It's time to demonetize Underfoot: PART 2

I want back to Underfoot to finish Quests and Hunters. Nearly every zone was taken over with Monks, run amok. It was so damn hard to get anything done. Just ten mob kills in Quarry took over 3 hrs, cuz a _____ monk was relentlessness. Tried to send a tell, and was already blocked. Tho I had never sent that person a tell before that. Tried Shout, OOC. That _________ never gave an inch. I had to KS to get the certain mob needed for the task. Even "ganked" the mob and the PC came with it. How does that work?? So what do we do?? Makes me HATE all Monks now. Nearly 7-24 at it. Jan, you have any ideas? Only think I can think of that might slow em down, is to up spawn rate to make em wait so long, it aint worth it. I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.
On a positive note, it's my EQ Birthday today! 22 years old.

I'm so sad I missed part 1

Yeah lots of UF zones are still farmed by 24/7 SK bots on bertox, would be nice to make it not worth it.. but IDK they would just move somewhere else. See lots of 24/7 bots in Dead Hills now, at some npc's that are nearly insta-repop.

It definitely should be much easier to report them. I can't be bothered most of the time because I have to be in the same zone they are, tab out, log in to CS website, and then fill out a 6(?) point form for each char I want to report. Really should be like other games where you can just rclick their name and be done with it.

EvE was the only other multiplayer game I really played... their bot reporting and detection system was pretty amazing, and they would send you an email when action was taken on a report generated, in part, by you. I have hundreds of these

The punishments should be WAAAAY more meaningful too. One strike should be a two week suspension, strike two is a ban. The current system is just a joke.. whatever is it.

So you went to a zone and it was camped. Instead of going elsewhere you opted to kill steal.

Wow.

Botting and automation is bad. And there should be irl laws and punishments for it.

Are you 12?

You should get punished or banned from the game if you break rules like that, sure. But sending them to jail for it? Seriously?

Granted that the game is a virtual public space. I still don't go to the park irl and cheat or abuse the space for personal profits.

I'm being hyperbolic and righteous..in order to express how bad that behavior is. From what I know and from having read online. The biggest cheaters RMT. And a lot of the RMT is done through exploiting people in foreign countries with squalid working conditions and long hours.

Automation. Cheating. RMT. Box armies. (not talking about 3 boxers or casual ppl keeping alts up to date or helping friends). Box armies and Automation and Cheating is spiritually destructive behavior.

It does real harm to the game. The people doing it. The community. Even the Intellectual property of Everquest is harmed by it.

So yeah. That's where I'm coming from. People shouldn't come back with an excuse of "I need to run 50 monks to farm kronos to enjoy the game". If you are in the need territory or your OK with the slippery slope to that. You need to really re-evaluate your lifes priorities.

Sadly it's out of Daybreaks hands and a lot of the people with these problems are adults so its not like their parents can (or would even understand to ground them).

The governments of the world have very big laws about gambling for these very reasons.

Yeah. I do think we should clean up the streets of Norrath and help these guys stop this behavior. Norrath belongs to everyone that subs. Not just the people willing to use 3rd party software and VMs.

We're calling automated bots destroying zones non-stop for weeks/months on end "camps" now, eh? Dismissing the prevalence of this behavior and the negative impacts of it on lower level players trying to experience content is a shame. What a joke to suggest that there are high levels of competition amongst real players in these lower level zones.

You don't see any shocked Pikachu faces in this thread because everyone knows it's happening and that Daybreak isn't doing anything about it. They've been told over and over that they could go into HoT/UF zones (or a myriad of other favorite places for automation), use their eyes for 5 seconds and see what real players are having to compete with but they can't/won't/don't. Appropriately leveled players in these zones trying to complete content/progression are no match for level 120 bots.

To the actual subject of this thread, demonetizing zones is a terrible solution to the problem of automation in this game. All that's going to do is hurt real players.

I imagine an easy solution would be to apply a new trivial loot code to the gems they are farming as soon as you reach 6+ lvls above the content you're farming in.

That way anyone capable of easily farming them solely for plat would be too high of a lvl to a receive gems anymore, but anyone still killing it as current content for their toons could receive the gems for their efforts.

That might be a good idea if they hadn't started removing item drops which sell for decent plat, in recent expacs. Still not sure what the point of that was.

Well they increased raw plat drop in recent years to match (roughly) what people were getting from the drops to remove the middle man it was producing.

But that does bring the long term issue of people just farming tbl when it becomes trivial for plat cause I doubt trivial loot code works on plat but idk.

No there shouldn't. This is a game.

This thread.. LOL!

Just bring an army.. an ya never have issues..

Well, if that was their intention, they missed the mark. Since moving into ToV, I am WAY down on net plat gains over my play sessions, compared to earlier (ROS and before) expacs. The plat drops from mobs is a lot higher, but not enough to make up for the lost random vendor trash.

Years, actually. The groups in Dead Hills have been there for close to a decade now. That's almost 10 years of automated groups farming plat continuously.

Meh, you could be 100% right but if you're getting less money, so is everyone else. Deflation. And no middle man gem to sell to acquire it.

Anyhow, death to autobot plat farmers!

....which is a joke, the team doesn't have the integrity to do anything about cheaters and has made it clear past few years.

No doubt, it would be silly to argue otherwise. However, for the perpetually EQ poor, it's a much bigger hit.

If you make a couple million a month, through drops and selling items you get, the loss of a few thousand plat a day isn't a big deal. For those who don't fight in the latest content, and don't regularly hunt names who drop sellable items, it's probably the difference between making >something< versus barely (or not even) breaking even every day.

I haven't gone to old content specifically to make plat, but on the occasions I have gone to old content to get an achievement, or collect TS mats, the extra gems/vendor trash have sure been an added bonus. Trivial loot code applied to that would really annoy me.

I was just in a UF zone to camp the enchanter belt and saw a bot running around. I swear the bad actors in this game just bring on future restrictions.

There's a saying...how does it go?

Oh, yeah - two wrongs don't make a right.

What they should have done was /report, /petition. Take video capture if they can, upload and host it on a private Youtube link. Then give a detailed explanation of what they saw and why they believe the suspects were cheating. Then move on. Let them dig their own hole. Personally I'm 11/14 on getting suspected cheaters and botters kicked from game. 6/11 of those I have yet to see in game since - guessing they're banned.

That's not what they, to their credit, admitted doing. If they're in fact botting/hacking whatever - they are in the wrong. But they anointed themselves judge, jury, and executioner.

Side note - imagine the irony of doing this in Plane of Justice. One could almost defend their actions as roleplaying.