Originally posted by arenasb

Currently level 34 in Aion and from my experience I had a lot more fun pvping in Warhammer than I have in Aion. You can go into specifics and mechanics all you want but in my opinion Warhammers pvp was a lot more enjoyable.

You think so? Man, I really disagree.  If anything, the way this game plays out to me is as fun as Warhammer was in the early tiers of the game.  Not any better but not any worse.

In fact, much as I liked the scenarios in Warhammer I'm glad this game doesn't have those so people are continually fighting all over the Abyss in areas the way it was meant to be in Warhammer until people realized it was much easier and productive time wise to simply do scenario after scenario.

However, they do seem to have issues with fortress battles just like Warhammer.  I was hoping someone would finally have this together if they had it available in game.  Apparently not, so unless there is other ways for them to fix the problems they are probably going to have to go the same route Warhammer did far as limiting the amount of people taht can participate in them.

Originally posted by raykor

I don’t have much PvP experience in fantasy-themed MMOGs as I’m not a big fan of the whole auto-targeting style of combat. Nonetheless, I love MMOGs and the lack of a decent PvP-centric Sci-Fi title convinced me to give WAR and Aion a test spin since both claimed to offer a strong focus on PvP.

There are a lot of possible comparison which could be made between these two games but I only want to address the actual PvP combat.

I tried WAR at release but only played for two months. There were plenty of mistakes made with that game BUT I was very surprised at how much fun the actual PvP combat was. My main made it to 33 and I leveled several other classes into the high teens and a few into the 20s. In those two months, I spent dozens and dozens of hours in the RvR lakes and scenarios and while there were certainly some class balance issues, the actual PvP combat was a blast!

I remember following the development of WAR and reading that there were several very important decisions being made to ensure a fun PvP experience.

1. Losing control of your character. The WAR devs said they didn’t like it when players lost control of their characters during PvP combat and I agree with them wholeheartedly. Now sure, WAR had plenty of knockbacks, roots, and slows but no sleep, fear, or stun-locks. In Aion, you can die in PvP without ever being able to fire-off a single skill. Aion is swamped with abilities that cause you to lose control over your character and I can’t say I enjoy it at all.

2. Level difference. War did a good job of offering a fair PvP experience for characters of all levels. I had a crapload of fun in tiers 1 & 2 with a variety of characters. Aion is the classic race to reach high levels so you can gank players that are much lower than you. I realize that this is a temporary problem until the majority of the playerbase reaches the level cap; however, given the extreme level grind in Aion, this will be a problem for quite some time. It also makes the prospect of leveling alts very unappealing when an army of 50s will dominate the Abyss.

3. Gear dependence. Gear in WAR mattered but not nearly as much as it does in Aion. There are some incredibly game-breaking golds in Aion and that doesn’t even begin to address the incredible grind required for Abyss-level gear that gives even greater advantages in PvP combat. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to throw at this game, you should fully expect to face players with significant gear-based advantages and you will lose a whole lot more often than you would if it were based primarily on your skill.

4. Performance. Aion is currently experiencing a big problem with a memory leak in the Cry engine. I have tried to participate in several fortress sieges but it turns into a 10-15 FPS slideshow that crashes the client in short order. (Yes, I have a strong PC and anyone familiar with the game knows this problem has nothing to do with a user’s system specs.)

 

The bottom line for me—your mileage may vary—is that after five weeks in Aion, I have had very little fun PvPing whereas in the same timeframe in WAR I had a whole lot of fun. I’ll probably keep playing for a while and see if it gets any better but at the moment, I feel like I am just grinding in hopes that a fun game will materialize somewhere down the line.
 

So what's your story?  Are you a WAR fanboy or getting some compensationr?  Cause your post is ridiculous.

1.  WAR is notorious for overwhelming CC which evaporated whole warbands.  How about those Bright Wizard AoE disables & stuns which made you stand there frozen unable to do anything for 5 seconds (or more).  I do not think there is any other game which took it to an extreme that Warhammer did.  Which by theway, was 100% contrary to what the developers promised.

2.  I do not even know what your point is.  In Warhammer you had to progress and had no way to stop, really.  The final goal was city sieges, so yes, there was a race to the top as well.  Especially once you hit level 30s, which is where the fun wore off so you pretty much had to try to hit lvl 40 for the endgame.

3.  There is little difference in gear dependence in the two games.  The only reason one would even perceive a difference, is because gear itemization in Warhammer is borderline retarded for many of the classes.

