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[Mark]

Originally Posted by Mark

So it seems this thread is split between pacifists, people who think NCsoft Korea will fix Aion's botting problems or that NCsoft West will handle the situation better than Korea has (since NCsoft West is cracking down on L2 botters, has better management, etc.), and activists, the people who view NCsoft (any flavor of the company, from Europe to Austin to Korea, etc.) very critically (they've earned the criticism long ago, after all, and no amount of recent actions are going to change most MMO veterans opinions of the company).

Both sides have their own arguements, some logical and some not so much...

NCsoft itself hasn't made a comment on the situation, neither on the official Korean BBS (as far as I know, I don't read Korean) or here on AionSource.com. When/if they do, how much trust should Aion's fans place in their statements? How can they prove that they mean what they say? What would make you guys believe?


I love using bold text sometimes, lol...

Will someone please respond to my post instead of arguing about inane stuff? ;_;

[Plastik]

For the currency dependency issue:

What's one major economic difference between WoW/WAR and Lineage 2 (perhaps Aion)?

The dependency on character wealth to determine the gear/enchants/items/etc that you can obtain.

I feel as in WoW and WAR, you could obtain decent gear through quests or pvp that puts you in a somewhat on-par playing field when it comes to pvp vs other players.

In L2 however, if you aren't either A) A farmer, B) A Crafter, or C) A 3rd party company with an inventory of top end gear, then you have absolutely no shot short of getting a miracle drop off a random mob, of obtaining any competitive gear that allows you to compete against other players.

Whether you consider that a downfall or not (it's obviously a design decision, but is it right?), it does show that games like L2 and Aion have a dependency on currency.

[Mark]

You can good equipment from quests (normally missions, quest chains) in AION.

[DevotionRK]

Originally Posted by Caeis

Try botting yourself to Gladiator title and endgame content, it doesn't work. The thing about WoW is gold has little value when it comes to progression, it's only something to help you in certain aspects, not make you the best player all of a sudden.

oh plz, people sell teams now, have done for months, yet another problem with WoW.
if you played "end game" arena you will also know teams stop playing when the real competition logs in just to try and get a few more points.

true gold does not = progression. but it helps.
my guild on US have just started wow like 4-5 weeks ago, they are already completing Naxx content in WOTLK. WoW "had" endgame content with BWL/MC/AQ but not anymore. the game is beyond casual its a joke.

[Urbandurban]

Originally Posted by DevotionRK

oh plz, people sell teams now, have done for months, yet another problem with WoW.
if you played "end game" arena you will also know teams stop playing when the real competition logs in just to try and get a few more points.

true gold does not = progression. but it helps.
my guild on US have just started wow like 4-5 weeks ago, they are already completing Naxx content in WOTLK. WoW "had" endgame content with BWL/MC/AQ but not anymore. the game is beyond casual its a joke.

Tell me about it ._..

[Anirk]

Originally Posted by Mark

So it seems this thread is split between pacifists, people who think NCsoft Korea will fix Aion's botting problems or that NCsoft West will handle the situation better than Korea has (since NCsoft West is cracking down on L2 botters, has better management, etc.), and activists, the people who view NCsoft (any flavor of the company, from Europe to Austin to Korea, etc.) very critically (they've earned the criticism long ago, after all, and no amount of recent actions are going to change most MMO veterans opinions of the company).

Both sides have their own arguements, some logical and some not so much...

NCsoft itself hasn't made a comment on the situation, neither on the official Korean BBS (as far as I know, I don't read Korean) or here on AionSource.com. When/if they do, how much trust should Aion's fans place in their statements? How can they prove that they mean what they say? What would make you guys believe?


I love using bold text sometimes, lol...

I think they did make a comment somewhere before OB started saying that It was difficult to deal with bots because they run on top of the client or something.

I dont think thats an excuse though.

If they start off with a strict policy and ban people who use bots they will have a higher retention rate. Yes even among the botters, because chances are they will be banned before they acquire all there elite gear etc and will likely come back to the game anyway. People at higher levels with there hard earned gear wont want to bot because of the fear of being banned. Isnt that a win-win situation?

Lets say a level 78 char gets banned for botting in L2 with billions of adena in gear etc, the chances of him coming back would be slim to none. However if you would have banned him at level 20 for botting there is a much higher chance of him returning and paying you your 15 dollars a month.

That would probably be the policy I would like Korea to state and take immediately for there retail version. A strict no questions asked no bot policy.

I would like some kind of statement from NcSoft west as well and would like to see them take up the same policy when retail hits.

As long as other problems are patched, fixed and more content added regularly then I dont really care, as long as I dont see bots taking over. It can be fun sometimes adapting to different classes when there bugged or OP.

[Chaos_Theory]

Originally Posted by Mark

Will someone please respond to my post instead of arguing about inane stuff? ;_;

I am responding to your post Mark. I hope it makes you happy.

[batusai707]

Originally Posted by Vex

My brother is a game dev and I am a programmer myself; getting rid of bots is not a "takes time, please be patient" problem. It's not a "It's okay if there are only 2 or 3" problem. It's not even a "12000 player per server, no way they could handle that much monitoring problem."

@Vex: Is your brother a dev on an OFFICIAL game? where you need to pay to play? I'm sorry don't take this the wrong way but I have been a gm on private servers (and i'm a programmer too), i have been banning bots and yes i banned them quick if i saw clear signs of botting. You can not ban players if someone tells you that someone is a botter. For me on private servers it was easy 60% sure banhammer on your *** but you cannot expect for OFFICIAL devs to act this way. They need proof when they will ban a PAYING player. If they have no proof and the player complains the gm can loose his job or what not stuff you have to take that in account too.

