bots

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 11:41 am

Pretty funny to watch the IGE site for the past few weeks.

A few weeks ago, every EQ2 server had gold/plat for sale on both Freeport and Qeynos sides. Since they started banning the IGE plat farmers, over half of the servers now have nothing for sale on either side.

Can't say the same about WoW... IGE is making a fortune there.

cid · Post by **cid** » April 6, 2005, 12:18 pm

300k subscriptions compared to 1.5m. Of course the larger number will have more to sell.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 12:54 pm

Don't you think it's ironic that Blizzard was tooting their own horn last month about banning accounts of bot farmers... yet IGE is still doing booming business in WoW?

SOE just quietly started investigating and banning IGE bots and plat farmers and didn't officially say anything about it until players started noticing.

The 3-4 known groups of plat farmers on Innothule are completely gone now... Servers that used to have full listings for plat and items on most EQ2 servers now have absolutely nothing.
The supposed banning of 'thousands of accounts' in WoW has done nothing to drop the volume of listings and sales of IGE sales in WoW.

It's becoming more and more obvious that SOE is far more effective in addressing and managing issues inherant to MMOGs. I can't think of one single thing that Blizzard has done better than SOE yet deluded idiot fanboys like you still continue to cling to the fallacy that SOE sucks and Blizzard can do no wrong.

Lynnsie · Post by **Lynnsie** » April 6, 2005, 1:15 pm

I heard if you are running a crafting macro but are still at your computer.. its legal? (By SOE rules) Do you all think so? Discuss!

cid · Post by **cid** » April 6, 2005, 1:26 pm

miir wrote:yet deluded idiot fanboys like you .

Pot meet kettle

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 6, 2005, 2:27 pm

It's a lot easier shooting fish in a barrel than in a lake..

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 2:31 pm

I may be a fanboy but I'm not so deluded that I have to make up excuses for shitty service, shitty server stability and a seemingly incompetent and ineffective development team.

With everything that Blizzard has fucked up, SOE has done the exact opposite. Everything that people predicted SOE would screw up in EQ2 is exactly what is happening in WoW.

I'm not debating which is a better game, both have their appeal and both are very popular... the difference is that EQ2 players don't have to put up with horrible service or make up excuses for SOE.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 2:37 pm

Your kidding yourself if you think EQ2 is 'very' popular.

Sure, I'm playing it, but most of the fan sites (the same type there are for WoW); i.e. class sites, tradeskill sites, etc. Get maybe 1-2 posts a day. Whereas a comparable WoW site gets tens or hundreds of posts a day. You're smoking crack if you think EQ2 is *very* popular. It has a following to be sure, but there are far less people playing it than WoW.

The definition of 'very popular' before WoW came out != the definition of 'very popular' now.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 2:37 pm

Animalor wrote:It's a lot easier shooting fish in a barrel than in a lake..

Might be an apt analogy if they were using their script/tools across their entire subscription base... more realistically they are polling server populations one at a time.
I believe that EQ2 even has a higher player population per server than WoW and their tool for flagging the IGE farmers seems to be much more effective than the one Blizzard is using.

Keep trying to justify the ineptness of the WoW dev team... It's kinda funny watching you guys continually make excuses for them.

cid · Post by **cid** » April 6, 2005, 2:41 pm

miir wrote: It's kinda funny watching you guys continually make excuses for them.

Do you hear yourself at all?

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 2:43 pm

miir wrote:Keep trying to justify the ineptness of the WoW dev team... It's kinda funny watching you guys continually make excuses for them.

Keep trying to sell us on a product that's doing FIVE TIMES the business of their nearest competitor while at the same time retaining customers has an inept dev team.

Should they be scaling up faster? Probably. Should they have all the *issues* addressed by now? Doubtful. EQ2 has it's share of problems as well. It's a solid piece of software, but it still has issues. Chat channels still are fucked up (they've been fixed at least once in the past), there are numerous threads about it on the EQ2 forums, and you'd think something as critical to an MMOG would have been addressed by now. There's not even a dev response to the latest set of chat channel issues. Every time I start the game, I have to right click on my chat channel, and click 'Open Existing Chat Window' before I can start playing, so that I can see all the chat I want to.

Or maybe we should talk about the 6800 issues that users are having. EQ2 starts up with a nice big NVIDIA ad, but the technical forums on the EQ2 site as well as the NVIDIA forums are flooded with posts about the 6800 stuttering issue.

Stop acting like EQ2 is perfect and WoW is bad. EQ2 would collapse under the weight that WoW is under.

