State of the Bot Address

[Bryton]

You realize the staff is not payed to sit and follow people around all day right?
And if every 31 could follow people around wiz invis. There would be so much cheating going on it would be insane.. "hey where is so and so... Oh let me get on my level 31 and check..

[Aemon]

It's Saturday afternoon in the USA and I see 17 visible mortals on.

I think it just illustrates the sad state of Arctic when players are bragging about seeing 40 players online.

I've played Arctic on and off for two decades, only last year (2012) did I start to bot because of the inability to find decent groups. Except for my first wipe, my chars have always been in the top 3 in their respective class, regardless if the playerbase was 120 fifteen years ago or 17 as it is now.

I can tell you from my deep experience, having played 1 char at once, and 10 chars at once at the opposite end of the spectrum, 10 chars at once is a lot more fun once you get past the initial learning curve. I played longer, I explored more, and I learned faster when I had my bot crew. I actually pk'd less. Unless you have actually tried it, you can only speak from one perspective and make erroneous conjectures without any experience about botting. When friends wanted to play with me, I'd boot a bot to make room for their char or they could just hop onto one of my existing legend bots.

One of my friends used my bot crew to teach himself Pax this wipe and now can lead Glymmer and Verminaard. There's no other scenario except with bots where he would have been able to do that and learn a challenging zone at his own pace.

[Kir]

The whole "why don't you try playing by the rules" argument is hilarious. That's like telling people to drive the speed limit. Driving 55 mph is the speed limit. Any faster and its against the rules (law). The rules are in place to protect people, buuuuttt guess what bro, everybody still speeds, breaking the law everyday. Why? it saves time? Its more practical? Its more efficient? Its more fun?

Gee, sounds like botting.

That's why people don't "play by the rules", for the same reason people don't abide by the speed limit.

And most people who are driving 65 in a 55 don't consider themselves criminals, just like most people who bot don't consider themselves cheaters. I say we bump that speed limit up to 70.

[Aemon]

I say we bump that speed limit up to 70.

In some parts of the country, the speed limit is 85, just sayin...
Not to mention the Autobahn.

Good analogy though.

[Rezin]

im not a cheater, im not involved with your large clan pk politics, I volunteer to help police it, and im sure others would as well, none of this should have to even be talked about if people could be trusted to respect the game and the rules, and even if theres only 19 people online, if you log on and run around with your 10 man bot crew, guess what that only adds 1 more person, you do not add anything significant to the mud landscape and you take away from its integrity, maybe im just from a different time and mentality of this game where what you can handle on your own without multiing and botting earns you respect, not how well you can script, and doesn't having every single person that plays the game leading his own 10 man group and leading every high lvl somewhat secret zones take a little bit away from the fun of the game?

[Rezin]

if the rules of the game don't mean anything to you and you feel like they shouldn't mean anything to anyone, why not just do away with them at all?

and comparing traffic laws to the rules of a txt based dungeons and dragons game is bapting stupid, its not a good analogy

[btown]

I say we bump that speed limit up to 70.

In some parts of the country, the speed limit is 85, just sayin...
Not to mention the Autobahn.

Good analogy though.

A better analogy would be you guys are driving 120 and the speed limit is 35 and you guys should go to prison

[Jorquin]

i think its fine other than the abuse that allowing botting will open up could be far more concerning than anything you're seeing at the moment


i mean, this one guy is saying he rocks out 8-9-10 characters. he's trying to at least hide it somewhat because its "illegal" right now. what if it was legal? whats to stop him, or even me, from just making 2 bashers and 8 ocean scouts with can fly, det invis ranks and some 13-14 damage weapons. triggering them all on 1-2 targets and just coming in, one rounding them, looting and recalling. if i die, so what? i lost some xp and i go to the world merchant to re-eq and try again. i no longer have to fear retribution, since botting is legal.

delete them all? no problem, groups of that size can be level 30 and rank 6-7 in 2-3 days (or a week if you have less time). any of which is much easier than trying to snake decays one by one off stacked characters.

[Aemon]

if you log on and run around with your 10 man bot crew, guess what that only adds 1 more person

This is where you are wrong and lack understanding. If I run around with a 10 man, it brings back at least 3 other players. Yes, I can zone with 10, but it is more fun to zone my bot crew with a couple other players. There are retired players who like to play my bots but don't have the time to invest and level one from scratch and rank it to legend. Botting is an avenue that these casual players can still be involved in the game.

Not to mention the players who have been alienated by the current staff and policies like the Finns or the current BiA who may or may not come back if anti-botting restrictions were lifted.

