The cheat detection is a joke. People getting suspended for auto clickers while fully automated, warping bots, have monk epic pieces fully locked down in South Karana. A human GM could spend 5 min in South Karana, Seb, Chardok, and see the obvious cheating
NGL I also found it surprising that the video starts with "I'm a member of Relentless Insomnia" and then proceeds to complain about people using 3rd party software to cheat and how they are bad for the server. Seemed rather ironic/hypocritical to me.
Which guilds on the server do you think don't have (many) members using unapproved 3rd party software? Daybreak has zero credibility on this topic, and until they do if you want to be in a guild, you have to accept that it exists. Like I mentioned to someone else, I don't control the RI roster, but as I said in EQ discord yesterday if you see someone blatantly using that stuff in Rampage, feel free to send me a video of it.
@@NotSure-b9d Rampage too. I remember trying to report an SK for KSing our groups named with HT. Tried to contact an officer in his guild to do something about it. He was the officer. Awesome. And yes Aeth there are guilds that don't stand for that type of thing on the server. I have been in and been leader of many guilds that have a 3 box limit, no KS policy. Just got to be content with something more casual.
This is why I love Project 1999 - solo char, literally no bots. The only two bots I feel like I have encountered, they let them go just the right amount of time before a ban to make them realize it's probably not worth it at all.
It's been a while since I've played, but I was thinking the leveling up group game was getting scarce in P99. A little top heavy, I guess. That's where 1 box could come in handy, but it would open the doors to a slew of problems. But yeah, the cheating issues with TLPs is a huge turnoff, even if some quality of life features are nice. I love Teek ruleset, but I think I'll hold off until Omens and some cheaters clear out.
P99 and "Classic Everquest" are dead. Nepotism, corruption, and the Staff despise the players while making rules they directly benefit from on the opposite servers. Try Monster and Memories, it's the true successor to Classic EQ
@@Unchainedfury Oh I follow M & M. To me p99 is perfect but I have no time to raid or be in that scene. I'm all about solo and small group, and it is great for that.
It would take all of 30m for someone who has access to the positioning data from the game logs to flag and ban all of the bots, but despite what DBG says about not liking the bot armies, they don't seem to care enough to stop them, considering every one of those bot armies you show in your video is generating them seven subs. If there were 8 picks, and 7 bots per pick, that's 56 paying accounts. The same goes for the whole epic mob kill stealing going on in various zones, including Lake of Ill Omen (you know who I'm talking about). The constant PL spamming is another part of that frustration. I'd love for them to create an option to ignore an account, not just a character, and ignores should be global for your account so you don't have to ignore them on every alt.
@@Aethplayseverquest I know he isn't a bot. I was just pointing out that DBG has ignored both his behavior, and the naming convention for several of his characters, or the characters of his group, because despite his obviously and very well documented toxic behavior and admission to the fact that he is doing it because he wants to be an a-hole, AND documented evidence that he is farming Krono to sell for money outside of the game, they don't do anything about him.
@@Aethplayseverquest I do, yes. I think that if people who were paying to play the game would keep paying to play the game rather than paying someone else to play the game for them. It might not have as many people playing, but then there would be less contention over camps / mobs, and people wouldn't be quitting because they are being griefed.
This is basically why I’ve stopped playing EQ. Sure they are making money from these bots but I guarantee it turns away 10x the number of casual players. The numbers are likely less obvious with slow trickle of churn, but for sure this is hitting their bottom line. Over the years this adds up well past the point of the cost of a full time staff member trying to put a stop to this. It is short sighted of them not to realize this.
I'll be honest I am a new player that did not know botting was an issue until now. It makes sense looking at it now, but I have barely seen 5 players in total while leveling. I am only hitting levels 15-20 though
@@luckyluc9972 It's unlikely you'd see many bots in the areas you'd be travelling at the moment. People like myself however who have a long history with the game see something like this and I just immediately know it's a non-starter for me. The effect bot farmers have on the economy is an issue all on it's own, but these are also highly covetted end-game group locations that I would want to see and experience again if I were ever to come back. Knowing these areas are perpetually camped by bots means there's no real point in trying, or at the very least that it's not worth the headache I already know it's going to be. I'd rather restart p99.
They banned so many accounts across the servers recently, I can't see them making it past 2025. I honestly don't give a crap about the weird ruleset servers. And not that you care, but their most recent expansion has 6 new zones and 7 raids with nothing new added. And some of these zones are SMALL. There's literally almost nowhere to go in them. I've already cancelled my alt subscriptions and I'm basically just riding out my main's yearly sub to see if they come up with something, as it's been a year of nothing of value added. If MQ2 is out, so is any manner of simulating group content.
@@Aethplayseverquest they're milking the cash cow while throwing the odd ban at the mostly harmless small time cheaters to pretend they are anti-cheat focused. As others said if volunteers can get rid of cheats on EMU's then DPG could easily get rid of cheats if they really wanted to.
The botting is completely out of control. If you join any of the big guilds on FV as a new or returning player you will have MQ2 shoved down your throat. The cheaters have been actively recruiting for years while DBG ignores it. Now we have a situation where the botters are likely the majority of their income and they are stuck in a catch 22 where doing something about it might actually kill the game. Its a fucked up situation, thats for sure.
What's sad about Teek is you know that Daybreak is an enabler for this botting to continue. They are enabling the botters because they want the money. If it can easily be shutdown on a private server and botters are IP banned with less resources than Daybreak. Then you know Daybreak is enabling this behavior. So the way they reacted in this video is lies. It's not hard to ban these botters, it's just Daybreak doesn't want too. It's really a disservice to anyone who enjoys time locked servers and wants to enjoy other content and expansions. Personally, I think the Everquest Community should hold Daybreak accountable and keep putting the pressure on them on the forums and at live events like this.
I think at this point with what we've seen that's quite likely. There's also a problem that when your studio head is an engineer, everything looks like a coding problem. As many have said in responses here, it's a very simple task to clean this up with GMs. They have a job right now on their website hiring CS for $16/hr, so it's not like GM enforcement would cost them a lot, probably even bring back some real players (who buy more than just the krono sub through the store).
Nice addition to have DZs. Wish some of those emu servers would play further into the game. None of the expansions through pop are among my favorite 5 in eq 😢
@@Aethplayseverquest Yeah but even if it's not your favorite expansions, atleast you know you'll be playing with over 1200 real people and not bots. But I can understand why its not your thing. I will say the good thing about Quarm is it's one server with 1200 people versus p99 that has 1,000 people split over 3 servers. Also p99 only goes to Velious where as Quarm goes to POP. I'm against Bots and Multiboxing in any game. I'm actually new to Everquest so Quarm has been good for me, I'm 29 in RL. The corpse Runs and Exp Loss on Quarm is not as bad as it is on p99, its a bit more fair and also there is no slow exp leveling when it comes to certain races, Quarm removed that for being tedious.
Ya I can definitely see the appeal. I'm glad those servers exist, as they keep a lot of people in the extended community who would have otherwise been long gone.
Just like all the other old guard MMOs, private servers are the preferable experience. They're not perfect but a lot of them like UO Outlands, P99 and Quarm take an active stance against botting and multiboxing to help foster an actual functioning economy and grouping community. The unfortunate truth is that botters and multiboxers are paying customers and any company running a game for profit doesn't really care as long as those money comes in.
I quit TLP for good this last one. Its just too much now. Bots cheaters boxers everywhere. I don't like any of that. Quarm and P99 is by far 10x like real EQ. On Quarm now and its by far the least toxic server I've ever played. People actually GM the server. Daybreak is a joke. I am so happy to finally be on a server I know I'll stay on.
That interview with the EQ devs was eye opening. It's clear they don't care and/or are given direction not to care because it sounds like they are specifically deflecting - "making perfect the enemy of great" is a pretty standard blow-off excuse. As you show in your video, you can easily Pareto this problem - you can catch 80% of the botters with almost zero effort. In fact, EQ devs should have just marked all the names of characters in this video and that would solve like 75% of the Seb problem. And when the devs say people are one step ahead of their cheat detection...I call utter bullshit. I spent probably 4-5 TLPs running (2) super-crude bot crews using autohotkey scripts over maybe 6-8 total months didn't get flagged even once. Made like 200 kronos I ran an AHK script ONCE on P99 to train some spell casting skills and that account got permabanned within 45 minutes.
In a sense I’m glad Devs aren’t spending much time on that topic, but wtf is the manager of their GMs doing? Like you said, just go look… it’s mq2 or a variant at every camp.
@@Aethplayseverquest Yep, idk...I hate to think conspiracies, but man, that girl in the video is making it sound like these are some scooby doo villains that keep slipping thru the cracks and they juuust can't catch them. Oh well - will hoard my kronos until the next TLP I guess in the hopes they finally start to crack down! I'm not getting any younger tho...
