I am currently sitting at the top of the leader board and I don't bot. I'm not even smart enough to know how to use a bot. If you still don't believe me then you can go through all my years of previous posts and you will find out how much I hate servers with botting and bots in general. With that said.. I've had a great deal of time to play which explains why I'm such a high level.
If I recall correctly, I was told that when pwner and knight burak were banned, the rules weren't as serious so apparently that's why they got off so easy. However Kebab got banned after the new rules were written so his ban should have been for 1 week as the rules state, so I'm not sure what happened there. It is pretty demoralizing to find out that people can bot for addon items and levels while others have to work hard for it, which is really unfair.
There are many times I question the professionalism of Gaal as well as the rest of the staff in terms of providing sufficient punishments. It was upsetting to see players caught for botting yet all they receive is a slap on the wrist.
The server is rapidly decaying in players and will eventually become a dead server like always. I was hoping this ERA might have been something different but it will die out just like every other time.
I thought there would have been more content, but I guess I was wrong. Not to mention all of the bugs that occurred and still have not been fixed. I understand that Gaal has job which is of course more important than an OT, but perhaps trying to host a demanding server such as Ascalon was not the best idea. Perhaps if you had more people to help you out with content it could have been better.
The Ascalon community is pretty bad as well. Some of the tutors never helped new players and often times people just troll new players. I try to help them out with some items and knowledge of the server, but sometimes it's not enough.
I've seen new players login, get bashed at, and then 30 minutes later they quit and never come back.
Many people complain and are willing to quit because they feel wizards are under-powered while berserkers are overpowered. While that statement is somewhat true it's not a reason to give up all hope. I think some people don't understand the roles of specific vocations, nor the pros and cons of each one. With that said it's also very hard to balance custom vocations in terms of PVP and PVE.
It's only a matter of time before the server reaches a total of 10 players online and when that happens I can't imagine myself playing anymore. In the meantime I will still stick around since I have some friends I'd like to play with.
Regardless of all this text, thanks for the work you have put into Ascalon.
@Gaal
