App was neither the first nor the last packet bot. There are plenty others still around. Fuzz didn't come up with the concept of a packet bot to make himself more money. NASA was simply by and far the most prevalent and readily available (which is why it had such a hefty price tag).
I'm not disputing any of that. That doesn't disprove my argument though. He made a bot to outcompete his own product. He used the "arms race" fear to drive people to buy his new bot at absurd prices, and he also profited on the side selling App based on its linked camping to the NASA competitors. That's an Arms Race.
Your only examples come from a game where RMT is highly illegal and frowned upon. In a game where, for example, the company providing the game also sells currency, none of these issues arise. Other issues certainly do, but RMT aren't really doing much these days. They send annoying tells (just another reason to use windower!) and try and hack accounts, but anyone whose not completely stupid should be fine. They were absolutely terrible before, and they were annoying as shit in sky, but these days they do next to nothing.
You asked what made the RMT bad and I answered. You can't say the argument doesn't apply because it only holds in conditions where RMT is illegal... when such conditions are in fact in place for FFXI.
And the fact that RMT are injecting drive-by Trojans into ads placed from Google is *quite* malicious. The RMT have proven capable of hacking tokens in real time by intercepting your PoL and force killing it. This is an incredible amount of virus detail really when you consider the fact token hardware is in use by professional banks. I mean of course people can use Firefox+NoScript+Adblocker to avoid infection, but that just sucks for the innocent webmasters who get deprived of the income as a result.
The RMT are always screwing someone over and you're supporting, enabling, and helping that malignant industry when you sell it gil.
4. Everything I've killed since I started botting, I've killed before I started botting. Doesn't lessen accomplishments at all (especially since claiming and fighting are entirely different).
Claiming Nidhogg with a bot doesn't make a 3 minute fight any less impressive. Claiming Fafnir legitimately does not make an hour fight any less embarrassing. I agree on this point.
But there's two negative impacts to botting.
First is external. Claiming is supposed to be random, supposed to reward shells that bring the most people consistently. Over the long run will reward those who put in the work. Botting fucks them over. Yadda yadda yadda, stuff you obviously won't care about if you're willing to use NASA.
Second is gamewide. For the most part, the rarity of FFXI makes it so that gear is supposed representation of a player's skill and a player's dedication. This maxi-min in this game is harsh. Ebodies, Drings, etc. used to be treated with respect because you have to do a hell of a lot to get them.
I feel that gets tarnished when you got yours simply by fighting more mobs cause you paid fuzz more money.
False. Absolution is (or was when I was in it) by and far the best shell on Quetz. Aura is absolutely laughable. The shell as a whole is probably the worst collection of players I've ever had the displeasure of playing alongside of. And before you accuse me of being prejudiced, I was in Aura for a couple weeks as well, and absolutely could not stand it. There are MAYBE 2 competent, decent players in the entire shell, and they are all absolute wastes of accounts as far as I'm concerned.
Once again, you won a battle against people who stopped caring long before you showed up... and retards.
Big accomplishment there. Pat yourself on the back why don't cha?
You're going to compare Absolution to what were undoubtedly three of the best linkshells in the history of the game?
Welcome to the clue train. That's exactly why I said your shell is shit on an *absolute scale*
You do realize there are players that are/were in Absolution that are excellent don't you? Forewarned was in NiN. A large majority of the shell was in Demo at some point or another.
And there are still some people in Dezvoltare who I respect. But that doesn't mean the shell as a collective isn't/wasn't full of complete and utter fail.
The shell is (or was) the best on the server, and a good shell overall.
Again, big fish in the small pond isn't impressive. Summa cum laude at Tijuana Tech vs. bottom percentile student from Harvard.
Some of the players are garbage, I will agree with that 100%. While I was in the shell there were several players I would have liked to have kicked. No, it's not NiN. No, it's not Apathy, or Excellence, or Iizerg. However, many of the players are excellent, and I'm sure you could find 18 players from Absolution who were about as knowledgeable as 18 from any of those shells. Was everyone? No. But I'm damned sure I could have made an Alliance consisting of damn good players.
Your top 18 vs. Apathy Excellence iiZerg NiN's bottom 18, I'll bet against you any day.
The only thing NASA helps you push people out of is Kings. Tiamat, Khimaira, Cerberus, Dark Ixion, and Sandworm were all killed very regularly as well.
And assuming you actually fought shells *that cared*, it certainly helps at Khim Cerb Tia KV. The reason I say your "takeover" of Quetz didn't mean much is that you got most stuff handed to you on a silver platter. Dez never had campers for this shit and even when we did we didn't have a night shift crew to handle them.
But if you tried to move in on those mobs vs a very top tier shell? You'd be fighting for claim the whole 24 hour window every hour. You'd be fighting for Tiamat every 30 minutes for the whole three days. And certainly NASA would give you a claim advantage then. But would you have been able to deal with it? I'm not so sure
Competitive players are drawn to each other, and tend to form competitive shells.
Competitive shells seek to dominate claims as much as possible and maximize their reward/effort ratio by using bots.
Excellence, NiN, iiZerg, Apathy, etc. are the pinnacle because of who they are. I have no doubt each has some botters. But none of them structured their Linkshell around botting. And I have no doubt they would all be successful without a single bot, even faced against a NASA shell.
The same is not true of Absolution. If the roles were reversed and Absolution was the native shell and Dezvoltare or Integral or Perseverance moved in with NASA, would you retain your dominance?
And as a sidenote: At what point do competitive players necessarily value winning the competition more than the competition. Everyone justifies their own foray into botting with the presumption that their opponents already have and they will get wiped out otherwise. Certainly competitive people are more likely to value winning and thus are likelier to overcome inhibitions against cheating.
But End Game success doesn't require botting. That's a self fulfilling prophecy. (Again, there's a difference between whether a shell has bots and whether a shell depends on bots)
You're completely avoiding the point that the people who play better and more are drawn to shells that do more (ie, claim more).
Do you think repeating this makes it more germane to the discussion somehow? This doesn't prove anything about your shell's mean skill level on an absolute scale.
Big fish, small pond.
Or you get shit like Dark Ixion that lets you afk like you would at Kings, but completely dodge botting? If you honestly think endgame would be more interesting with more then 3 king camps, you might want to rethink that.
1) Ixion's scan windows occur more often than King pop windows. In addition scanners have to watch through campaign in case it pops right after a campaign. Moreover dipshits and retards can scare Ixion away and frustrate attempts to kill it (notably, Richie Rich shells that can toss money buying extra toons are the ones most likely to profit from this caveat)
2) Doesn't solve back for the gigantic waste of time Sandworm becomes.
3) Doesn't solve back for numerous fail that was Einherjar nerf, Salvage, MMM, FoV augment system, and mini-expansions is... well WoTG NMs can't be botted!
4) I've seen a NASA shell bot the fuck out of Sandworm by automating scanning, so I'm pretty sure it helps you a bit at DI too. Especially if you augment NASA with trash accounts you buy to feed your extra scanning power (because the scanning functions off packet sniffing not your ability to actually widescan)
5) I think the game would be more fun if Square didn't have to move away from competitive PvE because some people have no respect for fair play in a competition.
Completely different scenarios. Baseball is a game. Being a professional baseball player in the MLB is a job, which comes with contracts and rules. There's absolutely nothing wrong with them using steroids to, say, play baseball with their friends. If you want to get SE to make playing FFXI a profession, go for it. I'll quit botting immediately.
What makes FFXI such an exception that justifies doing every and anything in it to get ahead? It meets all the criterion for a normal competition where something is at stake.
In FFXI you are competing for a (chance at) a reward. In the bigger picture you are also competing for supremacy in a "league" of sorts. There is a zero sum system and by cheating you thereby directly harm those you compete against. The method of competition is supposed to reward something and you are cheating by sidelining the importance of that something.
Is it because it's virtual? That doesn't seem like it matters. Via your own standards, professional Counterstrike players or Starcraft players aren't allowed to cheat cause there are contracts involved.
Is it about the contracts? So it's fine to cheat in any competition which isn't a job?
That has to be wrong.
Let's say two kids in the neighborhood got beef with each other. Let's say it's over an iPod. They decide to settle it with who wins in a boxing match. Then one of them burns their gloves (smears their gloves with the clotting ointment; making it so that you can blind your opponent) and wins the match only because they cheated. I don't think anyone in the world would say that instance of cheating was justified -- at least not justified by the fact it was a competition that wasn't about a job.
