NC has done nothing in 2 months to address this  issue and it has a very simple solution:  Hire GMs to start banning accounts until the RMT is suppressed to a somewhat reasonable level, not to mention cheaters are discouraged.  Simple enough, right?  But every time I meander through any non-abyss area, it's nothing but bots.  Bots farming aether, bots gathering, and bots farming world drops 24/7 and selling them at hugely inflated prices to keep the kinah RMT strong.

The problem here is that the fun from any game comes from the sense of earning and accomplishment that comes from time put in, but when cheaters come along, it ruins it.  In FPSs, aimbots ruin the game by padding player stats and causing endless frustration.  In MMORPGs, they control the markets, steal kills, steal consumable nodes, etc.  Either way, if you're thinking of playing this game, just know that bots make up easily a 10th of the server population during a given day, and it gets really old really quick.

Actualy they are starting to ban accounts.  The wrong accounts but at least they are making an effort.  My account got banned yesterday for supposedly using a 3rd party program.  I have been playing since release never had a gm talk to me or anything I was playing next thing I know I was kicked try to log back in says I was banned.  I called they said they couldn't help me had to go through emails.  So far ive sent 4 emails gotten the same replay every time.

Hello XXXXXX,

This mail is to notify you that account [xxxxxxxxx] was confirmed to be violating the User Agreement and/or Rules of Conduct by engaging in the use of an unauthorized third-party application in conjunction with the Aion service.

As a result of this violation of the User Agreement and/or Rules of Conduct, this and all related accounts have been permanently closed. The account(s) will no longer be accessible and will not be reactivated.

Our decision is made in the best interest of the Aion service and for the player base.

User Agreement
http://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/user-agreements/aion-user-agreement.html

Rules of Conduct
http://us.ncsoft.com/en/legal/user-agreements/aion-rules-of-conduct.html

Thank you,
GM Grackle
Aion Support Team

I am glad they are attemptting to make things better however they need to work on the ones they are booting.  With all the damn bots and gold spammers I get booted for something I have no idea what it is.  I even asked what proof they have and I feel they made a mistake but I get the same response every time.  Now I know people will say did you buy kinah or the usual to discredit this thread.  I never bought kinah I was a expert tailor so money was easy. 

I play Aion.

Bots and Spammers are easily blocked/blacklisted when you log in within around 10 seconds.

A small price to pay to continue playing an excellent game.

We get it - there's a problem with bots. How many threads do we actually need on this topic?

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Originally posted by Rawrg22
But every time I meander through any non-abyss area, it's nothing but bots.  Bots farming aether, bots gathering, and bots farming world drops 24/7 and selling them at hugely inflated prices to keep the kinah RMT strong.

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I often wonder about how bad the bot situation is, really. I find it difficult to be sure, a lot of the time. You see lots of people with all the hallmarks of a bot, except, is that enough to be sure? I can see NCSoft's dillemma. Even if they have GMs contact players, there's are reasons a player might not reply, or a bot might have a player nearby to jump on and pretend they've been playing all along. I've seen what I thought was an obvious bot auto-hunt its way into the middle of a camp of aggro mobs, to what would have been certain death, except that suddenly the character drops its routine and starts running like crazy, as if a real person saw what was happening and took over. How do you stop bots when they're usually not 100% bot, but players watching TV while they bot, or whatever? Which may not look all that different from players watching TV, while doing the same basic keystrokes over and over, to level without needing to pay that much attention?

The bot situation does seem to be pretty bad, but I'm not so sure the difference between this game and western bot-free MMOs is an issue of developer dilligence. Would other devs really handle the situation so much better?

Well there are a couple of things going on at the moment. The first and main thing I think is that because so many people see bots going for days on end they sort of say to themselves why not and then they start running one to keep their toon busy. The problem is most of these are running stupid simple macros that steal kills and annoy everyone to hell.

The biggest problem is that this is being created by NCSoft's inability to make a noticable dent in the problem so far. However, there are one of two things that is going to happen. Either NCSoft will continue to let the botting proliferate and lose many customers and control of the game or they have been working hard in the back ground and will be coming online with tools and people to resovle the problems and a lot of people are going to lose their accounts. Either way the problem will be resolved it is just up to NCSoft to decide to do something and do it and if they are going to do it the sooner the better.

And yeah these constant threads about the same thing are a bit old. The botters are just an annoyance at this time and there are plenty of things to do in the game other than worry about their lame butts.

Originally posted by Vhaln

 

 

The bot situation does seem to be pretty bad, but I'm not so sure the difference between this game and western bot-free MMOs is an issue of developer dilligence. Would other devs really handle the situation so much better?

 

I think at this point with Aion, complaining to GMs about bots is rather like going to the police station to file a complaint about police brutality.  Take that how you will. 

I'd like to point out that gold advertisement has gone down from 7$ for 1m to 3$. That basicly means people are not buying and that their bots are getting banned causing them to lose money in buying new accounts. They are getting desperate to make money and if it keeps heading that way they might give up altogether.

Botting is not done exclusively by gold sellers though. Botting software is largely distributed and players use it too. PlayNC will ban a botter if his gear matches the gold seller profile but most player bots have been left alone so far.