Eralea

Alright, I've popped into the other thread and I've found the reason we're not on the same page.

Helsa wrote: »

There will always be gold sellers, there will always be ad bots in Dunby Square.

I'd like you to know that we're not thinking of the same bots. You're clearly thinking of the foreign gold selling businesses that have always been around in the game. The bots I blame for the current state of affairs in Alexina were player-made and operated, and distributed inside certain guilds.

I understand that you probably haven't heard the existence of these people until now. You needed to either have been part of them, or have eyes and ears inside those cliques/guilds, to know what they were up to. Obviously 99% of players didn't have that privilege. I wasn't supposed to know any of this either, but I was lucky enough to be friends with people who used to have access to those guilds (and got blackballed when they made numerous attempts to alert Nexon of their activities).

They had scripts for running missions with multiple alts, doing daily quests for adventurer seals and exp fruit, building squires, grinding skills etc; basically automating many things that were tedious and profitable. They used those cheats to fill their own bank accounts, and then paid extraordinary prices for all the good gear and useful things like rebirth potions. Others sold the gold to other players. These sellers aren't related to the ad bots, they're actual players in our server. When I mentioned trapping a bot on a fence earlier in this thread, it wasn't a gold ad bot - it was someone's main character, a person who has been leader/officer of several end-game guilds. This character is standing afk in Dunby right now.

So I don't blame you for the confusion. I made it worse by being vague, which I had to do to avoid identifying anyone directly because of the rules regarding harassment.

I actually think Nexon's done a decent enough job of curbing the botting and sales by those foreign businesses, so I don't really care about those. It's their inability to monitor and take down entire guilds of cheaters within their own playerbase that bothers me. These players were not permabanned like they should have been, and were basically allowed to continue pumping their ill-gained gold into our market to the point where it's at now.

XCalibie wrote: »

People really need to stop using that "straw man" term, it doesn't award 'em any bonus points! (It often does quite the opposite, actually)

Most people misuse it. I am not one of those people.



Helsa is intentionally directing the topic elsewhere. It's almost like she doesn't want to acknowledge that there was rampant cheating on our server.

But I get it. There's a large group of casuals who simply weren't in the loop, and another large group of casuals who are actively participating in the cancer. I don't really care which one she belongs to, there's no point in trying to explain things to someone who insists on deflecting the issue.

Gaea/Crims isn't the only one who has given up on reporting anything to Nexon. I've known other active end-game players who quit out of disgust at both the cheating and Nexon's inaction whenever they tried to report dodgy stuff. Whether anyone acknowledges it or not, this is a factor that's affecting Mabi's player retention.

Helsa wrote: »

You take away the botters you will still have inflation. The botters make it worse, to be sure, but to say no botters means no inflation would be incorrect.

This is a classic straw man argument.

See how Helsa has completely ignored the part where I said "Stop conflating normal inflation with the banana republic levels of hyperinflation that Alexina experienced", to make it look like I'm arguing that there would be "no" inflation? That's the straw man.

Nobody is arguing that. Of course inflation in games exists and is normal. I'm arguing that our inflation was abnormal. It should have taken a good few more years to inflate to this level had the cheaters not existed.

If a person used spawned-in gear to reach damage levels that are impossible now but might be possible in a few years, would that be all right? Would you still say "well there would still be power creep even without the cheaters"? It's technically true but it still doesn't negate the fact that it happened before it should have, in ways that shouldn't be allowed in fair gameplay.

Miliardo wrote: »

Yeah I'm sure we'd all love a free Spirit of Tuan, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea from Nexon's end

They've given us a free permanent Spirit of Tuan before. Permanent event pets was something I'd considered a huge improvement over the Old Nexon from 2008-2012 that everyone hated - it showed that they weren't just trying to milk the game to death with prem/pay2win events (anyone remember white tiger robes?).

Hyping up free event pets was one of the few ways I could get old players who quit excited enough to come back, even for a little while, because they couldn't believe how nice and generous Nexon had become now. Now that they're expiring it's just meh. I'm not gonna hype that nonsense up.

Like everyone else, I didn't get an Attendance Completion box for the first part of the current event because of the bug. Now that I have actually received one, I'm ticked off again. It's a box with a 7 day expiry, containing two items with 30-day expiries, one of which is another box where you can select your choice of upgrade stone, which will also expire in 30 days. Why??

The upgrade stone is limited to one trade, which means certain multiclienters with 60-90 accounts will have no problems transferring heaps of prot stones to their mains or selling them off for easy cash. What's the point? Event prizes with this combination of limitations are only facilitating their event abuse. I'd rather have an untradeable permanent stone. It's still technically possible to abuse those but at least they'd have to fumble around with trade unlock potions to do so.

If the guy with 90 accounts manages to sell all his stones for 2m ea that's an easy 180m minus fees. Great for him, but I'm getting real sick of all this.

Helsa wrote: »

Eralea wrote: »

Don't talk like the massive amounts of gold in Alexina wasn't brought in by cheaters botting shadow missions, and MA tourney after missions got nerfed. This isn't "time and effort". It's automation and abuse of the terms of service.

The high prices are set by the people selling the goods. Those people have the goods to sell either because they spent real money getting NX to buy them, or they patiently built themselves up over time via buy low and sell high. Gold sellers allow inflation to occur quicker, but even without them there would still be inflation.

Setting high prices would be pointless if no one had the gold to pay them. The only reason sellers can set high prices in the first place is because cheaters and the people who buy gold from cheaters are able to afford it.

Legit players and merchants were not the ones who generated 30 million of gold from SMs every single day for most of a year. This isn't an exaggeration - that's the actual number the botters bragged about. Stop conflating normal inflation with the banana republic levels of hyperinflation that Alexina experienced.

People reported the cheaters and Nexon failed to stop them. It could have been stopped in the early stages, around two years ago, but instead it was allowed to continue festering for months, while the botters and multi-clienters got more and more brazen and openly bragged about getting away with their cheating.

It's exasperating enough to see these smug jackasses talk about why it's pointless to play legitimately, you don't need to help them out by downplaying the role they had in this economic cancer.