It's simple. VERY VERY VERY Simple. Have a GM/Guide on the server. Go back to active /petition instead of the website. Have the GM/Guide watch/interact IN THE GAME, and hardware ban them. It's not difficult.
yup exactly. suggested that even in one of my recent videos. they're hiring CS for $16/hr, so the amount they'd get from confiscated kronos from banned and related accounts would probably even pay for itself
@@Aethplayseverquest It seems to most that I've spoken to (on my server) agree that any suggestion(s) fall on deaf ears because the party we are reporting/petitioning is complicit in the krono-farming/botting as well.
@@Aethplayseverquest on live servers we see the crew doing a lot of the afk PLs occasionally get suspended then it seems to be overturned, usually within 2 days. There's definitely some janky stuff happening. I've seen some brag that they know a GM and are untouchable, and if it weren't for the fact they keep coming back I wouldn't believe it.
"What do you think the boxes are even doing?" There isn't a single answer that fits all situations. I know of many people who bot certain classes because those classes do not stick around long term (e.g., people are not reliable). Example: "Main" rogues, very rarely do people main them longer than a month or two. After being in countless guilds, it seems like 9/10 rogues quit after 1 or 2 months. They get their BIC weapon and.... poof gone. Enchanters, wizards... same thing. The worst part, people come back to EQ, get BIC and then ghost the rest of the guild, which is extremely disrespectful to the entire guild. Example: Let's dive into the "gameplay" of a rogue. At level 1, best case scenario, they get a group get behind a mob and turn on auto attack. This doesn't change until level 10, which they get backstab... oh wait /autoskill backstab. This doesn't change until... oh, even in OOW it still pretty much turn on auto attack and position behind the mob. At least they can hit their 2.0 every 3 mins and have two cooldowns they can hit once per named. So, they hit 1 button on 99/100 fights and we're expecting these people to continue playing the game? There are multiple points I am alluding to here. #1 The gameplay for some classes (i.e., the class fantasy) is extremely dull and offers no progressing challenge to real people they get bored and quit. Resulting in #2 The retention rate for "mains" of these types of classes is usually extremely low. This then results in #3 - people who continue playing the game, find it difficult to recruit or annoying to completely re-gear / re-flag a new member because someone left... eventually, the people who have been playing for months just box those classes and boxing gets annoying enough to then they use boxing assisting software. Personally, I feel if the complexity of class gameplay progressively got more and more engaging / difficult, you'd see less boxers... while the EQ offers a lot of enjoyment, what it lacks is the ability to compete with modern engaging gameplay, resulting in a lot higher of the population being "bots". TLP after TLP, gameplay doesn't change. Balancing between classes doesn't change. TBH, spending a lot of effort trying to detect 3rd party programs is fixing a symptom of a problem, not fixing the root cause of the problem. I would rather the developers spend more time making each TLP feel unique and make it combat more engaging. Balance out some of the classes to create variant meta gameplay.
Dead giveaway something is wrong, the question was being asked to the First dude, instead of answering he looked towards Jenn Chan to save him. You kind of feel like they all know what's going on but can't do anything about it because their all profiting somehow.
@@kaiz0099 I firmly believe some of the GMs have friends or family that are allowed to run bots. There is no way that some of these would be allowed otherwise.
Its crap for sure, I’ve had gms come right to me on mischief because I had characters on auto follow and suspend me on the spot, there’s no reason they can’t login and clear the zones especially during obvious hours like early morning etc, all macroquest did with their changes is make it hard for normal people to get it working while leaving the mega botters with less competition, I’ve seen a few mage armies along the way but return to camp features sit in scripts for kissassist etc so that’s an easy catch for a gm, how long would it really take them, 5 minutes to verify and ban most of the zone every morning ?
Dang sorry that happened to you. Yep, it would be super easy if they wanted to fix it... which is probably the answer right there, despite what jchan said in the panel.
@@Aethplayseverquest The odd thing to me is that you know they've probably seen your video already too or someone told them about it. It's all about that $$$, I got people mad at me for my multiboxing videos like I'm the enemy when they probably got Ai running those entire mage farms now lol.
That would be silly if true. Why hit the guys doing aoe? They are at least at the keyboard playing. They may be using auto clickers, but they are there. The ones I hate are the afk bots like he showed in the video.
That Yandy selling lower level PL in Sola is super irritating, he pick hops and then just terrorizes the zone. I did pay him back by having a cleric cycle Ae's at his pull location. He left pretty quick after that. Not sure why I care, anymore.
They are easy to find and delete you just have to care, the thing is each bot is a sub and they want subs. I've noticed private servers of any game I have played find and get rid of them quickly because money isn't involved.
I wonder if the economics of this are as simple as: - Raw plat per hour from these camps - Plat cost of krono - Sunk & ongoing infrastructure cost (ie computers/power) - probably pretty minimal these days Per camp/group/month: Krono income = (Raw plat/hr) * 24 * 30 / (plat per krono) $ profit = ((Krono income) - group size) * (black market krono price) - monthly infra expenses Take this profit times the # of groups running - with little of no oversight, it probably is pulling in a decent # of money. Example, say these camps are pulling in 1000 plat/hr in raw plat: 1000 * 24 * 30 = 720,000/month Plat price: 65,000 Monthly krono = 720,000/65,000 = 11 Krono 11 krono - 6 krono/group = 5 krono profit * $10/month/krono EC tunnel krono price = $50/month profit Run 20 of these groups on teek = $1000/month of basically AFK money. But lets be real, I'm sure it is more, and likely across a few servers so likely a fair bit higher.
@@Aethplayseverquest is it a huge hassle if it is 100% automated? Seems like easy mode money. People work for way less at way worse jobs in many parts of the world. Wish EA would get more aggressive as it has ruined the game for many.
I just can’t see that being worth the hassle. Like how long do you have to do that extremely slow farm to make a krono from plat sales when it’s so expensive now?
I came back a few years ago after a 16 year absence and no one wanted to play content with my 75 enchanter and I didn’t want to simply buy a power level. Someone suggested getting a bot. My 3 character group with 2 bots made it a few weeks before getting their first temporary ban. Cancelled my subs and haven’t looked back. I don’t blame them, but would have been nice to play some of the content I missed out on.
Ya you definitely need boxes to play later on in the game. If you were on a live server, they have mercenaries now to supplement groups. Can be an ok alternative.
theres this one guy that will sit at juggs and abc camp all day...every day with his mage army..and i report them all the time..and absolutely nothing happens to him
Aeth I appreciate your videos, but this video should come with a little bit of introspection regarding the problem at hand. Relentless Insomnia literally has officers and their full bot groups running 3rd party programs while afk in North Ro for 10 hours straight. It is most obvious when they leave their mod on that auto-cast buffs. Like being able to predict when the 3rd recast of Sow and Talisman buffs are going to land on the group with a +/- 2 second margin of error for all buffs around 3:15AM obvious. Yes, that means I predicted exactly when they would cast those buffs the other two rounds, as well as me predicting they would keep these buffs up despite being in the same afk autofollow formation the entire time. Speaking of Bots and Seb. I really would like to know how an RI enchanter and 2 wizards went from zone-in to magically appear in the Blood of Chottal room behind the locked doors without ever running by my crypt group.
Oh I'm sure people in RI, people in my other guild, Rampage, and people in almost all other guilds on the server are using unapproved 3rd party programs. Daybreak has zero credibility on cleaning that up. I don't control the roster of RI, but as I mentioned to some rando in EQ discord yesterday, if you see that stuff blatantly going on with people in Rampage, definitely send me a video of it so we can deal with it.
I just power leveled 3 toons with my main group recently and saw the same crap in sebilis over a few days. I’m in Chardok and had an encounter with one of the PL crews. Crazy enough they were actually friendly and offered me a location to level my guys they had been farming. I asked how they don’t get banned with everything going on and didn’t get a straight answer. I’d imagine they have an agreement with DBG at this point or are employees themselves. As others have said people get suspended for stupid crap when this goes on 24/7.
They let bots continue because bots mean a lot of subscriptions. Im not sure if the argument is valid but some say that EQ would die without the bot subs. Has anyone crunched the numbers?
Well I don’t think bot accounts are using the cash store account much, so 100 bots is just $1500/month or whatever. Or 1800 since they probably sub via kronos. Doesn’t seem like a lot of money to make their game look like that to the players.
They need a bigger budget, which will lead to more man power to help combat these things. It's basically shoe-string right now, and it's honestly pathetic.
I watched botters clearly botting and a gm came into the zone looked around the botters all line up simultaneously in a straight lined and saluted and hailed the gm at the exact same time then the gm said ok and left. They just dont care.
Yea I played Teek, got to about 28 and quit because of the mulitboxing. I wanted a classic experience, having powerlvling botters mass killing in upper guk ruined it for me. The other thing that ruined it for me was Kronos and Tower gear, it just didn't feel like original EQ to me, for me if all that stuff is going to stay in I may as well just continue to play my max level characters. I'm back on Quarm playing now, it goes to PoP eventually and if I want the live xp I can reactivate my max level characters and play at max level. If DB made a server where you cant box like Quarm, no Krono or Tower gear etc and actually banned the multi boxers like they do on Quarm and p99 I probably would play on a TLP.
