Bot Killing, A Lineage 2 Past Time

One of my favorite activities in Lineage 2 is bot killing. This sport involves the finding and slaying of bots. They are pretty easy to find, just head to the nearest Catacomb or Necropolis and they will be there, grinding away and doing what automatons do.

Once found there are a number of ways to kill the bots. You could try to “train” them. This involves attacking a roomful of monsters, then running to the room with the bots in it. The monsters pursue you but then see their friends being killed by the bots, who they then attack. If the botter team is not too strong, then the monsters will kill them. This is a good tactic because it keeps your hands clean of any actual killing.

Another way to kill a team of botters is to just PK the healers. If the team isn’t smart, and they don’t resurrect their healers (and they often don’t), then the rest will die without their support! This is often the quickest way to kill a bot team, though it does come with Karma. Karma is an entirely different aspect of Lineage 2’s gameplay that I won’t get into here.

Alright, so with that said the following is a few screenshots of my Bot Killing exploits in the underworld of Lineage 2.







See, sometimes people see what you are doing and they either don’t kill you when you turn red from killing bots, or they jump in and help out! And in these screens you see the real fun of bot killing, when they fight back! When bots fight back it means you have a pissed off farmer (likely from China, or wherever else they have gold farming businesses) on the other end of the computer. And for me, that makes it all the more fun when I kill them.

PS: Speaking of killing bots, and therefore pissing off farmers in China, that brings up an interesting moral debate that has been kicking around in my head for the past week. Is it worse to kill a farmer, someone just trying to do their job and make ends meet, or to kill a real player (who is botting themselves)? OK I probably lost you there, let me set this up a bit: In Lineage 2, there are two different types of botters. There are the farmer-botters, people from very poor parts of the world just trying to feed themselves by farming gold and selling it to westerners. They are just doing their job day-in-day-out. Killing them is a frustration to them and may even be taking food out of their mouths. But the other type of botter is the player-botters. These are people who feel they must bot to succeed in Lineage 2. These people bot so that they can get to the high levels, and they bot for money. To kill these people is to take away their money their time, their fun essentially.

The killing of either botter, pisses off the person behind the screen. But which is the worse, or the better, to kill? I don’t know, but it’s something to think about.