Posted by Spooner | 18 Comments
Confessions of an Aion Botter
I came across this little article and wanted to share it with my reader base. Originally this was posted by Tim over at The Net Raiders, but after reading the whole thing I didn’t feel like such a lone nut. I’m pretty sure with this first hand account I can put the whole experience to rest. Well, until it’s back in headlines and I report it again.
Let me first off start by saying that my name is (removed) 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.
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
- (removed)
This is the biggest load of crap I have ever seen. The guy is finding excuses for his cheating. It’s like robbers finding excuses for stealing from people “because the society made them do it”. If you don’t want to grind and want to take your girlfriend out – stop playing the game and take your girl out. Do not cheat by using bots and blame it on the way the game is made.
Well i still dont like bots, but i agree on everything else. You cant have Aion and a normal adult life. Well unless you want to be 50 in 1 year…
As I have said in previous posts, its just too much grinding which is boring for me. I like sotryline, quests, miniquests, hidden quests, things that keep you involved in the game sotry, not 10 major quests, 10 smaller quests, all 20 quests are about killing mobs and the relationship to the main storyline is just plain simple with no tiwsts or anything.
It takes two to tango. While botting is plain wrong, people wouldnt have to bot it:
1. The game were protected properly with a non-intrusive Warden-like program
2. The game didnt involve spending a day /played grinding mobs non stop for each level past 40, and was actually FUN to play.
That being said, cancelling your account is a faster way than botting to drive the message home to NCsoft that their game is shit.
1) If it took him as long as it did to cover the lower levels, it shows that he made no effort to optimize his efforts – i.e., no thinking at all. He went in with a preset opinion of the best way to level and it was wrong – so he resorted to botting instead of playing the game. He probably stopped “playing” the game long before that though.
2) So, he tried to grind his way to 50 and got burned out; and this is becoming a typical complaint among power levelers (for lack of a better term). The game is not designed to let you get to max level easily – on purpose. The repeatable quests are there to bore the snot out of you and to give you incentive to do the real (somewhat lame) quests that they spent time developing.
3) The bot bans were times to take place just after the majority of accounts would have renewed for the next month. The first round was timed for the presale accounts and the second round took place two days later for those who started playing when the game went live. Devious on the part of NCSoft, but not stupid.
He definitely could have spent more time trying to optimize his gameplay in the earlier levels, I got to 20 really quickly but once I got into the abyss itself where I thought everything was going to be promising and open and awesome and it turned out to be the complete opposite.
To quote many others. You’re doing it wrong.
Also, the guy said he played beta, got to 30, enjoyed it. So what was the problem? The only changes to the game from Beta to Release was the addition of MORE content, quests and Exp. They’ve also boosted some xp since release. How can you play beta, enjoy it, get to 30 without complaint of the grind – then at release… complain about the grind!?
You can hit 20 in a matter of 3 days with just a few hours of game play a night. This guy did not utilize his game time very well at all.
“Seriously wrong with this game when I approached level 31. It took me 10 hours, with rested xp, just to get a level.”
Oh no! a whole 10 hours to gain a level!!!
I was in the original release of Wow, and while I dont remember how long it took to level, I am on a shammie grinding to 80, and its taking me day to level, with all the BOA Exp, and the bell curve in wow seriously shifted to make it easier.
its a new game, why do you want to hit max level, so you can bitch about missing content?
5 years later its still takes me 2-3 weeks pump out a level 80, but its also not my first toon.
I don’t think that WoW is becoming easier for the sake of becoming easier, I think they’re making it so you can get to the end game content FASTER. I like that change. The real content is at level 80, the good PvP, the good raids and dungeons, the good looking gear and mounts. The developers are making content for the level 80 balance bracket and if you just started a new character or just started the game for the first time, it’s a big turn off to think “fuck I have to spend HOW LONG now to get to where everybody else is?” that’s the MM part of the MMORPG. You wanna see other players? Get to the end cap. To this day I rarely saw real live human players in Aion unless I was hanging out at the Morheim AH.
But even if you get to the endgame, in Aion, I hear there is nothing there.
but if you look at wow, was MC even in game the first year?
I know that Dire Maul and Mauradon didnt even make it till the second patch.
And while your right the level’s are easier in wow is there to get you to the end game, there is 5 years of endgame content.
Why people think they need to bot to get to max level , knowing full well they are going to be bored just tells me they arent Pro, they are just expecting the endgame to be there before its ready.
I know what I hear of Aion , scares me to think some or most of the game mechanics is poorly designed, like outleveling a dungeon, and not being allowed back in for your corps, thats piss poor design.
But ZOMG it takes too long to level, I want a level a day so I better Bot, just tells me they are someone who cant be pleased.
reminds me of a comercial I saw recently, people standing outside for a release at a store at a 24/7 store. Guys, clue in!
