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 =)

I didnt think you could Bot to that extent wow.

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Your story amused me greatly.



It would be interesting to set up a chat log just to see if anyone ever sent you any tells.



LOL

Good write up.

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Huh, they finally caught up eh? That's odd because I never heard a thing before I quit. Back in the very beginning, I botted my provisioner - got dozens of server firsts and one game first item and was 2nd to 50 provisioner. It was pretty freaking obvious if you just looked at eqplayers that I and a few others were putting in way too much time if we were for real. I'd had some conversations with the guy who got to 50 first actually and was 99% sure he was also botting, but he was on the evil side so I never got to see him at work.

It was way too easy though. Heck, I didn't even take the botting that seriously, just as a way to get some change.

That game was full of all sorts of other fairly obvious loopholes and exploits back then, and it sounds like a lot of them still exist. I remember cruising that auction app all the time for easy money. That game just never held the same interest for me as EQ1 though, and I think the easy botting and cheating might be the biggest reason.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

Eh. People botted in EQ as well for xp and tradeskills.

Now that I have issue with...though clearly the problem lies with the game not preventing it. When there are goals that matter to people that are easily stolen by cheating, there's a big problem with the game.

Of course there's much to be said about tedious treadmills as well, but I don't play EQ2. /shrug

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I remember botting tradeskills in DAOC... with a simple mouse macro program I got off tucows. You could train it to click certain areas of the screen in sequence, on a timer, and just set to repeat forever. That was 2002, I think.

I botted in UO with a roll of quarters.

Sarissa Candyangel

I was and remain as surprised and disappointed as you are.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

It's too bad though, because there were aspects of that game I loved. For example, I loved collecting the many books in that game and would buy or quest for any new ones I saw even if they were way below my level. Not for their literary value of course... but they looked nice and were reasonably varied and numerous enough to keep a collector's interest. Collecting in general was a pretty good addition to the game, come to think of it, for me at least. Maybe I'm just a really boring personality.

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Knowledge without reason is useless.

http://boxrockssocks.blogspot.com/

There are aspects of the game I think/thought are really cool too.

One of the biggest things I noticed about this game was how "same" the game was from level 1 to level 73. On noobie island, I was fighting goblins. Dot, nuke, pet, nuke. At level 30 I was killing goblins (EL), Dot, nuke, pet nuke .. at level 50 I was killing goblins(lavastorm), dot, nuke pet, nuke.. at level 73 I was killing Goblins (kylong plains) Dot, nuke pet nuke.. In fact, in all my levels of macroing, I only had to change my spell order a couple of times to include pet heals if the mobs were tough.

On noobie Island I was killilng spiders.... on level 73 was killing really big spiders. Really, the only think that changed was the size of the mobs. The spells I used were the same 4 spells over and over and over again, the only difference being the power of the spell and the HPs of the mob.

If you are killing and doing the same things for 73 levels and the only variation of you spells is the amount they hit for.... it makes for a pretty boring game.

Being able to make such a simple macro to level all the way up also speaks volumes about the skill required to accomplish things in game. If you had a keyboard with big bright buttons, you could easily train a monkey to do the work for you... though you might have to buy a lot of bananas as treats.

As far as automating WoW.. I don't know. I don't remember much about that game. I think it would probably be easy for a more sophisticated cheater. EQ2 was extremely easy to set up a macro for though. I don't remember things in WoW being especially easy to kill... I would have to play it again to give you a good opinion. I only played for about a month and only got to level 30ish.

I think maybe this sort of thing is what turns me off to MMORPGs. Not that their are cheaters.. I always knew people were cheating in eq1 and 2.. but it's just the fact that you just do the same crap over and over and over again - with very little variation. They can be fun... I totally "get" how people are into them. I just can't seem to get into it anymore. I think the best part is the people you are with and the fun you have with guildies and and other members. My fondest memories of EQ1 aren't killing xxx mob or making xxx money.. it was the people I met, and the "adventures" we had.

Oh, and Tarot.. funny, cause one of the first people I thought of when I set up these macro programs was you.

I thought, "You know, this is pretty handy. For somebody like Tarot with bad wrists, this could be very handy, if they were into games". I could set my thing to "go" and then sit next to the computer working or browsing the internet, and stop the macro long enough to loot or something, then get back to whatever I was doing.

Also, for the first couple of days, before I macro'd .. my wrists hurt pretty bad.

Sounds like WoW with trolls. So sick of trolls. fucking snow trolls in wotlk I'm sure.

if the trolls ever fucking united they would destroy the motherfucking cosmos.

Don't know why you expected drama. You botted, you got caught, you got punished. Good riddance.

