They had a midday maintenance break yesterday due to a “matchmaking issue.” I first discovered an issue when I tried to get into a Chaos Dungeon and receive no response several times. Swapping characters did not help. I thought my network was bad because of how I had two Twitch streams up. Lastly, I thought perhaps that bots had flooded the Chaos Dungeons to cause them to move at a crawl. Then the announcement was made and it looked like we were going to be down for 2 hours, which was pretty annoying since I hate context switching. Luckily, the maintenance did not last that long but it was still annoying.
Taking a break, I read on reddit that the issue probably was a botting one where the bots, in hitting the “enter” key repeatedly might’ve caused an issue to effectively DDOS the Chaos Dungeons somehow. It’s pretty crazy how these companies still haven’t figured out how to deal with this problem. I think it’s fairly easy if you look at the bots’ patterns. Like if you see the class and their movement, it’s clear that they’re following a script. If the game implemented some sort of click tracking where you store all the movements points to a character’s audit log of actions, you can probably see an issue emerge. Like let’s say you see 20-30 of these bots performing similar activities in a given location. You take the audit log and somehow clip those actions and try to pattern match those with another sample set. You can probably flag areas that are notorious for bots and give those sections priority.
Afterwards, you have people reviewing these logs. If you had an internal system that could replicate the game play to a display, anyone viewing them (in a kind of spectator mode) easily could determine that this group are bots and you could bulk ban them.
My guess is that these companies simply do not have the tools in place to do such a thing. I imagine that the required tools would need some heavy duty servers to process this amount of logs and data. But that is the type of tool I would try to design in creating a system for setting up basic auto bans until better tools are developed.
At any rate, the ordeal made me focus more on my dailies for a good hour until the maintenance started. Some things I did was switching my three Punika characters to become Lopang enjoyers. I calculated that a single character who had 1302+ gear could make around 80k silver/day. So at 3 alts, you’re looking at 240k/day minus guaranteed expenses such as BiFrost, which would be 4k of silver per character for completing those quests. And at 11 alts in a guild, I have an additional 66k of silver/day that I must account for. That means 3 alts doing Lopangs easily can cover up a day’s worth of expenses while turning a nice profit. If I had 10 alts doing Lopangs, I could make 850k silver per day not including expenses, which still would round of to close to 800k/day. That’s not too bad and a decent reason for moving as many alts into Punika as fast as possible.
Speaking of moving up, my Shadowhunter finally hit ilvl 1100. I was really pissed off at the cost of the red stones for getting +15 on my weapon. It felt outrageous and I had to use up every little thing I could muster to get her over the hump. I simply did not want to farm more Feiton Chaos Dungeons and getting scraps each time for another few days. So I’ll probably give her a day or two off to build up some rest XP while allowing me to take a break before getting her into Punika and dealing with the two shitty dungeons that are super unfun. But I should be able to get her to ilvl 1325 fairly quickly I believe and eventually turn her into yet another Lopang Enjoyer.
My Gunslinger will be my next focus as I pushed her into ilvl 1040. The next phase is going to be ultra painful and I won’t have access to the much needed tailoring books and mats that the chicken event had been generous in supplying soon. So I imagine starting from her, moving more people into Punika will be like shoving ones wiener into a car door that gets slammed by a roided out pro-wrestler.
In switching my top three into Lopang enjoyers, I also changed my Paladin and Berserker into progress machines by having them do leapstone dailies. Already, I saw a significant difference on my Paladin just because I was able to hone three times successfully. I imagine one more day will be required before he can hit the last difficulty of Yorn’s Chaos Dungeons before preparing for Feiton. My Berserker and Deathblade do not have this problem because of the prior farming I had done in killing Flame Yoho. I probably should start farming Flame Yoho but it’s such a pain in the ass. To be honest, I just want to get through everything and I’m just going through the motions at this stage because there really isn’t much content that I can get excited about unless some severe nerfs happen and allow quick boosts to get you passed all the outdated content.
One happy thing that occurred was getting the Island Soul for Alteisen. I still have one more Island Soul to turn in but I feel like I’m making better horizontal progress than vertical progress. I even did one of those Sea Bounties the other day which confused the hell out of me. Apparently, I already have two done. With a bunch of these Secret Maps I’ve got in storage, I might pick a day where I just run around the sea and complete as many as I can. Also, I had picked up the Crescent Isle one too a day ago just doing the Hunting guild quest so that made me happy.
Gradually, I’m going to need to return to horizontal content once more of my people hit Feiton and thus a torturous, overbearing wall that’ll take weeks to climb over. I know I should at least finish up the easier continents for the Adventure Tome. I’m sure if I pool together all the flowers I’ve gathered on the side while doing my relic searches I should be able to get a few cooking recipes done on Punika. Also, I need to work on Rapport. With my Paladin moving back into Leapstone reward dailies, I decided to do Hypnos’s Eyes again. It’s very easy on a Paladin because he has great AoE attacks and his Ultimate one shots the end boss in no time. In addition, I can work on the reputation there which is a good one to do because of the last reward.
In seeing how well all these alts are doing, I cannot help but think how worthless my Deadeye is. I know I can probably Knowledge Transfer him through Rohendel. But it feels like such a waste. I might try checking to see how many North Vern Knowledge Transfers I have left. I might be out but if I have one more available, I feel like I should delete my Deadeye and start up a Destroyer. The only thing is that I don’t know if I want to re-level another character at this point. Not to mention I still want a Summoner whenever she comes out. But who knows. The Destroyer still seems fun but I really have no idea if I want to go through all this again. From the rumblings I’ve read, we may eventually get a Punika Pass and I’d far more prefer to use that on a fresh alt than leveling one from scratch.
At any rate, my enthusiasm for this game is meh right now. I still enjoy it to a degree but boredom is steadily settling in. I really hope that these idiots over at SmileGate, etc. can figure out how to retain their non-robotic player base because if they’re target audience are the non-living and the hardcores (which are almost like the non-living) then this game will officially die in 3 months. Mark my words.