4.  This has got to be joke.  Aside from the CC/AoE nonsense, Warhammer is even more notorious for its horrific performance.  Do you know the main reason why so many from War flocked to Aion?  STABLE CLIENT!  Warhammer's client is a joke (although I heard they finally made a decent patch to fix it).  Forget 10-15fps, the game would be at sub 5fps when two warbands collided.  Crashes were common.  How about the server crash that a certain Order guild used to exploit on Dark Crag by flooding the zone with low levels whenever they started losing ground?  Please.

The bottom line is that you are either lying, blinded with fanboy love for War OR are relatively new to Warhammer.  You must be still having a blast in T1 and T2, which is, a blast.  But it only last so long and the rest of the game is still kinda fail. 

I do hear they are making progress, and while a part of me has some hope, I highly doubt they will make enough progress to save the population.  My old server, which was the top one at the beginning of summer, is near dead. 

Originally posted by Hydroblunt

So what's your story?  Are you a WAR fanboy or getting some compensationr?  Cause your post is ridiculous.

1.  WAR is notorious for overwhelming CC which evaporated whole warbands.  How about those Bright Wizard AoE disables & stuns which made you stand there frozen unable to do anything for 5 seconds (or more).  I do not think there is any other game which took it to an extreme that Warhammer did.  Which by theway, was 100% contrary to what the developers promised.

2.  I do not even know what your point is.  In Warhammer you had to progress and had no way to stop, really.  The final goal was city sieges, so yes, there was a race to the top as well.  Especially once you hit level 30s, which is where the fun wore off so you pretty much had to try to hit lvl 40 for the endgame.

3.  There is little difference in gear dependence in the two games.  The only reason one would even perceive a difference, is because gear itemization in Warhammer is borderline retarded for many of the classes.

4.  This has got to be joke.  Aside from the CC/AoE nonsense, Warhammer is even more notorious for its horrific performance.  Do you know the main reason why so many from War flocked to Aion?  STABLE CLIENT!  Warhammer's client is a joke (although I heard they finally made a decent patch to fix it).  Forget 10-15fps, the game would be at sub 5fps when two warbands collided.  Crashes were common.  How about the server crash that a certain Order guild used to exploit on Dark Crag by flooding the zone with low levels whenever they started losing ground?  Please.

The bottom line is that you are either lying, blinded with fanboy love for War OR are relatively new to Warhammer.  You must be still having a blast in T1 and T2, which is, a blast.  But it only last so long and the rest of the game is still kinda fail. 

I do hear they are making progress, and while a part of me has some hope, I highly doubt they will make enough progress to save the population.  My old server, which was the top one at the beginning of summer, is near dead. 

I played Warhammer for a year, and your analysis of its problems is a sound one.

Originally posted by Timzilla

I think if you had played well into T4 in WAR you might have different take. Stun-locks and CC in general was one of the top 3 or 5 reasons we bailed on WAR. True, you did get to play some awesome PvP in that game for 32 levels or so. The best pvp in the biz, imo. Then you got rewarded by having your game turned off at level 33.

Perhaps, but like I said in my post, I only made it to level 33 before quitting WAR. I never experienced any of this massive CC in the first three tiers.

My post is a comparison of my personal experience PvPing in both games in the early levels.  During the first six weeks in each game, I had an absolute blast PvPing in WAR and very little fun in Aion.  Obviously, the experience is likely different for others but this is my experience.

Originally posted by Dreken

As far as gear dependence I think Warhammer's was worse as you needed to have as much gear from a previous instance or renown rank or you would get an automatic stacking debuff that would cause you to take more damage in the next instance.

I didn't do many dungeon runs in my two months in WAR, but I believe this "ward" system you are referring to only applied to PvE instances and as such is not at all relevant to my comment about gear dependence in PvP.

Originally posted by Dreken

As far as PVP the RVR in Warhammer was extremely broken (I only played for 9 months after release so it may be different now.) It was near impossible to lock down areas on the map even after capturing all the capture points and keeps. I remember spending an entire weekend trying to lock down Praag and we had every point captured and didn't lose one for 10 hours yet the bar to lock down the zone never pushed through to actually locking it down. Also trying to attack a keep that was defended was pointless as the defenders even half the size of your force that was attacking was more than enough to defend a keep successfully because of how overpowered defense seige weapons are especially the burning oil which led to the sad trend of guilds and pick up groups only capturing undefended keeps. The funny part of that is for our server that my guild would coordinate with the opposite faction via the server's IRC channel and just keept rotating on capturing undefended keeps for renown farming.

