EBAYERS and BOTS Please ReadFollow

Please read if you want to save EQ2 before the Economy and General Game Play is ruined. BOTTING and FARMING has begun on all the servers. To all new players you might not know of the severity of this issue but to us seasoned players FARMING and BOTTING can compromise and degrade the economy ruining the game for many players. After reading several posts this morning and doing a little research on the EQ2 Players site the following is what I have found.

1. On all servers there are groups of 5 to 6 characters that currently hold have an “unnatural” high number of kills. ALL players have an “unnatural” high number of deaths. Each group of 6 on each server is the SAME classes. 5 Wizards and 1 cleric. When you try to speak to them the only response you get is “dffkspps occ” or “ofmmls”. It has been confirmed from other players that they are EBAYERS using BOTS. They use computer generated names. All are wizards except one may be a healer. They are a high level yet they use level 10 equipment. They sell the items they do loot. They go around camping spawns for items to sell. They are all equipped exactly the same.
2. Legitimate players who have around 19,000 kills are level 40. ALL of these BOTS are level 34 with anywhere from 30,000 to 70,000 kills depending on the age of the server.
3. Search on the EQ2 player’s site for World Wide and Players with the most kills. You will only one or two legitimate players. The rest will be these BOT characters. All of them are in the level 30 ranger. All of them only have an Artisan skill of 3 and they will all be grouped to their own server.

First I have no problem, with a Real Character selling or auctioning an item of their choice. However there is a real issue with what is currently going on with these BOTS. The BOTS will eat away at the economy where you will have a few very rich and nothing will have value. Exactly what happened in EQ1 and Lineage 2? Also there are a lot of Legitimate Players who should be ranked on their server or all the servers with real legitimate kills. Not a bunch of Bots that are running a macro. At this time Sony is limited to what they can do. However the more people that complain and open their mouths about this the quicker they will find a solution.

Now what we can do:

1. Spread the word and spread the word fast about these Bots. Have everyone on the look out for them. We can stop them we have the technology ;)
2. Swarm them, have EVERYONE in the zone surround them. We may not be able to attack them because no PVP but I am sure a scout or two will be able to train something to them.
3. Shout to the entire zone, call out to your guild create enough lag in front of them where they can’t move.
4. Complain and complain more to Sony. I will be bringing my complaints and will be happy to complain for you.

I am looking for anymore ideas of how we can stop these BOTS. You can email me here for any ideas and please post them here in response and continue to spread the word.
Please don’t think I am against finding a sweat spot and hanging out a killing a mob over and over again until you get the item you have been waiting for. I am against fake players and a BOTTING that ruins a game that we ALL pay for. I am against the fact that there are players that deserve to be ranked the Highest NPC rather then a bunch of Ebaying BOT Chars.

Please post if you have seen the bots, and encounters and any ideas of how we have the Everquest Community stop them.

Note: I am not doing this because I just want to complain or because I have nothing else to do. I am doing this because I enjoy the game, I want to see all the players enjoy the game and its just WRONG. We don’t pay a monthly fee for Cheaters.

Feel free to email me at mwhite6675@yahoo.com ASAP in reference to this Problem its time to Band together.

Soniaa of Unrest EQ2
Soniaa of Xegony EQ1

I think the only sensible method to stop the so called "bots" would be to target them, and /report them providing a brief explenation of why you reported them.

You may also want to make a post in the relavent forum on the official SOE EQ2 messageboard.

Trying to spam them, lag them, train them, etc is against SOE EULA and isn't even a very reliable method to counter bot farming. Encouraging people to /report and post on official forums is the best course to take in regards to problems like this.

yea trining them and purposly lagging them out will get you in more trouble then it gets them. gxm had it right you should report them when you see them in game and post on the eq2 forums page that soe runs there is a better chance of a gm investigating something like BoTs if it is done the right way and not the illegal way.
while i have no problems with ebay characters (since i bought a few to use for PL my alts) i have a problem with BoTs that purposly run the economy up on items cause it will ***** regular players.

If you can determine that they really are bots, and if you and some friends really want to invest the time, you can legally sit there and pre-farm them.

