I've been seeing a lot of threads about the farmer situation lately, even more than normal. As a result I've taken it upon myself to create a 9 step solution to the problem.
1. Locate all your friends and close relatives who bot, buy adena, or engage in other treacherous activities.
2. Drag them into a basement, preferably soundproof, and tie them securely to an uncomfortable chair.
3. Explain to them for a good 15 minutes exactly how their actions are harming the community, destroying the economy, and killing baby angels in heaven.
4. Beat them mercilessly with a tennis racket for 45 minutes or more, be careful to avoid severe head trauma or they may forget the point you're trying to make.
5. Send them off on their way with the mission to perform this anti cheating ritual on anyone they know who's cheating. Cheaters know cheaters after all.
6. In a few weeks farmers will no longer have any buyers, seeking to correct this problem farmers search newspapers and news sites, but with their grasp of the english language they are only able to decipher words like 'tennis racket'.
7. Farmers start up legitimate factories creating high quality tennis rackets and distribute them around the world. Popularity in tennis surges and it replaces all other major sports.
8. Aliens invade earth and challenge us to a tennis match for the fate of the world, with the recent surge of tennis popularity we easily dispatch the aliens and send them packing.
9. All people live together in peace and harmony using recently obtained alien technology. MMO design improves.
Thus concludes Silviera's Guide to Fighting Aliens...er...Eliminating Farmers.
In case you haven't figured it by now, this is a joke. The farmer problem in L2 and MMO's in general is not a joke however.
If you want to fix this problem then you can't tolerate cheaters just because they're your friends or clanmates. The market for adena is always going to exist as long as there are buyers for it.
It can be hard to take a stand in the face of cheaters when they exist everywhere. You might know someone that only buys a little adena to get them off their feet, or someone that buys it when they drop a valuable piece of equipment and don't feel they should grind for it again. You might know someone who just wants to have the best equipment, or someone who wants to help out their struggling clanmates.
These people are the core of the problem, not everyone who contributes to the problem is some powergaming server leader. If we can't take a stand against the people we trust then we can't make a difference in those we don't.
In short, the problem will never go away until people can accept games for what they are and play them within the rules.
We've all heard the NC responses to the problem before. They say they're doing their best and fighting to eliminate the sellers.
Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but it doesn't change the fact that we can do something about the buyers ourselves. If we don't, this kind of thing is going to exist in MMO's forever.
I've been seeing a lot of threads about the farmer situation lately, even more than normal. As a result I've taken it upon myself to create a 9 step solution to the problem.
1. Locate all your friends and close relatives who bot, buy adena, or engage in other treacherous activities.
2. Drag them into a basement, preferably soundproof, and tie them securely to an uncomfortable chair.
3. Explain to them for a good 15 minutes exactly how their actions are harming the community, destroying the economy, and killing baby angels in heaven.
4. Beat them mercilessly with a tennis racket for 45 minutes or more, be careful to avoid severe head trauma or they may forget the point you're trying to make.
5. Send them off on their way with the mission to perform this anti cheating ritual on anyone they know who's cheating. Cheaters know cheaters after all.
6. In a few weeks farmers will no longer have any buyers, seeking to correct this problem farmers search newspapers and news sites, but with their grasp of the english language they are only able to decipher words like 'tennis racket'.
7. Farmers start up legitimate factories creating high quality tennis rackets and distribute them around the world. Popularity in tennis surges and it replaces all other major sports.
8. Aliens invade earth and challenge us to a tennis match for the fate of the world, with the recent surge of tennis popularity we easily dispatch the aliens and send them packing.
9. All people live together in peace and harmony using recently obtained alien technology. MMO design improves.
In short, the problem will never go away until people can accept games for what they are and play them within the rules.
Rules suck.
Kinda looked like a Darkmotion post there at the begining, you had me scared for a second there...
Sellers bite but the buyers are the ones that bite teh big 0ne. Why ? Because they pay for computer code that doesn'T even belong to them in the first place.
I mean, that's about as stupid as selling DOS to Bill...
Don't let the size of the post scare you from actually reading it.
This is my response to the concerns of many players in L2 as of late, emphasized with a bit of humor and arranged in a separate thread to promote constructive criticism for once.
