Seems reasonable to me. I spent at least that long foraging in dreadlands on Fippy to supply my wife's alchemy habit.
I set up a top dollar buyer thats tested this theory on multiple servers and at best you're getting a few trickles of 25 or so lilies at a time. Nobody is accumulating 15 thousand of anything legitimately. And every eq player knows it.
Wow scratch that 15k, that's 30,000 nodding blue lilies according to the screenshot... rofl but not laughing.
The sad part with the amount of mobs the botter clears he won't even see NBL 20 per hour, but lets be generous and say he gets 25 per hour. That 600 per day, that's 50 days of botting a group for 24 hours a day.
I've seen them called out in Mangler general chat before, and they've been called out on the forums. It's no suprise so many of us see our friends leave EQ after coming back. The people with power don't seem to care when their game is treated like old school Diablo. Churn and burn Phinny clones, milk the pop for bag and pot money. Just makes you lose hope... unfortunately.
Unfortunately the guy who made all the newest EQ bot programs that all the mangler botters use, now makes the same programs for WoW classic, so you see it over there a lot too. At least on there they eventually get banned though, and if you play on a PvP server you can just kill them.
Until you factor in the chance to get something other than a Nodding Blue Lilly, which I didn't in my post. So assuming the DL forage table has 8 items and all items have an equal chance to be foraged, you'd need to forage for 6,520 hours, or foraging 24 hours a day for 272 days (on a single character).
Honestly, the best part about Ladyofleaves & Maeppendy is that he has a gnome enchanter named Drstrange. If he's not fully afk (or he sees you box him out by sitting on the spawn) he swaps over to Drstrange, charms an orc cent, buffs it with see invis, then camps it off on top of you to kill you. He's SAVAGE about his leaves. Pay the troll toll! Leaf collectors beware!
Everquest is that one inner city neighborhood where it once was nice. Over time, the place has become run down with gangs (Botters), drugs (RMT) and other less than desirable elements. Much like the analogy, the leaders are apathetic to the whole situation (And perhaps even benefiting from it). The unfortunate truth is simply this: Nothing is going to change until we as the community change it. To many people are hiding in their homes, wishing the problem will go away instead of trying to take the streets back. The botters and RMT uses fear and intimidation to keep doing business in our game, able to operate with little or no concern about their money flow. And it saddens me that so many people in the community defend the botting and RMT practice with so well practiced rebuttals knowing that they can do so until we as the community stand up to fight these SOB's. They're ruining EQ and they're going to be the reasons the game shuts down.
You must have played with blinders on if you think the gangs and drugs weren't there in the beginning.
So, we must ignore the problem because it's always been there? Sorry to tell you, that it was the exception to the rule, not the normality. As I have stated in the past, with a statement like that, you're apart of the problem, not the solution.
They start doing this way back in kunark when they first started making the alchemy vendors not scattered to the winds throughout the world. They did it again with velious in making thurgadin a zone where you could grind up your tradeskills for the quests. They did it again in luclin when they made shadowhaven a zone where you could just buy most mats. Then they did it in PoP putting spells in PoK and cutting the timesink of travel down some. LDoN camp teleporter dudes... etc. etc. etc. Personally I like those, lots of people did not, we're all individuals, mang so let's be buddies. They have been taking the timesinks out of the game since the day they put them in there (or i guess just moving them around, lol). EQ has never been a static snapshot of anyone's nostalgia goggles which is good because we all have our lines for what is fun and none of us are wrong.
Yeah, but you know they have like millions of subs and ban like 20 spamming chads a month. Thumping your chest about it and making real progress are two different things. While I appreciate the spirit of your desire that the worlds we inhabit be better places, ffxiv does not actually do any better than daybreak and when it comes to banning the things that I find annoying (the non-stop spamming in limsa/general) daybreak... oh right, darkpaw... is doing better than squeenix. We all have our things that matter to us. I hope you have a great day. When was the last time you saw 000platsforsale . c0m omg spammed all day for 6 years. Yeah it took 6 years, but there are no chads spamming under the nexus on mangler.
Don't be absurd. Botters and RMTers have no ability to threaten anyone. There is no fear or intimidation. And players, no matter how well-intentioned, cannot do anything to eliminate botters or rmters. These are things that only Darkpaw Games can do. This whole analogy is nuts. You aren't in any danger.
