Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

If you're still playing Aion right now, you're probably in one of two groups. You might be a casual player, probably in the late 20's or early 30's of leveling, and just now starting to feel the grind in your limited playtime opportunity. Or you might be one of the level 4 legion warlords, suffering for millions upon millions of experience points to get past the final few levels so you can never have a level based disadvantage in PvP again. No matter what group you're a part of, you've seen them.  Who knows, you might have been tempted to try them. Of course I'm talking about...

Bots. Like a cancer targeting the useless fat in your body, they terrorize the indigenous life of the world of Aion that has no idea how to fight back. They fight in zones for 10 levels at a time. They die and run back and die again before some operator takes them over with a full level of soul healing that probably costs more than a house to heal. Of course, they pay for that house with a mansion of fluxes from grinding in the area and a treasure trove of greens.

You see them everywhere. With classy names like Aaaaaaaa and Bjfkj they make you feel warm and fuzzy when you see a gladiator who actually knows what he is doing compared to these clowns. Assassins used to be all the rage for the botters, but Gladiators' superior durability and simple attack chains just scream 'bot me'. They steal your mobs, your aether, and would probably try and steal your firstborn if it didn't aggro.


Let's take a look at the good things bots do for us in Aion:

- Bots reduce the population of a lot of the aggressive monsters in annoying areas, such as the east gate area of Altgard with the annoying spiders, and the farmlands of Brusthonin.

- Bots make aether affordable for those who do not harvest and use it themselves

- Bots make some of the more annoying materials available. such as fluxes. Gathering bots put out Pure and Brilliant ores to great effect.

But they also put us through a lot of crap:

- They take up valuable space in front of the doors to the broker and bank in the capital with awesome signs like @@@@@@@ AWESOME MILLION KINAH 4 AMERICAN DOLLA DELIVERED BY HOT NIGHT ELF ASMODEAN WELCOME TO www.kinahescorts.com @@@@@@@

- Not only that, but they love to randomly shout awesome lines like HEY, COME HERE every 5 minutes. This leads you to shut off all of your local chat while crafting, leaving you only whispers and the almighty LFG channel to entertain you if your legion is asleep. General doesn't exist, it just migrated into LFG on virtually every server. Enjoy your Chuck Norris jokes and racial commentary.

- If that asshat Ekansssssssssss steals one more of my monsters I'm going to petition him and follow him around to the ends of the earth! Oh wait, the GMs don't care. Time to move to a different quest/grind zone since I can't compete with a soulless monster.

- I hate you level 20 chanter. I hate you and your running around with nothing more than a celerity chant and your birthday suit mining Adamantium/Platinum around Beluslan Fortress, a 30+ area.

How you can spot one of these jerks:

- No title, no legion. Dead give away. Even a retard will equip his precious TREASURE HUNTER title before he ascends. I sometimes would wear Shugo Chef into combat on accident, so don't hate if they have a non-combat title.

- The retard running into a tree for half an hour because he doesn't understand how waypoints work.

- The TRAIN.  This is particularlly funny to watch because it's 5 gladiators running around like they just got off the short bus all doing the exact same attack chain to a monster and killing it in .5 seconds for 2500 xp if that. You just have to make sure your monster isn't a part of the Cole Train, and you're safe from this hell.

- They attempt to steal your mobs at 30%.

- They run out from town with soul sickness and immediately pick a fight with the nearest wolf and die again. And again. And again. The poor bot owner probably comes back to an empty experience bar, and he STILL levels faster than you.

So what can you do?  /autoreporthunting is the first and laziest step. Do they care? Who knows.  The second option is petitioning. Petitioning a GM with a case of a bot running into a wall forever is a powerful argument alright. It's likely they'll be removed within minutes of being discovered... if they actually are discovered. The final option is don't do it yourself. It sounds so tempting, so easy, so rewarding. You'll get to 50 without knowing what an advanced stigma is and be totally clueless in PvP. This is a recipe for total disaster, and you just paid good money to get to the end game only to have no idea who you are and probably no friends to experience it with. Don't bot, but if you craft, don't hate on bots. A system revolving around rare drops is ridiculous to begin with and they make it a little less painful, at the expense of making the rest of our lives that much more painful.

Stow whispers : www.aiontthkinah.com for your crafting kinah needs!

If only we had right-click block again...