My post was not a comparison of each game's RvR system.  I agree with you that WAR's RvR system was very broken and is the number one reason I quit that game after only two months.  But whenever I did manage to find some PvP action in WAR, it was a whole lot of fun and THAT is indeed the point of my post.

I was not comparing RvR design but rather the actual combat experience in the initial six week period and for me, WAR's was a lot of fun and Aion's is not nearly so.

Originally posted by Aleste

1- Dont even compare Aion's perfomance to Warhammer's performance, and dont bother comparing them graphically either. Warhammer is well know-known to perform poorly, you only need to check there forums and make a census of Performance related opinions. A recent poll at Warhhameralliance stated Client/Server performance as the thing that is mostly in need of fixing in addition to Class balance.

If you were to tell me that WAR performed poorly for you and Aion runs great then I have no reason not to believe you.

In WAR, I could participate in open-field skirmishes of 30-40 people with absolutely zero lag and in 100+ player sieges with only minimal stuttering.  I never crashed a single time.

In Aion, my screen begins to stutter with only a handful of enemies in the area and turns into a total slide-show with the eventual crash at every single fortress siege.  Needless to say, PvPing is not very much fun under these conditions.

This is how the two games have performed on my personal system.  It is a fact and not open to debate.

It is also a fact that I am not alone in this experience as it is well documented on many forums and has even been acknowledged by the NC Soft staff.

Originally posted by raykor

Originally posted by Timzilla

I think if you had played well into T4 in WAR you might have different take. Stun-locks and CC in general was one of the top 3 or 5 reasons we bailed on WAR. True, you did get to play some awesome PvP in that game for 32 levels or so. The best pvp in the biz, imo. Then you got rewarded by having your game turned off at level 33.

 

Perhaps, but like I said in my post, I only made it to level 33 before quitting WAR. I never experienced any of this massive CC in the first three tiers.

My post is a comparison of my personal experience PvPing in both games in the early levels.  During the first six weeks in each game, I had an absolute blast PvPing in WAR and very little fun in Aion.  Obviously, the experience is likely different for others but this is my experience.

I agreed with Timzilla, War is as horrible as it can be for a PvP game prior to patch 1.3.2 which was too late for me.  T1-T3 was NOT that fun, don't understand why people said "It's so much fun" when you are just running around like a headless chicken with limited skills and most of time just try to leech xp and RR out of a SC or RvR rewards.  6 weeks in a game is not LONG enough to compare anything.  I played War for a year and it was NOT that great.  Why did I play for a year?  Because I like my guild and we all moved to Aion.  Is Aion that great?  No, but it's acceptable, now we are at 40s in Aion.

Originally posted by teco221 

T1-T3 was NOT that fun, don't understand why people said "It's so much fun" when you are just running around like a headless chicken with limited skills and most of time just try to leech xp and RR out of a SC or RvR rewards.  6 weeks in a game is not LONG enough to compare anything. 

....

Is Aion that great?  No, but it's acceptable, now we are at 40s in Aion.

Some people like country music and for others techno is the bomb. To each his own.

For me, Tiers 1-3 in WAR were a lot of fun with regards to the actual PvP combat. But remember that I quit in only two months so I was already keenly aware of WAR's many shortcomings—particularly the whole RvR system.

I am at level 38 so far in Aion and hoping it gets better but my post was motivated by my growing apathy towards the game. I am reaching the point where I don't want to log on and the extremely bad performance issue (at least for me) might be the final straw if it is not fixed soon.

Originally posted by sacdeep

The combat mechanics are too static and clunky: far too many abilities root the player in place, there aren't many instant attacks/spells, and animations run long and prevent subsequent abilities from firing (example: a player casts a spell and it takes affect, then 0.5-1.0 seconds later the player is finally free to start the next ability or maneuver due to the long animations - in many cases even the next step in a skill chain is delayed because of this).

You know it's bad when abilities and effects are so slow that you often find yourself being struck by an attack that your opponent started one or two seconds previous, with you being a good ten-or-twelve body lengths away by the time it goes off. And no, this is not lag, it's by design (one of the most recent patch notes points this out).

I honestly can't believe this game is nearly two years old after witnessing this. It's 2009. This shit wouldn't have cut it in 2003.

