ARC quest farming, what's the policy on this?

aetje

I need some clarification from the powers-that-be on what is and is not permitted when it comes to doing ARC quests. I'm a minor spender, play mostly F2P since I don't have a lot of money to burn, but I'm not above grinding a bit to get where I need to be in game. However, given that there are some methods in PWI by which players automate generating gold (mainly by heavily abusing Jolly Jones) the ability to buy gold ingame by spending time to farm some stuff for the richer players is broken. Take one look at the gold price in the auction house to verify this...

ARC quests as far as I can tell are the only other way to get gold directly. I've installed all games except for Elsword which is region blocked and am just doing the daily "load the launcher to get the count" for the games showing on ARC, which I know a lot of players are doing (if that even). Now recently a friend of mine in the faction apparantly got banned for this. Not discussing that ban ofc, but it got me worried.

So I need to know: What is permitted in regards to this? 'Cause I prefer to avoid eating a ban myself - but if what I'm doing is already not allowed, then I might as well leave PWI entirely, since there will be no way in hell I'll ever catch up with the ongoing power creep. At the current rate I get about 5 gold per 20ish days - not a lot, but enough to eventually buy a few orbs and get my gear refined, maybe even a few packs and hope for defense soulgems. You need that kind of gear if you want to have any fun in PVP these days... Heck, even for PVE some classes get rejected if they ain't R9+10 at least (mainly DD classes).

sleeper1#0704

the rate of gold now.. IS BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF MONEY MAKING IN GAME AND. not because of the arc quest.. actually the rate you have is almost the same as other people. 4-5g for 20-30days but its all random so its not guaranteed you have 5g @ the end of the month. . .. "if you have 1 tera of gb" well you can make full use of this. YOU CAN'T ABUSE REALLY ABUSE THIS. COZ ITS TIMEBASED 'THEY MADE SURE OF THAT' minimum POINTS YOU GET IS ABOUT 10 DAYS. The rewards stays the same and the each level makes it LONGER AND LONGER to get reward points. it can't really abuse. When you don't have any reliable money making in game.. what do you resort to get money? buy gold with cc. "literally every item on the game will receive 10-50% inflation. i said that on my previous thread... what are the effects of killing the only money making in the game."
you can't really abuse jolly. IF YOU HAVE 100 JOLLY. it will take you around 2-3 hrs to login 60 - if you are not bored enough to log the last 40 that is. IF YOU WANNA SPEND 4-5 HRS LOGGING 100 ALTS. and NOT PLAYING THE GAME. then do so.
I SUGGEST that you quit. coz 20% of my friendlist are already gone. and the main guild on TT is recruiting more players coz a SIGNIFICANT number of players quit already.. and i think its time for you to do so.. if you still complaining about POWER spending and whatnot.. .THIS IS A P2W GAME. THAT IS REALITY. DEAL WITH IT.

BTW YOU DON'T AUTOMATICALLY GENERATE GOLD.
YOU get coins from jollies. and tedious one. if i reiterate.. faster one is if you are r9+12 sin better just do ws badge run by yourself. you can technically frenzy every boss in badge run.

btw u also didnt not discuss why he got banned.. maybe he got banned while using VPN.. which is the case for 100% of the time. Don't use vpn while logging accounts and what not. it will get you ban,

heerohex#3018

Something your have to get kalystconquerer to check and confirm.

aetje

Actually, the average rate with all games available installed, and skipping the low yield "log arc for x days" quests, is 5 gold per 18-20 days. I ran the numbers on this, and it surprised me. It's way more efficient at the current gold exchange rate, to farm ARC then to do any (non-cheaty) in game farming, and it detaches your farming from the broken coin-to-gold market completely.

As for the person banned - she spoke to a GM and ARC farming was given as a reason for a permanent ban, without a chance to have it rescinded. That had me worried since I know myself and a LOT of players who don't have big wallets, use that to get some extra gold. Don't know if it's even true, but if it is, then I wager ~50% of the dawnglory playerbase is at risk of eating a ban for this.

