PLer toxicity discussion

I guess this just boils down to a fundamental disagreement on what caring is.

DPG knows every account and every person that has played the game with (you know what) loaded.

They ACTIVELY make the decision to NOT suspend/ban these accounts.

They ACTIVELY make the decision when they actually do ban waves, to only suspend/ban a number of accounts (its very rare for 1 person to have all of their accounts suspended during a ban wave).

To me, these actions indicate that they do not care about cheating as much as they let on. I think that they know that "cheaters" make up a very large portion of their subscribing customers so they let them be for 99% of the time. The 1% of the time that they action cheaters, they do so in a way that placates to the people who are outspoken and want cheating eliminated. By doing banwaves, they show those players that don't know better, that they are doing "something". But they still want those cheaters to be able to play the game.

As far as RMT is concerned...it shouldnt be that hard to locate players/accounts that are buying/selling krono on 3rd party websites. Its not exactly like people are hiding it. They are just f-in parceling krono multiple times a day with nothing in return. If they REALLY wanted to catch the big offenders, they would.

Thats all I mean when I say they dont care. They dont care enough to actually warrant solving the problem, both of which, I feel like would be easy to solve.

Hah, why would I want to slay my friends exactly? Many large ones are in my circle of friends...

I have no animus against Kronolords, just stating the metrics based on data available.

So you've not been here long... they tried that many moons ago before the notoriously bad version existed (or at least was known well enough for me to hear of the macaroni nonsense) and it went poorly for them, to the point that IIRC there was lawsuits at least threatened at which point they backed off completely, they DO acknowledge they can see such if they wanted to, but they have since stayed clear of flexing such muscle again. (Like we're talking long enough ago I think it predated Holly being the head)

And mind you on top of that, during the Holly era, they supposedly waved a white flag and stipulated that using such on old servers was OK, but TLPs were off limits and would be policed for such. Which of course makes a blanket detection thing a bit murkier as well, since if it's someone who plays both who forgot to turn it off or something.... oof.

I've not seen this - in my circle of friends, it's all or nothing for those with multiple accounts. Not that I'm aware of any using bad software, but the "oh I got banned, but it was totally over nothing" thing is bound to be a lie a number of times.

I've discussed this with old staff before, typical methodology for those doing such involves many layers of trading over different days, like money laundering - for people with less forensics know-how. Especially since many will put in cute messages like "Oh, here's the krono for the XXXX that you sold me a couple days ago, sorry about the delay" in the notes.

Again, I will repeat myself - them failing when trying to generate effective responses IS NOT the same as not trying to/not caring.

Doable but also potentially a way for you to catch a vacation. Someone else mentioned that earlier and it was brought up that doing that over and over could get you a few days off.

Mainly though, why? There are so many picks I see no reason for it.

For the record I have nothing against them either per say. For me I have issue when a person(s) play massively impacts others play out of maliciousness or just ole fashion greed/jerkness. Hording Krono is as honest as hording plat, I am not bothered by people to play to sell their lewts. I even buy some

Boxers from 2 to 75 are not the issue, nor are those that collect/recycle Krono on mass. It is the play and their utter distain for anything remotely resembling good play. Some of the most helpful people to me in recent years of play were 2-3 group boxers.

I do believe, in hindsight, Sony did not realise what would be the result of Krono. Instead of something to combat RMT, Krono became the de jure tradeable currency in EQ, while platinum really lost meaning other than for the initial weeks of a TLP for tradeskillers. We have to remember also, platinum really was not too valuable since early 2000s anyway.

I don't know about live but on TLPs anything worthwhile is priced in Kronos.

The only krono-sink so to speak is paying for the subs using Krono, but that does leave a HUGE portion of Kronos in circulation to be used in trades repeatedly just like a currency. I forgot example use Krono to pay for my account, and have around 58 Kronos. Haven't really "paid" using my CC since Phinegel, whenever I play.

Due to this I can fully see why a huge percentage of Kronos sold are still not consumed. Maybe, again in hindsight, they could have made them one time trade only or something. That would have killed the 3rd party market for 10 to 10 dollars per Krono.

I have nothing against Kronolords. I have everything against the almost corporate 24x7 setups bot farming and or disrupting zones to make Krono to sell on 3rd party sites.

This is not a tiny thing. It adds up.
There are people who have sold 2 to 3 thousand Kronos (one person I knew played only two accounts, just played a LOT) over years.

