DBG, if nothing else, fix the ice giant bot team. What are we even paying a sub?

Seriously, this guy runs a bot team 24/7 for weeks and you can't send one GM to address the issue?

One player impacting the play experience of so many should be your top priority on your sub only premium server.

Earn my sub, send a single GM to observe that of a farm and fix this.

I bound near ice giants to try and camp em. Every day I gate once or twice, and its always camped, often by said box team. Today I gated in and it was camped....by the box team. But there was an everfrost pick, and so I camped ice giants until i had to go to work. So, yay? Hill giants might be better plat in terms of it doesn't take so much mana to kill them.

That's all good, but one commerical bot farmer shouldn't be allowed to carry on like this on an official sub server. DBG might get to keep his 10 or so accounts by allowing him to continue, but I wonder how many pissed off other accounts they lose when it, and other examples, are such a visible examples of DBG just not caring who does what on their server.

Its not about the accounts, its about the Krono that_one_player buys with that plat (all of which are originally bought from DBG).

The bean counter eye test.
RMT profits
Game system integrity
---------------------------------------------------

dps it down - no camps in EQ

What gameplay experience of "so many" is being ruined by the loss of the IG camp?

Think about this for a minute and it really doesn't add up.

From DBG's perspective, the Krono is bought either way. There is absolutely no reason to prop up third party plat farming botters, who use that plat to buy already-purchased Krono off of players for plat and then resell the Krono.

The players could just farm their own plat to buy Krono or buy the Krono themselves to sell for plat. The third party sellers do not benefit DBG at all, they only benefit themselves by having a real world sale they can make simply by farming plat.

This really has nothing to do with Krono. Krono is just an added step that didn't exist between the plat farming and the real world sale before. DBG has figured out a way to monetize the plat selling for themselves, but they absolutely don't benefit from third party sales existing. They could shut them down and make the same Krono sales regardless.

They most likely don't shut down third party bot farming due to a lack of resources more than anything else. The best they can hope to do, given the way everything about the game works, is slow them down a little bit. There aren't really solutions you can come up with to botting that would eliminate it completely without hurting people who don't bot or don't even box. It's just too easy to make a new account. You can circumvent having to re-level and re-gear pretty easily if you have otherwise existing accounts in place to twink and PL that aren't related to your bot accounts.

The fact of the matter is there is probably little that can actually be done with the resources available or someone would certainly have solved this problem a long time ago, before Krono existed, and the conspiracy theory that they benefit from the farming is why they don't shut them down.

People listing something for sale and people actually selling something are also different things. But you guys making the anti Krono/anti boxing/anti flavor of the day posts, every single day. Your here, your clearly not going anywhere. Your threats of leaving are invalidated after the 100th time you cry wolf. If they are really ruining your game, cancel your subscription and let it go.

But if your still here day after day, then your level of enjoyment is higher than the inconvenience caused my a small minority. Go out there, farm you gear, raid, etc. I promise you there are not enough people botting to stop you from getting what you want, or force you to spend money on Krono. Most likely you suffer more from the game designed around forcing you to spend ungodly amounts of time to gear...not someone blocking your camp. (Which they literally can’t block your AoCs).

Yes, they should ban people cheating. But the number of people cheating is much smaller than you think by sitting on the forums all day.

It is also incredibly frustrating to want to do something and come across someone with a bunch of bots sitting on the camp you need every time you go to check it.

Likely if they weren't there, someone else would be, though. That's just the nature of how EQ works before instancing existed. Especially camps for highly sought-after items. It's a problem that wasn't really solved until later, but especially on TLP servers, it's part of the package that was asked for.

I don't mean to say "DWI" or whatever, but it is just a fact of how the game works, botters or not.

Then make them burn kronos to make six new accounts and spend two days leveling them up. Do it three or four times until the cost of doing business gets too big for the $8 per sale they get on “that site”. Honestly this is being done in about five zones all the time. Everyone knows which ones. It wouldn’t take ten minutes to pop in and wave the justice hammer if you’re a GM..

I don't disagree that it could potentially become burdensome enough for them to give up, but how much GM time can be allocated to doing this compared to the dent in their profit margins it would need to make before it becomes effective? I think that's the calculus that DBG has to make, and it may not be as simple as just having a GM take ten minutes to pop in and ban accounts. There is due diligence that needs to be done to ensure the bans are justified and not a case of mistaken identity. There are most certainly not GMs just sitting around with nothing to do who can be redeployed for this purpose.

If the solution were so simple, it stands to reason it would have been done by now after 20 years of complaints about this problem.

I’ve had two separate AC’s in OOT that I engaged first warped to and destroyed by six synched up mages before I finally got my ring. And that was only because they were in the middle of a 4 pull when AC literally popped on my head and I managed to get it to under 50% barely in time before team mage appeared with their 4 seafuries in tow. In total I spent probably 8 extra hours in OOT than I needed to because of the 24/7 pro farm teams in each pick.

It’s not even the boxing that bugs me. If you want to six box, if EQ is that important to you, so be it. It’s the blatant automation and the 24/7 3 shifts a day these crews run that is so frustrating.

It actually DOES add up, quite nicely.

The Krono is bought either way is precisely my point. It is bought by people who need plat. If this particular plat farmer is banned suspended dealt with etc...then another plat farmer takes their place. The people on TLP who have the most plat are those who farm plat exclusively - and this equates to there always being plat farmers (sometimes the same plat farmer) in the most popular plat farming spots.

Thus, dealing with this one plat farmer (or team of them playing same characters in shifts) has zero impact in solving the actual issue here.

Now if they nerfed the plat drops from the giants, youd find out real quick who the plat farmers are, as they would be on these boards screaming about it.

Why wont this happen?

Game system integrity
Profit from RMT

Thats why.

The less people who buy Kronos the less they are worth because supply:demand.

The lower the worth of krono, the less chance people will buy them.

Ban the boxers and you sell less Kronos.

My point is that this problem existed well before the advent of the Krono.

This isn't a Krono problem.

Why are you taking this anti consumer implied position? Just to be contrary?

I honestly do not care if it is knrono or not, that's not the point. The point is that the dude is openly botting 24/7 for weeks, and DBG do nothing.

They need to just take 5 mins and log into the game to see this sh!tshow. It isn't a happened and over moment that requires evidence, it is a persistant abuse of the server rules.

I completely agree that botting is a problem and that more should be done about it. I was taking issue specifically with the implication that getting rid of Krono would solve the problem.

I am fine with boxing as well, this isn't an attack on boxers for sure. This is about the *botting* that is clearly visible all day every day in this specified location (and others).

Very few people buy plat to buy plat. People buy plat so they have a more divisible currency in game to buy other items with. Phinny had very few botters and large box crews in classic. Normal players and 2 boxers still farmed the items, if you ban boxers it doesn't effect the supply of actually items nearly as much as you think. Phinny probable had the best "RMT" economy for DBG of all the TLPs and yet it was the one in which most botters were defacto banned.