But the big selling point in Aion was the end game PvP at level 50. Which was essentially a big lie as that doesn’t exist really.
And yes back in classic WoW it took a while to level but nothing as long as Aion. So there was midgame content like Mara and SM and such for you to tackle. There really isn’t any of that in Aion sadly. The biggest issue here is that NCsoft didn’t do their market research properly and as a result, we have a very Korean oriented game (grinding as the goal) in a player base (Americans and Europeans) that predominantly don’t like to sit and grind the same action millions of times over daily. That ideal alone tells me that they were hoping to get the addicts addicted and rely solely on the OCD state of many gamers to hold their subs.
Your comment on the level 50 PVP endgame is 100% true. You need people to reach that level to have viable PVP among level 50 characters.
At this time, on my server it is mostly between characters floating around level 40 (give or take).
Very interesting story, thanks for posting. To be honest the reason that I stopped playing Aion was because of how clunky the combat felt. Having to use a bug to cast spells fluidly was just not what I was looking for in a game.
Yeah Ross I never understood how if I rotated my character during a spell cast, it stopped casting… like it got interrupted and broke. Why?
That’s the shitter Kling – you’ll have a mob of level 40′s running around and then 2 level 50′s will come and pretty much decimate everybody.
Spooner: “Yeah Ross I never understood how if I rotated my character during a spell cast, it stopped casting… like it got interrupted and broke. Why?”
One thing is casters have to be stationary for some spells – not all but some. Move or turn and pift. Second and what is actually more annoying is that even turning the camera with the keyboard (as opposed to the mouse) is enough to break concentration.
Spooner: “That’s the shitter Kling – you’ll have a mob of level 40’s running around and then 2 level 50’s will come and pretty much decimate everybody.”
This has been the situation in all of my admittedly limited PVP gaming experience. As a result I am more accepting of this type of PVP environment.
While kill totals are recorded, in Aion, they don’t have an impact on the game and there is virtually no gain from waxing someone of significantly lower level. The only time it is justified is when you want to avoid having your movements broadcast to the enemy – at least that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. In other words it’s fully justified when rifting but less so in the Abyss.
This guy is bored with AION and decided to give botting one last shot before he officially quits? Fine. But earlier in the article he COMPLAINS about having a hard time levelling because of bots monopolizing the main grinding areas, and then does the same thing himself. I’m all for people doing whatever they want in MMO’s, up until the point where it starts hurting other players. The author was quite willing to walk all over other, legitimate players, ruining THEIR fun, just because he didn’t want to do the work. That’s the point where his opinion becomes void to me–if you’re willing to hurt other people to help yourself, then your complaints don’t mean much.
Thx for the post, wether if its to justify/redeem for youre actions or just to inform other people it was a fun article to read and apriciate it from youre part.
Not much more to say besides the plain fact ncsoft en that came of theres was a big dissapointment and with proud and my chin in the air I once again began playing wow. Believing that being glued to wow is bad but not as bad as to waste youre time on a grindfest/mindless and boring game like Aion.
Okay, I don’t sympathize with this guy, first off. However, I must admit he is right on several points, although he unfortunately doesn’t focus on them. Aion IS NOT FUN, botting wouldn’t be fun either, in that he is most assuredly wrong. why is Aion not fun, it has very little to do with the leveling, but rather the content of each level. I was promised customization (it lacks in that department, sure you can remodel things, but not all things and you can’t even dye or remodel AP / pvp gear…why?), there is no “sit back and relax” like in WoW, EQ2, or any other “american” games. I can’t go craft to just kill my questing/grinding headache from 16 hours straight. The cost is immense, there is nothing in the game besides the occasional rape that occurs in the PVP element.
Let me make this clearer. I can grind for so long, I get bored, I don’t care if I level or not, that isn’t my intent. I would like FUN things to do at each level, instances for me and my groups to go to (not FT where every damn thing is BoP and the ability to make any money for your hardwork is nil, or NTC where the drop rate is subpar at best) I want to enjoy my game, not feel like I’m paying NCSoft to work another job. Making money is next to impossible, getting any decent gear is next to impossible, having fun is close to next to impossible.
I’m not asking for ubergear, I’m not asking for massive amounts of kinah, all I am asking for is some DECENT gear, fine if everyone else has it, but I’ve not seen a cloth drop or a spell book drop in 12 levels, and trust me I’ve killed thousands of mobs. People say you have to earn it, but when I spend 2 days doing a long drawn out quest that never drops the needed item only to get a white hat that is worse than my 10lvl lower hat, I can’t help but to complain.
Aion has a lot to fix, faster leveling isn’t it, but the kinah sinks, the lack of drop rate of semi-decent items, and the ability to at least have some fun outside of the xp grind is too much.