Tool_of_Society

Well when I made a suggestion that would improve gameplay for the player base your response is OMG NO CAUSE BOTS!@!!! That's what I'm talking about.

TLDR : If someone is creating hundreds of accounts to game the event then they already have the tools in place to create hundreds more to get around your "solution". It's interesting how people get so obsessed with screwing over bots that they end up screwing the legit playerbase massively more.

That site is a "tool" that has many issues. One issue is that it's clearly unreliable as it will report servers as down that are not down. That shows it's pulling numbers in a very unreliable manner. It also lacks anything resembling a history so it's impossible to see any real trends. You checking in at set times to just look at the number isn't anywhere near good enough to be considered data points. If you had bothered to look at my example you would see why your site is bad at giving "data"... I've played on Giran since day one so what? I can log in hundreds of characters but I don't have the tools setup to automate the creation of hundreds of email accounts and the corresponding creation of the character accounts while keeping all that information in a format that is usable to do mass log ins. Neither do you but you'd rather pretend the whole concept is super easy and can be done by anyone. Meanwhile whales which exist in vastly more numbers are using their real life money to gain massive advantages over you in game... People are getting banned for creating one account and leveling it up too fast in one day. Those are usually temporary bans because it's considered suspicious behaviour. Doing that with "hundreds" of accounts would be noticed. Interestingly I've been leveling up a BD to replace the sorc in my party and I've been seeing very few bots in the process. I got to OB before running RBs to catch up. It's been kind of creepy how few low level bots I've seen. Those bots I do see aren't using the coin costumes ever. I litterly have a list of names of bots that I would see every day when grinding and never once did they have a costume on. Seems like a waste opportunity to maximize income but the reality is those bots are disposable and spending time to get the quest item to get the costumes is time not well spent in the botter's eyes. There's far better bang for the buck to just head out and bot the usual spots. There is a guy... I know a guy who has won 20 times with the raffle and he exists just as much as yours!!! Your tool is not extensive nor transparent. It is decent when it's not getting things completely wrong. You said hundreds from the start not "dozens". You're moving the goalposts really far at this point. I never said that leveling one account to 20 manually is difficult or anything of that sort. I simply stated the fact that if someone is able to level hundreds of accounts to 20 then they have heavily automated the full process which means your "solution" would be irrelevant as the person in question already has the tools in place to make "hundreds" more accounts to log in.... I never said vpns or VMs don't work you're just straight up making stuff up all over your last post. If account limits are in place then there's no problem as people can't create hundreds of accounts on short notice for an event.... Giran has not been heavy at 12-2am cdt. Giran doesn't pick up until much later with heavy being more a 6am and later thing. I want to see where this stated by ncwest because limiting accounts based on IP is not practical as vast amounts of people are behind NATs and other things that would cause them to share the same apparent IP as dozens to tens of thousands of other people. It would be child's play for a botter to get around it. But a normal player would be screwed. EDIT : Holy cow I had no idea I was playing on Giran for a year and half already.. Amazing.

*Error facts not found* I played in closed beta and even then there were bots running around and gold sellers spamming. Back then there was no working bot report button for the NA servers. What you describe isn't even how the bot report button action works. What goes down is after a set number of people use the bot report button on someone it causes a captcha to pop up and if they fail to enter the proper captcha 3 times in a row (or if the timer runs out) then your character is given a debuff that kills every stat and xp. When it was finally added to the NA servers with classic the report button was abused in PVP so much that Ncwest was forced to raise the number of reports to spawn a captcha from 3 to 10..

