Tool_of_Society

Do you realize that your obsession with bots is not productive (at least the angle you're going with)? Bots are going to bot what matters are the real players and their game play experience. Improve the game play experience and fewer people will bot. You act like Lineage 2i is the only game to ever go from pay to play to free to play.... See the thing is the bots are having NO trouble at all with running around being bots. "easy to bot" is anything at this point based on bot populations. Currently most areas aren't even saturated on Giran. The areas that ARE saturated are locations where specific items drop such as cursed main gauche or spellbooks. Personally I'd like to see spell books being dropped by more things or purchasable off something for a reasonable price...

I started playing in closed beta and even then there were people botting. It was commonly known that the servers were going to be wiped before open beta/release so I was surprised by bots running around. As stated on my servers all the top clans botted and/or had bot trains they ran for adena. Also as stated the gold farmers were far more organized and would kill you if you were in their spot or messing with them. Do you realize that you're talking about a fraction of what was available in the era I was discussing? There were bot trains back then too but there was enough space you could find a cata/necro that had clean areas for gathering mob trains. It's almost like NCwest wants to severely limit the amount of leveling space to force conflict or make the game seem more populated or something..

The problem with limiting accounts via IP is that there is a wide range of reasons why thousands of people might end up sharing the same IP from the perspective of a game server. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_address_translation One of my ISPs used a NAT for their entire service so litterly everyone who subscribed to that ISP had the same outside IP. Apartment complexes, condos, dorms and more will have a large number of people under the same IP. Even if they did limit one account per IP I could get around that easily as I have 8 desktops and a laptop which I could configure to use various proxies. I could also get other IPs via friends who already have services running on static IPs (I would just ask for them to setup a VPN or something for me). There are so many reason why companies don't even bother trying because they know it'll fail and cause massive headaches as people are outraged they can't play the game for "no reason" when in reality someone else is already playing the game on that IP. EDIT : Hardware ID locks are easily bypassed too as seen by the cheaters that are getting around HWID bans in forte nite and apex legends.

The reality is that during the pay to play era the gold farmers were actively using stolen credit cards and stolen game cards to pay for their bots. By the time NCsoft figured out that the charges were false the account had already served it's purpose. I always figured a good chunk of the sellers were just straight stealing CC info from buyers for this purpose too. One of the game cards I bought at the nearest best buy had already been used despite being sealed new in the box.. NCWest made things right though and the way the conversation went lead me to believe this wasn't unusual at all... It only happened once which isn't bad considering I had 4 accounts I was buying cards for every couple months.

No it had every bit as much. The only difference is that there were a LOT more areas at any given level that you could go to for effective leveling/adena. Basically every "major" player on the server botted. I would say outright every major player but I'm sure there were a handful that didn't. It was a bit of a game in a game to find the botting spots of the "leet players". Also back then the bot owners were far more aggressive about killing players so they would move out of the bot's area. If you messed with a bot train most likely some very high level characters would show up to kill you or train you. IT didn't matter much though because you could always move somewhere else to level up. When Necros/Catas were added it made the situation even better for the manual players because that gave you all kinds of opportunity for leveling and adena making. I miss the real old seven signs because with that system I had fun grinding huge AoE trains underground with my dorf via poling (with a SE cause VR actually worked back then). Sometimes farming with randoms but usually alone. The farming of green/blue/red whatever things that dropped which could be converted into Ancient Adena for sale to the rich people was a solid source of money that allowed me to get decent gear despite not having a CP or a clan to carry me through Raid bosses. Since I didn't bot I was always behind on levels compared to the "leetsauce" players (much like today on classic) so clans were never really interested in me. Meanwhile when I played world of world of warcraft years ago (there was no free trial etc) you would find +30 something level 1 characters floating in the air to form up URL addresses for gold selling sites and they would be up there floating forming different addresses in every single major city all day long with the same characters for weeks. That's hundreds of paid accounts just to make some gold advertisements on one server.

Oh wow are you serious? Because every pay to play mmorpg has bots galore including this game when it was pay to play.... If they wanted to kill bots they'd just make a throw away character to kill the bot's ponies. Kill the pony and most bots will be dead fairly quickly.. So you're probably closer to the truth.

Yeah no drop on PVE death was always dumb so that's why it was removed. It's a "sword" that cuts both ways as the botters would train real players out of their area. High level players would use it to grief lowbies. Seriously it was stupid with parties refusing to invite people unless someone the leader trusted would vouch for them and more. It just enabled a more toxic environment in general.