For those of you who prefer the footnotes: We can solve this problem on our own.
Don't let the size of the post scare you from actually reading it.
This is my response to the concerns of many players in L2 as of late, emphasized with a bit of humor and arranged in a separate thread to promote constructive criticism for once.
For those of you who prefer the footnotes: We can solve this problem on our own.
Silviera, well you made me laugh so you got 5 stars out of it. While I agree with you wholeheartedly, I've long since accepted farmers/botters/ebayers as something we have to live with. I'm simply happy in being in an alliance where the majority are legit and that's about as far as my expectations go.
I have to agree with the OP. In the beginning it was just the hardcore cheaters who bought adena. But the problem grew. First you have the PvPers who buy adena to catch up to the original cheaters. Then you have the more casual player who notices that lots of people have gear before they can even use it. Soon it becomes acceptable to many people (not to me).
As a WS, with level 9 craft, I know what it means when very few clanmates ever ask me to craft for them. No need to craft when the farmers will sell you adena, then take it back when you buy equipment from them.
Long time of not reading the forums means a free non-bump bump!
I agree with this - as for the person saying that this isn't an allowed post, you'd be missing the point if you think this aims at the farmer problem. It aims at the player problem.
Very well spoken, and I couldn't agree more - it's a difficult subject to breach, though - cheating is cheating, but bringing it up and standing against it will make you very lonely very quickly - or look for a new game.
Very well spoken, and I couldn't agree more - it's a difficult subject to breach, though - cheating is cheating, but bringing it up and standing against it will make you very lonely very quickly - or look for a new game.
True, this does alienate you a bit from a certain portion of the population. It's unlikely you'll find yourself a part of the most powerful Clans as well, since the stronger a Clan is the more likely it seems to have a 'look the other way' policy.
I also think that doing so allows you to have a better group of friends than just ignoring the problem however. You never know when someone else who's fed up with the way things have turned out is going to stand up beside you, and it's those people that you want to build a community out of.
If I strike from my friendlist all the people who I know have never been clanned or affiliated with cheaters and who have not looked the other way on someone (myself excluded, because I have done both), it will contain members of only one clan ... and that clan recently quit as a whole.
Disassociating yourself with everyone you know who has ever cooperated with cheaters is one thing, and taking a stand against those who continue to do so is another.
Everyone has made mistakes, the important thing is to learn from them and not repeat them.
You don't need to lose good friends over things like this, but there's an easy way to make people aware of your stand and perhaps make them think twice before supporting the farmers again.
The next time you hear someone talking about making a purchase, all you have to do is say, "Hey, that's not cool. If you really need the gear that badly I'll help you out. You're just going to make prices down the line even harder on yourself and all the rest of us." They might ignore you completely but they're not going to get angry and start hating you either. Even if they go through with the purchase that time you never know if the wisdom of your words will hit them again sometime in the future.
That's why it's important to start with people you trust. People that won't hide things from you, people that value your opinions. If they do the same it becomes a domino effect, but getting people to speak out is the hardest part.
You have no way of knowing wether they hide anything like that from you, unless you literally play with them all the time at the same location.
And they could still be cheating on different accounts. That's why I always ignore the "I play with them all the time so they can't be cheaters" comments.
There's an alliance, one clan of which I really liked - and they had another clan, but that clan didn't just have one bad egg - they were all very nice, and reeked like ebay like nobody's business. What now, of the standing invitation to the really nice clan, which would offer me everything from the sort of atmosphere I was looking for, to cooperation on the things I wanted to work together on, to my kind of sense of humour and clan events? I eventually accepted on an alt (but didn't get to meet up with them to tag before I quit).
I can tell them "expell them from your alliance, you can SEE they ebayed" - and what then, if they don't, and they wouldn't? I've just made the game a gloomier place for myself.
Taking a stand would have offended too many people I liked apart from that particular idiocy (because paying others to play a game for you is idiotic), it would have meant an end to pick-up groups etc.
Maybe it's discussed more openly on other servers, so that more opportunity to actually say "hey, that's not cool" arises - but the only thing I can ever think of is tell people how to make money, and then watch my niches close. :p
PS: The only way you could know someone didn't ebay is if you account-shared with them and kept close track of the money... which is, wohoo, against the rules.