(I have no interest in talking about lineage, lineage 2, or FFXI, so don't waste my time)

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 2:45 pm

noel wrote:Your kidding yourself if you think EQ2 is 'very' popular.

Sure, I'm playing it, but most of the fan sites (the same type there are for WoW); i.e. class sites, tradeskill sites, etc. Get maybe 1-2 posts a day. Whereas a comparable WoW site gets tens or hundreds of posts a day. You're smoking crack if you think EQ2 is *very* popular. It has a following to be sure, but there are far less people playing it than WoW.

The definition of 'very popular' before WoW came out != the definition of 'very popular' now.

Is that the best you can do, Noel?
The only way you judge a games popularity is by the number of posts on fan sites?

Both games are very popular... WoW is definately more popular than EQ2... just like Lineage and Lineage2 are definately more popular than WoW. Really any game that can sustain more than 250k subscribers could be considered very popular. EQ2 has more subscribers than the entire population of St. Louis.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 2:48 pm

miir wrote:
noel wrote:Your kidding yourself if you think EQ2 is 'very' popular.

Sure, I'm playing it, but most of the fan sites (the same type there are for WoW); i.e. class sites, tradeskill sites, etc. Get maybe 1-2 posts a day. Whereas a comparable WoW site gets tens or hundreds of posts a day. You're smoking crack if you think EQ2 is *very* popular. It has a following to be sure, but there are far less people playing it than WoW.

The definition of 'very popular' before WoW came out != the definition of 'very popular' now.
Is that the best you can do, Noel?
The only way you judge a games popularity is by the number of posts on fan sites?

Both games are very popular... WoW is definately more popular than EQ2... just like Lineage and Lineage2 are definately more popular than WoW. Really any game that can sustain more than 250k subscribers could be considered very popular. EQ2 has more subscribers than the entire population of St. Louis.

No, miir. The best I can do is to repeat what everyone else has already stated:

WoW - ~1.5million subs.
EQ2 - ~300k

I'm just explaining some of the differences I've seen since I've been playing EQ2. If I want to go out and search for information, say on the Swashbuckler class, the information is few and far between, and the sites get very few hits compared to say a rogue or hunter site for WoW. I'm attempting to add some RL experience to the topic.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 6, 2005, 2:48 pm

Debating with Miir on this subject is like arguing with a priest that there is no god.

It's pointless and there's gonna be a lot of preaching.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 2:56 pm

Keep trying to sell us on a product that's doing FIVE TIMES the business of their nearest competitor while at the same time retaining customers has an inept dev team.

You keep harping on the number of subscriptions. Since when is that any indication of quality.

Should they be scaling up faster? Probably. Should they have all the *issues* addressed by now? Doubtful. EQ2 has it's share of problems as well. It's a solid piece of software, but it still has issues. Chat channels still are fucked up (they've been fixed at least once in the past), there are numerous threads about it on the EQ2 forums, and you'd think something as critical to an MMOG would have been addressed by now. There's not even a dev response to the latest set of chat channel issues. Every time I start the game, I have to right click on my chat channel, and click 'Open Existing Chat Window' before I can start playing, so that I can see all the chat I want to.

That's the best you can do?
A minor UI bug?
Cripes, just delete your UI setting.ini file and fix it yourself.

You think a little glitch/kludge like that compares to login queues, server crashes and idiotic raid encounters that encourage greifing... haha nice 'fix' they came up for that one.

Stop acting like EQ2 is perfect and WoW is bad. EQ2 would collapse under the weight that WoW is under

Never said that EQ2 was perfect...
Feel free to make a list of problems you have with EQ2.

Do you hear yourself at all?

I'm not the one making excuses for SOE.
Keep throwing out your clueless one liners... you're really just helping to prove my point.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 3:01 pm

Well noel, it only seems logical that it would be easier to find info on a class in WoW with it's 1.5 million subscibers and 9 character classes than it would be to find info on a class in EQ2 with it's 350k subscribers and 24 character classes.

Especially when you play a faggoty class like swashbuckler

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 3:02 pm

miir wrote:You keep harping on the number of subscriptions. Since when is that any indication of quality.

Subs + Retention = Popularity. It's the same as EQ1. Was it a quality product? Not really, but it was the most popular North American/Euro MMOG of its day.

Miir wrote:That's the best you can do?
A minor UI bug?
Cripes, just delete your UI setting.ini file and fix it yourself.

I already did do that, and it exhibited identical behavior afterward.

Miir wrote:You think a little glitch/kludge like that compares to login queues, server crashes and idiotic raid encounters that encourage greifing... haha nice 'fix' they came up for that one.

