Just to be clear, 24/7 fully unattended gameplay *IS* OK?

GM's can see commands being sent from the client, like 'pet attack XYZ mob' being spammed.

It's perfectly easy to tell if by charming a mob of the bots' choice and moving it close to them, breaking & immediately re-charming - you'll see the mass of bot-pets instantly rush towards it.
Rinse, repeat, and they do the same thing without deviation.

100% verifiable unattended gameplay is still happening by bots...
Reports have been filed and completed, yet the bots remain.
SO, it must be OK to do?

Something is very wrong in the company. They're choosing to lie to customers every day instead of enforcing the rules.

They are too busy banning everyone on Rizlona to care about anywhere else.

"play the game" 'eh?
2x necro or mage bots sitting on virtually every named PH; 6bot groups sitting in desirable exp areas 24/7.
That's the problem - bots are not "playing" the game, and are taking content from PLAYers.

Wait a minute.... Truebox didn't alleviate this? I thought Truebox was the solution to bots and armies? Hmmmm.... Whiners gonna whine.

Notting his wrong if it’s done purely for making money,every moo I have played has the same issue do report them but don’t let it get to you,enjoy the game.

Every single TLP to date has had this issue. EVERY... SINGLE... ONE.

How many TLP servers do they have to do this on before the player base figures it out?

Look its simple; 3rd party programs are banned except where they aren't but we can't tell you which is which. You can't report it publicly anywhere (name and shame rules, which oddly they enforce those), reporting it privately to the company, even with video evidence is a 10/90 situation. 10% of the time they take action, 90% are ignored.

So you just have to be really good at having tells sent to your cell phone so you can respond to the GM when they do their "send a tell to the person reported for afk playing" thing and your golden. Or roll the dice and hope you fall into the 90% of reports they ignore.

Don't even think about doing something like training them though, those reports they always act on. Don't report it on the forums after sending months of private reports, they ACTUALLY police the forums.

Basically, do whatever you like and keep your head down. The literal worse they seem to do is a week vacation, so on the off chance the stars align and you get reported and they actually look into it and take action, you'll be back at it in a week.

Just drop a giant train of mobs on those 3rd party tool using losers. DPG obviously cares about them more than the average, decent player, so the onus is on us to act.

You know a real simple solution to at least some of this issue is to just remove the "autofollow" command and feature. Yeah it would inconvenience a few people but it would make it extremely hard to pull around 5 bots with one keyboard and most people don't have 6 sets of hands to work 6 keyboards.

The people that are cheating don't use the auto follow command and could work around this without much problem.

That would only hurt people not using the programs. Autofollow helps boxers. People using AFK automated farming have tools superior to autofollow.

I ran a box on Ragefire. The boxing software I used had it's own follow built in for other games. Boxing is great but it rarely lasts in any capacity on these TLPs. Most raiding guilds don't allow boxes on raids except in extreme cases. They start fading in Kunark and they are usually rare in Velious. It's easy to gear a box in Hate/Fear but you lose access to current raid gear starting in Kunark.

Well If I have to be honest, I feel the regular old boxes are also detrimental to the game. Case in point, we had a simple box duo in one of my groups. I sat there watching his Ranger Box stand with his nose in a corner, never once even entering melee. I ask about it and the response was, "Oh he is contributing. I have him toss thorns on the tank and he does some off healing". 18-20th level Ranger DS and heals for the win. He ended up just pretty much getting a power level for nothing and took up a slot that could have went to someone actually able to pay attention and contribute 100%.

I mean it was Unrest and there was a near constant /ooc X Class LFG so it wasn't like we couldn't find an active player who wanted to just play his main character and level it and that honestly is the crux of the matter, one player ended up consuming the content of 2 players resulting in a legitimate single box player left LFG waiting for content to open up.

The point here is that this scenario plays out all throughout the game. Even if someone is so good at multitasking they can give multiple characters the attention required to get 100% efficient out of them, which honestly they can't, there are probably 100s of players, focusing on a single, main character, that are sitting out at any given time, barred from actively participating in content because of boxers running multiple characters in the game simultaneously.

The bot farm groups are just the worst extension of the problem and I have to ask myself if Daybreak went all in and penalized boxing in any form, if it wouldn't be easier to then identify the bot farm groups? I mean if no one but the bot farmers were engaged in that particular pattern of behavior, it would be pretty obvious they were bot famers. However, if every Tom, Dik and Harry can run around controling half a dozen accounts, well it gets much, much harder determining who is the bot farmer and who isn't.

So the truth comes out, this isn't about what the developers consider cheating but what you don't like which is boxing and something that has been happening since EQ launched.

You could, but they will likely have video recording going and you WILL catch a suspension for training. If thats "worth it" to you, then by all means =)

So what if the ranger wasn't boxed and was just doing the same thing? Why did you treat it differently because it was a box? Sounds like you just don't like other people, maybe you should start boxing since you don't want to have to communicate and problem solve with your group members which is kind of the point of an MMO.

The truth is that I think one stems from the other.

The biggest issue of enforcing any given thing in an online game is identifying the behavior. You have two choices for identifying behaviors, either throw people or automation at it. People cost tons of money and automation is often imprecise and unfair since it is only tracking a behavior pattern, not actually verifying that the behavior pattern might be legit gameplay. You can't make it too strict or it is going to be banning legit boxes.

With either solution, the problem you have to overcome is being able to distinguish between a BoT Farm Group and legit Box Group. Both require some level of automation, case in point autofollow for the box group because no one has 6 hands and can control 6 computers at the same time. Even then someone actually trying to play 6 boxes is likely to use some other types of automation, maybe a keyboard splitter or something. Maybe they use macros to have their Wiz Nuke or their Mage to send the pet in to attack. Whatever they use, it is still amounts to a box group even if it is legit.

So here we are asking them to identify and ban Bot Farmers, but their activities aren't all that different from a legit box group player. Also, quite frankly, their effect on the game is pretty much the same. They both camp the named, farm them for loot which they will sell and/or trade for Krono, and prevent up to 5 non-boxed players from access to that content.

I digressed there a bit but the fact remains, that is hard to distinguish from Chinese Bot Farmers and someone legitimately boxing 6 characters so how do we expect Daybreak to identify and enforce any sort of bans on the non-legit gameplay? At best it is going to be an inefficient process which is what we got. The other solution is to just ban ALL gameplay that mimics these behaviors, i.e. any gameplay where one person can control multiple characters simultaneously.

Also, as I mentioned a couple paragraphs above, I do truly believe that a legit boxer sitting on top of any content designed for 6 real people at 6 different computers, is just as bad for the game as Bot Farmers. They both obstruct content from many in the playerbase. I doesn't matter if it is a Bot Farmer or just one guy camping the boss for loot, it still prevents 5 other people from having access to that content.

Trainers are absolute scum. Once a player gets into the habit of training they can find all sorts of excuses to train. Soon any time they see a group at a spawn they want they train them because they know that they are cheating. Anyone caught deliberately training should be banned for life.

After so many TLPs and so many programs out it's up to you to determine what you want to do in terms of using or not. They aren't going to do anything.

You can even test this by cheating and attempting to turn yourself in via tickets. We tried it way back when on an older TLP, took over a month and that account got a 7 day suspension.

Coming to the forums is waste really. Best of luck.