You made the right choice, Quarm is where it's at personally. An actual community, no boxing, no bots, Guild Instanced Raids, it's a great server. Has a lot of Quality of life and with Quarm Tools and Zeal, The Camera is fixed and can be played in third person with other quality of life stuff, modern UI, HD Graphics.
I think this is actually a part of it. There are certain botters that never seem to get caught up in ban waves. The forums are very cheater friendly too. Angeliana actively defends them and has for years.
It's the same economic problem as in WoW (also, like with Bliz Employees being paid off by botters), the basic model is: Who brings in more money. Though it's destructive.. companies are driven by the immediate bottom-line. Who brings in more, a player with one, maybe two accounts? Or a botter, who will be running 20, 40, 60, even a 100 per human. In the basic economics of it, the botter is actually a MORE valuable customer.. short term.
Crazy this is a-ok yet i got permabanned on the new eq2 origins server for manually 3 boxing while using joe multiboxer to resize and place 2 of my 3 accounts on a different monitor
Yeah it really sucks. One of the accounts was my original from 1999. And when I try to appeal I get a generic scripted response and I try to escalate and they just ignore it.
The RUclips channel "MetaGoblin" made a series of videos on the inner working of gold selling/RMT in World of Warcraft, it's insane how much money there is in that business, and how little Blizzard care about botting.
@@Aethplayseverquest Slow response to the issue, that is the problem in WoW as well, Blizzard like to do ban waves every 4 months I believe, but as the botter in that miniseries MetaGoblin made said, it is more than enough time for his to set a new bot farm, make tons of money. It's ironic that the WoW token was Blizzard trying to curb the gold buying problem, it worked in the sense that gold seller spam in the chat channels disappeared, but people still buy gold from 3rd party websites because they offer better prices most of the time. You mention the rising price of Krono. I currently play WoW classic (our version of TLP) and Blizzard introduced the WoW token during the second expansion, the first month the price would fluctuate a bit but would settle at about 7000 gold on my server, fast-forward to today, and it's up to 20k. In the retail version of WoW the token sits at 380k to 400k. (retail wow, is what we call the current version with the latest expansion of wow)
weird how a couple unpaid volunteers do a much better job of preventing cheating on unofficial servers vs. paid devs for a live game that generates money from a pay to win shop.
Those Bots are really killing the game, its sad to see one of my favorite EQ zone become like this... I guess when there something money involve then it will become ugly.
Anyone who ever played EQ is not surprised. Botting is the only way to play this game. Its why I quit. They refused to change their formula when WoW beat them up and stole their lunch money.
ohhh i can give you some friend of a friend insider info here. they've run the numbers. the amount of money generated by those boxes from both what they pay to subscribe and what they generate in getting other people to come back to pay is unfortunately pretty measurably higher than the population of just wanting to actually enjoy the game. You will never see them do any thing more than ceremonial bans and actions for publicity to those players because they are worth more than you.
How many just pure bots like this are there out in the wild. Not people who fully automate a few of their characters but just straight up afk 6 boxes? 1000 is only $18k/month if they sub with krono. Doesn’t seem like a big enough number to have your game look like a bot hellscape to me.
@@Aethplayseverquest thats a tiny part of the entitlement. 1000 at any given time sure, but realistically probably 3x that on a given server, ther's what 3 or 4 decently active tlp style servers, another 5 or more farther along and prob 1/4 the population. You're talking easily $50k+ a month, PLUS what about their customers, their prime customers are a massive revolving door of returning players who want to quickly get back into the swing of things. They draw in more returning players than any amount of daybreak emails, social media campaigns, i'm sure it's so minimal and low quality from them cause they know they just rely on the aftermarket such as this to really do their work for them lol. Then the next thing is while these are the most popular by far the combined of the live servers still out weighs them and at the very least the estimates are 50% of the population on most of those drinal/bristlebanes and what not are boxing using MQ2 automation. They just can't, when alls said and done it starts to come out to figures along the line of more than half their monthly income is from users violating their agreements in some fashion.
Daybreak loves botters because if you keep a server population up - artificially or through real players - you give a sense of popularity and trendiness. Also, if there's any subscription fees coming in, money is money no matter where it comes from. Daybreak and Sony brought this on by permitting and turning a blind eye to MQ2 for years.
I mean I play on a low-pop server, I like 6 boxing so I have my group. I don't farm to sell or farm krona. I just play the game, I quest, and i do group content. I don't consider that hurting the economy or anyone else. Why do I have to get banned because I pay for 6 accounts and play the game the way it was intended to be played if the servers had more pop? And when an char get banned i haev to make another account and buy krono to sell for plat so i can quickly gear him in a gdkp. Hmm i stat to think thats why they ban me they are making money on it.... hmmm that is why they dont ban the true problems because they are making money on it. Just a thought.
That's probably a lower level of cheating if you're trying to single player EQ with some robot help on a server that's been out 25 years. This video is about their most popular TLP ever a couple months after launch I'm talking about here. It's like nearly 3 years away from having mercs even.
@@Aethplayseverquest Just about everyone I play with stopped after Luclin. DAOC and WOW came out and everyone I knew went there. No nostalgia for later expansions so private emulators are PERFECT
"We don't like BOTs and we'd love to get rid of them" Well, when you have a literal macro program implemented into your game, you basically welcome BOTs into your game with open arms. I know a lot of regular players use macros for QoL, but I always state that any player that relies on a macro program to play a game, isn't really playing the game. No statement or argument from them will ever convince me otherwise.
I can see the appeal although wish all those emus would get to some of the better expansions. The first 4 expansions are all worse than the whole approximately TSS-ROF era.
Daybreak/darkpaw rating on anti cheat is -2/10. Its pretty pathetic really. Its such an easy fix to. I mean get some GMs to check out the usual zones. Its obvious when someone is botting 😂
It does not punish the pro farmers of the West Taiwan ping pong team. It punishes the people that are anti-social or would rather 3-6 box/bot their own group and keep to themselves.
THANK YOU for all these videos. IMO there is no fix to this at all in EQ. Anti-Cheat yada yada blah blah. I get it and sounds great, but by now people like me say those are nice words but where's the action? I do not mean to bash anyone at DB nor do I dislike their 'progress' with this but I would like to see something. The truth I believe is in your videos or Zaidegod videos ... or both. This all boils down to money. Krono = money for DB and helps them to continue on with their mission of supporting this game which a decent amount of people still pay for. There is 1 server, Agnarr. Wouldn't you know, the shannaigans that go on like this do not happen there. Why....well, it's stuck. It's not going anywhere. Why? Because it is a Era Locked progression server. IMO, DB needs to make more of those. I bet they would be a sh*t show at the beginning too, just like Teek and Tormax but once they settle at the end game content their, the folks who do that stuff would slowly just disappear. Maybe DB could learn from this because I find it SUPER funny how they say these other TLPs are 'super popular' but what I see is not even a person having fun. I see bots on top of bots on top of bots that make up this supposed "highly populated" server SOooooOOOOO popular. Anyway, you can't get rid of these people who set this up. And in reference to that one video - ruclips.net/video/gxYLKRnULvA/видео.html -, that dude doesn't play the game (STILL) for fun. He plays it to earn money and that is what ruins it all for players who want to enjoy the game like you and I.
Dunno about expansion locked, sounds like a prison to me, but I’m sure a lot of people would go for another locked server. Maybe a bit later into the game this time
@@Aethplayseverquest Late response. Prison, 110% correct. But, it's a prison you know well. If you think about it all can be referenced a prison, but maybe I'm going OUT of my way to convince here. HAHA! Sorry dude. Truth is, I really want them to do another expansion locked ANYWHERE past PoP like they have because I think it would be amazing. They've already made comments, not directly worded, about not doing anymore which really sucks.
@@Aethplayseverquest It is, but when you're afk who really cares. To your point many of the bots have shut down, its not viable at a certain point and RBGs aren't selling like they once were.
I give DPG a grade of F- All it would take is to send someone to do literally exactly what you just did in this video, except they could do it even faster than having to invis and run down to each camp. Go to the camps, look at the groups, ban the accounts. If they *really* wanted to do it, it would take ONE person to go and do that, and they could improve the integrity of their game SIGNIFICANTLY. But they don't, because those are all "paying" accounts. They have ulterior motives for letting them stay around. Let's not kid ourselves, here. Again, F-
They should make a server that allows it for them to play on with their cheater friends then ban them from the servers that don't allow it. Some game lobbies on shooters started doing that and it was very good. Want to cheat? No problem, enjoy playing with your fellow cheaters.
