Botting and Macroing Policy and Guidelines

I wanted to let players know that we have new server logic in place for tracking and identifying botters and are starting to enforce this more strictly than we have in the past. We won't go into the details of how the system works, but it immediately flagged enough that were all clearly players who were playing unattended AKA botting, that we thought the best thing to do was to issue a warning before starting to swing the ban hammer too hard.

Players who are botting for gaining items of value or for killing creatures may be subject to a permanent ban from the game. We just banned a few of these. These seriously damage the game and are not acceptable.

In the past we had said we weren't enforcing players who were botting crafting. We had said we weren't going after crafters because there are some elements of crafting that can be tedious, but since we had said that we have added batch crafting options to remove the tedious elements for modest amounts of crafting.

Sadly, some players saw us saying we weren't going after crafters who bot as an open invitation to bot salvage and craft as many as 30,000 items a day, so this policy of overlooking this practice must end. While this botting does little harm to the economy, it damages the fairness of the game. If some players bot crafting, all players feel they need to do the same to be competitive.

As @Lum the Mad is fond of saying, "This is why we can't have nice things".

For clarity, what we are considering botting is unattended playing. It doesn't matter whether this is done through a third party program or a keyboard macro or a robotic arm. You need to be at the computer pressing buttons. Backing yourself into a corner in a low tier scene with auto attack and a macro to keep you from idling out is still botting.

Going forward, no botting will be tolerated for crafting or salvaging and first violations will receive a one week (168) hour suspension ban from the game. Second violations will be more severe. Consider this your fair warning.

Also, if you want to start a batch of crafting stuff while you go to get a drink or use the bathroom, GREAT, this warning isn't aimed at you, so don't panic. If you have a concern about your actions here, or if you happened to be banned for botting and actually were not, please bring it up with our support team.

Thanks for your understanding. We will start enforcing this strictly later this week.