Possible Solution to the NASA Bot

[Seraphus]

the more i see everyone agree with OP the more enthusiastic my smile becomes =)

EDIT: Also, I would like to take a shot in the dark here

Is there any way I could get a mod to change one of the options:

From: No, I don't think this idea would work at all

To: No, my linkshell just bought NASA, fuck off

[Zoner]

I'm with making the Kings poppable, the pop item would come from the new chest system SE recently implemented so farming wouldn't be restricted to one type of mob, it would however be allowed to drop only once a day. Maybe even make the pop item sellable?

[Raithen]

Killing the King system removes the goals of a large portion of the player base.

Who the fuck is this guy and is he serious? Get your head out of your ass you moron. 100-150 people is not a large portion of any server. Do you even know math? That's less than 5% I guarantee you. I have played this game for 5 years and have never felt the desire to camp kings. Fuck, most everyone I know has never wanted to camp kings. We all still have found ways to entertain ourselves in FFXI over the years. Get over yourself.

I'm not an expert at this HOW BOTS WORK shit, but I've tried to claim enough things in my years to feel safe saying if a yellow monster gives you the "Cannot perform, target already claimed" message when you try to JA, it's been botted. Get with the times SE, you can tell.

Anyway, I don't think enough people who play the game (or work at SE for that matter) care if Kings get "fixed." If SE cared about appeasing (or banning) less than 5% of the population, they would have done it years ago.

PS: I do agree it would be nice if SE banned botters, but if they really can't prove it with solid evidence then it won't happen. If they could, people would be QQing faster than you could say "Salvage bans."

[Smartdrv]

Can leave the Kings how they are, but perhaps add Ridill and D-Ring to the loot pool of the KS99 versions with the same drop rate.

Since the drop rate of both is total shit (you can do 20 Fafnirs in a row and not get a Ridill) I don't think it would flood the market that much. So what if you did, just means people won't be quite as heartbroken if SE released some gear that totally made Zilart stuff obsolete.

If not that, toss the gear on Vrtra/Jorm/something else with a repop time similar to kings and the same shitty drop rate. Sure they may get botted still but at least they are a little tougher to kill and it may spread the campers out a bit and increase the odds without breaking the game.

[Corrderio]

But if we make them forced pop it'd be epic to see the ppl piss and moan for paying money for a bot D:

[Kipling]

Can leave the Kings how they are, but perhaps add Ridill and D-Ring to the loot pool of the KS99 versions with the same drop rate.

Since the drop rate of both is total shit (you can do 20 Fafnirs in a row and not get a Ridill) I don't think it would flood the market that much. So what if you did, just means people won't be quite as heartbroken if SE released some gear that totally made Zilart stuff obsolete.

If not that, toss the gear on Vrtra/Jorm/something else with a repop time similar to kings and the same shitty drop rate. Sure they may get botted still but at least they are a little tougher to kill and it may spread the campers out a bit and increase the odds without breaking the game.

LOL, is this serious?

[BadKarma]

LOL, is this serious?

Very stupid too imo, HAY LETS STUFF 500 people in a 16 foot long area

[Kipling]

Very stupid too imo, HAY LETS STUFF 500 people in a 16 foot long area

HOLY SHIT WHAT IF A RIDILL AND A SPEED BELT DROPS AT THE SAME TIME OMFG

[LordshadowRagnarok]

Squeenix actually reads the wiki suggestions forum. Please, post this there. This is deffinately a valid idea.

[Gredival]

Who the fuck is this guy and is he serious? Get your head out of your ass you moron. 100-150 people is not a large portion of any server. Do you even know math? That's less than 5% I guarantee you. I have played this game for 5 years and have never felt the desire to camp kings. Fuck, most everyone I know has never wanted to camp kings. We all still have found ways to entertain ourselves in FFXI over the years. Get over yourself.

Another of those inexplicably bitter non HNMLS players that devotes a disproportionate amount of time decrying the evils of world spawns compared with their lack of interest in Kings?

