Blatant botting is completely out of hand

And everyone who assumes you will keep your name... well that's just the start of the server merge hassle.

You want more people to group? Go buy a server transfer token, come back and tell us all about the results. Please! Go join a more populated server and save the rest of us the prostration.

Guilds moved to new games because there were new games. Primarily Wow.

And thank you. Because I disagree with you then you have to attack me. It's a sad thing that happens over and over on these forums.

My guild was highly successful before any mergers as well as after. Successful guilds tend to survive. I won't apologize for that.

Problems occurred and guilds had issues because Everquest was bleeding players so much due to other games that they HAD to merge servers. The server mergers helped stem the tide of those leaving but it couldn't prevent it.

I am sorry some people had guilds not strong enough to handle new games coming out. I don't like seeing any guilds die off. But the server mergers weren't the cause of that.

Was there some merging of guilds after the server mergers? Yes there was. For the same reason the mergers were required in the first place. Everquest was losing players left and righting.

Anyone who doesn't acknowledge that Everquest was losing a lot of players BEFORE the mergers and that the mergers were a result of that is just lying to themselves.

Actually in the 2004 merges my guild moved en masse to EQ2 as a direct result of the merge. AFAIK some individuals later may have moved to WoW but not as a group

What about the mergers made your guild move? And what made you move to EQ2?

I dunno.. EQ2 comes out. Wow comes out. Large numbers of players move. Seems to be more of a direct correlation to that then to server mergers.

Once things settled I had about a net 10 percent drop in people who mainly went to EQ2. Some continued in EQ off and on but ended up on eq2 only. A few more dabbled in EQ2 but stayed on EQ. But that was on EQ2s launch. Not when servers merged.


I think the important thing here is that we are talking about far smaller player numbers now.

I group with pugs on FV if anyone wants to move to FV we have some great grouping guilds too and a few guilds that raid in different time slots. Come one come all.

What does you hearing stuff year's ago, have anything to do relevantly to this conversation here an now?

Same as this

code-zero said: ↑

“Actually in the 2004 merges my guild moved en masse to EQ2 as a direct result of the merge. AFAIK some individuals later may have moved to WoW but not as a group”

and this


code-zero said: ↑

“Server merges resulted in so much frustration that guilds migrated to entirely new games rather than deal with it. I recall back at the last one that less than 6 months after the event there were once again calls on the forums to merge some more. You only think that you didn't have problems because you were undoubtedly busy recruiting victims of the merge”

And I could go on quoting more. We are talking about what happened during the last server mergers because it seems people have different opinions about how they went.

I am guessing you didn't actually read everyone before posting or you would have seen the complaints about how badly some think the last set of mergers went.

Some moan about the last set of mergers and others like me can't figure out why.

And lastly I think one set of mergers is relevant to another set of mergers even if I think they went well then and will go well now

If i move on it wont be from mergers or not finding groups it will be from nerfs and the developers ruining game play worse with every new expansion. I will admit i keep coming back to EQ hoping they have finally removed the part of body that should have a brain cell in it from the dark cavern it is in but so far my dreams have been crushed. Dreams though are eternal so i suppose will continue to hope and see how long of a break i take this time.

Same. I always grab the randoms LFG while I named hunt. FV is a great server.

I think one of the better ideas I have heard is for DBG to announce closure of low population servers and offer people free transfers off server for 3 months before it is archived and mothballed.

As far as the OP goes I think issue is time and resources. Personally I have never "botted" however i have boxed for 15+ yrs. I know a few who have "botted" and they don't play anymore. I hope that developers will come up with a way to detect "unintended gameplay" that requires little or no time/resources to verify and ban ip addresses or simply delete/deny access to those accounts.

I think its worse if DBG doesn't say "hey everyone from x is going to y and you can have a free transfer too" because letting people choose where they go breaks up communities and people have to reform guilds and what about the people who only play a few months of the year.

