Aether Extraction: 1.5.1 Patch Notes Part 2 - Aether Poison Gas?

[Blackweb]

Item
1. When you extract Aether, there’s a chance that Aether Poison Gas will infiltrate your body. The poison blocks gathering for a certain period of time unless you detoxify the poison.
- Once you are poisoned the only way to detoxify yourself is to utter the "Cleansing Word.”
- To utter the Cleansing Word, type the randomly given letters and numbers within the designated time
- When you utter the Word, you get three chances to enter the correct letter/number sequence. If you fail three times, Vitality Extracting and Aether Extracting are prohibited.
- The “/ExtractStatus” command provides your extraction status.
- When you have Aether Poison Gas in your body, you can still move and activate other abilities, so move to a safe place before you utter the Cleansing Word.

What is the justification for this change?

Is Aether extraction not difficult enough already?

Is this change supposed to stop botters?

Do the devs understand that when we extract aether in the abyss and other areas, we are already being attacked?

Now we are supposed to enter a code to unlock our aether and vitality extraction while we are flying and very likley being attacked in a contested area?

What does "Vitality and Aether Extraction are Prohibited" mean? In which zone? For how long?

Is this going to be extended to vitality extraction?

Of all of the things that need to be fixed in Aion NCsoft, where and why did you come up with this one?

[Fallen87]

To hopefully hinder the amount of people botting Aether. But who knows how well it will work.

[Mazak1312]

All this is going to do is allow them to get away with having less staff on hand to seek out and remove the bots. That's all it's going to do. I am sure that someone will find a way around this. Again, it's just another poor customer service feature of the game. Something the GM's are paid to do, now we suffer the consequences of them not having enough people to police the game.

Thanks a ton NCSoft!

[Rarz]

Yeh, it's a pretty pathetic way of handling the situation. Not to mention that captcha's haven't been safe for years. :/

[Rash]

The good news is, all the high grade aether crystals I stocked up will go up

I honestly don't like it. Aether gathering is already painful as it is, and it's kinda crappy that it actually hinders our aether gathering ability. Actually it should be helping us, as we use AETHER to FLY.

Oh and Captchas are easy to solve; most advanced bots can do it.

[moger]

As if Aether gathering was not enough of a pain in the ***. All this will do is make it more difficult for people to gather. I bet the bots have this automated in a day or 2 if they do not have it already. So like the restrictions to chatting or mail this is just one more way real players get screwed to combat the bots and the bots are un efffected. Mind as well get a bot to gather will be easier.

[RamzaBehoulve]

It's going to help more than you can imagine with the botters...

It won't stop the chinese pros, but the casual botter will be nyerked hardcore because there is no free bot programm that will handle this without getting them flaged and banned.

[Rim]

Why are people complaining about this change? It will only take an extra 5 seconds to type in the code. I, for one, love it. Botters can't bot it, which means prices go up because aether prices are dropping atm with all the bots.

[Purple]

Originally Posted by Rim

Why are people complaining about this change? It will only take an extra 5 seconds to type in the code. I, for one, love it. Botters can't bot it, which means prices go up because aether prices are dropping atm with all the bots.

5 seconds is a lot when you're on a flight timer. 5 seconds is a lot when it takes 30-60 seconds to vitality extract from a node your level and it's taking you 45-100 million experience to level at 25-35 thousand xp a kill.

Do you understand that this is their solution to the exploitation caused by teams and teams of Chinese gold farmers that are only costing them money? It's really not something they should acknowledge.

They should have completely eliminated that trash weeks ago.

[Rim]

It's only an extra 5s. Maybe you won't get done with the last piece of that node, so what? It's one aether. I still love they are introducing this.

Personally, I wish this froze your character in place for 5m until you typed in the code. Once you lost your flight time (b/c you were botting and couldn't type in the code) you fell to your death.

[Kaedan94]

Originally Posted by Rim

It's only an extra 5s. Maybe you won't get done with the last piece of that node, so what? It's one aether. I still love they are introducing this.

Personally, I wish this froze your character in place for 5m until you typed in the code. Once you lost your flight time (b/c you were botting and couldn't type in the code) you fell to your death.

That would be really cool ^^ I'd like to see the bots falling to their deaths all over the place.

I agree with you, this is a good step in gathering bot prevention. And depending on how good the captcha is, it could be incredibly effective. 5 secs is nothing if you're prepared for Aether gathering properly. Obviously those complaining about 5 extra secs are doing it wrong.

[Rash]

5s makes a huge difference if a particular extract takes 20+ seconds towards the end of your flight time, especially pre-30 wings.

And that idea is really not good, Rim. Yes, while aether extracting, you do pay attention unless you're botting, but that's not always the case. RL events can cause you to get sidetracked and forget.

Besides, captcha's are very easy to automatically solve if bots are good enough.

[Araella]

Originally Posted by Blackweb

What is the justification for this change?

Is Aether extraction not difficult enough already?

I won't speak for anyone else, but I for one had an absolute BLAST leveling Aether into the 300s when I could only get 1 or 2 hits off of almost *every single node* between 250-300 due to the damn aether bots. Now, like myself, you might at first think: how can Aether be botted? Well, trust me, it can be botted...

If it DOES work against the bots, I'll take entering CJK (or whatever it ends up being) every 15 gathers over getting 1 aether per node because I'm mobbed by 2 characters named rtvnasd every time I go to gather. That said, banning the bots would be the preferred fix, and NC should be able to ban anything named something like ahasdvdhhh well before it hits lv10 (nevermind 40+...)

[Phoenix Pinion]

Well I can see the cost of jewelry and other accessories that increase flight time going up in price. Personally I am glad I have 1:31 of flight time pre-30 wings because this captcha thing would have totally turned me off to the game.

[Ruke]

It's 5 seconds... That's like, one less aether extraction around 5% of the time? Maybe 2-3 less aether an hour?

I've been gathering aether almost every day for weeks (hit 399 1-2 weeks ago) and yeah, it'll suck to occasionally lose 5s of gather time, but it's not the end of the world nor is it going to blow the difficulty of extracting aether out of the water.. Yeah, it's a band-aid fix that will give players some inconvenience, and I'm sure it could be better, but it's still something.

But really, anyone with a reasonable amount of experience gathering and a shred of common sense would agree that a lowered frequency of botters far outweighs the inconvenience of this system. Botters right now in aether extraction areas camp the easiest leveling areas making it far more difficult to level, steal points from you while you're gathering, flood the auction and undercut prices by ridiculous amounts.

Last week I was selling Aether/H-Aether/P-Aether/B-Aether at 2-3k/15-20k/12-18k/80-120k per all throughout the week and previous weeks reliably. This past weekend 4 bots showed up, and right now the prices are .5-.9k/5-8k/2-4k/25-40k and the auction is flooded with them even still. Yes, prices fell by more than 50% in every area in just a few days; it completely ruins the market.

If you can't see the benefit in losing out on 5s of flight time once in a while vs keeping prices a bit more stable & market reasonably stocked, reducing the botting problem, and combating goldfarmers... I don't know what else to say for you.

This change is an inconvenience, but it's far less of a problem than the bots are giving aether extractors right now.


EDIT: Also, what are people extracting aether in? If you want to seriously level and make money off of aether extraction, you should have some sort of +flight set of gear. It far out-balances the costs of it before long. I turned my old gear set into +flight gear and have a 4m flight timer, makes things far more efficient.