First if you read my posts at all I indicated that it's not the case that Kings were irreplaceable but that they would need to be, in some way, replaced. My point is that Square's style of administration is ill-suited to make that change. XI currently runs on the premise that you will do old content for a long time for crap drops. The whole way this functions is by the drops being crap.

If you make the drops more common, Square will had to add something else for us to do. This will either be equally time-consuming (which means that all the change people will clamor for will result in relatively little because casual players will still not enter the ring) or it will necessitate a radical structural change in XI gear where the top levels of gear have short shelf-life and are replaced every few months with new End Game content. This system where you get people hooked by constantly releasing new content for them instead of giving them really hard content they spend years on is characterized better by WoW.

Reference the Sky analogy. People who didn't even do Sky jumped onto the Sky ship when Byakko got nerfed. Crowded out, and now Sky's emptier than it ever was because people finished it.

But Sky, even its most crowded days, facilitated 5+ runs of nearly any God but Byakko (if Ulli was being a bitch). All the pop items were on 2hr cooldown NMs. What happens when you do that with Kings, where previously the mobs popped once a day and the HQs once every 5-9 days?

Massive flooding. And no matter your opinion of Kings as an activity, the rewards are undeniably good. Many pieces are irreplaceable and sit at the very top of the gear food-chain. So what happens when everyone gets them like they did with Haidate? Well, then a major activity has just gotten its pillars cut from under it. Right now, even for people who don't participate in Kings, there exists the quest to better oneself. That quest takes a major hit when a lot of the utmost pinnacle of gear becomes common as dirt (all those people who don't care about Ridill now will probably care a lot more if they can get one as easy as Haidate is now)

That's where my whole point about the necessity of fresh content comes in. You have to keep dangling the carrot. You can change Kings, but you'd have to in some way replace them. I'm not saying it's not possible, but given the outright bile everyone regards Square with why would you have faith they could do this correctly?

Look at different hacked private servers for MMO's. Sure none of them compare to the full official version, but which ones do better? The ones that remove tedious elements and respond quickly to fill player desires unanswered by official developers, but also leave major challenging portions of the game in place. Servers where you can pick up the best armor in the street, kill one monster to hit max level, etc. always perform very badly. Surely some people still play them, but nothing representative of the servers truer to the original. Within 10 minutes the novelty is done.

Fun in games is doing the challenge, then enjoying the rewards. For traditional games that reward lies mostly in the utility of the reward. The Biggorron Sword helps you get through OOT faster. But for an MMO enjoying that reward is more complex and it involves other people - working with and against them. And whatever you want to attribute it to (greed, ego, Oedipus complexes) it's going to be a lot less rewarding to have that gear when everyone has it (cue the facepalms that happened after Bonanza when retard PLDs won Hauteclaire)

Lastly if it's such a small overall amount of people that camp Kings or even have an interest why is there always the incessant bitching about the pit and about the botters who ruin the pit by people who don't camp in the pit? Why waste your breath bitching about getting an activity you have no interest in?

My point is that for a lot of us in the pit, the competition is fun. What needs to be changed is the botting, and only the botting. And that can be solved, and should be solved, without resorting to scrapping the World Spawn nature of the system. There is a disproportionate amount of people who don't camp who advocate fixing it by overhauling the system. To me there seems to be other motivations for that line of thinking.

I think botting is the strawman of the "Kings suck" arguments. Don't get me wrong I condemn botting; I'm not one of those who is trying to justify botting because "others do it anyway." But I will say, with a few exceptions though (keep in mind I reside in the server where this latest round of Absolution NASA bot drama came up), botting isn't a horrendous problem. To the best of my knowledge botting within my shell is minimal as it is within every shell besides Absolution (and its forerunners). Every shell probably has a few botters, but no more than a handful. It tends to be server transfer cancer-recruit shells that do all the botting. But even so, they don't always claim. Even with them, definitely no more than 50% (and that's a very liberal estimate) of the Fafhoggs in a week (that I actually go camp) are bot claimed (that figure reached by comparing NASA Bot shell's claim rate vs. Everyone else).