As far as I am aware Krono (not a SoE invention btw) were brought in to combat plat sellers and other RMT within the game. Krono are a solid trade item for in game cash/items with SoE getting a cut of the pie. I have no issue with them myself, even allows those with more time then income a way to pay for their play.

I agree with the single trade element myself and have advocated for it in forums countless times. Krono when purchased should be a std inventory item, but once traded it becomes "account bound" to that account and can only be consumed (using the paper doll slot for it).

For Krono owned now, they are transitioned to inventory items and then act as any bought from the store. That and encrypt the game data flows.

Yep, my kronolord friends are as chill as can be overall - very good social players, the ones that stuck to Mischief for a while would sell raid loot, but not at the detriment of others - just the "free grab" loots that were going to rot and old stuff that they were upgrading out of.

Other ones would literally just do arbitrage all day of buying low and selling high - while farming group stuff with the least impact to others. (one of my best kronolord friends would roam around when he was bored at work in OoW era sniping named that people left up in between work calls - ended OoW with nearly 200 krono earned from almost exclusively selling the runes from that)

But it definitely does force a personality shift in SOME - which is odd to me, because as someone who 6 boxes, I've got much more means to be a good person rather than a scumbag, and with spending more time online you'd be subjecting yourself to more people being negative to you because of you being a jerk - it's a weird cycle that I'd never want to help perpetuate.

I've got theories as to why, but keeping those to myself.

Absolutely, my OoW rune farming friend, when he and his new wife decided they'd likely never return to EQ (she tried it a little, never resonated with her, she did more WoW) paid for a good hunk of their wedding liquidating a substantial portion of the horde he was sitting on. [As well as wedding gift packages he sent to the EQ playing attendees]

He did state he's keeping a small hedge of kronos in case he ever does change his mind though - but the implications I've read into it is low double digits.

Im not fancy like you and dont know how to break up the replies. I dont really wanna argue with you back and forth since like i said in my last post, I think we just have a fundamental difference in what we think "Caring" looks like but a few things to point out:

1) .. This never happened. It was all made up by the person involved in order to garner favor with the people invested in his project.
As to the point about TLPs vs Live .. You are right in that most people who play on live using assistance do not get caught in the waves, but thats not because its "allowed" its because theres little to no complaining about live server cheaters. Which reiterates my point, they are actioning people only when the complaints or reports from players get too loud.

2) Youre wrong. Im not going to go into it further.
3 this doesnt happen. And while yes, im sure its not as easy as just checking which parcels contain krono, im sure its not difficult to locate some of the large parties who are selling 100s a krono a day.

I Dont know when youre referring to, ive never heard a story about lawsuits when attempting to ban someone. If you have any articles, or sources for this I would love to read up on it. But if this were the case, then there would be precedent for anyone that has an account banned to get it overturned. I just dont see something like this happening. Ive been around before Holly also.

If youre genuinely interested to know more about 1, 2, and 3 .. you can shoot me a PM and we can talk on discord. Rather than talking about the dealers we know in the middle of the police station lol.

The only way this would happen would be if you sat and killed their mobs, they up and moved to a different area/pick and you followed them. That would be considered targeted harassment I believe.

But if they just sit there all day and let it happen, I dont really see how that could be actioned. In fact theres a guy leveling up a few wizards to do just this. In an attempt to extort krono from the PLers in order for him to leave them alone ... lol.

I want to believe differently ... however I must admit the strength of this argument...

They've lost so many customers because of this. It's such a bad financial strategy, and the risk is so enormous.

I doubt they have lost very many people over this. I would even be willing to bet you that they retain more players due to plvls than by not. I also would bet you they sell more high dollar exp potions due to plvl than not. Someone getting an aoe plvl will splurge for the $10+ exp potions that they wouldn't normally buy.

Let me guess? You are an rmter and every post you put in this 13 page chain about toxicity from plers is pretty much harmful to your business model of money launderung, tax evasion, international trade law etc.


But the people paying their subs with money, the ones also constantly complaining about this behavior, the ones also cancelling their subs and people not buying ingame store items or services, and when they leave it's their fault not yours "insert random insult at the people actually paying for the game while paying own rent with same people's money". Your small, but vocal community of greedy sociopaths have been running EQ into the groubd financially for over a decade. You recycle gift cards when you are banned, you cause people to quit, and then you come on reddit and forums and try to make tke the case that the paying customers are wrong...

