NCSoft is currently embroiled in a seemingly endless saga involving 'bot farms' in Aion 2. For the uninitiated, these are organised groups utilising illicit software to grind in-game currency at breakneck speeds. Players across the official forums and various communities are growing increasingly vocal, accusing NCSoft of a lukewarm response to these operations that are effectively strangling the game's economy and ruining the experience for genuine players.

The consensus among the player base is that these bot armies have infiltrated even the 'rural servers'—those with lower populations. It seems they are exploiting the integrated exchange system, choosing servers with less competition to hoard wealth. One player noted, "You see more macro characters with eerily similar usernames than actual human players," adding, "We are even seeing login queues on servers that should be quiet, which is frankly absurd."

These operations generally run on 24-hour automation. By camping out in specific gathering spots or hunting grounds, they use macros to endlessly hoover up resources like Orichalcum. There are mounting suspicions that they are leveraging mobile multi-client systems or external illicit software to operate on a massive scale, making it impossible for an honest player to even stand a fighting chance.

Then there is the issue of 'currency laundering,' a major disruptor of the market. This involves exploiting price discrepancies between servers or using personal trade systems to shuffle vast amounts of wealth between servers without paying transaction fees. Players argue that this flood of illicitly gained currency into high-population servers is systematically dismantling the unique economic balance of each world.

An infinite supply of currency inevitably leads to a crash in the value of Kinah and other items. Players who once laboured through gathering or hunting are finding their profit margins completely evaporated. They argue that the incentive to progress is dead, with many lamenting that the 'ladder of growth' has been kicked away from underneath them by these bot-driven market crashes.

NCSoft has announced that they have sanctioned bot accounts over ten times in regular intervals, yet the efficacy of these measures remains questionable. Players point out that the rate at which new bot accounts are churned out far outpaces the bans. Some have even resorted to cynical conspiracy theories, suggesting that NCSoft keeps them around because they are technically paid subscribers—though, in reality, sabotaging their own game's longevity seems a rather foolish business move.

Frustrated by the developer's passivity, some players have taken matters into their own hands. They are using the 'Rift' system to invade opposing servers and hunt down the bots, acting as a sort of makeshift vigilante force. It is, however, merely a stopgap. Even when the developer attempts to tweak currency drop rates, critics argue that these updates often end up hurting regular players far more than the bot operators.