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.

style="width: 400px; height: 304px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/77098">

Hell yeah, it's like we're a Bot Train!

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:
style="font-weight: bold;">


- 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 href="http://www.kinahescorts.com" target="_blank">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 : style="color: rgb(6, 253, 105);"
href="http://www.aiontthkinah.com" target="_blank">www.aiontthkinah.com style="color: rgb(6, 253, 105);"> for your crafting
kinah needs!



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