[btown]

Nobody want anything to do with this bot vision of the future.  People like Aamon are making other minor bitters look bad.  Your world is chaos.  People play chaos days for not long

[Rezin]

I guess we haven't really made it clear, but you, your bot crew, and most of sob, are not missed at all, rgb, not missed at all, we are happy you feel alienated, and we hope that you continue to feel that way and not play

if we think of botting being made legal and how to do it right and how to do it wrong, the way you did it, and the way your clan conducted themselves is wrong, if you hadn't of been so cocky and pked everyone you came across, then started pking the neutral clans of the mud, u may well still be botting to this day, but you couldn't handle that much power maturely

with BIA, they didn't jump people for no reason, they didn't random people, they didn't skrew with neutral clans, they kept to themselves and did their thing on the mud, if that's how botting was done, I don't think I would be as against it

if this wipe hadn't taken place, and the mud hadn't seen exactly what would happen if botting isn't against the rules, I doubt most of the people would be against it, but you showed perfectly why something like that cant happen, we can change the mud and try and fix it all we want, but theres nothing we can do to fix you or your clans mentality

[Jarrad]

Lipman, btown, Aemon and perhaps Kir, please refrain from posting for a while. Your opinions are clear, instead of conducting a flame war, sit back and wait for some others to enter the debate...

[Hoss]

I started pruning a little more, but I think that is a lost cause, the thread has become too diluted to extract anything of value out of. I would love to hear from others, and I agree with Jarrad here that I think the cock slapping between the 4 people that has been going on for 4 pages just needs to end. You have more than made your point and provided your perspective the constant bickering doesn't solidify your stance.

[Aemon]

he was aggressive towards everyone

...
its the fault of someone powertripping with 10 bots, and that's 1 guy creating that environment for the whole mud

I will refrain from posting further if I can make one point to defend myself using facts because someone is making baseless accusations.

Let me use real hard data from Arctic. Going line by line through the in-game pk command I've found:

2013-05-13 19:13:15 Moinier killed Kog.
2013-05-18 22:57:13 Yhonk killed Alanis.
2013-05-19 23:57:52 Moinier killed Rhonda.
2013-05-25 06:21:40 Moinier killed Alanis.
2013-05-26 11:01:15 Yhonk killed Atahl.
2013-06-06 01:09:20 Yhonk killed Rippit.
2013-06-06 15:59:36 Kog killed Lashric.
2013-06-12 22:01:14 Alanis killed Agravaine.
2013-06-15 13:22:03 Moinier killed Veigar.

So of the nine total pk's, five were friendly-fire accidents (mass charm, etc.).
So let me discuss the 4 non friendly-fire accidents:

2013-05-26 11:01:15 Yhonk killed Atahl.   (provoked by Atahl, he was randomly summoning us)
2013-06-06 01:09:20 Yhonk killed Rippit.  (ambush in Silvi, <dele> member)
2013-06-06 15:59:36 Kog killed Lashric.   (enemy, <dele> associate)
2013-06-12 22:01:14 Alanis killed Agravaine. (hit by area/volley, all gear returned within 10 minutes)

So out of the four total legitimate pk's, 1 was an accident, 1 was provoked by summoning, and 2 were straight up attacks. I hardly see how that is "aggressive towards everyone"

[Zervun]

I hope my posts didn't cause a ruckus. I just want a level playing field.

At the heart of it, arctic was always the place that I could depend on that was a hard core mud where everyone was on the same page. Botting puts people on different pages.

I see the Imms making a huge effort (they always have) to make life easier on us with little tweaks and I'm excited for future changes. Recently there have been some very nice simple additions that have been quite nice.

The challenge and working with others has always been my arctic. With 10 man bot teams that can run high end zones, it's going to end up in unbalanced playing field where non botters can't compete. The argument that with the bot teams it bring back players just seems completely silly. I would wager that if allowing multi/bot completely that it will completely nix any old school players coming back and it would just be a handful of botters. Do you really want to play with 5 people and bots at high times?

If there was no PK it would be a bit of a different story. With PK botting takes on a massive meaning - it is a smooth road to trash PK characters without really any risk.

There is not any penalty from losing levels anymore...

After 20 years on here I have not heard anyone admit to botting - some always do it and I realize that. I think you should run the risk if you want to.

The comment on the Imms are not around to police it 24/7 is so sad. If there is a risk, it's less likely to happen. Simple alerts can be set up. The Imms over the years have done a great job and I wouldn't expect any super overtime for this policy, which has really been enforced for years...

Arctic population has gone down and muds are not a popular thing. Arctic is very PK. The 1000s that come back to reminisce and might stay for the new changes will probably have a short stay when a bot team rolls them, and even more so if they make it to higher levels.

The game was built to have team effort at higher levels. Bots simplify it. I've played muds with bots and they are completely non social. I don't know about you guys but that is one of the cardinal things I valued of arctic. I liked the exp increase, the having to stick to a class for a wipe (mostly), and making it more rewarding for whatever you do. Risk vs. reward. Very few things in gaming have it anymore. Bots is going down the WoW path which is 100% not what arctic is.

I'm actually pretty confused. If you can run a 10 man team with bots - what value is arctic to you?