What's the difference in price between a live player and a bot? NOTHING! They both pay 1 krono a month. DB allowing ANY sort of botting is a massive mistake. But they have to allow it when they push new servers every year. Otherwise the old servers would be ghost towns.
best to not bring it up or you'll be the one that get actioned. they value $$$ over enforcing their rules which id why i stopped playing on teek or everquest at all. i pointed the guild that was mostly doing the rules violations and i get threatened and banned. good let's see how long before even the hardcore fans say enough and their cash cow is wholly dependent on cheats who are only there so they can best other players with their 'first' accomplishments.
Myth: DBG is not invested in you having some nostalgia trip down memory lane. DBG is invested in EQ making money. What the bots can’t cheat is that each account costs money.
@@Aethplayseverquest It really does fix a lot of problems. All that rule-lawyering and poop-socking goes out the window when you can get the boys together and take what you deserve. You think there would be a bunch of bots poop-socking fungi on a PVP server? Nah, they'd be merc'd the second that camp popped. You can't box in PVP, it's just a free kill for your enemy.
They are krono farming. That's what it's all about. They farm krono and then sell them for 10-12 bucks a pop on discord. Completely hollowed out the game
Im fairly well known on my server for reporting bot cheaters. Looooot of people are not a fan =p The tired excuse is always that boxers are getting targeted... No... No they arent. And the video proof given to the GMs... well... proves it.
I think the only real solution right now unfortunately is to seek a server that takes boxing and cheating more seriously like P99 or project quarm. If things continue on at this rate the servers are going to end up like EQMac where people were just botting their own raids.
I’m not super interested in those servers, mostly because they don’t get to any of the better expansions in the game and not many of the QOL features, but I can see the appeal.
@@Aethplayseverquest Quarm actually has more quality of life than you think, you'd be suprised, its a huge step up over p99. Im playing Quarm with a 1440 P Modern UI, Also Quarm Tools and Zeal, Third party apps built by quarm community has really moderized the game for a classic feel. Its a step up over 99.
@@Aethplayseverquest maybe not in true box servers but once it opens up absolutely. Even in true box servers there are loads of people still using some type of 3rd party program.
We don't like the either....No,no, You love the botters. The bots push the purchasing of Kronos which in the end makes your a crap-ton of money. You wouldn't fix it if you could.
Try making the game playable and people wont need bots. do any of you play EQ? the games awful, exp is so slow and only good gear comes from raids. most of us don't have time to spend on raids. so much of the game is 3 or more players. try making some 1 to 2 player content?
It cost them 6 krono for 30 days of plat farming non stop there so all they need to make back is 6 in 30 days the stock pile of nodding blue lillies for PoP potions is what there after
Ya, but like how many fire opals does it take to make a krono when they're 75k plat & rising? All those bots were killing stuff pretty slowly & not even pulling huge areas.
1) None of these people working on EQ know what they are doing at all. You have some weird asian woman? Man? Not sure what it is making decisions. Obviously a DEI hire 2) You will never get a new EQ game. It is all DEI garbage now. Two women talking about nothing and some neckbeard guy just there to look the part. EQ is dead unless you feel like playing EMUs. You can also play Monsters and Memories or Evercraft, which is where I will most likely go. There is NO future in this game
So would their be the same out rage if it wasnt 1 person controlling six toons but instead 6 dudes in china all playing each one with time shifts of the next players? If you think botting is the problem you are misguided.
The bots are paying subscribers and they aren’t generating an insane amount of revenue. DAnd it’s always the same farmers and bots. I have been power leveled by the same guy on different servers for years. Is it really fun to play a game with people who make it completely one-sided every single time a server opens.
What are the bots doing? Good question. I believe there are just way too many anti-social middle-aged men that completely get off on having a mini-server farm in their basement to run 6 box crews with the goal of farming krono and getting rich. This is the biggest server ever so unfortunately it attracted the most flies. And now that everyone got to 60 and took a break, all the 6-boxers don't know what to do. They only get off on farming krono, but the economy crashed. They don't really care about other people. They endlessly grind the same loot that is worthless because they don't know what else to do.
This could be fixed by asking for player volunteers to monitor the servers they play on, the old guide program. If you suspect a bot group, you can observed them, try to interact and make sure you gather evidence for the GMs to suspend or ban them. The truth is these Devs don't care at all about the player base. Ask for a couple people per server to be guides and this could significantly decrease the bot groups.
Right but I believe they had problems with the old guide program legally in CA. Too much like an unpaid intern when they were doing customer service tasks 🤷♂️
![Lil Uzi Vert - We Good [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/DrSfBULAsek/mqdefault.jpg)
The cheat detection is a joke. People getting suspended for auto clickers while fully automated, warping bots, have monk epic pieces fully locked down in South Karana. A human GM could spend 5 min in South Karana, Seb, Chardok, and see the obvious cheating
Too busy AFK checking people in guild hall 🤦♂️
@@Aethplayseverquest They are more likely to ban a person six boxing with num pads than a person using MQ2.
@@myrhev before I quit I ran 2 groups on FV AFK killing in an open zone, killing 24 hours for almost a month and not even a suspension
It's why I don't even both on live eq anymore making my own emu with server at home.
Relentless Insomnia has bots in OW zones running ShowEQ to get dragon spawns.
NGL I also found it surprising that the video starts with "I'm a member of Relentless Insomnia" and then proceeds to complain about people using 3rd party software to cheat and how they are bad for the server. Seemed rather ironic/hypocritical to me.
Which guilds on the server do you think don't have (many) members using unapproved 3rd party software? Daybreak has zero credibility on this topic, and until they do if you want to be in a guild, you have to accept that it exists.
Like I mentioned to someone else, I don't control the RI roster, but as I said in EQ discord yesterday if you see someone blatantly using that stuff in Rampage, feel free to send me a video of it.
@@NotSure-b9d Rampage too. I remember trying to report an SK for KSing our groups named with HT. Tried to contact an officer in his guild to do something about it. He was the officer. Awesome. And yes Aeth there are guilds that don't stand for that type of thing on the server. I have been in and been leader of many guilds that have a 3 box limit, no KS policy. Just got to be content with something more casual.
@@Ziplomatic007 No ks policy cuz ur bad
This is why I love Project 1999 - solo char, literally no bots.
The only two bots I feel like I have encountered, they let them go just the right amount of time before a ban to make them realize it's probably not worth it at all.
They'll also auto-fail you if they think you're boxing and one of the characters crashes while zoning when they summon you to Unrest for their test.
It's been a while since I've played, but I was thinking the leveling up group game was getting scarce in P99. A little top heavy, I guess. That's where 1 box could come in handy, but it would open the doors to a slew of problems.
But yeah, the cheating issues with TLPs is a huge turnoff, even if some quality of life features are nice. I love Teek ruleset, but I think I'll hold off until Omens and some cheaters clear out.
P99 and "Classic Everquest" are dead. Nepotism, corruption, and the Staff despise the players while making rules they directly benefit from on the opposite servers.
Try Monster and Memories, it's the true successor to Classic EQ
@@Unchainedfury Oh I follow M & M. To me p99 is perfect but I have no time to raid or be in that scene. I'm all about solo and small group, and it is great for that.
@@Unchainedfury Saying it's dead feels dishonest. Is it in it's prime? or even super healthy? No, but certainly not close to dead.
Project 1999 would be good if they didn't have the corrupt admin and his GMs.
lol I don't know the drama there. sounds fun 😎
These GMs look exactly as I suspected lol
Thanks for saving me the trouble of playing again. I was feeling nostalgic but screw that crap
Maybe next year!
It would take all of 30m for someone who has access to the positioning data from the game logs to flag and ban all of the bots, but despite what DBG says about not liking the bot armies, they don't seem to care enough to stop them, considering every one of those bot armies you show in your video is generating them seven subs. If there were 8 picks, and 7 bots per pick, that's 56 paying accounts. The same goes for the whole epic mob kill stealing going on in various zones, including Lake of Ill Omen (you know who I'm talking about). The constant PL spamming is another part of that frustration. I'd love for them to create an option to ignore an account, not just a character, and ignores should be global for your account so you don't have to ignore them on every alt.
Agreed. Agesz isn't bots btw, he's just a jerk.
I do like the spirit of the guy who PL'd 6 SKs to stand there and counter KS him, though!
@@Aethplayseverquest I know he isn't a bot. I was just pointing out that DBG has ignored both his behavior, and the naming convention for several of his characters, or the characters of his group, because despite his obviously and very well documented toxic behavior and admission to the fact that he is doing it because he wants to be an a-hole, AND documented evidence that he is farming Krono to sell for money outside of the game, they don't do anything about him.
I think I did see they're changing that mob to get an asterisk in the next patch at least.
Do you think these new servers would even be viable without the income of the bots?
@@Aethplayseverquest I do, yes. I think that if people who were paying to play the game would keep paying to play the game rather than paying someone else to play the game for them. It might not have as many people playing, but then there would be less contention over camps / mobs, and people wouldn't be quitting because they are being griefed.