Sorry you don't like mmorpgs. Turning them into single player games via botting sure as shit wont change your outlook on them because you are going to notice the tedious shit that comes along with them MORE.

That's the truth.

I don't really think there is anything wrong with MMORPGs.. They just aren't my taste. I don't like a lot of genres of games. Really, about the only game I still enjoy is racing games and occasionally a FPS. I rarely play those either.

I don't really know what happened with me and games. I grew up as part of the Nintendo generation, like many of you did. I LOVED video games. I can't even begin to count the hours I played. Gradually though, I just lost all fascination with them. I think I got jaded maybe. It's like a racing game is a racing game, the graphics change and the challenges can be different but it's always just going to be Rad Racer. I dunno.

I do drop some change when I see a pacman machine, but beyond that, I just don't like them anymore.

Just reminds me of the old Fight Club days, and packaging up my custom warp/zone/ghost/stacker/bot code for MQ2 waaaay back. To this day I'm amazed I never got banned.

The only time I've ever botted was in FFXI, cuz fuck fishing in that game.

I used a 'illegal' macro in UO but I never botted with it. I was always at the keyboard, I just wasn't interested in the tedious bullshit. I should say I think I was always at the keyboard...I don't recall botting with it. Lots of people did tho, most ppl didn't care. It was a boring ass treadmill.

Games which have things like that which are tedious and repetitive to no purpose are fundementally broken. Why bother doing that today? In WoW you can level grind, but it's so retardedly easy to level up with questing that I could probably level a brand new hunter faster than any bot could. There's stuff I don't especially like farming, but overall I'm enjoying the game...or why bother doing it.

Just as an aside on my wrists, I had surgery last Nov, long story short I'm thrilled with the results.

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Is this a 'sin confessional' thread now? Because the shit I pulled during late-nights as a guide on Mith Marr could probably fill a novella.

I would lock the really annoying players in the room behind the NFP bank, bind them there with my clicky, and delete their petitions for help. And sit. And watch.

And I got a free account for doing it. God I love the old days.

Of everything posted here so far, I'd say that is easily the shittiest, Dola. I wouldn't be proud of that. Just my opinion, I suppose.

Only two times I can think of in over a decade of mmo gaming i've done anything like that.

Diablo 1, Battle.net. I used to roll with the guys that made Townkill. I was 16 or so at the time. I learned a bit about hex editing and general programming shit from them, and actually how to protect your computer from shit like NetBUS and all that crap going around at the time. I remember my 486 DX2 50mhz Packard Bell with 4 meg of video memory ON BOARD and 32 meg of ram was a screaming demon back then.

Ultima Online. I used to use EZ Macro and/or jam a quarter in a bound in game macro key to hold it down. Back then nobody really through of it as cheating. It was just something everyone did to raise a skill that took forever. Since 99% of it took place in places that didn't bother any other players, or even interact with them, it was kind of shocking when it was deemed "bad".

After that, believe it or not I've been probably one of the straightest arrows in gaming. I've never used anything like Macroquest. I have never botted. I have never bought gold. Never scammed a single soul. Sold an account or two tho. I was a guide/ARC in several mmorpgs. Not once did I abuse any power, except maybe exploring an empty Sleepers Tomb when that was considered akin to date rape.

Always makes me giggle at the shit I used to get accused of back when. Stealing guildbanks, wow beta accounts and the like. Casu making a thread devoted to proving it and failing hard. I'm sure I played with people that used shit like Macroquest. It would be impossible not to, and I won't lie and say it didn't "even the odds" during the Fallen Legacy days. It probably did. I'm sure it did. It was also a wise plan to keep me in the dark about it.

I'd be curious to see how many people knowingly used cheats/exploits in EQ. I never cheated or used a program to help me in the game. I'd say the only exploits I ever did were simply pathing exploits while kiting.

If someone is keeping tabs of who did and didn't, I may as well report that I didn't ever use exploits while playing any MMO, as far as I remember.

I used one of those programs in the 2nd incarnation of Fallen Legacy. I used it to summon corpses and check if rare spawns were up. I know we had one guy who played a warrior main, but he had a rogue that he used to farm with and he used a program that allowed him to put the throwing star from Plane of Time in his main hand; which let him do crazy damage.

As far as I know he never did that kind of thing in our raids, but it made me wonder at the time why I was ok with using a program to summon corpses and check spawns; but that what he was doing was not ok. I think I probably justified it by thinking that I could get the corpses or check the spawns manually, but was just saving time; whereas he could never use that weapon in his main hand within the game.

Givin reminded me of my Diablo days. Speaking of learning Hex, I remember actually helping one of the groups create trainers. I remember working on the infinite belt (potions) etc. It was awesome... young, dumb, and thought I was the coolest for hanging out with those guys/girls.