To me it seems like the King-decriers just throw botting as a justification to not camp and to complain about getting the system changed so that access to this gear widens (which for whatever reason they claim is obsolete while pressing for it to be more widely available)

None of what Kings add to this game is irreplaceable; just irreplaceable with the way Square currently manages XI. But to suggest just scrapping World Spawns and make everything happy-Sky-time with ??? is ignorant. Fafhogg's probably a lot more important to this game than you care to admit.

[Seraphus]

HOLY SHIT WHAT IF A RIDILL AND A SPEED BELT DROPS AT THE SAME TIME OMFG

HOLY SHIT ITS A SPEEDDLE RIBELT GET THE FUCK IN THE CAR

[Kipling]

HOLY SHIT ITS A SPEEDDLE RIBELT GET THE FUCK IN THE CAR

HAHAHA

[Raithen]

Another of those inexplicably bitter non HNMLS players that devotes a disproportionate amount of time decrying the evils of world spawns compared with their lack of interest in Kings?

Holy shit I, nor anyone else for that matter, is going to read your wall of text, but jesus don't go assuming things about me. I don't see how I came across as bitter; I was pointing out that you're a fucking dumbass. I have my Black Belt, my friends have their Ridills. I'm just telling you to get your head out of your ass and stop being fucking retarded. Kings disappearing, or people camping Kings disappearing, would in no way damage this game.

[Zumi]

Anyone that got kicked out of a LS that bought the bot send it to SE yet? lol

[Corrderio]

Anyone that got kicked out of a LS that bought the bot send it to SE yet? lol

I'm hoping to god the Fenrir peeps did after how bad they seemed to have got screwed over.

[Gredival]

Holy shit I, nor anyone else for that matter, is going to read your wall of text, but jesus don't go assuming things about me. I don't see how I came across as bitter; I was pointing out that you're a fucking dumbass. I have my Black Belt, my friends have their Ridills. I'm just telling you to get your head out of your ass and stop being fucking retarded. Kings disappearing, or people camping Kings disappearing, would in no way damage this game.

Your argument is that you've never felt a desire to camp Kings and that you don't know anyone who has. That seemed to indicate you didn't do them, nor did you ever want to. If you did in fact do them, good for you. But you would be completely wrong to say that no one camps because they want to.

Content takes room. Arguments are supposed to be developed. I backed up my claims. All you've done is repeat "fucking dumbass" a bunch of times.

[Tricen]

Anyone that got kicked out of a LS that bought the bot send it to SE yet? lol

A long time ago, someone did this with a bot. Wasn't an uber bot I don't think, got a bunch of LS members banned.

[Kaces]

why do you guys assume if the bot is sent in, it will be dissected and dealt with? "nasa's" method of claiming is the safest way possible, even safer than hewhocannotbenamed's version of the packet bot.

[Kaia]

Someone else said it best... If you whine about kings but don't spam the crap out of salvage and Einherjar, then you are part of the problem.
I stopped doing kings after a certain LS moved to my server and botted everything to fund their relics (95% of their LS got banned for salvage duping, btw). I'll put any of my jobs with salvage gear against anyone with kings gear, and while I might not win definitively every time, I'll always put up a close match. I don't agree with botting at all... but christ, people need to find another outlet for their aggression. If you can't stand losing claims then go do Einherjar and Salvage. Ridills and Drings are all but obsolete now, anyway. The only thing you're missing by not doing kings is flexing your epeens in front of people while you fight and they watch.

I'm comfortable with the thought that the people using bots now are probably the same people who used Gameshark to beat Goldeneye 64.

People will always cheat to get ahead, and good people will always become cheaters so they can keep up. I'm sure Barry Bonds would love to stop taking steroids... but if he did, he'd cease to be occasionally 2-3x better than other players.

[Omnipotent]

why do you guys assume if the bot is sent in, it will be dissected and dealt with? "nasa's" method of claiming is the safest way possible, even safer than hewhocannotbenamed's version of the packet bot.

OMG I KNOW WHO hewhocannotbenamed is!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!