The thing you seem to keep missing is that in all of *my* time playing WoW, I never saw a login queue once, and the servers were always available when I wanted to play. Certainly this doesn't mean that other servers aren't experiencing issues, but as it never affected me, I'd have to assume that the issues can be directly correlated to load, and EQ2 doesn't really need to worry about load related issues, so comparing the two pieces of software on dealing with an issue that EQ2 WILL NEVER HAVE seems kind of stupid to me.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 3:03 pm

miir wrote:Well noel, it only seems logical that it would be easier to find info on a class in WoW with it's 1.5 million subscibers and 9 character classes than it would be to find info on a class in EQ2 with it's 350k subscribers and 24 character classes.

Especially when you play a faggoty class like swashbuckler

I played a Ranger in EQ, so I figured it would be a natural progression.

The only forums I've seen that seem especially active for EQ2 are the SOE boards and the IGN boards (which I generally avoid for the same reasons I avoid the WoW forums). There's a great Scout (including all subclasses) board, which covers all of the various subclasses, but it's just doesn't get the posting volume that most of the WoW forums get.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 3:07 pm

EQ2 did have load related issues... the first day.

Drinsic Darkwood · Post by **Drinsic Darkwood** » April 6, 2005, 3:17 pm

miir wrote:EQ2 did have load related issues... the first day.

Please correct me if I'm wrong here, but are you claiming that catering to 300k subscribers is anywhere near catering to 1.5 million simply because EQ2 had load related issues on the first day that have since been wonderfully fixed?

Lynks · Post by **Lynks** » April 6, 2005, 3:50 pm

If you type 'wolf meat' in google WoW sites pop up before anything else.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 3:52 pm

I think it would be nigh impossible for SOE to do a worse job than Blizzard at addressing server issues.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 3:53 pm

miir wrote:I think it would be nigh impossible for SOE to do a worse job than Blizzard at addressing server issues.

We'll never know!

Drinsic Darkwood · Post by **Drinsic Darkwood** » April 6, 2005, 3:54 pm

Well, unless SOE suddenly has their subscription count surge upwards by 1.2 million to accurately compare, we really won't know.

Drinsic Darkwood · Post by **Drinsic Darkwood** » April 6, 2005, 3:55 pm

Aranoel beat me by seconds =(

noel · Post by **noel** » April 6, 2005, 3:56 pm

Oh, I just want to add...

I'm having a good time playing EQ2. Grouping is lots of fun.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 6, 2005, 3:59 pm

If your account hasn't expired again, I suggest giving it another go.

I don't about Shattered Hand in particular but stability and connection complaints have virtually dropped off the face of the general forum.

Zygar_ Cthulhukin · Post by **Zygar_ Cthulhukin** » April 6, 2005, 5:47 pm

Swashies > all....please get back to WoW vs. EQ2 please

miir · Post by **miir** » April 6, 2005, 5:48 pm

Brig > Swash
Bruiser > all

That is all.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » April 7, 2005, 6:32 pm

Hi, miir, the present is calling. Every issue you have pointed out about WoW was fixed in the last patch. While there are still some servers with load issues, the server splits seem to be going pretty well overall.

Hey, here's a new gripe you can harp on for months after it's fixed a week from now: the instance servers are a bit overloaded now that the raid-splitting bug has been addressed. Nothing game breaking, just a bit more latency than outside. I'm sure you can spin this into your idea that the WoW is teh doomed.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 7, 2005, 8:48 pm

Cool, 5 months to fix that shit.... looks like Blizzard is about as competent I thought.

noel · Post by **noel** » April 7, 2005, 8:56 pm

As long as they haven't lost too many subs, it doesn't matter how long it took, blizzard wins.

Fyredragn · Post by **Fyredragn** » April 20, 2005, 6:47 am

Starting in late June, SOE will begin offering a new service called Station Exchange. This secure service will allow EverQuest II players on specific servers to buy and sell the right to use items, coin and characters. To be clear, all we are doing is facilitating these transactions. We are NOT in the business of selling virtual goods ourselves.

From this

Robbynn · Post by **Robbynn** » April 20, 2005, 12:16 pm

Ohmy lol Thanks for the info Fyre.

Animalor · Post by **Animalor** » April 20, 2005, 12:18 pm

Fyredragn wrote:
Starting in late June, SOE will begin offering a new service called Station Exchange. This secure service will allow EverQuest II players on specific servers to buy and sell the right to use items, coin and characters. To be clear, all we are doing is facilitating these transactions. We are NOT in the business of selling virtual goods ourselves.
From this

That Exchangestation is the biggest fucking joke I've ever seen. Yeah Sony cracked down on sellers, but they did it so they can put in their own eBay and skim money off the top by charging listing fees. They've given IGE a fucking tool to do their stuff legally, securely and without consequence and they skim a profit out of it too.