I know I had to make everyone's life miserable in Diablo. I even ended up making friends with BoBaFeTT. He was an interesting character.

Anyway, I don't think i've used anything outside of the stuff we built for Diablo. As I got older, I enjoyed the challenges and the integrity of gaming. I use to get so mad at my cousin for cheating on console games like Final Fantasy. I knew people who used stuff in EQ for tradeskilling and saw a lot of it in EQ2. People are using hacks in StarCraft but, typically you don't run into it if you play the more popular maps.

I just don't like to cheat. It takes away from games and everyone loses if others cheat. Sometimes I differ with what people consider "against policy" such as EQ2 Maps and so forth. However, I will never use anything that would give me an outright advantage over another. Either you are better or worse than I am. If i'm better, it's just because I worked to do so.

This made me look forward to playing Diablo III, SC2, and EQClassic. I think i'm pretty well done with MMO's unless KOTRO hits a homerun.

The little shit was trade scamming people in NFP. He deserved a ban. He got some jail time instead.

haha you must be referring to me Cinnas, Enash was my main in FL then Stabrex before that on lanys.. but I rarely ever used the 100 damage shruikens, I did do alot of other things with fight club though..

Oh god where do I start... Hehehe.

I use macroquestion on my 3rd return to EQ to quickly get myself aquanted with the new zones, but other then that I havent really cheated any since Diablo I

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Hacked the ever living fuck out of Diablo, map hacked in Diablo 2 because I got tired of looking for dumb little shit and it taking forever.

That's about it.

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

Only thing I did was use ranger autofire on my ranger alt and map it to foraging and sat in that velious dwarf city looking for tufts while I slept. Think I used it for fishing too, but I was present at the keyboard for that.

Quick reply looks ugly. Any way to get it going like in InvisionBB?

What the fuck dude, it's been installed 5 fucking minutes and you're already bitching? Why don't I just ban you from the boards and then you won't be so miserable. Also put it in an even more obscure place next time.



Functionality is added.. Cak will work on the looks and how it gels, for fucks sake

PS. Unless you include what theme you're bitching about there is no way for whomever to tell wtf you're talking about.

Poor Lou .

I used the quick reply to post this!

Quick reply drama llama!

I thought it was a feature included in 3.0.2 or whatever, not some home-made hack.

PS feel free to ban me if you'd like brotha. I don't know what you're so worked up about, I thought it was a hokey ass place for the quick reply box to be in an update provided by PHPbb. That's all.

Its a Add-on and the other option is a Javascript enabled one which I really dont want installed. Ill make it pretty across all themes over this week dont worry.

_________________
"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Well for one don't post in some lame eq2bot thread, second you were probably aware the boards just came back up which makes you a douche. We have I think 5 themes in use and I have to edit each theme.


BTW, in Subsilver2, which is what you were using.. it does look like shit, but it is halfway decent in other themes.

you better watch out or i'm going to reply to you quickly

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I like sub-silver best of what options there were when i last looked.

This topic sure de-railed.

Back on topic, Its funny I do see EQ botting still going on in EQ today... i dont understand why though lol.

_________________
"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Because people want to earn AA's while they aren't playing to try catch up with whoever is still playing that has 3000+ AAs or whatever the cap is with all the new expansions.

Tradeskills have become pretty much automated in EQ, just need to have the stuff in your inventory and hit 2 buttons to combine whatever drop it in your bag and repeat. Bards were turned into bots years ago when they introduced autotwisting one of the more useful functions of macroquest to everyone.

I really wasn't trying to be a prick.

It looked really bad on Subsilver2. Haha. You reset my skin though and it looks a lot better. I really thought that the 3.0.2 update included a QuickReply feature. My bad.

Looks good though. Can't wait til it's fully integrated.

[19:17:43] <@CakvalaSC> Digi
[19:17:52] <@CakvalaSC> Do you have time to install a quick reply on the boards?
[19:22:18] <@digi> well
[19:22:21] <@digi> if I do that
[19:22:25] <@digi> I might as well update the boards
[19:22:29] <@digi> and then you'd have to fix the themes again~

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Marauder Harabakc Goat

Aw, now I feel really bad.

"I'm sorry" works.

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When my carpole tunnel got so bad, I looked for easier ways to fire off them arrows for my ranger.

I ended up using a game pad and a auto fire program. It worked really well, just turned it on and the arrows would fly.

I got creative one night while drinking and grinding XP in earth, can't remember who was tanking, but I added to the macro auto assist on the tank in the group.
It was great, I just kicked back and opened up a fresh six pack.

Eventually I passed out and the tank started targetting mobs out in the field with no intention of pulling them, or knowing that I would fire off arrows in those directions.