[Edit] And sleeper: I clearly stated that whoever was using those bazillion jolly accounts was not doing it manually. The behaviour of the characters indicates that there's a bot at work there. And I don't mean autoculti. I know there still are non-autoculti bots in PWI. Some for Jolly, some for farming mineables, some even run the dailies - I've seen that one get stuck somewhere, and it was hilarious. I don't have them, but they do exist. I report the toons using them, no action ever seems to be taken on those.

eeepsilon

aetje wrote: »

Actually, the average rate with all games available installed, and skipping the low yield "log arc for x days" quests, is 5 gold per 18-20 days. I ran the numbers on this, and it surprised me. It's way more efficient at the current gold exchange rate, to farm ARC then to do any (non-cheaty) in game farming, and it detaches your farming from the broken coin-to-gold market completely.

As for the person banned - she spoke to a GM and ARC farming was given as a reason for a permanent ban, without a chance to have it rescinded. That had me worried since I know myself and a LOT of players who don't have big wallets, use that to get some extra gold. Don't know if it's even true, but if it is, then I wager ~50% of the dawnglory playerbase is at risk of eating a ban for this.

[Edit] And sleeper: I clearly stated that whoever was using those bazillion jolly accounts was not doing it manually. The behaviour of the characters indicates that there's a bot at work there. And I don't mean autoculti. I know there still are non-autoculti bots in PWI. Some for Jolly, some for farming mineables, some even run the dailies - I've seen that one get stuck somewhere, and it was hilarious. I don't have them, but they do exist. I report the toons using them, no action ever seems to be taken on those.

I am not really sure about the rules on arc quest, however there is a chance that if this person you are talking about got baned, maybe he/she was using multiple arc account to farm a lot of golds, so maybe they detected a lot of accounts from same IP / MAC adress and ban them.

From the people I know, I never heard anyone baned for doing arc quests on 2 diferent accounts (which is what was allowed to have). However if a person create a lot of accounts with the sole purpose of farming golds from that system, I would not be surprised if they ban them, especially considering that they probably have better ways for monitoring arc than PWI.

About the whole bots on jolly problem: Yes, there are definitely people abusing that, I can guess they are those russian and indonesian coin sellers that either send mail spam or even wc sometimes. There are 3rd party bot programs that are known for being way more efficient than the autoculti system. Still I am really surprised that pwe does little to no effort in ban them, after all those are a direct threat to the company.

Also identifying those bots is really easy. Just as you said they have a clear behavior. One example could be that most of the bots are mystics with really basic gear, those mystic usually all look the same and they behave the same way, e.x: they always fly to the jolly machine and always summon a devil on it and heal it one time. Sometimes you can see a mass of docens of those mystics and their devils floating above the machine.

Other people also abuse the whole jolly thing with multiple accounts, another example on this would be those people that login 10 or more acc at same time, two of which are psys with summon skill, so they put a psy on the dragonet lake and other on the jolly npc, and you will see this psys teleporting other characters multiple times.

glay4fun

Why pwi just doesnt send 1 gm for 1 week to monitor those jollies, find IP, and IP ban >.>. => Inflation problem solved, Gold selling for $ problem solved = more $ for PWI = more gold for players that buy gold. And of most important problem of them all: The god damn annoying mail spam selling coin will also be gone

Unknown

This content has been removed.

aetje

Killing the bots isn't really gonna help much, they'd be back a few weeks later. Killing off what is bottable (or making it so unrewarding that there's no point to it) is the preferred solution. Moreso because that doesn't require paid GMs to keep an eye on things. Fixing Jollies by deleting the give-cash-on-taking-missions is simple and effective. No idea why it hasn't been implemented yet, seeing as the loot tables for almost all NPCs were overhauled to prevent autocultivation from being a cashcow.

But this is drifting offtopic. I've still not seen any official word on this, and am still looking for guidelines.