Over in China, Aion follows the suit of many other MMOs: A major bot problem. This isn’t necessarily due to NCsoft “not caring” about the gold farmers, but rather the enormous market compared to services in the West that brings in a substantial profit margin and results in a flood of input into a system that is already large enough to explode. It’s important to remember a major facet of gold farming: If there wasn’t any demand, there wouldn’t be any market for supply. But there will always be a demand, proportional to the size of the population, and legitimate players cannot be blamed for the actions of those who do buy from these services.
Players in China, however, decided that enough was enough, and staged a protest. MMOSITE estimates that there were thirty thousand people in attendance, in a protest that spanned numerous cities and lagged those areas to a slow crawl. Players created new toons adorned with names like “no bots” and “ban the bots.” Eventually, at least four servers buckled under the strain and had to be taken down for maintenance.
Of course, this inevitably received the attention of NCSoft, who attempted to disperse the crowd by spawning several Grand Chieftain Saendukals (boss), which the swarms of players quickly overtook.
You can read the entire story here: http://news.mmosite.com/content/2010-04-12/30000_aion_players_protest_bots_led_to_servers_down.shtml#ue_pic
Hopefully this sent a clear message to NCsoft to ramp up the anti-bot operations over in China. Here in North America/Europe, the bot problem isn’t nearly as large and NCsoft has brought in the G-Unit to bust gold farming. I’m not certain if there is a similar system in China.
More in Aion as it appears.
MMO Fallout 