The bots are bad and only going to get worse

Hard to believe it’s love of systems that you pay $90 a month to avoid all of those systems and create a solo play game. Actually that sounds like the opposite of enjoying the game as it’s setup, but wanting to create an entirely new game devoted to self play, but staying away from games actually meant for doing so causes people to go to far extremes and massive use of cheat programs.

But everytime SoE tried to actually make the game more solo friendly, ohhh no the world was ending and it’s becoming WoW. But 6 boxing, that’s the spirit!

Boxing allows you the benefit of an economy to help prop you up, while avoiding the social, interdependent aspect of being in a community.

So it's really a match made in heaven for your modern eq player.

boxing allows me the freedom to get group flags non usa prime time i work 3rd shift so i start work late in the night and get home early the next day,for example its 3.15am tuesday morning here and in the states in one of the time zones its 9.15 am monday morning so i wake up to raid and play after the raid, also when i am boxing i am to busy to get involved in guild drama.

The problem is... the people who are paying cash to DBG for Kronos are doing it to get items or money for items. The people farming the money and items are often these botters. I'd bet 80% or more of the Kronos I have sold have been bought by some botter (just a guess). Getting rid of the botters will drastically reduce the amount of trade going on with Kronos. I buy Kronos from DBG sometimes - I just don't have the time to farm cash and gear. So I basically outsource it, lol.

I would bet DBG is probably making a large percentage of their revenue from EQ off of Krono sales. Even if a casual player buys a single Krono a month - that more than doubles what they are paying for just the subscription.

The botters on the other hand aren't using the Kronos to buy gear - they are selling them on third party sites - less than DBG games does - for real cash.

If DBG really wants to get them - they could just drop the price of their Kronos on the DBG store to like $5.00 each, if you have a paid sub. That would seriously impact the revenue stream of the botters - because they would have to start selling their Kronos for less than $5.00 a month. Of course, then DBG loses cash too.

So DBG have gotten themselves into a dirty little circle of revenue vs. dealing with these cheaters. At the end of the day, it's a business and their primary objective is to make cash. It's all well and good for now, since EQ still has some steam left in it yet. Although, I have to admit, I left this game around the time when Mangler hit Velious and didn't really plan on coming back. I do often come back, but it probably won't be long before the botters AoEing the good areas or acting like pricks will have me playing something else again.

The community could take care of it themselves by only buying Kronos from DBG, but you know everyone won't do that. Personally, I only buy from DBG - it's enough risk using a credit card online with a big company; no way I'm giving one of these various sites credit card info. I don't trust them to not be selling that info in the background as well. Obviously; ethics doesn't matter to them - as they'll walk all over people so they don't have to get a real job.

One thing that DBG could do that would REALLY help without really impacting the in-game market is to just simply allow instances/picks on demand. That way if some tool is AoEing everything in a zone, me and my normal group can just go into an instance by ourselves. I mean - what harm would there be in that - how would picks on demand hurt anything in the game? It works just fine for LDON. If anything - it would help. You can't say the botters would exploit it - they are already running over people, hogging up zones, and generally exploiting the game. It would just give normal players a chance.

I disagree.

In 3 years I believe they did as best they could with the resources available. Of course they could have done more, but was it in the budget to do so? These are questions that we should ask ourselves before pointing a finger at the Darkpaw team.

They don't have more resources now than they did then...

And the answer to "do they have more resources now than they did then" will almost certainly be no, no matter what time period you're talking about.

Pretty sure once RF and LJ started running they had "more" resources.
The problem is someone mismanaged those resources.

How much resources does it really take to shut down 40 to 100 man bot armies that have been getting called out on the forums for a year or more?

That's just it. It's not like these players are sneaking around hiding in the shadows. They've been more blatant and obvious on Mangler as on any of the TLP's I've been on since Phinny...and they're the same people doing it.

The guys selling the ornate armor, the guys selling 45 copies of each of the spells, the guys selling 1800 blue diamonds, the guys that had 10000 inks, the guys selling LR in raid instances day in day out, the guys sitting at Ice giants and HG's on classic.

It's the same small group of players running entire guilds worth of bots.

They stand out like neon signs and anyone with 30 seconds of log time can point them out. Why are they still around?

I mean the team isn't ever getting more money or more staff. They have more stuff to manage every year and fewer manhours and dollars to spend doing it. I'm sure there's some mismanagement, but there's also just a very low capacity.

Probably more than any of us could know.

I have a few theories as to why the cheaters are free to roam on Mangler. That said, my hunch is that these new servers will have anti-cheat measures in place server-side. Those anti-cheat measures may also be pushed down to EverQuest clients as well. DB obviously doesn't have or want to waste resources on a 24/7 GM team. With that in mind, the easiest way forward would be to use Anti-Cheat software. You integrate it directly into the game engine and now you don't need a full team working night & day to catch cheaters. You stop them from even executing the cheats and block the machine entirely. Not saying they'll use it, but PunkBuster is a great example of an Anti-Cheat software for Online gaming.

If their management doesn't assign more resources when they had it, don't think the company as a whole gets to use any excuse. If they have to manage more so be it, just expect less support from paying customers overall.

This is delusional. They aren't going to do anything that involves any kind of programming. The most we're going to get is a GM banning the blatant AFK farmers and even that seems to be too much to ask

You already have 'GM banning' and it isn't working. DarkPaw develops *software*, why wouldn't they look at the most cost-effective route to police their product? I'll tell you this - if they don't implement some form of anti-cheat, I can garuntee these 2 progression servers will be ghost towns. The majority don't want to deal with cheating, RMT, or inactive server management. The evidence is smeared all over the walls, just look at Manlger's population in PoP which speaks volumes. The server has 10 active guilds clearing Plane of Time. Phinigel had more than double that.

I think it's delusion to believe that they would waste their time, money, and effort in releasing new servers that no one would play on.

Agreed. I think they learned their lesson after Miragul but I could be wrong. End of the day, it sounds like the cheating has become so rampant on Mangler that the Devs may actually be listening. And with that, they are probably working on addressing it on the new servers. It would explain why the servers don't have a launch date yet because I'm sure the behind-the-scenes process takes time.

I could be wrong, but a little transparency goes a long way with the customer. But then again I do understand not wanting to under-deliver either.

My thoughts exactly and I admit that we be could be dead wrong - it just makes the most sense moving forward.

People have been saying this about every new TLP for the last four years, and yet here we are.

I'm not sure about other games, but PunkBuster was a colossal failure in Battlefield.

Nobody likes the people who are afk botting. I'm betting not even the people who 6 box like the botters. However, instead of reporting actual afk botters, the vast majority of people complain about regular boxers. This just clogs up the reporting system and doesn't accomplish much. Want to know if it is a bot vs a boxed group? Start by watching what they do. If they run in a set pattern every time, always turn to face the same direction after mobs are dead, sometimes get stuck on world geometry and stay there, then they are likely a bot. Otherwise, chances are they are just boxing.

If the real afk bots are reported, and not people who are just boxing, then maybe something can get done about it.