provide the links in your petition.
Alternatively, put your videos through an editor that will decompress them to a size that is actually reasonable to send.

Isn't that against the forum rules or something, calling people out by name? Posting the video here on the forum could get you banned?

Even though I firmly believe the complaint against this guy is childish tattling at best, and almost certainly unfounded and will garner no response from DBG, I still think the folks should submit their complaints and include a link to the video. Let DBG sort it out and decide whether anybody has violated DBG's rules.

But posting the video here is likely to get you in trouble, not the guy killing HGs.

their upload size is 20 mb, it's pretty much unfit for any video attachments longer than 10 seconds. This is their way of forcing people to host their petition videos on youtube instead of daybreak's severs

haha yeah, look at these absolute babies complaining about someone having the ability to totally dominate the best raw plat farm in classic through sheer automation and illegitimate boxing. i can't believe people would be upset about someone openly mass-botting for over 38 hours straight in an extremely nondiscreet location haha

"You guys are babies and tattletails! I enjoy using you as playthings and entertainment!".
I know this game is 20 years old, but do the trolling tactics have to be as well? So lame and cliche.

Just a casual observation here: Does it seem like to anybody else that those who are defending the botting/and or trolling seem to have the typing, language comprehension and conversational skills of a penguin on acid?

You know, if they are afk botting and have something set up to alert for tells, a great thing to do would be to send a tell every half hour or so, so they never get sleep

That's not a bad idea...

Send them a tell that says " 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre"