After six months of operation, including 1002 players and 640 raids, Tarabot is down. It will not be back.
When Tarabot was first written, we were struggling to take Camelot back from Omni control. It became apparent that without more organization and stronger cooperation, we would not be able to take and hold the castle. The issues that we faced were chat system limitations (chat would break if the raid leader (usually Javaschick) disconnected) and a very tedious raffle system (collecting numbers to two clients and having helpbot roll). I wrote Tarabot to be a tool for raid leaders to manage these things more effectively. My only real condition on it was that I wanted it to stay an equitable environment (many people wanted to have weighting by organization size or similar things).
Tarabot did successfully resolve these issues. However, people came to me as if I was somehow the leader of the raid leaders. I would log in to play every day and spend my first 30-45 minutes of game time responding to offline tells and trying to resolve disputes. Many tells were complaints or even heated insults. It got to the point where I wouldn't even play my main character (Asmoran) because I could not play for 10 minutes without having someone jump my ass about something. I bought vBulletin (the same forum system we have here) and set it up so players would have somewhere out of game to discuss issues. But very few people used it and I continued to have my game time disrupted. So I took the bot down -- I'm here to play a game in my limited free time, not be a target for whining.
Azzazzimon and I had a few chats about it, and together we worked out a system that would help alleviate this and allow me to play. So I brought Tarabot back with a wiped userlist and the mandatory restriction that no user would be added to the bot without registering on the forums. Additionally, major participating organizations would have representatives on the admin team. I stated outright that Tarabot is nothing more than a tool and the admins are the people to take issues to. This worked for the most part.
Tarabot is gone now because:
- it rewards players who exploit the system (registering for raffles from missions or pvp).
- it is an abusive environment for people who are serving the community, to the point where we don't really have any active admins.
- people don't respect my time and efforts enough to actually read the sticky threads in our forums before posting for addition, obvious because of the questions I get in-game and the idiots who post outside the obvious thread.
- people who argue with my requirement for posting on the forums without understanding the history behind it.
- people who spit negativity toward the whole thing but aren't willing to put any effort into making it better.
- people who pile into the box room to /afk when there is no opposition, but as soon as it requires any work they are nowhere to be found.
- people who accuse me of rigging or cheating the system when I've bent over backwards to make sure that Tarabot was completely fair. And in this group are the people who think that my organization is rolling in Tarasque loot when most of us have never won a damn thing we want.
I created Tarabot to enhance our (the players) enjoyment of the game. It has become apparent to me that it has not done this. If it has done anything, it has encouraged an entitlement attitude that has made Camelot anything but fun. I consider Tarabot a failure, and for this I'll apologize. I'm sorry that I wasn't able to find a way to make this work that brought out the best in people rather than the worst in people.
Best of luck.
no bot = no clans = no fun 
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