We need a truly Bot-Free Server

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by MacArthurIV, Jul 29, 2019.

  1. Protius Make Everquest TLP's Great, Again.

    The company has too much to gain from the bots flooding the zones that have high interest items even though it is affecting gameplay for non-botters/boxers. It directly violates some of the EULA/ and other company policies I'm quite sure of it but, we will have to continue to go on policing it ourselves. It took me 3 days to remove one AFK farmer from a zone recently and about 12 hours for another one to be removed from the same exact spot only a few hours later. Send in screen shots and what you are doing at the time and wait for 30-60 minutes to send another screen shot and the devs will log in their character and investigate the /petition. Otherwise, back on topic, I'd love a no box or 2 box only server as seeing 6-12-18... etc boxes set up in a high interest zone constantly soaking up gear so I am forced to change the way I play. It's utter hogwash that 3 or 4... or 5 spawn points are locked down by bot farmers.
  2. Nickatropolis Augur

    I disagree, true box has helped, I don't know if you recall the original ragefire server but every 3rd group you encountered was a 6 pack mage army. You don't see them nearly as frequently with true box.
    Chatoyan and Xanathol like this.
  3. Radical New Member

    Again, impossible. You expect DBG to send a representative to each and every home on the globe to insure no one is using a VPN? VPN's are a necessity in this day and age.

    Tricks? I would not want to ever use a credit card or gain access to my bank without being connected to a VPN.
  4. Protius Make Everquest TLP's Great, Again.

  5. Agonybot New Member

    Leave the bots alone. They never hurt nobody!
  6. Cypren New Member

    From a technological perspective, it's incredibly costly to fight the cat-and-mouse game of detection and evasion with botters, and anyone who says "it's simple" probably has no experience actually doing it. It's almost always a massive net loss to a game company to do so unless the botters are at the point where they're threatening the viability of the game model; given the population numbers on Mangler, EQ doesn't seem to be anywhere near that point.

    Bots could be better addressed with changes to the business model and game design rather than the technology. Right now they have mechanics in place (such as the ability to play unverified, credit-card-less accounts) that enable mass account creation and evasion of bans with fairly low risk. The nature of the game with contested spawns, transferrable loot rights and rare drops that lend themselves to automated farming means there's a high profit motive for cheating and botting.

    One way to get your bot-free server would be to charge people for a year's subscription up-front when they make their account, with a 7 day waiting period for chargebacks/credit card theft before being allowed to play. Suddenly being banned for botting means $180 out of pocket rather than $10, severely reducing the profit motive. It would give people far more skin in the game.

    Of course, how many people would actually play on a server with this stipulation? Probably not enough to keep the game alive, is my guess, but I could be wrong.

    There have been some games in the past that have had success with charging extremely high fees and using them to provide a higher level of human interaction and support. I'm thinking in particular of Simutronics' Platinum series of games, which charge a $50/mo subscription fee both as a way of improving the GM-to-player ratio and as a disincentive for people to treat their accounts as disposable.

    The quality of a service is usually directly proportionate to its cost. How many people would be willing to pay a lot more for a better EQ?
  7. kenmei Augur

    We been down this road before. It ends badly.
    $49/mo back then was it? can't remember, it wasn't worth it, lol.

    Only way for a non-box server is one directly enforced by the players. deity-based pvp. Which also was done before, and received a great population (right before DAoC launched), until they merged it with Zek, thus changing the rules ..
    regardless, pvp is the only answer to boxes.
    but they are too chicken-s*** to help ask for one, they know they would be hunted. There would be no krono market on a deity based server either, true rewards are the no drop medals off the pvp corpses. The only reason they would come is to prove how skilled they are, which 1 was back then...but I believe it was only 1. (ranger+5 wiz)
  8. Nessirfiti Augur

    Ah, Yes, PVP is totally the way to stop people from boxing. I mean Look at EVE online, Nobody there runs more than one acco... Oh. Wait I have 9.
    code-zero likes this.
  9. kenmei Augur

    Like I said, those with skill will play, (cause you can't help yourself). You wouldn't be there to sell krono, but tell me you wouldn't be hunting them down first and foremost.
  10. Nessirfiti Augur

    I wouldn't play on an EQ PVP server beyond trying to emulate Fansy, because EQ PVP is a joke, and not even a good one.
  11. yerm Augur

    Nobody wants to play on a deity based pvp server and it wouldn't stop boxing or botting even if they did. Daybreak is also not going to take extra measures, especially human resource ones like gm enforcement, to make a less-popular-ruleset somehow sorta kinda viable.

    No need to be so heavyhanded. Any purchase using a valid credit card payment would be sufficient, such as the minimum amount of daybucks possible to buy. Once an account has registered with any sort of credit card on file, krono use is fine, the only stipulation is to make krono-ONLY accounts not fly. Those are the tlp throwaways. People don't tag their name or financials to a potential rmt ot training account, they krono it up.

    The idea isn't that you can ever stop everything. The idea is to catch the low hanging fruit. In the case of tlps, it is krono-only throwaway accounts or maliciously-used alts kept separate from someone's veteran-enabled raiding main.
  12. Accipiter Old Timer


    :)
  13. Jaera Augur

    Because of two reasons:
    1. AoCs meant there's no reason to run a 6 box mage army to get things done.
    2. MOTM meant there's no point to run a 6 box mage army to try and get raid content.

    Truebox had nothing to do with it. Two changes were made simultaneously that had enormous impact on the game and people continue to give credit to the wrong one, and then complain when botting and people playing more than one character exist.

    Like changing Shadow Knight's harm touch, once a gameplay solution was introduced, the amount of people playing a class that abuses broken mechanics went down dramatically.

    At the very least, we need progression server with 3 month unlocks that does not have truebox but has AoCs and MoTM, which is what people have been saying for years, but instead we keep getting ctrl+c, ctrl-v on Phinigel with some tweaks to the timer.
    Aneuren likes this.
  14. Nothappening Lorekeeper

    I had a 4 group mage army on ragefire, truebox definitely effected me. I could no longer run 15 accounts on one computer while using I S BOXER across my network to control my other computer with the rest of my army. I had that many mages because in order to farm elemental staff masteries I had to compete with other mage armies that just kept getting bigger, so you also had to get bigger. . There were bigger armies, the ones that would farm cazic thule and beat raiding guilds, but I didnt touch those, I wasn't nearly as sophisticated as them. Didnt have a tank, didnt have CH chain setup, just chain petted down other bosses.

    I had to start buying $100 mini PCs just to be able to 6 box on phinigel. First week of phinigel I was the only 6 boxer, truebox definitely put a lockdown on boxing, as well as disconnecting for I S BOXER. MOTM nerf sucked so did the water pet nerf too. People seem to forget that most people didnt realize virtual machines worked until late late phinigel or early agnarr. Maybe a few smart people figured it out but to me it was a risk, everyone knew if you logged on a live server with vmware it would be flagged and banned later on. Ever since VMs have been growing each server without DBG doing much of anything until late coirnav where they did "one" ban wave and actually patched one VM for mangler/selos but left it working on all the previous truebox TLPs (if this doesnt say volumes).

    As one of the few 6 boxers most of phinigel I got huge grief and hate, random people I never met would train me, cuss at me, petition me all the time. It was a wild time though.

    Id say phinigel levels of boxing was similar to sleeper/fippy boxing, most people had maybe 1 box and grouped, 6 boxers were rare. We'll likely never see that again.
    Nickatropolis likes this.
  15. Accipiter Old Timer


    Of course it did. You can argue that it was the lesser of three major changes introduced but to argue that Truebox had nothing to do with it is flat out wrong.
  16. NameAlreadyInUse #CactusGate

    Private /picks for the win.

    The rest of the discussion is pointless (coming from a boxer who likes to group with people and has discussed it from both sides until the cows came home).
  17. Jaera Augur

    Really? Then why is it every other day we have a complaint about botters monopolizing spawns. Truebox was supposed to solve that, remember?

    MOTM and AoCs solved the content domination problem.
  18. Nothappening Lorekeeper

    people adapt. it worked for two TLPs and DBG hasnt adapted to combat that since.
  19. Accipiter Old Timer


    /sigh

    Phinny was pretty clean when it launched. It was clean because I S Boxxer and emqueue2 were disabled. Now there's a new cheat program that DBG hasn't been able to disable.

    MOTM and AoCs obviously didn't solve the problem because, apparently, "every other day we have a complaint about botters monopolizing spawns."
  20. kenmei Augur

    Can't tell you how disgusted you feel when you finally get into the top guilds and find out they have been doing content because their main members are 6-12 boxing on truebox servers. Usually more than 3/4 raid force are being 3rd party manipulated. They are not hiding.
    Also folk forget, the 'good' ones level up in LDoNs. Doesn't make it any less wrong though.
    I think accounts need to be based on a credit card payment system, with valid identities, and that will prevent alot of this. You can pay for the accounts with krono but the account must be a valid person first.