I am not saying it should take so slow to ban bots don't get me wrong but this kind of work does take some time if you need to be a 100% sure someone is botting. The only solution is that they hire more gm's to bot and i mean ONLY ban bots. A strike team (and one big enhough) is the only way to to keep the servers (mostly) clean of while devs find ways to prevent bots from logging in. (untill the bots bypass that again and we can start anew).

I do agree a lot with you though that reporting bots in not our duty. If i see a bot i'll report it but no player should be aspected to do the same, we are PAYING for this game so why do we have to do te gm's job. So if you want to do it fine, if you don't its fine too just realize gm's can ALWAYS use help since "strike teams" will have a boring life only hunting bots.

[Felluah]

Originally Posted by Mark

So it seems this thread is split between pacifists, people who think NCsoft Korea will fix Aion's botting problems or that NCsoft West will handle the situation better than Korea has (since NCsoft West is cracking down on L2 botters, has better management, etc.), and activists, the people who view NCsoft (any flavor of the company, from Europe to Austin to Korea, etc.) very critically (they've earned the criticism long ago, after all, and no amount of recent actions are going to change most MMO veterans opinions of the company).

Both sides have their own arguements, some logical and some not so much...

NCsoft itself hasn't made a comment on the situation, neither on the official Korean BBS (as far as I know, I don't read Korean) or here on AionSource.com. When/if they do, how much trust should Aions fans place in their statements? How can they prove that they mean what they say? What would make you guys believe?


I love using bold text sometimes, lol...

I tend to agree with this. It seems there are a lot of people who have had their hearts broken in the past in a game previously run by NCSoft. And now they are having trust issues. It's easy for those that haven't been burned to say wait and see, and they are more likely to take the point of view that there's zero tolerance and the first signs of bots is proof absolute that NCSoft have gone back to their 'lyin' cheatin' ways'.

Previous posts have already, rightly said, don't compare a 4 year old WoW to as 12 day old Aion. There's no point, if you want to compare Aion in 4 years time to WoW as it is right now - that's fair enough - especially on technical issues like botting and balance (which I think anyone who's played WoW will freely admit is still an issue).

The instant NO BOTS RIGHT NAO argument is fair enough to a point. I don't think it's a technical impossibility to stop the bots. I'm not sure there's anyway of automating it enough to reduce the false-positives to a minimum outside of a highly advanced AI. These sorts of things, especially when it involves real-life paying customers, needs the human touch. Aion's GMs might not be doing much... yet. Again, the game is less that 2 weeks old, being trained on what to do, how to handle situations, helping real-people with in game issues, will be a higher priority than killing the bots off. But that doesn't mean they aren't aware of the situation, and aren't actively working on ways to rectify this. Of course, this can't be proved. Even if they official announce what they are doing (not wise, as this gives the bot makers more info to go on), most of the complainers wouldn't believe it until it happens.

All I would suggest is that you forget about your past experiences for now, give them the benefit of the doubt and a few months to let the dust settle, and if you are not satisfied, 'vote with your feet'.

I would probably also say, you should give NCWest a chance to manage the game. They've not managed a game from release yet, let's see how they do in the first few months. I'm not thinking it'll be perfect, but it's the way they react that will be telling. Right now, it's pointless arguing about policies of one management team when it's not been confirmed in the slightest that NCWest will manage things in the same way.

(and yeah BOLD is fun - but not as unreadable as some peoples choice of text colour)

[justamemory]

Originally Posted by Diablo

@Vex, enjoy p1ssing into the wind much?

Common sense left this thread 190 posts ago.

I hear it's quite the liberating experience.

Common sense is non-sense

[Riku]

This is nothing new in the gaming community and games in general. New games will always have issues and bugs and gamers will bi*ch until no end !!!

As for me i'll just sit back and see how the game progress throughout its birth, Remember folks this game is still a baby in korea (just a few days old from launch).

[yume]

I love using bold text sometimes, lol...

Good for you.

[justamemory]

Originally Posted by Riku

This is nothing new in the gaming community and games in general. New games will always have issues and bugs and gamers will bi*ch until no end !!!

As for me i'll just sit back and see how the game progress throughout its birth, Remember folks this game is still a baby in korea (just a few days old from launch).

abort, abort! jk

[Anirk]

Originally Posted by batusai707

@Vex: Is your brother a dev on an OFFICIAL game? where you need to pay to play? I'm sorry don't take this the wrong way but I have been a gm on private servers (and i'm a programmer too), i have been banning bots and yes i banned them quick if i saw clear signs of botting. You can not ban players if someone tells you that someone is a botter. For me on private servers it was easy 60% sure banhammer on your *** but you cannot expect for OFFICIAL devs to act this way. They need proof when they will ban a PAYING player. If they have no proof and the player complains the gm can loose his job or what not stuff you have to take that in account too.

In the TOS i think they say that they have the right to terminate your account at there discretion.

Also many people have asked for proof that they were botting on blah but ncsoft never ever gives any =)

[Vex]

Originally Posted by batusai707

post

No offense taken. He is a "real dev" but not for an mmo. That should not discredit that other game types need to protect from third party software aswell (like aimbots). Why I brought that up is not because Devs are the ones banning players but because the programmers are the ones that can create stronger security measures. We don't need to argue how long it takes to verify that someone is botting when a decent programmer can write up code that will flag 100% of botters with 0 false positives within a couple hours. Lineage 2 used to have dedicated "chinese farmers" when it was released. That turned in to dedicated l2walker parties. You'd need a large strike team for the live farmers, whereas you'd need one programmer for the bots.