>>41486Either way, a story: In the case of this game, players can choose between 1 of 2 factions, both of which can attack each other and will share the majority of end-game maps. Quest objectives are similar for both sides, so you will inevitably run into PvP when going about quests and grinding. There are also world bosses, boss monsters that only spawn every 24h hours or so and which you'd typically recruit everyone available for because of the large HP pool, strong attacks and valuable loot. In older Aion, you can actually duo most of these bosses or at least do them with a small group of friends, the risk being that it would only take 1 or 2 people from the enemy faction to kill everyone during the fight, since these bosses are designed for 12, 24 or more people and take some time.
I was doing some things with a group of experienced players, basically the jocks of the server, and we noticed one of those world bosses being up on a time-limited map that only had an hour or so left. We tried to kill it in our group of 6, but near the end got interrupted and killed by a handful of enemy players. The leader got extremely angry and decided to just publicly recruit a bunch of random players so to still kill the boss in time, the plan having been to just exploit the randoms for their damage and running off with the loot for ourselves - this is possible because loot gets rolled for, but the leader of such groups may also put the setting to "leader only" and distribute items manually afterwards, which isn't an uncommon thing to do as it ensures random people can't just roll on multiple items.
However, to make this even worse: One guy from our group had a secondary account on the other side and wanted to farm free kill points on it by having us tell him the best time to strike (when everyone is low HP), at which point he killed a bunch of people, specifically targeting everyone but our internal group and it's still funny to me over a decade later how extremely obvious the foul play was. Us in the know moved to the side mere seconds before the attack and some acted cartoonishly surprised afterwards when the enemy's name was almost IDENTICAL (think Anonimous instead of Anonymous) to the one guy in our midst who logged out 5 minutes earlier and came back right after the incident. That's what made the guys such assholes, the group betrayal had no motivation other than "It would be funny" and they deliberately overacted with posts such as "Wow, what a douche!!! Some people!!!" and then screamed laughing like apes in the voice chat. In any case, we killed the boss, the leader ran off and we distributed everything among ourselves the next day.
Another funny thing, which was so cartoonish that I feel the need to specifically mention it's not made up: The voice chat we were in was on a public server and while we were laughing and giving incriminating statements ("Haha, did you see that guy whining about losing points when he died to Anon's attack? Anyway, how should we distribute the stuff?"), all of a sudden a new voice in the channel uttered this loud "Ahem!" to draw attention to himself, shutting everyone up 3 seconds before the whole room erupted into laughter when we realized it was a renown player with lots of connections who heard absolutely everything because no one noticed him joining with how loud everyone was. The sad thing is, said guy was the one who taught me to play my class around 2 years earlier and I still participated in this drama because it felt good to be part of a """respected""" group for once. The guy then proceeded to spam the public chat with the names of everyone involved, effectively blacklisting us from group recruitments.
A tiny bonus story: I did the same world boss as leader with a different group a few months later and right after looting, I'm talking not more than 10 seconds after the kill, I got disconnected because of an auto-ban I received for having accidentally used a Proxy server to access the ingame shop earlier that day. This was such an unrealistic coincidence that everyone thought I was scamming them again, but luckily I got unbanned the next few days and everyone got their deserved share.
Other situations that involved me misbehaving were more minor, like killstealing valuable monsters (only the person or group with >50% damage on a monster gets the loot) or deliberately not helping people with those so that they would die and the monster resets, enabling me to get it instead.
This has all been way over a decade ago and I changed my ways, now preferring to actually help less experienced players or even give them items to help them on their way. As I said, the game is split into innocent PvErs and extremely degenerate PvPers, and it hurts to see cute players just having fun get kuso on for perhaps not being the best at their respective class. I think I somehow developed some kind of "savior complex", always feeling the need to reach out to people when they got wronged, hoping they will stay with the game and not get bullied into cynicism.
Cheaters and (real money) traders I would say aren't as interesting as one might think - it's either a professional bot farm for goldselling, a small hobbyist bot setup for personal gain or account / item trading for real money when someone decides to quit or is so obsessed with the game they want to speed up progress by any means necessary. Cheating then is mostly PvPers (even naturally good people) either looking for that edge in combat (faster animations) or wanting to speed up progress by soloing dungeons for maximum profit or to literally just finish them quicker.
(2/2)