Botting

Evryn - Morai wrote: »

Nope, bots are NPCs just like the mobs. Objects for manual players' amusement. When you've hit F12 and give control to the autopilot, there's no brain behind the controls anymore. It is not possible to grieve a machine.

If I feel like it I'll kill bots for the fun of it, usually by dragging a big scary boss into range of them with a weak aggro skill, then watch and laugh. If it happens to my own characters while they're on autoculti, I laugh it off and click respawn. Dragging a boss to a player who's manually attacking things doesn't hurt said player, they'll never get aggro (I avoid AOE bosses for this reason).

So its like digitally robbing a bank is ok because theres noone there.

Of course it happens to me too. Every day i wake up its a surprise, maybe it died after an hour, maybe its still going. And nope, i dont worry about it much.

But it does surprise me. No not that, it doesnt anymore. I mean i do still find it special and slightly dissapointing that there are people who think its so much fun to pointlessly grieve other players. That they do this without even comprehending that they are immoral. But oh well, thats what in 35 years i have never understood about people in general anyway, nothing specific for PWI of course.

WannaBM - Archosaur wrote: »

Of course it happens to me too. Every day i wake up its a surprise, maybe it died after an hour, maybe its still going. And nope, i dont worry about it much.

Meh, the bulk of bots that die (after burning out their entire life charm) is due to them trying to pick up other people's drops and failing to do so while enemies pound away at them. In rare cases, that'll cause autocultivation to completely stall out. Proper fix: Autoculti in an area where you are out of the way, alone, where noone will go. Some areas in Morai, Momaganon and Lothranis are quite untouched as far as bots are concerned.

If other folk don't see you, they can't mess with you. Most of the bots I mess with are folks who have:
- Their range set idiotically large. Seriously, 60-70 is all you need. Be courteous to your fellow players who want to shoot things too, right?
- Bot quest mobs that I need. Such as Lethal Sharpfang Araneids or sometimes those serpents for the Jolly71 quest.
- Or plop their character -right on top of mine- when I'm on autoculti myself and monitoring. That pisses me off and I tend to make sure they at least burn off some charm for their efforts. Not that hard to find a free spot folks, just look for where the enemies are clustered tight, that's where noone has been shooting them for a bit.


And yea, making autoculti a for-cash-only feature or limiting it's availability will simply cause third party bots to become common again. They're still in use now - I've seen several bots that do things that autoculti can't (such as automatically disengage to sell items or revive when they've been killed, then automatically head back to their spot for more). These characters I've reported to the GMs... several I've not seen since then ('though I've got no idea if the GMs actually took action, or if that mess in the Ukraine took out the puppet master).