No doubt, some people on these forums act like a boxer broke into their house and violated their families because they cant do a dungeon crawl in OW Deep. Personally I dont think it ZOMG ruins EQ, there is actually positives to some of these guys, maybe Mangler is different but when Coirnav was the hot server the botters destroyed the economy on sea horse belts and ink, which was actually a good thing for most of the other players as a nice stat item was dirt cheap and potions were also dirt cheap and easy to get. It also made alchemy one of the easiest tradeskills to level. If crawling the in the Deep is really that big of a deal then there is always the AoC you can pop and go grind in. *shrug*
I didn't say that did I? I just pointed out the flaw in your analogy that EQ was this pristine neighborhood that's now run down.
The botting rmters are responding to market demand. If the demand isn't there, the botters don't show. Analogies implying they show up and there goes the neighborhood are misguided. The neighborhood developed a drug addiction problem, mangler being particularly infested with folks who are hooked on rmt to get high, and now that mangler neighborhood - sometimes the same rmt addicts even - seem confused at why people are selling hits of rmt there.
The demand is there because they created it for the sole purpose of exploiting the economy. Basic economics, sure. But in this case, the RMT'ers went in with the full knowledge of how to create that demand because they have done so many times before. Although, and this is just my personal opinion; I fully support those who would be willing to wage a crusade against the RMT'ers for the sole purpose of escalating the battle lines to clean up EverQuest.
Again, this is just my personal opinion. But the RMT'ers have been playing dirty since this beginning. Which is why it's such a losing battle. Time to fight fire with napalm
And then they went the other way again. Many expansions had spell vendors spread out over many zones. It's dumb, honestly. HoT, VoA and RoF, CotF have the spell vendors in one zone. Maybe that's the pattern from HoT on.
Yeah that's not how it works at all. All you have to do is look at the difference between Phinny and Mangler to see this. Phinny was much much more buyer hungry then Mangler is, yet Mangler has a much larger amount of botters.
Part of the issue which allows bot teams to thrive is the static nature of spawns. i.e. if you go to point x, and kill the mob in this location, then the boss has a chance to spawn with phat lewtz you can sell. Something that would instantly break that would be to make things a bit more interactive. e.g. - Give a boss multiple locations they can spawn and even better have them wander hasten bootstrutter style round whatever dungeon/zone they're in. Want to prevent warping... have them wander through some really nasty areas, or have some guards that wander with them that would overpower would-be warpers if the guards aren't split. - Want to prevent farming... make things less static... have mobs have multiple spawn points, so that when you kill it, it might respawn to be killed again, it might respawn elsewhere in the zone... i.e. the mob count in a zone doesn't drop, but the area round you might get quiet. Really the key is to make groups more mobile. bot groups by their very nature are static, so the best deterrant is to make static much less attractive, and encourage the good old 'dungeon crawl' instead.
Redesigning the entire structure of the game isn't the solution. A human element is the solution. Whether or not Darkpaw/Daybreak wants to put up the money for a human based solution is the problem at hand. Seeing characters pathing like NPCs in the open world is pretty obvious. Seeing characters follow extremely rigid movement patterns afforded by an alternative /follow command is pretty obvious. Warping is a problem that should have been automatically solved two decades ago. How hard is it really to check player/client movement against some variables and flag them for further review with some automated system? Money and time is the answer. For all the complaining about botting, EQ TLPs are still ridiculously popular, and their extremely hands-off policy towards this stuff isn't impacting their bottom line too hard, clearly.
Oh i don't think this is a major redesign of how the game works. It's just tinkering a little with the spawn mechanism a little. As to bosses, even if boss pathing is known, it does add some randomness into the equation and stops people monopolising camps. The key thing is it forces people to move, and will almost certainly kill unattened gameplay.
honestly the issues for bots on mangler will be gone soon. Because PoP and beyond it will take more and more effort for them to be effective, additionally a new TLP will release soon and they will all jump ship to go there to maximize their investment. Finally while the BoTs do infact suck they don't really effect the server as much as alot of people would like to make you think they do. Other than waking sleeper that is.
How do you figure it's not. The population has plenty of area's to exp the amount of droppable items and gear disappears so it means selling loot rights which takes longer to do especially if you are afk botting. Last but not least after PoI there is no more ae grouping happening really anywhere. So each expansion it gets a little harder for them to block current content. Thus leading to them jumping ship to the next TLP where they can make more money. Doesn't completely eliminate them not even by a long shot but it becomes less and less of an issue on the server as time goes on.
Face it, original, Kunark and Velious are all prime territory for the sort of exploits that draws all the complaints and yet people are already clamoring for a new TLP so it can all be repeated again.
You are conflating two different issues. Not all botters are RMTers. PoP and later content certainly makes RMT more difficult. It does not make botting more difficult.
Bots, hacks, automation is all easily detectable in this day and age and especially on a game that is this old. Simple fact is if they wanted it gone, they would have done it already with anti-cheat. They are not, probably because they don't want to lose that kind of money in what is already barely staying afloat we can assume. Debate all you want, it could be taken care of and is not...come up with your own reasoning but the fact that it has been an issue for decades with little to no recourse is not because it isn't possible to get rid of is for sure. And yes, they will always go to the most populated location to make the most profit, which is the repeating yearly tlp of classic - pop. If there is a new server they will 100% flock to that one if that is where the population goes. They gotta feed their children off krono sales . Regardless of the game higher population always = higher hacks/bots/etc.
This ^^ Obviously they can detect Macaroni quest running, at least most of the time. If they wanted to ban everyone using it, they could catch 90%. Their subs would plummet and they would lose boatloads of revenue, but they could do it if they wanted. But that's not an excuse to turn a blind eye to it on Truebox, which was designed from the outset to be different. If they aren't going to enforce the Truebox rules, why still have it at all?
So the cycle of TLP truebox servers where only cheaters can box effectively and the regulars who don't want to break rules and own 3 PCs/laptops get passed over. All hope is soon lost.
Should have been done day 1, enforcement I mean, at this point however they screwed themselves. Because now everyone has realized they had 0 enforcement so more and more people are ignoring the truebox "rule" and are doing it. So now if they were to enforce it they would lose way too many. Screwed the pooch lol. My guess is you will see a non truebox server soon. With picks, aocs, etc they have no reason not to allow more accounts and have more money coming in and not be held accountable for their lack of security or monitoring of their own rules.
