IDEAS FOR RYZOM

I am not sure how serious the issue of boss camping is. During the last 3 days I encountered a lvl 170 and a lvl 270 boss without any intention to go for or having searched it. As too few of my friends were on, I decided to leave them for the next to detect them. A couple of weeks earlier, I encountered another lvl 270 boss which I reported to friends (I was about to log out at that time and could not wait). In neither case I saw a suspicious charakter in the environs. In some cases, bosses up to lvl 270 have even been called out in uni during the last months, therefore I assume the issue is more and more to get an apt team rather than just spotting.

The situation with nameds seems to have relaxed even more. I seldom see homins near known spawns of frequently searched nameds. I do not know about sup mats situation too much, but sometimes saw characters hanging around for no obvious purpose. Maybe they were just idle, or indeed spamming tracking spells. But here, I think that the return of the KP will be the solution.

About a year ago I heard and read a lot of accusations of camping against players I knew well. And from knowing them well I also knew that they had no need of camping as they were able to traverse every region of interest in short time, the rest done by /tar macros, and I saw them patrolling.

Using alts for tracking may be felt as abusive, and I do not like or defend it. But I think we should be more patient and not jump to too easy conclusions. Read especially the first part of Casy's post attentively and imagine you had to be the CSR deciding whether a certain behavior was unruly or not. The CSR are volonteers, and their efforts deserve better than being wasted that way.


Edit (comment to Casy not to waste space for another post): the 2 lvl 270 bosses mentioned were "important" ones (for PvP jewelry to be exact). Camping is to some extent self defeating: even if having an alt logged all time one has also to be close to the spot and able to gather a team (ok 3-4 players suffice even for lvl 270), otherwise the effort is wasted. And even that may not work without botting. So I would rather suggest botting detectors (which could be implemented on server side).

The problem is that these "empty spaces" are often important for diggers or explorers, especially those of lower level, not seldom the resting point after tough agro regions (e.g. in HH, GoC, or SC). Making Atys more impassable for younger explorers and single players because of a few campers is not a good idea.

Same goes, btw., for Mjollren's proposal of bosses and their minions roaming as a large pack of agro. Would also harm lower level players venturing in higher level regions as well as diggers and homins being afk for a minute.

Sounds all pretty much overkill to me, and waste of time for a problem of lower significance.

Again: The number of lvl 270 bosses is 25, that of lvl 220 bosses 27. The number of spawns per boss is 3, as I recall (or 4?), a few like Shooketh, Stinkan, Cratchakin, Slavekya may have only 1 or 2. Assuming that out of these 52 bosses only 20 or so are "important", still more than 60 (80?) spots remain to be monitored (sup plots not considered).

So it needs a lot of administrative work to monitor bosses, several players interacting, and for effectiveness, botting will be inevitably involved.

Such behavior may be detected from server side without much effort. The position of the boss spawns is in the code so that resting at the same place in a 250m diameter for a longer time may easily be found out. Idling but sending messages constantly is an abnormal behavioral pattern which is easy to identify, and botting detection is a standard procedure which can be implemented with fairly less effort than changing boss behavior - mind that the server is "big brother" and may monitor regularities in /tar calls, command and macro execution in general. The CSR and devs are aware of the accounts using an IP, or can identify them. So it should be possible to make botting by campers risky. And camping without botting is toothless.