You wanna try and justify this one Miir?

Robbynn · Post by **Robbynn** » April 20, 2005, 12:31 pm

Animalor wrote:
Fyredragn wrote:
Starting in late June, SOE will begin offering a new service called Station Exchange. This secure service will allow EverQuest II players on specific servers to buy and sell the right to use items, coin and characters. To be clear, all we are doing is facilitating these transactions. We are NOT in the business of selling virtual goods ourselves.
From this
That Exchangestation is the biggest fucking joke I've ever seen. Yeah Sony cracked down on sellers, but they did it so they can put in their own eBay and skim money off the top by charging listing fees. They've given IGE a fucking tool to do their stuff legally, securely and without consequence and they skim a profit out of it too.

You wanna try and justify this one Miir?

That is the same impression I'm getting myself. I'm hoping that they are mostly trying to stop the bots by hitting them in the pocketbooks so to speak, only time will tell I guess. But it also does look like they saw another way to line their own pockets.

miir · Post by **miir** » April 20, 2005, 12:36 pm

Before making any snap judgement, do a bit of research on it.

-------

- I would never user it
- I will 'vote' against it on both of my accounts on each server I play on
- I will have my characters moved to a 'non SOExchange' server if my current server changes to SOExchange.

------

When you think about it, this program could be a very useful tool for SOE to crackdown even more on botters and macroers.

IGE is not going to go away.
There is a lucrative market for people to buy items and money.
SOE having control over this market will help 'protect' the people who choose to purchase items, characters or cash.

-------

This is no different than governments decriminalising soft drugs.

You wanna try and justify this one Miir?

What's to justify?
If you think this will have any effect whatsoever in game, you're mistaken. It's pretty funny watching people acting all shocked and disgusted by this. It happens in every fucking MMOG and it's a complete non issue for the vast majority of players.... hell, you probably know a bunch of people who have bought plat or items from IGE.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » April 20, 2005, 12:51 pm

also part of the equation is:

IGE makes money off of doing "x".

they are technically violating our EULA, but this gives us a good idea.

They identified a market, thank you very much, we'll take it from here. So they will then make the money.

Robbynn · Post by **Robbynn** » April 20, 2005, 2:11 pm

I can see why they did it, honestly wondering what took them so long to come to that decision. I personally will move all 3 accounts to a non exchange server if mine chooses to go the other way. I do however hope this weeds out some of the bots as I personally have had a few not too nice run ins with them in Feerrott at the HH camps.

As I stated before, only time will tell how this move will effect people and SOE. Better to put money in their own pockets than IGE's I guess lol. There are always going to be whiners and complainers, no matter what is done.

Lynnsie · Post by **Lynnsie** » April 20, 2005, 8:42 pm

Sony said that they wouldn't make any pre-existing servers, exchange servers unless the demand for them was extremely high. In my opinion, they should do nothing with the pre-existing servers regardless of how high the demand for an exchange server program is. If they make Permafrost an exchange server, I will have to move. Why should I, have to leave my server I started my character on, leave my friends and the guild I'm in, just because the demand was high for an exchange server? I shouldn't, but thats just my opinion.

There's good and bad ways to look at this change, I suppose. You could say that Sony, since they couldn't get rid of the botters, is now trying to control them, by only allowing such stuff to happen on "special" servers. Which is fine. But the "botters" market is gonna plumit. I still think they will be doing all the same things they could do on exchange servers on non-exchange servers because they will make more money doing it, where SOE isn't involved. As long as Sony makes new servers and keeps the exchange on the new servers and gives people that want to go there a chance to move for free, it's not that big of a deal to me. I honestly could care less, if it's going to make my gameplay more enjoyable by not having bot groups overload camping spots that I like to hunt at, let them do it. I just don't think it's going to work the way that SOE thinks it is. I don't think that the "cheaters" are going to think its that great of a thing that Sony wants to allow them to do their thing on only exchange servers. Again, that's just my opinion. I guess thinking negatively you can just see Sony wanting to get in on something they couldn't stop because there is lots of money to be made that way. I don't think they should have made a big deal about "700 Exploiters, No thanks!" then turn around and say they are going to allow it, but only on special servers. /rant off.. Just my opinion, either way, I won't be playing on an exchange server, and as long as I don't have to move off of my server that I am currently playing on, then more power to them.