the net raiders

I got this email earlier this morning. From a person I had been in contact with during my adventures in AION. I asked him for some thoughts on the game, the bot issues and the gold selling controversy that is currently riddling the game with holes. I was wondering how some of these higher leveled guys were able to keep up. Some are super human, and some buy super human programs. Turns out he was a botter himself, one way or another, the game drove him to it. Anyway, I thought I would post this up here with his permission and just blot out the name since he has a pretty detailed history with MMO’s…. anyway, enjoy the wall of text.

Let me first off start by saying that my name is ###### and yes, I botted in AION. Why did I do it? Well that takes a little bit of explanation. And don’t misunderstand me when I write this. It IS wrong. It’s cheating plain a simple. However, in light of this latest “Bot Exodus” there are a lot of kids spitting on the corpses of these dead bots. Understandable, I was one of them at one point. But I figured I would like to post some sort of reasoning behind the madness. I didn’t do it to be an asshole and sink an economy. But, like I said, this all takes a little bit of an explanation.

Like many who were sick and tired of the WoW fanfare, and disenfranchised by the fail that was Warhammer Online… I had blindly drank the NCsoft Kool-Aid thinking that AION was going to be the MMO to end all MMO’s (heh big mistake). It promised the depth and balance of WoW, merged with the epic fortress sieges of Dark Age of Camelot. The graphics were (are) amazing, the classes perfect; I was in heaven. What was even more amazing was the beta, where we had the opportunity to play all the way to level 30. I did so pretty quickly, and enjoyed what little PvP there was to be had until release came.

This game was going to have it all, or so I thought. And I am an MMO pro. I had several max levels in DAOC, WoW, CoH, CoV, WAR …. So getting to level 50 was going to be a piece of cake. You see the critical thing to remember in any MMO that hails from the eastwestern American market is that Asian players are far more obsessed with the leveling than they are with the quests, or even really (from my personal observation…) the end game content. I think Ragnorok is a prime example of this. The grind itself is the payoff, not the completion of quests or raids. Once you hit max level, you got to reset your character and level them again for a “super max level” character. And NCsoft US did a great job of hiding this end content from us through a couple of different means. Primarily, they didn’t say a damn thing about their game from the time you start leveling to the time you finish. All of the video podcasts I saw were just a verbal beat-off of their end game content. Talking about how amazing and complex the game was. Looking back on those videos, they never really touched any critical parts of the game… like time to level (in an American market). And they left their community completely in the dark with absolutely no acknowledgement or feedback discussion; think of Mythic and their development process as the polar opposite of this communication fail.

The game then came out and it was amazing. I shot up to level 11 in the first day before taking a break to sleep. The next day was 11 – 13. As to be expected. The next day was 13 – 14, and then after that it was about a day or two before the next level. It is also important to point out at this point that I try my best to win in RL. I have a pretty good advertising job in the bay area, I have a girlfriend, bills, and the whole lot that comes with being an adult. So the good old days of college where the epic leveling grind session was a thing of the past. I had, on a good night, about 6 hours to devote entirely to AION. Which I think is pretty damn good all things considered. This would be ample time to make it to the end of the game and experience the sweetest open PvP known to man. I mean I did this in WoW and WAR while working a high end job. No sweat right? Wrong. Dead wrong.co

Once I got to level 20, I started to suspect something was up. NCsoft took out some of the elite mob grind spots and replaced them with regular mobs. So my buddies and myself couldn’t start farming for fun. Quests started giving out A LOT less, and I was spending a more than “a few” evenings a week just to get a single level. I came to the full realization that something was seriously wrong with this game when I approached level 31. It took me 10 hours, with rested xp, just to get a level. The quests at this point offered little to nothing in terms of xp. Hell, the reward was the same as killing a few mobs, and half a map away. The time to kill the mobs would be more beneficial than turning in the actual quest… what?? Yeah that, and the fact that teaming up with someone did NOTHING for xp gains. I mean, I know DAOC took a while, but atleast there were group and camp bonuses when you teamed up with people. And the XP from Fire Temple? Laughable at best. Loot drops were miserable and inconsistent. So twinking my way to level 50 was out of the question. If you just pair up with a buddy, the return just wasn’t as fast as grinding by yourself.  Thus all of my friends that I planned to play with… all went their separate ways. It was the only decent way to level… by yourself. The guild chat became the only real way to interact with anyone. And thus the real grind began. After about a week of this I started to pull out my hair. This was a waste. It was going to take months, if not beyond the first of the new year, just to get to the max level. The sweet-sweet bread and butter of PvPvE. That’s all I wanted. And it didn’t make sense. Why would a game, so feverishly centered around end game PvP combat and fortress seiges make the road to PvP combat take so long? It was so completely counter intuitive. Now I know what you are thinking, you can PvP while you level by going through rifts… yeah, well a level 20 something really stands a snowballs chance in hell against a 30 something. I once saw a level 40 on my side take down 6 (six… a  whole six) players, a full group, of level 30. To make matters worse, my account was banned (during their first “exodus”) for apparently being a Chinese bot. And since all I was doing at this point was grinding, I fit the mold perfectly. The truth of the matter was that for a weekend I had gone up to my parents to play, and my father, who is paranoid as ever, has a proxy. So getting my account back took long enough to convince the GM’s that I was an American. Great, I’m grinding so much I look like a Chinese player…. And this set me back in being able to catch up to all of my friends. Most of this was a result of NCsoft’s gameguard…. Or lack there of. A program like Blizzard’s Warden, which monitored all ongoing processes on your machine. They took it out before launch, so there wasn’t (and still isn’t) a concrete way to prove that anyone is using anything malicious to advance in the game short of an IP address. This was also at the beginning of what I like to call the “Bot witch-hunt,” since NCsoft doesn’t even have the technology to properly detect bots. Most likely I was probably “reported” by someone who just wanted me out of their Beluslan grind spot.