I think we need a no krono subbed, strict bot banning server. I would pay more for this, especially with Vaniki like elements and random loot. The level of hate for the paying players of this community that love this game and hate it's exploitation need relief from this nonsense botting and pl spam and toxic boxers ripping of whole camps of newbies all day. That quite literally costs the company money. Deleting posts of protest or complaint about it is both a violation of 1a, which is a civil rights violation, but the company seems to think it can deem protest speech as censorable as "not productive". Not productive is ignoring your paying player base and trying to silence them on behalf of a vocal minority of toxic vultures who rip your company off and probably launder money for illicit purposes in other countries. It can't be ignored any longer.

It's done by repeating the (bracket)quote(bracket) and (bracket)/quote(bracket) another time - it's completely not necessary, although it does make things look cleaner though for item by item discussions.

As someone who plays a decent amount on Live - and used to have friends that would actively use the "ghostkilling" for TBS content during the Holly era and get banned regularly, and then magically around the same time as that was "made up" he never got banned again while we remained in touch... I'll honestly say, while I understand your doubt in the person that promoted that, since Holly never confirmed it on her end, the results when it came to that friend bore out the expected outcome you would see if it was true. And at the same time, it was obvious that the automation on TLPs dropped precipitously as well, when Devs finally made something that the software could look for to identify it being a TLP server that made it inactivate itself.

Now that said, with no recent statements - and that friend being out of touch since pre-COVID at this point, it's possible the staff change has had a different stance since Holly and/or other changes in the dynamics - and regardless the number of folks that have figured out how to defeat the "we've got code to not allow it on TLPs" part is clearly substantial now.

Never had to deal with it firsthand, but just stating my friends and what they've relayed - even the one that got banned recently-ish (although I believe it was for training folks from the sounds of his cousin), all three of his accounts were nuked, even one that he hadn't logged in for close to a week.

Only times I've heard single accounts being banned for a multi-boxer, it's folks like the person in my guild who had one week vacation - but that's for being incredibly inappropriate in chat. Not sure what he said, since I wasn't there, but I've seen some of his other rants, and if he said he went over the top it had to be absolutely nuts.

Again, in this case I have ex-staff I keep in touch with regularly - and they're still themselves in touch with the rest, been a good enough source of data that I knew about the persona feature being planned two years before it was announced for example - they've literally said that's how many of them work.

Now generally they do all have emails for dozens of free accounts parked with the krono until they need to move them all with the same host which generally gives a strong implication, but due to the nature of their policies, they have to treat separate emails as if they are another person unless clear identification otherwise is given. Remember, you do not give anything like an ID to validate who is behind each account.

https://techreport.com/news/the-everquest-doesnt-justify-the-means/

Came along very early - really tough to find stuff from 2000 at this point though, but that's during the beginning of the hubbub over it, and eventually Brad and company came back and made a promise (that is standing to my knowledge) to remove the TSR scan and to not use it in the future after the law suit threats or where ever it actually led to.

Same reason why I didn't worry about running EQ on my work machine from 2 jobs back, even though my work machine booted with VMWare, since I wouldn't use it and I only ever ran EQ in the primary environment. I've heard similar for some with Multiplicity being used as a software KVM only outside of normal play to help write out all the social keys for a box character before relegating them to using a keypad 24-7. (I do similar, but I've got multidevice keyboards for my boxes, so they've got a hardware KVM to do such, but similarly, they live in a drawer outside of expansion launch UI updates)

LOL. No, I just find it funny that people cry and cry about other players having fun when there are pick zones. I get it, you want people to be forced to play a certain way so that they have no advantage over you and are forced to group with you.

Again, a power level group these days are like 3 groups. If they are power leveling another group that is 4 groups. I see nothing wrong with 4 groups of players taking 4 or 5 camps.

So far the most toxic people I have ran into are the guy in Sol B who is pick hopping, and regular players who train me.

I don't know why you think some unfair treatment you get as a boxer somehow translates into you needing to defend the RMT PL crews. I guess you're trying to be consistent in terms of "i pay for 6 so i get to take a camp, they pay for 24 they get to take 4 camps" but its just not the same thing.

also you can't play the "you're trying to control everyone" card since you said non-raiders shouldn't play TLPs.

also trains almost never happen and if they do its fun and part of the game, i learned that here on the forums

Most PLers are doing it for money. It's work, not fun. The people being PLed are also not having fun because they're not playing. And the players who would like to play in the zone but can't aren't having fun either. PLing is the fun killer.

The AOE AFK PLers are the bad guys here. You're not gonna trick anyone with that overused line.