I've struggled for years to define exactly what it is that makes botting in Lineage 2 so disturbing to me, personally. This post is an attempt to cement that definition and express my viewpoint on what a bot is.
Everyone signs the same social contract.
Everyone picks a race.
Everyone picks a sex.
Everyone picks a height.
Everyone picks a hairstyle.
Everyone picks a face.
Everyone begins this game with an act of self creation and expression. We choose our names. People scream who they are in all caps. Other people understate themselves with none. ASKFOR. dekciw. Crown. Life. pku520. ErB. Mong. spam. LIE.
These names and faces and pixels in motion are living expressions of real people in how they play and interact with each other. Each is unique, unpredictable, and dynamic - evidence of life that can't be simulated or completely defined in one unchanging block of text that might attempt to define how something called a 'human' behaves in any given condition, and what the nature of that thing is.
A character with a name and a face and an identity - a human identity - no longer being controlled by any person at the keyboard is a thing that, when fully understood, should terrify you. It is the lie of humanity where no humanity exists. A thing that moves and jerkes and runs and talks like people without ever having been one. A thing without a heartbeat that was not born, has no mother, does not sleep, and does not think.
This is what made Poe's Mask of the Red Death such a terrifying thing to comprehend. Something that wore a mask and walked like a human through a crowd in silence. When they rushed to pull back the mask and direct their fury at the wearer, there was simply nothing there. Nothing under the mask but empty space. The total lack not just of a human, but of anything.
Death was under the mask because nothing was there.
The lack of a human and the death it represents is what I see when a cluster of bots twitches across my screen. I see an animated mask of pixels and sound created to make me think I am not alone when in fact I am, and was from the beginning. The people around me were never people to begin with.
Long term, wide spread botting leads players to begin seeing one another not as people but as the lie of other people. Distrust becomes the default and the norm between two people interacting with each other for the first time. New players are treated as if they don't exist because everyone thinks they truly do not exist. Game interaction loses its humanity, and that humanity is what attracts us all to this game.
We don't need programs to compete. Humans play Lineage 2 as it exists today in ways no script or program can be equivalent to. Agreeing to play with each other as humans is what makes our community a community of consent and not ****. Violating the social agreement we all made by using a program to control a character obliterates the fundamental trust our community is based on, replacing the foundation with lie. The concept of a lie being the foundation of all human interaction is one that will drive a human insane.
It does not need to happen twice.
Real bots are obvious. If you see them, write down their names, the time and date, what they were doing, and take screen shots. Submit this information to NCSoft through the http://us.ncsoft.com/en/support/ interface.
Yes, bots are being banned. Keep reporting them. Keep them out of good clans and away from the community until NC has the time it needs to read the reports and remove them from the game.