Yes that shows an unverifiable number updated at an unknown rate with no history or any sort of really useful information. Also according to it right now TI is down...Here's an example of that concept done in a manner that would actually be useful for what you're trying to do with it. https://eve-offline.net/?server=tranquility Regardless there's a thing some people call "prime time" for games/servers which is when the largest number of people are playing and that prime time for giran seems to coincide with Europe's time zones. To leap to the conclusion that it's actually only because some unknown people are logging in hundreds of accounts each to exploit the system is dubious at best. The point is you missed my point completely. Characters already have to be level 20 to even use the disguises which means automation is definitely involved in anyone doing "hundreds" of accounts. So switching to the number of disguises based on VIP level would have no effect on the cheaters while needlessly screwing over the real players who only have one or two accounts. Since there are "hundreds" of accounts being logged in for this event according to the OP then clearly the "throttle" you speak of isn't working or is made up. So on one hand OP is claiming people are creating hundreds of accounts to exploit the event and on the other hand you're claiming it's impossible because they are throttled. Considering the similarity of your name to the OP I can't help but wonder if you're arguing with yourself at this point. Certainly this is the first time I've seen someone claim there is a "throttle" on account creation.

If someone is logging in "hundreds of characters" it won't matter if it's one or four tries an account because at that point they can just log more over and over. Have you tried to register, setup and log in "hundreds of characters(accounts)"? It's not something you would do manually which means there's automation involved (and a lot of machines). At that point logging over to another set of "hundreds of characters" would just require a little more information being added in beforehand. Where are you getting the data point of the number of people playing? On giran in my experience when leveling there is always an increase of players in the wee early hours CDT (4am and past). That would be late morning for Europeans and later for those east of Europe. Always felt like an European server based on how the majority of people I meet are located there.

Hell here on Giran I've been trying hard to find the people buying steel for 9k adena each or any of that kind of stuff. No luck so far

Well if the only reason you PVP is to cause your opponents to lose XP then you're missing out. I PVP so I have the feeling of pride at triumphing over my enemy. I PVP for my ego and the experience of besting my opponents. I PVP for the challenge of overcoming the scenario. So XP loss is a de-motivator to PVP because why bother when I'm probably going to lose an hour of work. Might as well ignore that person flagging on me because it's just a trap anyway. When the event ends people can go back to complaining on this forum and in game about how no one wants to PVPs their swarm...

I could do 27 accounts without even touching a VM and I'm starting to feel dumb for not going whole hog for this event.That and how the hell would I register 16 more accounts? I don't even want to try to keep track of that much log in info for emails and the game.

I've been waay more open to pvp with randoms the last few weeks because of the 0% loss. Normally I would be far more selective but basically I'll try to take anyone who flags on me right now.

On Giran prices are pretty much the same as prior to the event. Some things are little more expensive others a little cheaper. Nothing major in my experience has changed. Well other than my ability to afford to buy spell books for my buffers and weapons for my dps. I'd like to know if any of the +16 weapons being listed at +800m actually ever sell though. I've seen the same ones in giran for at least a week now. Maybe we're just looking for different things at different times. I generally scan the market areas 1-4 time(s) a day and I'm mostly looking at/for C and higher stuff. I haven't really seen enough A grade to have any real tracking information on prices. I have seen that B grade weapons in particular are cheap lately. Inflation is a thing in games regardless of server settings. The growth in prices has been along pre-event trajectories. I haven't spotted any abnormalities so any information you can give would be appreciated.

Umm so where does classic figure into that?

I wouldn't consider the community members themselves as "old" based on my interactions in game and on the forums. There are only a couple people who still even post on the forums from the older days. RMT = bannable which you conveniently forgot to mention in your spiel...

Not every drawing has a winner so your odds of winning are much lower than 1/400. I've had many hours where my characters received 20 or no coins. I don't seem to be grinding during popular hours =/

I multibox because that's what I find fun in games. In the first few months on my server I averaged 1 captcha a day with my group. I wasn't even farming that hardcore or anything. Just running around with my "train" was enough to get reported (and yelled at). Now I can run anywhere and people don't even bother. It's entirely possible that I'm just running past bots these days so there's no one there to care. I dunno. As for the spellbooks that's why I suggested a possible fix of having more areas drop them so at least you can maybe find a spot to farm? God doing ivory tower for my second job quests was just a nightmare on some of the characters. I had to straight up use my PR's bow on my orc shaman (and some others) as I was doing it's second class transfer quests (WC) because the pony bots were just destroying the quest mobs.

Well yeah it was a crappy bag of coins but it was still a win. Just wish it had been for the previous reward lol..