Being behind, I got desperate. There needed to be some sort of silver bullet to alleviate this grinding hell. I purchased a guide. I grabbed the one by Kozen. It got favorable reviews, but after I did most of the quests, it only gave me about 20% of a level. Completely worthless and a waste of $39 bucks. I then started to notice something about the people I was playing around. None of them responded. I toss them a buff, no thank you’s. I warned them that opposing faction players were coming to get us, no response. A lot of them had weird names like they just slammed their face on the keyboard. No guild, no title. After a while, and cruising on the forums, I realized these were bots. I was surrounded by them. Everywhere I went. They attacked faster, more efficiently, plus they camped all of the quest mobs that I needed to kill. I tried using that report feature, but obviously NCsoft had tuned out at this point because all of those assholes were still there. Leeching anything I needed in over to move forward in the game.

You know that old saying, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em?” Well I took a long hard look at my experience with AION. I wasn’t having fun… at all. Planning my life around this game was getting on my nerves. I had already been unjustifiably banned once. The PvP was obviously not happening any time soon. The grind was very isolating and boring. In a game that was an MMO, it was Online, and Massive, yet the Multiplayer was flawed beyond repair. So I did the unthinkable. I read up on some reviews, watched a few youtube videos, and then purchased a bot. I would like to say for the record, that it was at this very point that I had quit AION. The justification went as follows…

I hate this game and the time it takes to get to the end is not worth it and tedious beyond belief. I’m already F’d and have no desire to continue wasting my time. The PvP, while not worth the effort, seemed entertaining, so if I could make it to level 50 then maybe I could have a little fun.

And that is exactly what I did. I wasn’t playing AION anymore, I was playing “BOT.” And honestly it was a little more entertaining to watch it grind than actually performing the grind myself (which is sad). Set the guy up in an area of my liking, then take the girlfriend out to a nice candle-lit Champagne dinner. And come home to a bot happily working away next to 10 other bots happily working away. Turn him off, play for an hour or two, and then get some much needed rest. I played other games. I went outside, I ran while the sun was out. It was great. In my entire AION experience, The bot was the smartest move I made. It honestly felt like I was playing WoW again in terms of getting my time back. I had a life and a killer MMO character to boot.

(God I just expressed appreciation for WoW …. *shudders*)

Then when I thought the leveling couldn’t get anymore unbelievable…. It became more unbelievable. In the low 40’s I was clocking in 10, 11, 12 bot grinding sessions and still no level. When I used to wake up to a new level, I woke up to half a level. I started setting up the bot to run while I was at work. I eventually made it to level 48 where it took me 18 hours of non stop grinding just to polish off most of a level!!!! Good thing I was almost done… I hit 50, with a sense of accomplishment. I had totally gotten away with it. Lord only knows how many hours were clocked in total. I honestly never want to know. Even running the bot for that much time proved to be a lot of work. Trust me the feeling was pretty strange since I wasn’t physically there for most of it.

A few days later, came this most recent bot banning, and of course I was banned. It happened right before I went to work. I was brushing my teeth when it happened and was about to level for work. When I tried to log back in, the game informed me that the account was locked….. meh. So I got caught along the way. All good. Like I had said earlier… I quit playing this game when I got the bot. And the botting game was more fun than the leveling game in AION, so it just meant both games were over now. When I got to work, I found out that half of my guild had been banned too. Some guilds in our alliance were virtually wiped clean. Those of us who weren’t banned, have now canceled their accounts…. So we are all most likely going to go back to WoW after we take a month break and get caught up on a little console gaming for a while. Meanwhile I can think of a handful of people off the top of my head that the bot banning missed, and are still going strong at the time that I am writing this.

For what it was worth, it was fun. It was wrong, but fun. I feel that a lot of this could have been avoided, and most of this is NCsoft’s fault in the first place. I know it might seem wrong to blame the victim, but something I realized along the way is that the victims are actually just the normal guys who haven’t considered bots an option. Ironically, the people I sympathize with the most are the people who are going to rip me apart after I post this. It’s funny to read the posts of people cheering on the death of the bots on the AION message boards because most of their characters are around level 25 – 29. They have absolutely no idea just how much time this game is going to be consumed, and I won’t be surprised if the subscription totals start dropping off at the end of December and fall completely flat in January. NCsoft built this game that was going to take forever, because they didn’t have any content or filler to keep most of the high levels interested enough to play honestly. The worst part is that it didn’t need to be this way. They had the power to change all of this for an American market while the game was released a year before in China. If anything this was a market research fail. But an entertaining couple of months to say the least. I am glad the pressure of this game is off of me now. And I am looking forward to an honest run of WoW Cataclysm and Star Wars: The Old Republic. Hopefully they will learn from NCsoft and put a little bit more thought into the journey to max level.

Peace

- ######

Update: 12/11/09 – I have been getting a handful of emails regarding this article. I figure I would just make this clear before it becomes trend for my inbox– The person being referred to in this article (the part colored in blue) is not me. I had asked this person to give me his perspective on AION and what I got was a lot more than I expected. I have kept in contact with this person and we are both amazed at the attention this article got, and very intrigued with the feedback. It has been a pleasure reading all the opinions.