I've probably seen a group like this w/out realizing what they are. They probably get to an area of green ^ or ^^s for the better chest drops. They probably turn off exp gain. And they farm away.

If live players can sit there with them and "Lock" their targets before they can cast on them, they could be neutralized. The problem with this, of course, is that it will get boring for a real player. Say you and a pal beat them to their kills for 2 hrs. Well, they run their bots 23 hours a day, you only nip them about 10%.

Training them - well, if they really are bots, I wouldn't care about breaking the eula. It's really hard to get caught training. As long as you say "oops sorry - watch out!" or something and act like its an accident, there isn't much they can do. If you TELL people you're training, you can be narced on. If a hidden GM sees you training them over and over (the bot owner might report you) - then yeah, you'd be in for it. BUT in theory the bot owner is off at work -he's set up his bots to farm, and he only wants to check in on them occasionally - if at all. One train = bot breakdown. Problem, not all trained mobs agro - I've seen mobs ignore players and run back to their camps instead of attacking, when pulled off their spot by a sprinting char.

Gosh, I'm assuming the owner would have to manually recover after a wipe. A clever botfarmer could in theory use the waypoint system to have his bots reset themselves. Even if they get an insane amount of debt it wouldn't matter. Hmmmm.

Ult. Sony might have to police this - actually pay to have gms observe - have a protocol they can put in the eula that is illegal - and boot out obvious bot farmers. Doable, but will Sony care enough to put the $ into it? They haven't before.

Worst case of botting i've ever seen was in ragnarok.

But I must say I am suprised.. that there are already programs written that work on Eq2.. and people are already bored enough to do it.

It's not really about what we do that matters.. it's how serious SoE is about stoping them this time. In past companies cared less then they should. They still get money from the acount and they didn't care.

If they start banning botter acounts with more force, it just wouldn't be money making for them keep paying new acounts and lvling up again. Ofcourse i would imagine some more extensive methods be used then a witch hunt "He's a bot!"

It's important they get only real botters.. but at same time if they don't set an example about how it's not worth it to bot.. servers be walked all over again like every other MMORPG lately.

Edited, Tue Dec 21 16:43:27 2004 by Barbatus

A few years into old EQ, 10k plat was an insane amount of money. Most players were lucky to have 2-4k plat, even if they had a lvl 50 charcter.

A few years? ********* Maybe in the first year. But even then all you needed to know was 'buy low, sell high' and you could get rich easily, even before the bazaar. I was the slug of slugs and had way more then 10k before the first year was out. My playing partner, who spent more time trading in NFP had well over 100k.


Unless you really knew your prices - went after cool items and sold them high - and worked at it (this is pre-bazaar - people just sold live in e commons), it was really hard to get rich.

Not it wasn't. Rich is a relative term. Yeah, it was hard to get 1 million plat, but it wasn't hard to get rich at all.

But years of people exploiting bugged recipes and etc changed this. Suddenly 4k plat was almost nothing. A fungal tunic (high regen built in) that had been selling at 10k was selling for 60k or more. Money sinks didn't work (like horses) - they instead just fueled the fire.

Piffle. The reason there was so much platinum floating around was because the vast majority of it never leaves the game. It just gets handed from player to player, and all the while more plat is dropping everyday, and more is being handed out by merchants buying dropped goods. Its the same with equipment, for the most part once an item is dropped and looted, it never leaves the game.

The problem was that a "normal" eq player starting up and not buying plat would have so-so armor and weapons - and would be playing with people on horses or drogmar, with fungals, with god-like weapons - lvl 20 chars w/ literally 200k plat in gear or more. You felt like a punk.

Such is life when you start the game late. Your feelings, punkish or otherwise, are your problem to deal with and have nothing to do with the state of the game's economy or the equipment of others. More than likely if you felt like a punk, you were a punk.

So invariably you do what they'd done - you plop down $40 in real money to buy, what, 20k-40k plat - it varied a lot - and you buy one uber item w/ that - and you plop down another $60 to get a something-else - and you still don't ahve a horse.....