Exactly!  The actual combat experience—besides being extremely laggy for me—just doesn't "feel" right.  My primary PvP experience is in FPS games but I was very surprised at how fun the combat in WAR was.  It was very fluid, and while I was often slowed, rooted, or knocked back, it all felt very manageable.  I was never being slept, feared, chain-stun-locked, or flung up in the air completely incapable of doing anything but just watching the screen.

Originally posted by FastTx 

There is a patch that may help you because of the settings aion uses Windows by default basically increases your ping by 200 . Turning this setting off reduced my ping from about 250ms to 40ms. I've noticed a huge difference since.

Where is this magic patch because my ping—when NOT lagging—is 250-400 ms.  Granted, I am playing from the West Coast and I know the servers are all on the East Coast so I figured this was the best I could do.

Originally posted by raykor

I tried WAR at release but only played for two months. There were plenty of mistakes made with that game BUT I was very surprised at how much fun the actual PvP combat was. My main made it to 33 and I leveled several other classes into the high teens and a few into the 20s. In those two months, I spent dozens and dozens of hours in the RvR lakes and scenarios and while there were certainly some class balance issues, the actual PvP combat was a blast!

 I really enjoyed PvP in WAR until level 31+. I had a good time from t1 through t3, but in T4 WAR became just like every other mmo to me, a skill-less equipment based grind, where class imbalances were magnified.

1. Losing control of your character. The WAR devs said they didn’t like it when players lost control of their characters during PvP combat and I agree with them wholeheartedly. Now sure, WAR had plenty of knockbacks, roots, and slows but no sleep, fear, or stun-locks. In Aion, you can die in PvP without ever being able to fire-off a single skill. Aion is swamped with abilities that cause you to lose control over your character and I can’t say I enjoy it at all.

 WAR has its own issues with CC. I do enjoy less crowd comtrol. Altho, in WAR you can die to 1 Sorc, disarm and nuke down...

2. Level difference. War did a good job of offering a fair PvP experience for characters of all levels. I had a crapload of fun in tiers 1 & 2 with a variety of characters. Aion is the classic race to reach high levels so you can gank players that are much lower than you. I realize that this is a temporary problem until the majority of the playerbase reaches the level cap; however, given the extreme level grind in Aion, this will be a problem for quite some time. It also makes the prospect of leveling alts very unappealing.

Leveling from level 1 to max and being able to obtain gear through PvP is what makes WAR the only true PvP game out there. I wish more games gave you the option of leveling through PvP. PvE just will not cut it for me, anymore. I do not enjoy bashing on  mobs for hours with no risk involved.

 Aion follows the same old, Gear + level = victory, mechanics. Aion is  a PvE focused game, with minor attempts at PvP thrown in there. This game caters to the WoW crowd that believes that if they have spent more time playing than you, it should mean that they win ever time.   I have come to the conclusion

 

3. Gear dependence. Gear in WAR mattered but not nearly as much as it does in Aion. There are some incredibly game-breaking golds in Aion and that doesn’t even begin to address the incredible grind required for Abyss-level gear that gives even greater advantages in PvP combat. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to throw at this game, you should fully expect to face players with significant gear-based advantages and you will lose a whole lot more often than you would if it were based primarily on your skill.

  Gear in WAR was more of a problem than you would think. At levels 11 I remember tromping through the PvP areas solo with my geared to the teeth black orc. I could take on 2-5 people, depending on level, pretty easily with this character. In T4 is where WAR becomes much like every other MMO, where gear and level trump skill in every way.

4. Performance. Aion is currently experiencing a big problem with a memory leak in the Cry engine. I have tried to participate in several fortress sieges but it turns into a 10-15 FPS slideshow that crashes the client in short order. (Yes, I have a strong PC and anyone familiar with the game knows this problem has nothing to do with a user’s system specs.)

 I would expect Aion to be pretty much bug free considering how long its been out. Pretty sad...

The bottom line for me—your mileage may vary—is that after five weeks in Aion, I have had very little fun PvPing whereas in the same timeframe in WAR I had a whole lot of fun. I’ll probably keep playing for a while and see if it gets any better but at the moment, I feel like I am just grinding in hopes that a fun game will materialize somewhere down the line.
 

   I feel pretty much the same way. The level 1 to 25 grind pretty much bored me to death and now that I can enter the Abyss, I dont really care so much about it. If I wanted the same old gear and levels = automatic win mechanics, I would play any other game out there....

 

Aion's PvP gets better as you level.  

WAR's PvP gets worse.

