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I hadn't considered herbing/mining/etc only pvp botting.

Woops :3

I don't deny that the activities that are botted are tedious and pointless. But that IS the game.

To me, that's also why Rift is stupid. Why play another permutation of the flawed game paradigm that encourages botting, just like in Aion and EQ?

Grinds exist essentially as a shill for wanting content. They are necessary due to the high marginal cost of quality, original content. This is also why the supposedly low-grind GW2 will fail - their claims will prove totally impractical due to sheer economics - and why the MMO that revolutionizes the genre will be an indie game (possibly literally) - to get around the high marginal cost of content by using primitive graphics.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I guess I don't buy that content costs blizzard so much because of the graphics...I mean...WoW's graphics are pretty bleh.

When I say "graphics", I mean the complexity of the environments, not the number of polygons or what have you.

Look at places like Deepholme or Storm Peaks or Dalaran. Really complex environments with a lot of elements, a lot of things that can go wrong, a lot of time spent developing and debugging the content.

So it's no small wonder that you spend months or years slogging through Icecrown or Tol Barad doing your dailies for the millionth time - it wouldn't be economical to build enough content that you wouldn't have to see that same content more than perhaps once a week.

That kind of complexity/eye candy is taken as a necessity in the here and now, but it obviously doesn't make the game more fun in its own right than games like Starcraft Classic or classic console gaming. So I think that assumption as to the necessity of that complexity should be questioned.

I think art quality, palette and creativity should be the driving force behind the visual quality of environments - WoW has "bad graphics", but Vanilla WoW zones like Azshara or Ashenvale or Arathi were quality in spite of that because of good palette and presentation. Games like the ones we are talking about on the Lolcat forum are other positive examples of good visual quality over "graphics".

The marginal cost of those kinds of models is much lower.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

I agree. Blizzard has lost a lot of subscribers in the past expansion pack. Them banning people who did archeology botting, they know they'll end up coming back.

Pretty much me right about now, sadly:

Stream: www.athenelive.com/brykon
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Brykon50?feature=mhee

I'm actually surprised he didn't come in here and mention it, but React got permabanned for botting on his hunter a little over three years ago. Blizzard had hacked into Glider's customer database and went about meticulously banning anyone linked to the developer in any way. But yeah, they don't fuck around with botting, at least according to the four people (including Brykon) that I've seen get busted for it.

Anyway, my biggest regret is the most obvious one (inb4starting): the OS25 ninja in December of 2008. If I remember correctly, I had spent the night leading a raid of mostly fresh 80s through some heroics, VoA and eventually Sarth. I had been loot-hungry since hitting 80 just days before and didn't really know anyone in the raid, so I figured I'd quietly take the T7.5 glove token as a reward for the stress induced by having to sort out the group for hours on end. But right after taking the gloves, my Internet shit the bed and I had to restart. By the time I got back on, pretty much everyone had left and was spamming trade. Mind you, this was in the month following Wrath's release and people were very angry with me. Needless to say, I was ostracized on my rogue from what I considered the mainstream BH community for the next two years and thus became a WoW nihilist, spending nearly every play session trolling and doing absolutely nothing to better my rogue.

But eventually, I started working on my priest and hit 80 in the summer of 2009. I geared up within weeks thanks to help from Kaldoreii and a few ex-Dissension bros and embedded myself into the raid circuit over the next few months. I got into a decent guild with React and ended up clearing a good portion of ICC with them upon its release. After a few months of relative stagnation, though, the guild and I parted ways and I joined LastOneStanding right before its demise due to officer inactivity. Lucky me. At that point, I didn't really care about PvE and started running 3s with some friends. It was starting to show some promise, but the shit hit the fan between the other two friends and I ended up losing all motivation to play the game. So I took a break for about half a year and then came back (mid-September 2010) to regularly run ICC/RS GDKPs and achievement runs with Aestu and Zaryi. After two months of that, Cataclysm came out and I had a temporarily renewed interest in the game until I hit a brick wall with my new guild and fizzled out completely. Haven't played since.

And here I am now. I can't say I wholeheartedly regret ninjaing the gloves since it turned out pretty good for me in the long run. But I can only speculate as to what could have happened if I didn't.

I botted nearly 20 hours a day 7 days a week on 3-4 accounts and never had an account banned for botting. They really don't care they just try and enact banwaves to scare botters.

Hey dagery, if you expect people to buy your story you might not want to change it every time you tell it.

Don't make me link that scene from "Tapestry".

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Yeah, my biggest regret would have been botting on my huntard. Stupid decision, but I knew the risks involved. What I didn't fully comprehend was how much it fucked others over and had I taken this into consideration I wouldn't have done it.

@Dagery, you gotta admit linking those gloves in trade chat with a spirit gem in them was just too much win to pass over. People act like you're the only person to ever ninja something. Not condoning it, but you took a lot of heat for one unfortunate incident, where others were just looked over without a second thought to it.

Brawlsack

Taking an extended hiatus from gaming

I've never understood botting. The game was boring enough to *play*, but therein lies the only enjoyment to be had. Having imaginary items that you didn't even play the game to achieve... Why not just doodle them on a pad of paper and pretend it's basically the same thing.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face

People don't play the game for the portions of the game that they bot. The very fact those activities are bottable demonstrates just how engaging they are.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

There is a lot of truth to that. Getting ready to raid at the beginning of an expansion and need to craft some leather gear? Enjoy that 30 hour grind to get all the mats, including the rare drop leather that they haven't added to a vendor yet. Need that gem cut? Take pleasure in repeating the same quests for three months until you have all your JC recipes...then add another two or three weeks after they add your epic cuts. Wow, they added some new enchant recipes? Hope you're lucky enough to be in a raid when it drops, and that you're the only one in the raid that can use it. Flasks for raid night? Nothing more fun than competing with the 800 Tauren Druid bots in Uldum for the fucking stinkweed you need.

If a simple AI program can handle these tasks, how appealing could they possibly be? Why would anyone want to do them...especially when offered the option to have them automated?

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Or don't craft it and go farm gear out of instances. I remember in cataclysm people in RM were like "dek you gotta craft this gear" then they looked at what I had gotten out of 5 mans and a few faction vendors and were like "nevermind your gear is pretty much just as good".

There was once a time in the game when gear was exclusive and there was only one way to get something of it's caliber, whatever it might be. That's most certainly not the case anymore.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face

As a good example, people who played with me in wow know that I rarely ever actually used my professions for raid-useful things if I even used them at all and I almost never farmed gold, nor did I play the AH. For raiding I would make myself enough gold to keep flasks on and really that's about it. I bought the flasks on the AH when I saw a reasonable price. I usually made that gold running 5 mans and pretty much vendoring all the drops I got along with a weekly gdkp run. I'd farm specialty mats for enchants but I'd do it in bulk and keep them handy.

I raided a full raid schedule without much of any mindless farming that would be botted. If I didn't want to do things a certain way (mindless farming) I found another way or I didn't do it. And I never really suffered for it.

Akina: bitch I will stab you in the face