Why not let people redistribute themselves as they see fit? There's an argument that it's free will... and that's kinda important. Maybe someone will use the server sunset as an opportunity to finally jump to a major raiding guild server and try to app with one of the bigboy guilds. The casual players may not care where they end up because they just stick to themselves anyway. It varies wildly, but at least you're given a choice.

They can still redistribute themselves with the free transfer you would still get on a server merge. It's more there has to be a default location set for people so that full guilds don't have to have an internal argument and you can expect to see most of your friends in the new place.

If people really wanted to just move to some random place they already could use their free 500 cash a month, save up and get a server transfer or just outright pay for one. They don't do this because they want to stay with their community members.

Not having a default place to get moved to also leads to a host of other issues

Shared banks
guild banks
housing
recreating guilds (for raid guilds this isn't really that big of an issue you can get it mostly sorted easily but for a family guild that could have 500+ members its not a small task you also can't just give everyone invite permissions in a family guild like you could in a raid guild)

And to sum it all off, I believe the special tool that does do server merges is broken and they have to remake it or something.

I see a problem with the first paragraph even though I think its a great idea in some ways. Problem being you want to keep the social connections a server has as complete as possible. I think people connections keep most playing the game. Merging servers does this because everyone ends up in the same place.

The other problem I see are returning players. Is empty server kept going for them to log in to or does EQ have to create a new interface that allows them to pick a server to transfer to even though their server has stopped operation? And how do they figure out where their friends went? I think a lot of returning peeps might just give up at this point.

Merging servers keeps everyone together AND deals with the returning player issue at the same time.

Though I guess you still have the initial "Where did my server go" problem we have always had.

On your second paragraph I agree completely there has to be a way to detect unattended gameplay. Maybe a captcha that comes up on each toons screen and stays there for half an hour until one of the toons completes it. Or maybe it just shows on the pullers screen. Anyway something like that might work.

I don't think you can detect afk play without getting input from the player to prove they are at the keyboard or by inaction not at the keyboard.

They would also just find a way around it and it would only end up punishing legitimate players

Likely true. Although the Capcha stuff seems to be the industry standard against bots. the afk bots would have to find a way to transmit it to their master on his or her phone to finish it. Doubt it would be easy to add that stuff to eq though.

Yeah but could you imagine getting a captcha pop on your screen during gameplay? Its bad enough that gm's supposdly send tells to people and expect them to respond.

I was farming PoE the other day for TS stuff. My 3 year old wanted to play so I let him run around for and hour playing with my pet off /ghold he could easy be thought of as a "bot" and not able to send a tell if questioned. So how does the gm /tell thing prevent boting ? after all if you have a program that can control your toon then you could have a program that send you a text when you get a message and you could respond to the text that send it back to the program to post the reply.

If they want to stop bot they need to find a way that tracks a monitored toons actions for repeated actions. IMO.

I multi-box, but even when I don't, I rarely pay much attention to tells unless I'm expecting one. If this horrible practice is true, they need to change it. Nothing short of "physical" presence of a DM should be able to determine an AFK botter.

Its not hard to set things up so you don't miss tells though. I use the in game audio to make a trigger that beeps when I get a tell on my main (for times I forget to put GINA up) as well as using GINA so it says "Corwyhn tell" or whatever toon name gets the tell. Since I run a guild its in my interest not to miss any tells.

I box and run a guild and I don't usually get too overwhelmed with tells. I would find it hard to believe any other boxer gets so many tells that using a system similar to mine would be a problem.

All that being said I don't think they will do much on the Live servers. DBG only seems to get really concerned about afk play on the TLP servers.

And no they are not using any automated system to determine botters atm. And DBG is not going to pay to have GMs fulltime to police botting which is what it would take since you would be checking out regular boxers and bot groups to figure out who was who.

BUT yes when a GM shows up they are going to send you tells if you don't answer you are that much closer to having them think you are an auto bot.