This is basically why I’ve stopped playing EQ. Sure they are making money from these bots but I guarantee it turns away 10x the number of casual players. The numbers are likely less obvious with slow trickle of churn, but for sure this is hitting their bottom line.
Over the years this adds up well past the point of the cost of a full time staff member trying to put a stop to this. It is short sighted of them not to realize this.
I'll be honest I am a new player that did not know botting was an issue until now. It makes sense looking at it now, but I have barely seen 5 players in total while leveling. I am only hitting levels 15-20 though
@@luckyluc9972 It's unlikely you'd see many bots in the areas you'd be travelling at the moment. People like myself however who have a long history with the game see something like this and I just immediately know it's a non-starter for me. The effect bot farmers have on the economy is an issue all on it's own, but these are also highly covetted end-game group locations that I would want to see and experience again if I were ever to come back. Knowing these areas are perpetually camped by bots means there's no real point in trying, or at the very least that it's not worth the headache I already know it's going to be. I'd rather restart p99.
They banned so many accounts across the servers recently, I can't see them making it past 2025. I honestly don't give a crap about the weird ruleset servers. And not that you care, but their most recent expansion has 6 new zones and 7 raids with nothing new added. And some of these zones are SMALL. There's literally almost nowhere to go in them. I've already cancelled my alt subscriptions and I'm basically just riding out my main's yearly sub to see if they come up with something, as it's been a year of nothing of value added. If MQ2 is out, so is any manner of simulating group content.
"We've been thinking really hard, we've done a lot of research, but getting rid of the most obvious problem is beyond our means."
🪦
RI has a permanent druid teleport bot stationed outside the anni tower.
So I guess you think CS isn't doing a very good job, either?
@@Aethplayseverquest they're milking the cash cow while throwing the odd ban at the mostly harmless small time cheaters to pretend they are anti-cheat focused. As others said if volunteers can get rid of cheats on EMU's then DPG could easily get rid of cheats if they really wanted to.
100% agreed
@@Aethplayseverquest Shameless hypocrisy. As if it's EQ's fault your guild is filled with cheaters.
The botting is completely out of control. If you join any of the big guilds on FV as a new or returning player you will have MQ2 shoved down your throat. The cheaters have been actively recruiting for years while DBG ignores it. Now we have a situation where the botters are likely the majority of their income and they are stuck in a catch 22 where doing something about it might actually kill the game.
Its a fucked up situation, thats for sure.
What is MQ2?
@@WtFGankalot Macroquest 2.
What's sad about Teek is you know that Daybreak is an enabler for this botting to continue. They are enabling the botters because they want the money. If it can easily be shutdown on a private server and botters are IP banned with less resources than Daybreak. Then you know Daybreak is enabling this behavior. So the way they reacted in this video is lies. It's not hard to ban these botters, it's just Daybreak doesn't want too. It's really a disservice to anyone who enjoys time locked servers and wants to enjoy other content and expansions. Personally, I think the Everquest Community should hold Daybreak accountable and keep putting the pressure on them on the forums and at live events like this.
I think at this point with what we've seen that's quite likely. There's also a problem that when your studio head is an engineer, everything looks like a coding problem. As many have said in responses here, it's a very simple task to clean this up with GMs. They have a job right now on their website hiring CS for $16/hr, so it's not like GM enforcement would cost them a lot, probably even bring back some real players (who buy more than just the krono sub through the store).
Project Quarm has guild instances for raids, so you can't camp or grieve people.
Nice addition to have DZs. Wish some of those emu servers would play further into the game. None of the expansions through pop are among my favorite 5 in eq 😢
@@Aethplayseverquest Yeah but even if it's not your favorite expansions, atleast you know you'll be playing with over 1200 real people and not bots. But I can understand why its not your thing. I will say the good thing about Quarm is it's one server with 1200 people versus p99 that has 1,000 people split over 3 servers. Also p99 only goes to Velious where as Quarm goes to POP. I'm against Bots and Multiboxing in any game. I'm actually new to Everquest so Quarm has been good for me, I'm 29 in RL. The corpse Runs and Exp Loss on Quarm is not as bad as it is on p99, its a bit more fair and also there is no slow exp leveling when it comes to certain races, Quarm removed that for being tedious.
Ya I can definitely see the appeal. I'm glad those servers exist, as they keep a lot of people in the extended community who would have otherwise been long gone.
@@Plaximos " there is no slow exp leveling when it comes to certain races"
As a Troll on Quarm, believe the exp penalty for race is in.
@@gavcarl I meant to say classes not races.
Just like all the other old guard MMOs, private servers are the preferable experience. They're not perfect but a lot of them like UO Outlands, P99 and Quarm take an active stance against botting and multiboxing to help foster an actual functioning economy and grouping community. The unfortunate truth is that botters and multiboxers are paying customers and any company running a game for profit doesn't really care as long as those money comes in.
I quit TLP for good this last one. Its just too much now. Bots cheaters boxers everywhere. I don't like any of that. Quarm and P99 is by far 10x like real EQ. On Quarm now and its by far the least toxic server I've ever played. People actually GM the server. Daybreak is a joke. I am so happy to finally be on a server I know I'll stay on.
That interview with the EQ devs was eye opening. It's clear they don't care and/or are given direction not to care because it sounds like they are specifically deflecting - "making perfect the enemy of great" is a pretty standard blow-off excuse.
As you show in your video, you can easily Pareto this problem - you can catch 80% of the botters with almost zero effort. In fact, EQ devs should have just marked all the names of characters in this video and that would solve like 75% of the Seb problem.
And when the devs say people are one step ahead of their cheat detection...I call utter bullshit. I spent probably 4-5 TLPs running (2) super-crude bot crews using autohotkey scripts over maybe 6-8 total months didn't get flagged even once. Made like 200 kronos
I ran an AHK script ONCE on P99 to train some spell casting skills and that account got permabanned within 45 minutes.
In a sense I’m glad Devs aren’t spending much time on that topic, but wtf is the manager of their GMs doing? Like you said, just go look… it’s mq2 or a variant at every camp.
@@Aethplayseverquest Yep, idk...I hate to think conspiracies, but man, that girl in the video is making it sound like these are some scooby doo villains that keep slipping thru the cracks and they juuust can't catch them.
Oh well - will hoard my kronos until the next TLP I guess in the hopes they finally start to crack down! I'm not getting any younger tho...
Unless they randomly vanish, which is another big issue atm! 🤦♂️
It's a damn shame what botting has done to EQ.
It's simple. VERY VERY VERY Simple. Have a GM/Guide on the server. Go back to active /petition instead of the website. Have the GM/Guide watch/interact IN THE GAME, and hardware ban them. It's not difficult.
yup exactly. suggested that even in one of my recent videos. they're hiring CS for $16/hr, so the amount they'd get from confiscated kronos from banned and related accounts would probably even pay for itself
@@Aethplayseverquest It seems to most that I've spoken to (on my server) agree that any suggestion(s) fall on deaf ears because the party we are reporting/petitioning is complicit in the krono-farming/botting as well.
at this point & seeing how they behave year after year, that's quite possible
@@Aethplayseverquest on live servers we see the crew doing a lot of the afk PLs occasionally get suspended then it seems to be overturned, usually within 2 days. There's definitely some janky stuff happening. I've seen some brag that they know a GM and are untouchable, and if it weren't for the fact they keep coming back I wouldn't believe it.
That is... entirely believable 🤷♂️
How many Kronos does DBG have to sell in order to fix their botting problem? 🤔
More 🤯
Teek will be the last time I ever play EQ, and it's a shame.
It's definitely got a bit different feel than the old days. You should stick it out for some later expansions if you've never seen them before.
"What do you think the boxes are even doing?"
There isn't a single answer that fits all situations. I know of many people who bot certain classes because those classes do not stick around long term (e.g., people are not reliable). Example: "Main" rogues, very rarely do people main them longer than a month or two. After being in countless guilds, it seems like 9/10 rogues quit after 1 or 2 months. They get their BIC weapon and.... poof gone. Enchanters, wizards... same thing. The worst part, people come back to EQ, get BIC and then ghost the rest of the guild, which is extremely disrespectful to the entire guild.
Example: Let's dive into the "gameplay" of a rogue. At level 1, best case scenario, they get a group get behind a mob and turn on auto attack. This doesn't change until level 10, which they get backstab... oh wait /autoskill backstab. This doesn't change until... oh, even in OOW it still pretty much turn on auto attack and position behind the mob. At least they can hit their 2.0 every 3 mins and have two cooldowns they can hit once per named. So, they hit 1 button on 99/100 fights and we're expecting these people to continue playing the game?
There are multiple points I am alluding to here. #1 The gameplay for some classes (i.e., the class fantasy) is extremely dull and offers no progressing challenge to real people they get bored and quit. Resulting in #2 The retention rate for "mains" of these types of classes is usually extremely low. This then results in #3 - people who continue playing the game, find it difficult to recruit or annoying to completely re-gear / re-flag a new member because someone left... eventually, the people who have been playing for months just box those classes and boxing gets annoying enough to then they use boxing assisting software.