Who says they bought their plat? Every player I know in the game that got rich, got rich through hard work. By mastering one or more tradeskills, and getting into the expansion zones as soon as they could and making the new recipes and selling them for ridiculous amounts of money. None of them bought a single platinum piece. You're making some absurdly broad assumptions.

But is this going to be the case? Are these limits really going to hold back the madness?

The madness? You really think of this as madness? You're taking this game waaaaaaaaaaay too seriously.

There has never been an online game with an economy that wasn't "ruined". Just stop and think for a moment. They aren't real economies. There is not a limited amount of wealth as in reality. Every day, more and more wealth pours into the game, with very little ever leaving it. What do you really have to spend money on, such that the money actually leaves the economy? Food from NPC vendors? The upkeep for your room? Mending your armor?

Its not a real economy, its not that it gets ruined, its just that its a ******** model of an economy from the get go. All the ebayers, botters and farmers in the world are not going to seriously affect that at all. All they can do is slightly alter the rate at which the wealth pours into the world. But it will keep on pouring in at a prodigious rate no matter what happens, and it will be drained at a miniscule rate, again... no mattter what happens. Such is the way of online game economies.

So please, everyone stop crying about ruination. Its a ********* unrealistic economy to begin with. Get over it.

lol you guys have NO idea how bat botting and farming can get... try a game that has Pk'ing.

me and my buddy played lineage for along time

there was this one dungeon that was low level stuff where me, a cleric, and my friend a good tank could get this stuff that he needed for a craft for his main char. the item drops were the best you could possibley think of for how easy it was to get. about 20-25 rooms full of these guys no normal people could ever drain how many mobs there were to kill.

but what do you know, farmers and botters with low level dwarfes would be soloing while a high level actual playing AZN guy would sit there and make sure not a single person even entered the room, if he did he was twice your level and would kill you instantly. the going red system didnt work because you couldnt even kill him anyways, and this was on the half of the world that people 35 and under were at, while these high level pkers were 50+ not to mention there was a handful of them.

so 24 hours a day for weeks straight, the same players and the same bots would be farming this place. dozens of us reported, dozens of us died, we waited for weeks to see if they would leave because there was only one alternative to get the things that these mobs dropped, and it was in dragon valley a place for a big group of level 60+ chars, and they dropped much less frequent.

and im sure the exact same people and the exact same bots are still there, and this was almost 3 months ago.

you couldnt walk into any place at all without seeing a bot or farmer, people would devote there accounts and characters to PKing the farmers at risk of dropping there equipeed weapons... and if that happened there would be no point to play you could never even think of buying it again, the economy is so weird that your equipped weapon is 85% of your accounts worth, youd have to delevel 10+ levels to be able to use a weapon you could afford and effeciently kill anything.

whoa im ranting. anyways EQ could never come anywhere near as close to lineage in farming, botting, and ebaying is what im trying to get at i guess.

Well speaking of bots found this on EQ2 site. Evidence is right there.

http://eq2players.station.sony.com/en/player_swrankings_detailed.vm?action=CharacterAgg.getByRankSwide&rank=npcKillsRankSwide&type=MostNPCKills

All I know is whatever the cost, I DON'T want to see a repeat of FFXI's economy/bot/money seller problem. It ruined that game, and it can ruin this one unless it's nipped in the bud.