Typically how it goes on the live servers. Usually they go for the lowbie players because the high level ones can fight back.

Most mmorpgs have no where near +10 million active accounts. Not even WoW has that many....

The burden of proof is on you. I've left my accounts running afk for days at a time since looping was added. Banning people for using an in game function is dumb and I find any claims of such highly dubious.

THe explanations I've seen through search give me no reason to be worried about it. Alas people here keep implying that it's impossible to avoid and I'd like to know how. I've had people try and fail several times now so I am curious to know if those that tried on me were just failures.

I paid money to buy the game for each of my accounts and I paid for years of subscriptions on them starting with my first account in closed beta in 2004. So after putting 15 years of my life, effort, and money into my accounts you're just going to arbitrarily delete them....Yeah you need to rethink that. EDIT : Trying to enforce your suggestion would be a nightmare due to the ease of bypassing...

The bot report button somewhat does that already. Once enough people have used the bot report button on you a captcha will pop up and if you mess it up you get a debuff and unknown stuff happens in the background. In the first few months of the classic servers I was getting at least one captcha a day while leveling. The thing is if the bot program is of sufficient complexity it can answer captchas.. It's kind of sad but automated programs have an easier time answering captchas than me sometimes...

WoW has a ton of bots too. My favorite were the level 1's floating in all the major towns using their bodies to spell out gold seller sites. The most annoying would have to be those that run around under the map gathering all the harvest nodes...

I had never heard of that game nor have any of the online friends of mine that I have consulted. So I had to use google to find out what you were talking about. Ronan Blood Feud manages to have substantially worse scores than lineage 2 on every rating site. Not exactly a good game nor is it very popular. I'm not surprised botters and RMT aren't bothering with that game as the profit just isn't there. There are some posts in this thread that are simply divorced from reality. Bots cost NCwest money directly via server operating costs and indirectly by turning off potential paying customers. Absurd claims such as the one about getting banned for sharing soul shots with a guild mate isn't helping the matter either. At least try to stay somewhat within reach of reality please... Or silly crap like this... That's funny as the creator was freaking out about spies just last month. You know when one of the big waves of "OMGZ IW AS BANNED FOR BEING AFK IN TOWN!!" posts appeared on these forums. I do admit I only discovered this thanks to some of the regulars on discord pointing it out. So I'm not exactly on the up to date list of what bots are hot or whatever. You're absolutely delusional if you believe NCwest is getting a cut of any of this. There would be no way for NCwest to legally hide such income from publicly available filings. Nor would this be something that could exist without at least one former/current employee (most seem rather disgruntled based on employer review sites) blowing the lid off it. It's pure crap conspiracy theory on level with flat earthers...

okay embedding is harder than thought lol

You talk as if there are a large number of large clans running around. I have no interest in being PVP fodder locked into an endless war because it's one of 5 large clans that exist on the server.. This thread is asking for what we like and what we dislike about the changes. So I answered it truthfully. I'd rather quit the game if the only other option is to join one of the handful of large clans that exists. Of course if leveling clans wasn't such a ridiculous experience then there would be MORE large clans to choose from....

Likes Client stability and performance has improved nicely Clan management windows are better dislikes Leveling a clan is now practically impossible for a small clan. The clan rep that is rewarded is absolutely tiny and to add insult to injury there is a very low limit to the number of quests you can complete in a week. Taking a fortress is now practically impossible for a small clan Forced to pick between PVE or PVP clan skills Removal of runes and other daily quest rewards hurts new players (as if not being able to chat and the lack of information on game mechanics isn't bad enough for a newbie) Still no way for a player who doesn't have friends in high places to progress into end game PVE content through actual gameplay. LFG is full of parties looking for players who are equipped with items that you cannot reasonable procure without using NCstore or bots galore. The same BLATANT bots running in isle of souls for +5 months now. I know how macroing works and those parties aren't being run with macros. Some of the group moves around in a manner that would require clicking the ground (the spoiler's movements being the most obvious) and never target flagged people. If you dare to try to run a yin camp under one of these bot groups you'll eventually be attacked by the same lvl +100 shiny +10 armor wearing character. The Iss "diversification" my iss is now considered "worthless" for the few groups I used to be able to get in to... I would like a way to change that without spending more real $$$. Or at least a reduced price to change race.. L2 store items being more pay to win.