Personally, I feel if the complexity of class gameplay progressively got more and more engaging / difficult, you'd see less boxers... while the EQ offers a lot of enjoyment, what it lacks is the ability to compete with modern engaging gameplay, resulting in a lot higher of the population being "bots".
TLP after TLP, gameplay doesn't change. Balancing between classes doesn't change. TBH, spending a lot of effort trying to detect 3rd party programs is fixing a symptom of a problem, not fixing the root cause of the problem. I would rather the developers spend more time making each TLP feel unique and make it combat more engaging. Balance out some of the classes to create variant meta gameplay.
"He's more machine now than man. Twisted and evil."
Dead giveaway something is wrong, the question was being asked to the First dude, instead of answering he looked towards Jenn Chan to save him. You kind of feel like they all know what's going on but can't do anything about it because their all profiting somehow.
Ngreth would know too 😉
Wouldnt surprise me if dbg is running the box machines. Infinite krono scheme.
@@kaiz0099 I firmly believe some of the GMs have friends or family that are allowed to run bots. There is no way that some of these would be allowed otherwise.
i swear richgirl is part of the company just to get rid of krono
I can't help but think the gambling house in the commonlands tunnel is directly linked to these farming bots
Oh how so?
Its crap for sure, I’ve had gms come right to me on mischief because I had characters on auto follow and suspend me on the spot, there’s no reason they can’t login and clear the zones especially during obvious hours like early morning etc, all macroquest did with their changes is make it hard for normal people to get it working while leaving the mega botters with less competition, I’ve seen a few mage armies along the way but return to camp features sit in scripts for kissassist etc so that’s an easy catch for a gm, how long would it really take them, 5 minutes to verify and ban most of the zone every morning ?
Dang sorry that happened to you.
Yep, it would be super easy if they wanted to fix it... which is probably the answer right there, despite what jchan said in the panel.
@@Aethplayseverquest The odd thing to me is that you know they've probably seen your video already too or someone told them about it. It's all about that $$$, I got people mad at me for my multiboxing videos like I'm the enemy when they probably got Ai running those entire mage farms now lol.
No one cheats better than Relentless Insomnia. Funny you left them out!
Ya they should definitely do a better job with anti-cheat. It's way too inconsistent at the moment.
They lie. It is a money source they cant live without
bad for the social aspects.... but good for the bottom line. Just omitted the last part.
I have seen popular PL’ers running around leveling up full groups. I think a big ban wave hot recently.
That would be silly if true. Why hit the guys doing aoe? They are at least at the keyboard playing. They may be using auto clickers, but they are there. The ones I hate are the afk bots like he showed in the video.
That Yandy selling lower level PL in Sola is super irritating, he pick hops and then just terrorizes the zone. I did pay him back by having a cleric cycle Ae's at his pull location. He left pretty quick after that. Not sure why I care, anymore.
They are easy to find and delete you just have to care, the thing is each bot is a sub and they want subs. I've noticed private servers of any game I have played find and get rid of them quickly because money isn't involved.
bots having F'ing ruined this old game
I wonder if the economics of this are as simple as:
- Raw plat per hour from these camps
- Plat cost of krono
- Sunk & ongoing infrastructure cost (ie computers/power) - probably pretty minimal these days
Per camp/group/month:
Krono income = (Raw plat/hr) * 24 * 30 / (plat per krono)
$ profit = ((Krono income) - group size) * (black market krono price) - monthly infra expenses
Take this profit times the # of groups running - with little of no oversight, it probably is pulling in a decent # of money.
Example, say these camps are pulling in 1000 plat/hr in raw plat:
1000 * 24 * 30 = 720,000/month
Plat price: 65,000
Monthly krono = 720,000/65,000 = 11 Krono
11 krono - 6 krono/group = 5 krono profit * $10/month/krono EC tunnel krono price = $50/month profit
Run 20 of these groups on teek = $1000/month of basically AFK money. But lets be real, I'm sure it is more, and likely across a few servers so likely a fair bit higher.
Also the $1000/month is USD - that can go far else where in the world.
and... krono just increased to 75k each while you were typing lol
seems like a huge hassle for the profit
ah ya that is true for sure.
@@Aethplayseverquest is it a huge hassle if it is 100% automated? Seems like easy mode money. People work for way less at way worse jobs in many parts of the world.
Wish EA would get more aggressive as it has ruined the game for many.
Ya I get it for some third world setup.
Bet these are same dudes who sell raid gear and pl on a bunch of different servers. It’s a few people that work together.
I just can’t see that being worth the hassle. Like how long do you have to do that extremely slow farm to make a krono from plat sales when it’s so expensive now?
I came back a few years ago after a 16 year absence and no one wanted to play content with my 75 enchanter and I didn’t want to simply buy a power level. Someone suggested getting a bot. My 3 character group with 2 bots made it a few weeks before getting their first temporary ban. Cancelled my subs and haven’t looked back. I don’t blame them, but would have been nice to play some of the content I missed out on.
Ya you definitely need boxes to play later on in the game. If you were on a live server, they have mercenaries now to supplement groups. Can be an ok alternative.
@@Aethplayseverquest 2 merc wizards and merc healer complemented my bot tank and bot mage, but rules are rules. ;)
theres this one guy that will sit at juggs and abc camp all day...every day with his mage army..and i report them all the time..and absolutely nothing happens to him
We had to change where we kill OW Trak because the bots at juggs never move and don't want our monks to get suspended
Aeth I appreciate your videos, but this video should come with a little bit of introspection regarding the problem at hand.
Relentless Insomnia literally has officers and their full bot groups running 3rd party programs while afk in North Ro for 10 hours straight. It is most obvious when they leave their mod on that auto-cast buffs. Like being able to predict when the 3rd recast of Sow and Talisman buffs are going to land on the group with a +/- 2 second margin of error for all buffs around 3:15AM obvious.
Yes, that means I predicted exactly when they would cast those buffs the other two rounds, as well as me predicting they would keep these buffs up despite being in the same afk autofollow formation the entire time.
Speaking of Bots and Seb. I really would like to know how an RI enchanter and 2 wizards went from zone-in to magically appear in the Blood of Chottal room behind the locked doors without ever running by my crypt group.
Oh I'm sure people in RI, people in my other guild, Rampage, and people in almost all other guilds on the server are using unapproved 3rd party programs. Daybreak has zero credibility on cleaning that up.
I don't control the roster of RI, but as I mentioned to some rando in EQ discord yesterday, if you see that stuff blatantly going on with people in Rampage, definitely send me a video of it so we can deal with it.
Zaide created this account 2 days ago just to cry about RI getting 95% of open world for 2 months now..
@@manglernecro3697 lol
I just power leveled 3 toons with my main group recently and saw the same crap in sebilis over a few days. I’m in Chardok and had an encounter with one of the PL crews. Crazy enough they were actually friendly and offered me a location to level my guys they had been farming. I asked how they don’t get banned with everything going on and didn’t get a straight answer. I’d imagine they have an agreement with DBG at this point or are employees themselves. As others have said people get suspended for stupid crap when this goes on 24/7.
Pretty sure the PLers are at least there/interactive (got to talk to the customers after all), but these guys were totally afk.
@@Aethplayseverquest Yep I just pulled over the guys that were in disco for awhile. Was so obvious they were bots.
remove krono and that will fix a ton
They let bots continue because bots mean a lot of subscriptions. Im not sure if the argument is valid but some say that EQ would die without the bot subs. Has anyone crunched the numbers?
Well I don’t think bot accounts are using the cash store account much, so 100 bots is just $1500/month or whatever. Or 1800 since they probably sub via kronos. Doesn’t seem like a lot of money to make their game look like that to the players.
They need a bigger budget, which will lead to more man power to help combat these things. It's basically shoe-string right now, and it's honestly pathetic.
If they rehauled the graphics alone, you cant play on a potato anymore.
I watched botters clearly botting and a gm came into the zone looked around the botters all line up simultaneously in a straight lined and saluted and hailed the gm at the exact same time then the gm said ok and left. They just dont care.
Lol that’s just sad 😭
Yea I played Teek, got to about 28 and quit because of the mulitboxing. I wanted a classic experience, having powerlvling botters mass killing in upper guk ruined it for me. The other thing that ruined it for me was Kronos and Tower gear, it just didn't feel like original EQ to me, for me if all that stuff is going to stay in I may as well just continue to play my max level characters. I'm back on Quarm playing now, it goes to PoP eventually and if I want the live xp I can reactivate my max level characters and play at max level. If DB made a server where you cant box like Quarm, no Krono or Tower gear etc and actually banned the multi boxers like they do on Quarm and p99 I probably would play on a TLP.
