Botters ruining TLP, what do Daybreak?

If you have identified an actual Chinese bazaar trader then your answer isn't botters but rather a room full of chinese folks playing each and every one of those characters on an individual machine all perfectly legal and according to the rules

I mean no disrespect when I say this. But, if you're being sarcastic then the irony is lost considering the stance you seem to champion when the blatant and obvious evidence is there about botting and third party RMT. So, my main question is: Why are you even defending this? One could suspect that you have a stake in it.

I haven't played in 10 years but this doesn't sound like a new problem. It is a problem. It's incredibly annoying to find everything you want to do perma-camped. At least you have the /pick option now, I guess.

I don't know how you solve the problem. Let everyone create their own instances instead of just using /pick that anyone can join? Resource-wise that would probably be a nightmare and I'm sure it would kill a lot of the social aspect of the game.

These tactics wouldn't work if there weren't a demand for buying things instead of earning them, but it's certainly not a character flaw to have a job and a life outside of a video game. Not everyone has equal time to put into it.

It was obnoxious when I played from 1999-2008 for sure, but it never actually prevented me from playing the game. There was always something else to do, but I never played on the bleeding edge in the first place, so I never had a problem waiting until I could get lucky and find something open.

Before you reply to this thread, watch the freaking video on it. THAT is botting. It's not the same as boxing (which can be annoying, sure). Botting is in a different league, and anyone, yes ANYONE here that cares about Everquest should be pissed that people can even defend that stuff.

If you watch that video and come away from it saying, "looks like a well performed group" to me, then you need to get your eyes checked. Analyze the program-like behavior of each of the characters.

When you are picking around in a zone, doing camp checks, it can be irritating to not find an open camp. But heck, if they are all real players, at least it's not as bad as something like a group of program controlled bots holding down those camps, preventing you and your group from gaining exp with the excitement of named drops.

I'd train the heck out of them.....problem is, there aren't any mobs to train them with lol

His bots are running at the same camp this morning. His puller was bugged and stuck in the lava. Hours gone by and monk has not drown or taken a single point of damage while being at the bottom of lava. I could barely stay in for 10 seconds.

His shammy and chanter are also casting cha buff on.the chanter every 2 minutes. Just keeps overriding each other's cha buffs over and over and over again. I imagine it's gone on for 4+hours. Maybe he is awake by now and fixed his program. Who knows.

It’s a game design problem more than anything else. I wanted to camp Lord Grimrot this weekend, so did 4/5 other Clerics, most I ever saw was 3 picks of SK, normally only 2 if not 1. At that point you have 3 options; DPS race, First come first serve, or leave. This has nothing to do with making the game “social” at this point, it’s a population problem. People know what they want to do and if someone else is there it pisses them off (real group, box, bot) doesn’t matter, they are mad they can’t play what they want to play.

But unless they give us single group instances....just the way it is.

Ceffener, that is what I don't understand...that is what it has always been like in era. Sure if your frame of reference is trying to do Epic 1.0 on Live today (or even back in OoW or something), sure there is no problem claiming a camp for yourself. But to complete an epic in Kunark - Luclin, it's always been this way for most classes.

I spent nearly 13 straight hours farming the shrink wand in the Deep just this past weekend...throughout the day a number of folks poked their heads in camp, saw it was taken and gated out.

This is nothing new. It's just the nature of EQ.

Sometimes you just have to keep looking til you find the spot open. Sure it sucks even more when you add botters into the situation, but eventually you find it open. Just like I did when I camped the Idol of the Underking in the Hole. That's just EQ.

It's definitely an issue newer games have had the opportunity to learn from and correct, but I don't know that you can implement those corrections within the framework of EQ. Single group instances for what are intended to be open world zones creates a different problem to the one it solves. Is that a fix? Does it make things worse in unintended ways? Not really sure how you answer that hypothetically.

This also includes the element of nastiness and childish behavior a lot of players will engage in. There is no good way to stop this, because there are not infinite GM resources to police it, so it is to some extent just an aspect of the game people have to accept and deal with. Everybody wants to do their thing right now when they want to, but that's just not possible because of how the game works.

I'm sure there are compromise solutions that could make it better than doing nothing, though. I don't mean to sound like my response is "well, deal with it."

Just because I did spent 35 hours straight to get my Grimrot kills doesn’t mean it was a good idea. But that is classic EQ, it changed with time. Personally I find the modern changes better, but others don’t and I can live with that.

I have absolutely no issue with taking a camp by force from a bot group and if they die in the process... too bad. I would also encourage groups to contest camps held by box groups, especially when they're obviously mage groups trying to farm Krono. I would even be tempted to encourage groups to contest spawns held down by single high level players and I say that as someone who is currently trying to hold down camps solo myself.

I'm not sure I'm cool with a frontier justice approach, especially one that encourages people being jerks to each other because they think they are more deserving of a camp spot.

I had no issues out DPSing a Cleric that tried to take the camp I had been at for hours. But when we are down to Clerics DPS racing things are just getting silly.

That is a scary amount of time on a single mob. I'm glad at least with the amount of botters and farmer that items / quests are easy to just buy.

as many people that complain about "auto boxers" why havent they combined forces to dps race these farmers out of their 24/7 camps? seems like an easy fix. If these crews stopped getting loot, theyd leave for greener pastures.

the answer is that they really arent a major problem, just a minor nuisance at worst.

Fighting bad with bad is not the answer. Even if the bot team gets trolled 22 hours out of the day, that’s still 2 hours of free unobstructed farming without them even at the computer. The video posted in this thread is beyond damning and the DBG team should ban this person so fast it isn’t even funny. Targeting mobs you’re about to pull while still in the camp? I mean, this is so obviously automation there shouldn’t even be a second chance. Ban this person immediately, this is a mockery of the game and another hour of this going without punishment is not acceptable.

That bot team is still online. /boggle

Damn, I've earned like 2 cents off that video getting all of these views, woot.

All he does is farm loots to sell. I did open a ticket and got the auto response about a week ago. The lack of enforcement is a bit annoying, as it basically looks like DBG doesn't care.

The Krono system is pay to win. Instead of buying the items directly from Daybreak Games, the existence of Krono enables the clever subterfuge of the appearance of legitimately buying items from other players. These mage armies who are perma-camping all the best rare camps in EQ are not players, they are professional farmers who are destroying the play experience of paying customers at the same time selling Krono on the black market which is a clear violation of the rules.

DGB knows exactly what is going on.They do nothing because they profit from it. It's a disgraceful situation that should not be tolerated.

I've run into the exact same bot behavior in a few places on Agnarr and Coirnav in the past. It's extremely blatant and obvious, the botters do nothing to disguise the fact that their teams are being automated. After several times reporting an army of 36 bots farming SG castle 24/7 I just stopped caring. Daybreak won't enforce their own rules, as far as I can tell the only rule they even attempt to enforce is AFK checking people occasionally.

I don't believe they have the will to ban people for running bot armies if they can respond to an AFK check. Doing that would mean admitting truebox code has failed and would require GM resources to enforce.

Good luck to mangler players on proving me wrong. I would suggest you try to coordinate mass reports with video evidence of these bot armies over and over until DBG is forced to act in some way. Maybe if they had 40 people complaining loudly for every team of 30 botters the equation would look different to them