I also used macros for trade skilling, there just was no way to skill up with carpole tunnel.

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Jake Rivers - Senex Legio
Get off my Lawn alliance

heh i was in that PoE group. i think we just let you die after a while, though the trains were fun for a time

good old bad old days

Not even sure if these actually qualify as exploiting or anything of the sort, but here goes nothing-

Magicians, when positioned on the side of a hill above a mob, used to be able to cast DD bolt spells and have it land twice for only one cast. Some bug in the game, but I made sure I was on the side of a hill as much as I could.

I used to AFK in Droga when it was a lower level zone and faction off the mobs there. When you first dropped down, there was 3 spawns in there and a roamer. Would drop down as a lvl 60 mage (in a lvl 35 zone or so) and kill one mob... wait several minutes, kill another... wait several minutes, kill the third... wait several minutes, then kill the roamer. Once camp was broken, would go to sleep for the night and let pet do all the work. Result- positive Chardok faction for not only that ring quest, but to COH people for King/Queen raids.

Other than that, nothing. I guess you could technically say that "pet canni" was an exploit, but it was moreso using game mechanics to give yourself a great mana regen advantage. That and the old mod rods used to be instant click with no recast- summon rod, click three times, summon another, click three times, shaman HoT, rinse and repeat.

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Can't forget that bridge exploit that made some news back in the day...

nice i haven't seen that video in years

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People still raid Sleepers still lol.. there was one going on last night

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"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

I checked my account today on the website. I guess they just temp banned me. My account is re-instated

I've already deleted eq2 off my gaming computer though because I'm giving that PC to my brother-in-law.

If I went back, I would just go right back to botting, and frankly, I got a good story out of it already, so no real point in spending the next 2 days patching (it took 20 hours last time) just to bot again.

EQ took a day to patch when I loaded it up.. thats crazy !

_________________
"Creating Havoc and Pie Since 2001!"
My Website: http://www.anthonyhays.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/cakvala

Out of curiousity, how does raiding compare between WoW and EQ? I only played EQ (well, and DAoC, Anarchy Online, and SWG).

As someone who plays WoW now, let me start by saying that my view may be biased. And I also know that raids in EQ have changed. But "back in the day" raids in EQ were all about 1 tank (and maybe a few offtanks/Rampage tanks) and 10 healers rotating heals on that main tank. Sure, there were some strats involved, but for the most part, you could have a raid of 72 monkeys and find a way to win as long as 12 of those monkeys knew how to heal in a rotation. The fights in WoW are VERY different than that. They involve coordination from everyone in the raid, in most cases. Granted, they have lowered the raids from 40-man raids to 25-man raids (and even 10-man) but still, you can't really skate by with 25% of your raid doing 95% of the work like you could in EQ. If you have one idiot in a raid and he gets stuck with a task that is make or break, you will fail.

Also, the all-night raids from EQ are not really existent in WoW. You don't have to spend 3 hours killing trash before you see a boss, like you did in VT. I wouldn't call it instant gratification, but it is much easier to get to where you are going in WoW. World dragons (and the like) kind of suck in WoW because they are on a set timer when they respawn, as opposed to the randomness of EQ. EQ was cool because sometimes a particular world boss could spawn while you happened to be passing through the zone and you could mobilize everyone and get the kill before any other guild. There is virtually zero "racing" going on in WoW. At one time, it existed, but for the most part, people look at killing those world bosses as a chore rather than a reward (it could be due to the loot they drop as well).

Speaking of loot, the biggest dissapointment, to me, is the loot in WoW raids vs. EQ raids. In EQ, if you had Quarm loot, people knew you had Quarm loot. In WoW, the awesome 2 handed axe you just got off of the end-game boss may share a look with a lvl 18 axe (but it's a different shade of pink woot!). Also, since the game has such a large player base, the "raiders" are not rewarded as much as they were in EQ. The "casuals" can get pretty comparable gear simply by doing daily, mundane things such as doing a dungeon with 4 friends Granted, you'd have to do lots of dungeons to get the badges needed for some of the better items, but you can still do it. One cool thing about the dungeons, though, is that the "bosses" in them are like mini raid bosses, complete with unique strats you have to learn to win. It's not like going to Seb and killing named. It takes coordination and even a little skill the first few times you do dungeon bosses.

For anyone who would like to claim that EQ raids do not require complex strategies, I invite them to hit up the end raid zones from Omens of War and on.

Oh, I know. Once uh.. whatever that place was called where I got my shield from hit, the bosses got much more complex. What was that place called? It's where Vita last raided (before the idiots tried to take over Vita). I'll look it up.

I'd like to see/read some examples of this claim. Especialy about the new sleeper encounter.