First Thanks for all the responses, I have posted and pleaded my case on several websites. I have received several emails with LOTS of great ideas on how to start dealing with the current BOT issue that is rising on the servers. A few things that I would like to address,
1. I know that intentionally bothering, swarming or attempting to interfere with another player’s game play is against the EULA. Yes I was extreme. Yes I have received several great ideas on other ways on dealing with BOTS that I will also be posting. However, I PERSONALLY DO NOT feels that a BOT or a group of BOTS is a real player therefore in my OPINION I would take my chances. However I will not try to convince or promote any other player possibly jeopardizing their account.
2. For all those who don’t believe there is a BOT issue or need proof. If you look at the rankings for NPC kills you will see clusters of 5 to 6 people on all the servers. The players have names such as “hjkl” and “gfdsa”. For example:
1. Devildh Wizard 34 Unguilded Nektulos 69,423
2. Allkill Wizard 34 Unguilded Nektulos 69,443
3. Oamaceep Wizard 34 Deaths Eve Nektulos 69,326
4. Dfghj Inquisitor 34 Unguilded Nektulos 69,207
5. Apheenia Wizard 34 Unguilded Nektulos 68,716
6. Salian Wizard 34 Unguilded Nektulos 68,710
Now this is just for the Nektulos server. Every server has the same cluster when you look at the World Statistics. The probability of the top 6 players being 5 Wizards, 1 Cleric. ALL level 34 and all within the same ranger of kills. And then factoring in that the next top players has only 22,000 kills is IMPOSSIBLE. There BOTS. Every server has the same cluster of Characters.

3. I do not believe that BOTS are part of the game that should be expected. This practice affects everyone, it affects the economy, it affects the market for items and it affects spawn time.

Again if you don’t care that’s fine I am not going to try to convince. However from the responses that I have been getting via email I see that there are a TON of players that do care and that do feel the same way. Please keep the ideas coming. I will be forming a list of all current ideas of how to deal with the BOT issue and posting it shortly. I also have contacted Sony and will keep you updated on the status.
Keep the emails coming mwhite6675@yahoo.com
Thank you for ALL of your responses.
Soniaa!
Live Long

It is One live person playing with 5 other BOT accounts. I am sorry there is no excuse for having ANYONE no matter what their situation organize and make a living out of ruining a game that I pay a monthly fee for.
There is a huge thread here in reference to this matter


Also I have players contacting me from all servers on organizing and putting a end to this, please keep and email. I am also sending emails to SOE with all of the data I have gathered and have been sent by other players. Also a formal complaint has been sent to SOE in reference to this matter.

Again contact me at mwhite6675@yahoo.com

Soniaa

well this is how they ruined the FFXI economy

ill use the archers ring as an example:

ebayer botters camped the named mob and always got it. every time it would spawn (10-15 minutes) they would get it and kill it. the archers rings they got from this mob were put on auction for 200k gil. now the crafters needed to raise there skill by turning these rings into snipers rings, so in order to purchase these archers rings, they would have to jack up the price for everything else they sell to save up the money, and then with their finished sniper rings, would sell them for 400k.

FFXI had a terrible partying system where people expected you to have the best things for the job and level you were. if you were a ranger or used any type of ranged weapon often, you were expected to have two sniper rings. now to afford 800k for two rings, the theives and rangers of the world would have to jack their prices of everything they sold to afford them.

So now a whole bunch of items on the auction were overpriced, but people needed these other items, and so the downfall continues...

now thats just an example with one item, there were more then just one group of ebay botters on my server camping all the named mobs with high gil drops.


and thats one way the FFXI economy fell.

so yes, the items are more common because they saturate the market with them, but when they have the monoply on the item, and get to name the price, its reprocussions travel far...

I say again, EQ2 will not suffer the same problems as FFXI <or EQ1 for that matter> because it has in built safeguards against exactly the sort of things that promote farming.

1. All the best gear in the game will be quested or raided. This means that the best gear could not be farmed since quests can only be done once and raids will require more than 6 BoT's

2. Every droppable piece of armour is hugely level restricted to balance the game, this means that it is atually better to get your own items through quests than attempt to buy them

3. The only truely sellable items i have seen so far are the node items that are random spawns in random locations of random types which makes it difficult if not impossible for it to be a viable farming method for Bot's

4. It only effects the ecconomy if a need for money or items arrises, as it is there is no need for them so stop worrying about it

5. Quest items and "box" items only fall from green+ mobs which totally blows a whole in you whole farming theory. how could people who have killed so many mobs be farming for gear since they must be killing greys to not have leveled.

I surgest they are tradeskillers who have XP turned off and are in lower level zones farming nodes for tradeskills and killing as they go.

Sonya, how can you prove that the names you mentioned are bot's how do you not know they are just unemployed people who play alot? Not everyone is utterly absorbed by leveling.