Or they could go the way most MMORPGs go and give you the ability to actually get gear from grinding and questing (character bound). Instead of randomly bestowing godlike weapons they could actually reward their playerbase for actually playing the game. Spending +$400 monthly on a 15 year old game for a small chance at gear.... That's the problem with modern gaming right there. The whales are just outright silly. If you're going to blow that kind of money you can get WAAAAy more out of it if you spent it elsewhere.

The report button works but it only applies a debuff for an hour if enough people report the character. Your reports only count as one so that's why it seems to do nothing even if you report daily. What you should do is take screenshots and file a ticket to report the bots to customer support directly. Frankly spellbooks should drop in far more places and/or at a much higher rate. It's silly how perfectly the system is setup for botters to exploit for adena farming.

Wow that's so naive. These bots litterly automatically go to town to turn in quests and pick skills while repositioning automatically and you think they can't handle a few aggressive mobs? Even the most basic of "bots" aka macro users can deal with aggressive mobs pretty easily. It does make it hella more annoying for regular players just trying to finish a quest or two.... Holy cow that's a funny statement as whole sections of nullspace is packed with mining bots and anom bots....This is confirmed by CCP themselves in the various bot reports they've released over the years.

I won a coin box several days ago on an account that has VIP 1 so please stop with the silly VIP conspiracy crap.

6 to 12 is basically 100k xp. You're exaggerating (you didn't complete the quest chain in "seconds") but I do appreciate you telling me what quest you did. Feeling the old-style gameplay is impossible because drop rates on the classic servers are nerfed compared to the early days of the live server. That's why you have no money relative to where you would of been in the days of old.

I'm going to assume when you say "more classics" that you mean other servers. Well those are other servers located in other areas of the world which have vastly different player bases. Meanwhile I'm comparing current classic to how live here was at that stage of development and with the drops/PK settings you want. I've already told you how that went down and Ncwest agrees with me... Feel free to move back to one of those "more classics" you have been playing.. I still find it hilarious that you actually believe bot trains wouldn't run....

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHAHAHA.... You clearly never played live where all that existed AND bots were still all over. At least now you don't have to worry about the bot owners PKing and/or mob training you out of their preferred leveling area. Because in early years of the game that was a pretty common occurrence if you tried to level in a nice area that a bot train was already running or wanted to run.. Your suggestions are bad and things are the way they are now because people were heavily griefing and using exploits against non bots. People get bored messing with bots pretty quickly and end up griefing lowbies instead (you get much better reactions). That's why on the live servers cursed swords inevitably end up being used to kill lowbies... Also item drop on death made it hard as hell to get a party because everyone was paranoid and refused to invite people they didn't personally know. There's a whole list of reasons but I don't have the time to flesh out the rest. I'm sure if you think about it you;'d understand.

What are you talking about? I just leveled up 3 replacement characters and did not experience leveling from 6-12 in seconds. The stuff you get from doing quests is good enough to get you well into your 20s. Along the way you can easily buy a top NG weapon for >250,000 adena from the variety of player shops sitting around. If you're on gludio then well sorry you're probably going to have to buy from the NPC shops. Buy NG shots in Giran as the price is cheapest there (use the warehouse NPC nearby to store extra shots for later). Concentrate on a weapon upgrade as the moonlight knight quest at 25 gives you solid armor you can use into C grade levels. Always do the collection quests where you're grinding. ruins of despair, abandoned camp, and Orc Barracks have collection quests. It's not a huge amount of adena but it's decent over time and will help offset the costs of shots.

I'm not trying to be mean here but the game was only "hard.. really hard" for you because you were clueless. This isn't an insult because you have to start learning somewhere. I didn't have trouble because I already had many years of experience with Korean MMORPGS (RO for example) and I already knew what I needed to do when the closed beta started for north America. It also helped that the live servers back then had much better drop rates for everything than what we have currently in this bastardized "classic"... I was really hoping for the oldschool experience including leveling with my wolf. I knew of course that things like MM SAs weren't going to be added back in. Sadly that is not what I got EDIT : I ended up on bartz at some point. I can't remember if it was when they merged servers or if when I restarted I changed servers. A lot has happened in the last decade and half since then.