Originally posted by raykor

I don’t have much PvP experience in fantasy-themed MMOGs as I’m not a big fan of the whole auto-targeting style of combat. Nonetheless, I love MMOGs and the lack of a decent PvP-centric Sci-Fi title convinced me to give WAR and Aion a test spin since both claimed to offer a strong focus on PvP.

There are a lot of possible comparison which could be made between these two games but I only want to address the actual PvP combat.

I tried WAR at release but only played for two months. There were plenty of mistakes made with that game BUT I was very surprised at how much fun the actual PvP combat was. My main made it to 33 and I leveled several other classes into the high teens and a few into the 20s. In those two months, I spent dozens and dozens of hours in the RvR lakes and scenarios and while there were certainly some class balance issues, the actual PvP combat was a blast!

I remember following the development of WAR and reading that there were several very important decisions being made to ensure a fun PvP experience.

1. Losing control of your character. The WAR devs said they didn’t like it when players lost control of their characters during PvP combat and I agree with them wholeheartedly. Now sure, WAR had plenty of knockbacks, roots, and slows but no sleep, fear, or stun-locks. In Aion, you can die in PvP without ever being able to fire-off a single skill. Aion is swamped with abilities that cause you to lose control over your character and I can’t say I enjoy it at all.

2. Level difference. War did a good job of offering a fair PvP experience for characters of all levels. I had a crapload of fun in tiers 1 & 2 with a variety of characters. Aion is the classic race to reach high levels so you can gank players that are much lower than you. I realize that this is a temporary problem until the majority of the playerbase reaches the level cap; however, given the extreme level grind in Aion, this will be a problem for quite some time. It also makes the prospect of leveling alts very unappealing when an army of 50s will dominate the Abyss.

3. Gear dependence. Gear in WAR mattered but not nearly as much as it does in Aion. There are some incredibly game-breaking golds in Aion and that doesn’t even begin to address the incredible grind required for Abyss-level gear that gives even greater advantages in PvP combat. If you don’t have a whole lot of time to throw at this game, you should fully expect to face players with significant gear-based advantages and you will lose a whole lot more often than you would if it were based primarily on your skill.

4. Performance. Aion is currently experiencing a big problem with a memory leak in the Cry engine. I have tried to participate in several fortress sieges but it turns into a 10-15 FPS slideshow that crashes the client in short order. (Yes, I have a strong PC and anyone familiar with the game knows this problem has nothing to do with a user’s system specs.)

 

The bottom line for me—your mileage may vary—is that after five weeks in Aion, I have had very little fun PvPing whereas in the same timeframe in WAR I had a whole lot of fun. I’ll probably keep playing for a while and see if it gets any better but at the moment, I feel like I am just grinding in hopes that a fun game will materialize somewhere down the line.
 

Thing is, WAR and Aion are polar opposites.

WAR was very strong in lower levels, and did make the leveling experience pretty easy on you, as you could level thru PvP, and you were "auto buffed" to a competitive level when fighting others.

But WAR fell apart in Tier 4, which was horribly balanced, ran horribly, had broken ORvR mechanics that are still being repaired to this day, had far too much land to cover where 2/3 of them did not have the "Castles" they were supposed to which broke the core gameplay, and did not have enough of a player base for the war to actually cover as much land as the three T4 zones had for battles.

Aion is not as welcoming to lower level PvPers - it does not have scenarios for quick action where you can level up quickly, it does not auto level you to your enemies, but it is focused where most of the content is based around end-game gameplay.

When it comes to performance, I do not know of any that had many problems with the sieges as long as you put on "Fixed FPS" in your options. The only problem that has persisted is the random disconnects in large fort battles. Which is annoying, but with some battles we had reaching over 200v200 they were surprisingly playable. Much more playable then WAR's fort sieges, and Wintergrasp even.

If your getting CC"d to much, sounds like you need to bring some healing pots to break the CC. Unless I've been jumped by 3+ people, or someone much higher level. I havent died before I could do anything.

Originally posted by Xasapis

This is not my experience. The spam filter is working, thus now the spammers resorted in using gibberish to bypass the filter. Which is a clear indication that the filter is indeed working for normal text advertisements.

As for the bots (if they exist, I didn't notice any tbh, but that's probably because I outleveled the possible farming grounds), give them some time. They've been extremely fast in implementing an official company spam filter, I'm sure they'll respond equally fast against the botters. (In comparison, how many months did it take Blizzard to create their inhouse spam filter, when the game was relying on 3rd party addons for spam protection. How long did it take them to remove the glide bots and the like? I think some of us need some perspective in what we perceive as adequate time needed to solve certain issues).

