Yeah when I said "protection racket" I thought it was obvious that I was exaggerating.
Not implying that some kind of international cabal has taken over EQ. Or maybe one has, who knows?
More like a corrupt DMV (oMg FeDerAl EmPlOyee) worker taking kickbacks to give out fake drivers licenses, of course that would never happen.
Easier to believe that people running a dozen or more automated characters in multiple zones 24/7 are passing every GM AFK check than it is to believe that they could be getting their beaks wet in exchange for looking the other way, or at least giving a heads up before they make their rounds.
I don't think it's likely that we will ever know what is really going, there has just been so many "weird" things that have happened across the servers in regards to the afk botting that makes it very hard to speculate that there isn't something more nefarious going on.
I can give you 3 examples from the same bot crew that ran on mangler that I personally witnessed and are not just a story I heard from someone. There was a bot crew that ran in every pick of solb on Mangler afk farming. It was 1 group per pick and the monk puller wasn't warping, but was ran on a script that would go to the mob and actually pull it. I used to spend all day in solb on mangler waiting for naggy to spawn just to mess with RI out of boredom and force them to do naggy with no charm pets and not using the wall trick so I would often watch people mess with this bot crew.
Tell me if you can justify the suspensions that these 3 different people got:
1. Since the monk puller was ran on a script that would run to the mob, tag it, then return to camp waiting for the mob to arrive, someone decided to wait for the monk to tag a mob and then they mezzed it. The monk returned to camp waiting for the mob to arrive. This mob was pretty far away from where they were pulling to. The bot crew was inactive for over an hour while the guy just kept the mob mezzed since the monk still had that mob targetted the whole time waiting for it to get to their camp. About an hour and half in to it, the guy mezzing that one single mob got a 7 day suspension. In what world could a person get suspended for chain mezzing a random mob in solb?
2. From many people watching the monks pathing over time, we noticed that there were some corners that the monk would turn very sharply so if you simply stood in their way they would sometimes get stuck. An ogre SK decided to just FD at one of these corners and the monk puller got stuck there. The ogre wasn't blocking the path, he was just simply FD'd at the corner leaving tons of room for any normal person to walk by. Any normal player could have just taken 1 step to the side and went around it. After the monk was stuck there for a while, the ogre SK got a 7 day suspension. Is it against the rules to FD now? He wasn't afk. He was at his computer, we were chatting in tells. He never got any tell from a GM asking him to move or if he was afk.
3. A couple days after these two instances, a necro went and FD'd in the middle of their camp. I was talking with him in tells and he said he was recording them and sending the video. About 30 minutes or less after he sent in a petition, his character went LD. He messages me in discord with a SS of his 7 day suspension. Is it against the rules to petition someone?
How in any of these cases was their suspension justified? I'm sure you could lawyer quest a reason, but it's not something that would normally get any person in trouble. Would you not agree that things like this is why players heavily speculate about connections between botters and GM's?
edit: Just to add, I believe the first 2 cases the suspensions were labelled as zone disruption and the 3rd was harassment.
