Beatricea

a significant portion of that 98% will never be lvl 70, at least on TI server. consider the thousands of bots in the fields and running through dion daily to delevel... that alone will dramatically cut the % of players achieving anything above level 39

apparently it's okay for NCSoft to ban legitimate players for no reason but not okay to ban bots. must be their new company policy........

the clearest answer to your question of how does NC benefit from all the bots is...... the bots belong to them! i think it is entirely possible a majority of them do. and why not? with bots making so much adena NC can benefit in real money for selling that adena. i also believe many of the bots that don't belong to NC do belong to their high-spending whales and are thus immune from banning. ban my bots, lose my money... of course they aren't going to respond. they can't answer the hard questions. it's pretty obvious that, despite them saying they ban hundreds of bots, they really aren't effectively scratching the surface. the game is unplayable because of the bots, they are losing real players all the time. soon all they'll have left is bots and whales. it all comes down to bad management policies within the company. the bottom line of greed, botting makes money. bad management is in the fact they refuse to fix the problem and even worse, they refuse to communicate with their playing community. yeah, this thread is 13 pages with no GM response. and they won't respond. the game will die because they refuse to enforce their own rules which will drive real people away. they don't get it, they don't care. they'll milk it for what they can until it's dead.

you must be one of them.. an NCSoft staff member incognito. LOL it wouldn't take 100 people live in-game to take care of the bots. a team of one GM per server could handle it easily enough. go to a field, see a bot, account ban. not hard. takes less than 30 seconds. granted with the thousands of bots on some of the servers it will take more than a day or two. once one server is done the GM's can move to the other servers to help. as for me, i'm finished helping NCSoft with bot reports. such reports go completely ignored. bots i reported weeks ago are still running in the same fields in the game even now. NCSoft is not doing anything either proactive or reactive about it. they're trying to develop some kind of automated bot detection system that will never work because someone will always find a way to program a third-party bot program around it. the problem is they've let this problem go on for 15 years. at this point i doubt there is any solution but to leave NCSoft servers. not only do they not solve the botting problems, they ban legitimate players without reason. 72 hours now for one person who was account banned and no reason given despite the fact he has submitted three tickets asking "why?" he has been told nothing. the way this should work is, an email should be generated to that account the moment it is banned saying, your account has been banned and this is why. and then give appeal information. they way they do it now, they ban people then wait for those people to appeal the ban and then they don't answer for.. who knows how long. it's backward, unethical and wrong. NCSoft needs to be completely restructured from the top down with people who actually give a damn. because none of them do.

for all i know i could be banned. i don't really care. banning people in-game for sharing the truth and demanding answers in the forum is cowardly in my opinion. no stand-up company is going to ban first and ask questions later the way this company does. how they get away with it is beyond me. how they manage to not really communicate with us is an art form. what are the forums for if not to communicate? and how many complaints is it going to take before they get off their duff and fix the problems?

one person in my clan was banned from the game for using inappropriate language with a GM in a private ticket. 14 days. ridiculous. a second clan member was banned and has now waited 48 hours for a response to his ticket asking why. bots are still rampant throughout the servers. nothing has been done about them. NCSoft is unresponsive as to any timeline. they simply say they understand our frustration and to please bear with them and they appreciate our patience. @NcsoftFTW is quick to ban legitimate players who have not committed any in-game infractions, and refuse to respond timely to reasonable requests asking why, yet bots still rule the realm. NCSoft says they take botting seriously. all i can say is, i agree, they do. bots net them some amount of income which buys bot immunity. NCSoft takes that income seriously. i defy any NCSoft staff member to refute this. i demand NCSoft give its community a timeline of its progress in banning bots. i further demand that NCSoft change its policy of ban first, ask questions later.

are people still being unreasonably banned? and if so, why are bots still rampant on the servers? @NcsoftFTW y'all need to bring in live GM's and pay attention to who's getting banned. bots are so easy to spot and they are still everywhere!