Well, then.. here's another perspective on it...

WoW is Blizzard's first MMORPG, so even entering a market where RMT is/was a known issue, they could be forgiven as making a "newbie mistake". 

NCSoft doesn't have that excuse.

1. Aion is their third in-house game, and they have 7+ years experience in running them.
2. Their first two MMOs, Lineage 1 and 2, are both overrun with bots. In Lineage 2, in particular, it's gotten to the point where the RMT practically owns the economy in that game. Players openly discuss botting now, on their forums and in-game, because they know NC will do nothing about it. 
3. Aion was in development while all the RMT issues were happening in those games. The outcry from their players asking them to do something about it in L1 and L2 alone should have been a big red flag that Aion needed better RMT/Bot management from the start.
4. Aion was out a year in Korea before they launched it here. They had plenty of time to implement whatever filters they needed, etc.

It's great that they're finally making efforts to do something about it - though whether they keep it up or they disappear into the woodwork after a week or so, as they've done in L2 many times, remains to be seen. However, that they're only *now* making an effort to deal with it shows that they were not prepared for it to begin with.... and they should have been.

That said... I've been checking it out on my last few days of a live sub and I've only gotten 1 spam, seen two bots and saw two RMT ads in-town using the private stores. The RMT spam never happened again, those two bots I saw (and reported) were gone within a couple hours and when I went back to Sanctum, the private shop RMT ads were gone. So... that certainly shows an improvement.

Time will tell, however, if this is NC seriously stepping up to the plate... or just doing it for good PR because they know people's subs are about to renew.

 Point one is certainly true NCsoft have been an mmo publisher for a long (relatively) time, Lineage was released over 10 years ago. However, being around for a while isn't necessarily a guide for how well games are run, both Funcom and Mythic have reasonably long histories and produced two flops last year, AoC and WAR respectively, though these games have both been patched and will survive, though maybe to do so F2P will be the way for them. SOE seem to make some strange decisions with their games over the years. Overall, I think pedigree not a guarantee of quality, though I think some games companies such as Bioware and Blizzard are exceptions, since they haven't had to deal with a flop mmo yet or one with significant issues. I think the issue here is that NCsoft are a Korean company, so their approach to gaming is different. The PC Bang and pay-to-play/F2P rule in that market, so I am wondering whether there is greater tolerance of things such as boting, maybe it doesn't ruin their game experience as much as it does for a Western sub player. Third and  fourth points relates to the second. I simply think in Korea there is a different attitude towards bots and gold spammers. Consequently, NCsoft have not needed to crack down on these activities in the way Blizzard, a Western games developer has. If in Korea and China these activities don't ruin the game experience they are tolerated by the developer, after all going to great lengths to eliminate them does cost money and make game development and production more expensive.

Originally posted by Illyssia

 Point one is certainly true NCsoft have been an mmo publisher for a long (relatively) time, Lineage was released over 10 years ago. However, being around for a while isn't necessarily a guide for how well games are run, both Funcom and Mythic have reasonably long histories and produced two flops last year, AoC and WAR respectively, though these games have both been patched and will survive, though maybe to do so F2P will be the way for them. SOE seem to make some strange decisions with their games over the years. Overall, I think pedigree not a guarantee of quality, though I think some games companies such as Bioware and Blizzard are exceptions, since they haven't had to deal with a flop mmo yet or one with significant issues. I think the issue here is that NCsoft are a Korean company, so their approach to gaming is different. The PC Bang and pay-to-play/F2P rule in that market, so I am wondering whether there is greater tolerance of things such as boting, maybe it doesn't ruin their game experience as much as it does for a Western sub player. Third and  fourth points relates to the second. I simply think in Korea there is a different attitude towards bots and gold spammers. Consequently, NCsoft have not needed to crack down on these activities in the way Blizzard, a Western games developer has. If in Korea and China these activities don't ruin the game experience they are tolerated by the developer, after all going to great lengths to eliminate them does cost money and make game development and production more expensive.

 

 

Lets not forget how many months bots were around before Blizzard got rid of them.

Difference in WoW was most bots were used inside instances were noone would notice. Even hacks such as mages blinking in to the ceiling owning elites.

They have already made more progress in a short amount of time than WoW did at release.