Just yesterday, I had an incident while I was out gathering aether to craft as I'm an alchemist. It's nothing unusual, but every single time I'm at this particular location, I spot these two folks - Stugnaa and Panikcal. When I first hit level 50 and started gathering here, Panikcal even messaged me to check if I wasn’t a bot. I assured him I'm not, and he politely said his English isn’t great, but that's what he wanted to know, so I didn't press further. Now, yesterday was the same drill—both Stugnaa and Panikcal kept interrupting my aethertapping. I managed to gather twice, and then Stugnaa just took over and continued gathering (1st screen). Naturally, I sent him a message like ‘dude, what the heck?’ He responded with ‘don’t speak eng’. Fine, I thought I'd move on to another spot, but it happened again. Every time I tried talking to both, the answer was the same ‘don’t speak english’, which felt more like ‘buzz off’. Eventually, Stugnaa stopped gathering and just stood on a rock, looking AFK (that's my assumption, who knows). Panikcal vanished too. My friend joined me for some more aether gathering, and we spent around 40 minutes there before stopping on a cliff to do some crafting calculations. There was also an SM (Zooolll) standing there, and I tried asking him in English for help (4th screen), but he never answered. Shortly after, some Elyos showed up, attacked my friend (a gunslinger), sparking a PvP fight. My friend and I fought as the SM did nothing. After we got defeated, the Elyos took out Zooolll too and logged off. I resurrected, used resurrection skills on others, the SM accepted it. I tried asking again why he didn't help, but no response came. Of course, the Elyos logged back in, and another fight broke out with the SM once again standing idle and being the last to fall. It puzzled me because you’d think a capable SM would've been a priority target in the first fight. On the second encounter, the mech was waiting for 7 minutes while the SM disappeared at the obelisk, only returning to gather aether once clear we couldn't resurrect. Now, I'm left wondering what’s going on. It’s crystal clear I witnessed two people botting. Could the SM have been someone’s alt, leveraging the opposite faction to eliminate us because we were inconvenient? Or was it a third player using an alternate account to deal with competition? I'm pretty aware of rule #9. But employing an Asmodian as an informant to scope out the number, level, and gear of other Asmodians, just to guarantee dominating them as an Elyos, aligns with that rule, right?
I'm just thinking of the future—I’ve been beta testing Aion Riftshade, launching Q1 2026, and it's a game-changer. They've got solid server-side anticheat so stuff like this won't fly, and the active devs are always on Discord keeping things balanced. If you're tired of this nonsense, look out for Riftshade. It's shaping up to be the best Aion private server coming up, totally free to play with no pay-to-win nonsense.