You made the right choice, Quarm is where it's at personally. An actual community, no boxing, no bots, Guild Instanced Raids, it's a great server. Has a lot of Quality of life and with Quarm Tools and Zeal, The Camera is fixed and can be played in third person with other quality of life stuff, modern UI, HD Graphics.
the hole, chardok, solb, everywhere i go they are pulling the entire zone. I'm trying to xp yo!
ya >:(
Don't be silly, it is Daybreak employees themselves botting and cashing in on the Krono-fest
lol
I think this is actually a part of it. There are certain botters that never seem to get caught up in ban waves. The forums are very cheater friendly too. Angeliana actively defends them and has for years.
Ya it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if there’s some inside grift going on.
Daybreak games is nothing but an organization of grifters
It's the same economic problem as in WoW (also, like with Bliz Employees being paid off by botters), the basic model is: Who brings in more money. Though it's destructive.. companies are driven by the immediate bottom-line. Who brings in more, a player with one, maybe two accounts? Or a botter, who will be running 20, 40, 60, even a 100 per human. In the basic economics of it, the botter is actually a MORE valuable customer.. short term.
If only they put the time in to modernize this amazing game it could still compete with todays mmorpgs.
Crazy this is a-ok yet i got permabanned on the new eq2 origins server for manually 3 boxing while using joe multiboxer to resize and place 2 of my 3 accounts on a different monitor
They’re definitely not consistent on enforcement
Yeah it really sucks. One of the accounts was my original from 1999. And when I try to appeal I get a generic scripted response and I try to escalate and they just ignore it.
excited to go back to p99 tbh
The RUclips channel "MetaGoblin" made a series of videos on the inner working of gold selling/RMT in World of Warcraft, it's insane how much money there is in that business, and how little Blizzard care about botting.
Ya I’m pretty sure I’ve seen that. With krono at 75k plat and rising, what these guys are doing just seems dreadfully slow.
@@Aethplayseverquest Slow response to the issue, that is the problem in WoW as well, Blizzard like to do ban waves every 4 months I believe, but as the botter in that miniseries MetaGoblin made said, it is more than enough time for his to set a new bot farm, make tons of money. It's ironic that the WoW token was Blizzard trying to curb the gold buying problem, it worked in the sense that gold seller spam in the chat channels disappeared, but people still buy gold from 3rd party websites because they offer better prices most of the time.
You mention the rising price of Krono. I currently play WoW classic (our version of TLP) and Blizzard introduced the WoW token during the second expansion, the first month the price would fluctuate a bit but would settle at about 7000 gold on my server, fast-forward to today, and it's up to 20k. In the retail version of WoW the token sits at 380k to 400k. (retail wow, is what we call the current version with the latest expansion of wow)
weird how a couple unpaid volunteers do a much better job of preventing cheating on unofficial servers vs. paid devs for a live game that generates money from a pay to win shop.
Those Bots are really killing the game, its sad to see one of my favorite EQ zone become like this... I guess when there something money involve then it will become ugly.
Thanks!
well thank you!
Look at all that CO2 darkpaw is dumping into the atmosphere with their terrible 'true box' code.
😂
Anyone who ever played EQ is not surprised. Botting is the only way to play this game. Its why I quit. They refused to change their formula when WoW beat them up and stole their lunch money.
Maybe one day it'll get better 🤷♂️
ohhh i can give you some friend of a friend insider info here. they've run the numbers. the amount of money generated by those boxes from both what they pay to subscribe and what they generate in getting other people to come back to pay is unfortunately pretty measurably higher than the population of just wanting to actually enjoy the game.
You will never see them do any thing more than ceremonial bans and actions for publicity to those players because they are worth more than you.
How many just pure bots like this are there out in the wild. Not people who fully automate a few of their characters but just straight up afk 6 boxes? 1000 is only $18k/month if they sub with krono. Doesn’t seem like a big enough number to have your game look like a bot hellscape to me.
@@Aethplayseverquest thats a tiny part of the entitlement. 1000 at any given time sure, but realistically probably 3x that on a given server, ther's what 3 or 4 decently active tlp style servers, another 5 or more farther along and prob 1/4 the population. You're talking easily $50k+ a month, PLUS what about their customers, their prime customers are a massive revolving door of returning players who want to quickly get back into the swing of things. They draw in more returning players than any amount of daybreak emails, social media campaigns, i'm sure it's so minimal and low quality from them cause they know they just rely on the aftermarket such as this to really do their work for them lol.
Then the next thing is while these are the most popular by far the combined of the live servers still out weighs them and at the very least the estimates are 50% of the population on most of those drinal/bristlebanes and what not are boxing using MQ2 automation.
They just can't, when alls said and done it starts to come out to figures along the line of more than half their monthly income is from users violating their agreements in some fashion.
Daybreak loves botters because if you keep a server population up - artificially or through real players - you give a sense of popularity and trendiness.
Also, if there's any subscription fees coming in, money is money no matter where it comes from.
Daybreak and Sony brought this on by permitting and turning a blind eye to MQ2 for years.
I mean I play on a low-pop server, I like 6 boxing so I have my group. I don't farm to sell or farm krona. I just play the game, I quest, and i do group content. I don't consider that hurting the economy or anyone else. Why do I have to get banned because I pay for 6 accounts and play the game the way it was intended to be played if the servers had more pop? And when an char get banned i haev to make another account and buy krono to sell for plat so i can quickly gear him in a gdkp. Hmm i stat to think thats why they ban me they are making money on it.... hmmm that is why they dont ban the true problems because they are making money on it. Just a thought.
That's probably a lower level of cheating if you're trying to single player EQ with some robot help on a server that's been out 25 years. This video is about their most popular TLP ever a couple months after launch I'm talking about here. It's like nearly 3 years away from having mercs even.
Why anyone would play on an EQ TLP over an Emulator is beyond me. Emulator experience is so much better.
Apart from never getting to any of the good expansions, but if you just like the really early ones, I can see that.
@@Aethplayseverquest Just about everyone I play with stopped after Luclin. DAOC and WOW came out and everyone I knew went there. No nostalgia for later expansions so private emulators are PERFECT
Ah too bad. Yall should try some of the later expansions sometime. UF & ROF are my favorites ;)
if you want the side from a person who does sell / use programs give me a shout
"We don't like BOTs and we'd love to get rid of them"
Well, when you have a literal macro program implemented into your game, you basically welcome BOTs into your game with open arms. I know a lot of regular players use macros for QoL, but I always state that any player that relies on a macro program to play a game, isn't really playing the game. No statement or argument from them will ever convince me otherwise.
Daybreak running it down -- better off on Project Quarm or Project 1999 👍
I can see the appeal although wish all those emus would get to some of the better expansions. The first 4 expansions are all worse than the whole approximately TSS-ROF era.
im on the free to play server some french name or something, high pop. just got back from a 20+ year break lol
on a live server or an emu you mean?
Daybreak/darkpaw rating on anti cheat is -2/10. Its pretty pathetic really. Its such an easy fix to. I mean get some GMs to check out the usual zones. Its obvious when someone is botting 😂
100%
It does not punish the pro farmers of the West Taiwan ping pong team. It punishes the people that are anti-social or would rather 3-6 box/bot their own group and keep to themselves.
Truebox you mean? Ya or just people who play off hours where it's not super easy to find people who want to all do the same thing as you.
THANK YOU for all these videos. IMO there is no fix to this at all in EQ. Anti-Cheat yada yada blah blah. I get it and sounds great, but by now people like me say those are nice words but where's the action? I do not mean to bash anyone at DB nor do I dislike their 'progress' with this but I would like to see something.
The truth I believe is in your videos or Zaidegod videos ... or both. This all boils down to money. Krono = money for DB and helps them to continue on with their mission of supporting this game which a decent amount of people still pay for.
There is 1 server, Agnarr. Wouldn't you know, the shannaigans that go on like this do not happen there. Why....well, it's stuck. It's not going anywhere. Why? Because it is a Era Locked progression server. IMO, DB needs to make more of those. I bet they would be a sh*t show at the beginning too, just like Teek and Tormax but once they settle at the end game content their, the folks who do that stuff would slowly just disappear.
Maybe DB could learn from this because I find it SUPER funny how they say these other TLPs are 'super popular' but what I see is not even a person having fun. I see bots on top of bots on top of bots that make up this supposed "highly populated" server SOooooOOOOO popular.
Anyway, you can't get rid of these people who set this up. And in reference to that one video - ruclips.net/video/gxYLKRnULvA/видео.html -, that dude doesn't play the game (STILL) for fun. He plays it to earn money and that is what ruins it all for players who want to enjoy the game like you and I.
Dunno about expansion locked, sounds like a prison to me, but I’m sure a lot of people would go for another locked server. Maybe a bit later into the game this time
@@Aethplayseverquest Late response. Prison, 110% correct. But, it's a prison you know well. If you think about it all can be referenced a prison, but maybe I'm going OUT of my way to convince here. HAHA! Sorry dude. Truth is, I really want them to do another expansion locked ANYWHERE past PoP like they have because I think it would be amazing. They've already made comments, not directly worded, about not doing anymore which really sucks.
