Well, for your reading pleasure I submit to you my experience as an EQ2 bot.
As many of you know, Sony gave away some free time for folks that have their account inactive for awhile. I hadn’t logged into EQ2 since 2005 so I was eligible for the Living Legacy, Fight with Legends promotion. Back around 2005 I completely lost interest in MMORPGs and within the last 2 years, I lost interest in gaming all together.
I remembered playing years ago and seeing automated players in the tradeskill instances who would stay at a workstation for days and days. I would petition every once in awhile, but nothing ever happened, so I pretty much gave up trying. There is no integrity in these games, honestly. People automate characters without consequence while honest people get carpel tunnel and spend hours sitting in one spot mashing the same buttons over and over.
When this promotion started, I logged back on to my still gimp Templar 45 templar 50 Provisioner. I had originally planned to automate my tradeskills and see if I got caught. I searched for a good macro program and found Macro Magic. So I bought a buncha raw materials and fuel and set up a macro to constantly mash 3 buttons, and move my mouse over and click the “restart” button. This worked great. I macroed up to about level 60 something… but I wanted more! So easy.
I took my cleric out and decided to try to automate hunting. First stop, lavastorm. There are some non-aggro lizards on the beach. I automated a “target closest enemy” and then automated nuke, nuke heal nuke nuke nuke heal…. This worked great... probably gained a couple of levels this way. Turns out there is a rare spawn there that would kill me ever so often so I had to find a new place to hunt.
Templars have horrible DPS and automating the hunt was hard… But, I did have a level 27 necromancer on my account, so I logged him on and found that he was exceptional at soloing.
So, I took to the task of finding some easy mobs to practice on. I set up my macro again to dot dot nuke siphon life... well within just a few days, I was well into my 30s thanks to my stored up vitality.
This was too easy. I knew where to go from my days of playing for solo mobs… Spent a good deal of time in Zek, hen on to enchanted lands for turtles, then lavastorm for some goblins, by this time I was in my 50s. This was probably within the first week. I was a part of a guild and though I outpaced leveling of fellow guildies, nobody every said a word…. I must be the most hardcore dedicated player ever.
I pretty much continued hunting for new, out of the way spots to do my boting… this was the hardest part. It is harder than one would think to find a spot of easy non social grouped mobs to give me a steady stream of exp.
After about a month now, I guess I have leveled more than any reasonable person would level in the same amount of time. My necromancer is now level 73 and my templar is a level 77 provisioner.
The 70’s in EQ2 are hard to bot though. EXP slows down to almost non-existent and you are expected to do the solo timeline of quests to level. Bah, assholes, making me sit at my computer and actually play the game.
I played for a few days, botting at night to get a little exp. I sat at a gremlin camp in Looping planes and just killed thousands of gremlins. I began to dislike this game immensely during the course of time while I played.
I never really had an “end game” plan. I thought about selling my account, but a saturated market for an unpopular game? I thought it might be more time and hassle to sell than it was worth. So what? Play? Be a raider? Shit, I ain’t got the time or the desire to do that. Honestly, I’m not even sure why I was doing it. I am still trying figure that one out. My wife was slightly amused by my shenanigans, so I guess it had entertainment value.
I know some of you will be sore at me for cheating. It’s really not a very nice thing to do. I tried to minimize my impact as much as possible, especially with my guildies. I rarely spoke, so I didn’t make any friends and I never accepted any help or items or anything from guild members. I only grouped about 3 times and I did a few writs here and there (legit) to give the guild exp. Not that that is a legitimate justification for cheating.
So, in closing, over the course of the month or so I played, I gained 74 total levels, made about 100pp and decided that I still dislike MMORPGs. I also concluded that “keeping up with other characters” sucks because you never know if that other person is botting while you are sleeping. I remember this one guild member who was 13 levels above my necromancer when I started, and now he’s 53 and I am 20 levels above him. Had I kept botting, I would have capped my level within the next 2 weeks probably.
Which brings me to the rainbow… the silver lining… the justice to it all.
This morning, while I was moving some furniture to store when we move, I noticed that my character was at the log-in screen. I tried to put him back into game a few times to get him back to work. After 3 unsuccessful login attempts, I exited the game to restart it. When I logged in my account, I got a nice little message letting me know the account had been suspended. Ooops.
Well, so there is justice in the world and the GMs at EQ2 will suspend you if you stand in the same spot for 4 days in a row killing the same green mobs, never looting anything. Who knew?
So there ya have it folks. I figure we haven’t had any good game drama around here in awhile, so here is my contribution. Flame away =)
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