Quote Originally Posted by Brojam View Post
How is it ruining the game?
1.Well if you can have a bot running 24/7 farming mats you can afford to sell them cheaper as you have 0 time invested in collecting them thereby hurting the economy which will in the end ruin the game. I think you may not be seeing the real use of this. If I had a bot running I would be gathering while I work, sleep whatever and be gaining a huge advantage over you. If you don't see an advantage go look at the prices of mats in the AH then tell me they are wasting their time by having this run all night...
One of the original features of V1 was a way to prevent this, but it was also basically a slap in the face to people who actually play for long periods of time legitimately. The way to "solve", and by "solve" I mean nerf, botting is to make inappropriate gear wear out (crystals only require the level 1 starter gear, but you can't start Mining/Botany until level 10, I followed bots around today and it took them less than 4 hours to hit level 10, then they all logged off.) So a player that is harvesting/mining with newbie gear, will have that gear wear out rapidly.

To solve the bots going after the crystals... well that's an entirely other problem. One thing they're certainly doing is acquiring the crystals from all the quest givers by joining the guilds, this has to be eliminated. The guildmasters should give the player just enough materials to do the level 5/10/15 quest they give, and require the finished product to signed by them before allowing the player to "level up" those crafting skills. The harvesting ones likewise should not level up unless a quest has been completed by the guildmaster. These are basically one-time "level cap quests", and unfortunately the idea comes from Mabinogi because that's exactly the point of the cap quests (to prevent powerleveling by botting.) Players didn't like having to constantly do the cap quests (despite being every 5 levels.)

Ultimately we can't just throw technical solutions on this. SE could hire a few players that fill out accurate helpful reports and give them someone to email/im/skype directly with to kill bots quicker.