@@joeblow7735 Takin' it to live bro! Last year they got tons of content with the new expansion, two missions, one of them even works mostly!
They control both sides. Have since the get go. Follow the money (krono)
The bots aren't killing the game they are the game
They're all just farming plat, those are the same bots I've seen for over a month. They're all and have been 60 the whole time so no selling accounts.
Thanks. Must be dreadfully slow to earn a krono that way at 75k+ each
@@Aethplayseverquest It is, but when you're afk who really cares. To your point many of the bots have shut down, its not viable at a certain point and RBGs aren't selling like they once were.
I give DPG a grade of F-
All it would take is to send someone to do literally exactly what you just did in this video, except they could do it even faster than having to invis and run down to each camp. Go to the camps, look at the groups, ban the accounts. If they *really* wanted to do it, it would take ONE person to go and do that, and they could improve the integrity of their game SIGNIFICANTLY. But they don't, because those are all "paying" accounts. They have ulterior motives for letting them stay around. Let's not kid ourselves, here. Again, F-
ya pretty much. hard to see how they could be this incompetent unless it were the intended outcome
They should make a server that allows it for them to play on with their cheater friends then ban them from the servers that don't allow it. Some game lobbies on shooters started doing that and it was very good. Want to cheat? No problem, enjoy playing with your fellow cheaters.
What's the difference in price between a live player and a bot? NOTHING! They both pay 1 krono a month. DB allowing ANY sort of botting is a massive mistake. But they have to allow it when they push new servers every year. Otherwise the old servers would be ghost towns.
I bet those bots interact with the cash shop A LOT less than real players.
best to not bring it up or you'll be the one that get actioned. they value $$$ over enforcing their rules which id why i stopped playing on teek or everquest at all. i pointed the guild that was mostly doing the rules violations and i get threatened and banned. good let's see how long before even the hardcore fans say enough and their cash cow is wholly dependent on cheats who are only there so they can best other players with their 'first' accomplishments.
Speedrunning EQ is pretty dumb. Dumber is then putting it on a website lording over other guilds who didn't even have picks or DZs when they did it 🤣
what a sad state.... this is why Id rather play p99 or Quarm instead of live
Myth: DBG is not invested in you having some nostalgia trip down memory lane. DBG is invested in EQ making money.
What the bots can’t cheat is that each account costs money.
That sounds more like the truth!
AnyBrain Ai Anticheat would fix all of this
Yet another problem that EQ PVP solves. They should just make it mandatory PVP when you hit max level.
I wouldn't mind if there were pvp in picks for max levels.
@@Aethplayseverquest It really does fix a lot of problems. All that rule-lawyering and poop-socking goes out the window when you can get the boys together and take what you deserve. You think there would be a bunch of bots poop-socking fungi on a PVP server? Nah, they'd be merc'd the second that camp popped. You can't box in PVP, it's just a free kill for your enemy.
They are krono farming. That's what it's all about. They farm krono and then sell them for 10-12 bucks a pop on discord.
Completely hollowed out the game
Good luck with that with krono at like 250k each now lol
tired of bots? Come have a fresh start on Tormax!
🤣🤣🤣
Im fairly well known on my server for reporting bot cheaters. Looooot of people are not a fan =p
The tired excuse is always that boxers are getting targeted... No... No they arent. And the video proof given to the GMs... well... proves it.
I always like the ones who say they were unfairly suspended. Then immediately say… all I was doing was [insert something definitely against the TOS] 😂
@@Aethplayseverquest ohhh yea... Happens EVERY time. Just had two different ones on our server over the last 2 or so weeks.
This is why I didn’t play teek, the more popular the server the more shit like this you encounter
Are you one of the brave few on Tormax?
I think the only real solution right now unfortunately is to seek a server that takes boxing and cheating more seriously like P99 or project quarm. If things continue on at this rate the servers are going to end up like EQMac where people were just botting their own raids.
I’m not super interested in those servers, mostly because they don’t get to any of the better expansions in the game and not many of the QOL features, but I can see the appeal.
@@Aethplayseverquest unfortunatly qol for a lot of players i think means pl’s and solo-ability in the form of boxing :/
@@Aethplayseverquest Quarm actually has more quality of life than you think, you'd be suprised, its a huge step up over p99. Im playing Quarm with a 1440 P Modern UI, Also Quarm Tools and Zeal, Third party apps built by quarm community has really moderized the game for a classic feel. Its a step up over 99.
Nice! Glad to hear it
@@Aethplayseverquest they actually reduced spawn timers which is something long overdue for most spawn timers on tlps.
Yeah, EQ's become a joke. Love the game, hate the devs. Cancelled my subs awhile ago.
I think the devs aren’t really that bad even, their CS and just how their management approaches that is abysmal.
90% of EQ players use MQ2 that’s just a fact there is nothing you can do about it, just be glad ghost kill is dead
I doubt it's anywhere close to 90% on TLPs...
@@Aethplayseverquest maybe not in true box servers but once it opens up absolutely. Even in true box servers there are loads of people still using some type of 3rd party program.
We don't like the either....No,no, You love the botters. The bots push the purchasing of Kronos which in the end makes your a crap-ton of money. You wouldn't fix it if you could.
I liked the earlier comment about Ngreth’s side eyes to Jchan on that question. Definitely a sensitive topic
Try making the game playable and people wont need bots. do any of you play EQ? the games awful, exp is so slow and only good gear comes from raids. most of us don't have time to spend on raids. so much of the game is 3 or more players. try making some 1 to 2 player content?
Don't play the game if its too hard for you loser cheater
Don't mean to come off as too mean-spirited, but those are some real bottom of the barrel devs.
Devs have been trying a lot harder this year, but the customer service wing is pretty hopeless there.
Probably account selling or buying krono for plat to sell on Black market.
Account selling I can see, but that can’t be profitable for just raw plat farming with how slow they’re going and how expensive kr is now can it?
It cost them 6 krono for 30 days of plat farming non stop there so all they need to make back is 6 in 30 days the stock pile of nodding blue lillies for PoP potions is what there after
Ya, but like how many fire opals does it take to make a krono when they're 75k plat & rising? All those bots were killing stuff pretty slowly & not even pulling huge areas.
They are daybroke......lmao
The financials from the past year were not good, it's true. EBIT of barely more than $1m for the whole daybreak studio in their annuals iirc.
1) None of these people working on EQ know what they are doing at all. You have some weird asian woman? Man? Not sure what it is making decisions. Obviously a DEI hire
2) You will never get a new EQ game. It is all DEI garbage now. Two women talking about nothing and some neckbeard guy just there to look the part.
EQ is dead unless you feel like playing EMUs. You can also play Monsters and Memories or Evercraft, which is where I will most likely go.
There is NO future in this game
Q
Monsters and Memories looks pretty promising! Will have to see once it's a bit further along.
So would their be the same out rage if it wasnt 1 person controlling six toons but instead 6 dudes in china all playing each one with time shifts of the next players?
If you think botting is the problem you are misguided.
Why
so many fats at DBG
Teek has more bots than players
Close to it if not!
Come to quarm.
I don't much care for those early expansions, not much point me playing somewhere when it doesn't move past them 🤦♂️
Someone from Relentless Insomnia doing a video complaining about bot camps is peak irony.
Glad you found the video interesting! 👍
Teek sucks...progression servers getting old....whens eq 3
They have a concept of a new game at this point :P
The bots are paying subscribers and they aren’t generating an insane amount of revenue. DAnd it’s always the same farmers and bots. I have been power leveled by the same guy on different servers for years. Is it really fun to play a game with people who make it completely one-sided every single time a server opens.
turn it into a pvp server and KEEL them
lol
non-sarcastically, I wouldn't mind server rules that had pvp enabled in picks of those big bot zones
What are the bots doing? Good question. I believe there are just way too many anti-social middle-aged men that completely get off on having a mini-server farm in their basement to run 6 box crews with the goal of farming krono and getting rich. This is the biggest server ever so unfortunately it attracted the most flies. And now that everyone got to 60 and took a break, all the 6-boxers don't know what to do. They only get off on farming krono, but the economy crashed. They don't really care about other people. They endlessly grind the same loot that is worthless because they don't know what else to do.
They want to lock everything down to prevent you from getting things yourself and then sell you those things for stupid prices.
This could be fixed by asking for player volunteers to monitor the servers they play on, the old guide program. If you suspect a bot group, you can observed them, try to interact and make sure you gather evidence for the GMs to suspend or ban them. The truth is these Devs don't care at all about the player base. Ask for a couple people per server to be guides and this could significantly decrease the bot groups.
Right but I believe they had problems with the old guide program legally in CA. Too much like an unpaid intern when they were doing customer service tasks 🤷♂️
Some of those may be Krono farming 2 ways. Loot & AFK power leveling.