Invictus Demonus
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Posted - 2011.02.15 00:23:00 -
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Premise:
Gold farmers, ISK farmers, Credits farmers, etc. have existed as long as their has been MMORPGS and in almost every case the community cries out for a removal of the people who do it.
Hypothesis:
The majority of the problem is not fixed by removing the bots.
There are two kinds of people who Bot. Those who are trying to game the system and get more then their fellow players by "playing" the game when they aren't able to manually play it, and those who use it to fund RMT (real money trading).
Creating a punishment system for botting, by in large, helps against those trying to game the system, it keeps honest people honest, and works to remove "naughty" players from the player base.
The problem is that this is not the biggest problem. The primary threat to the game economy is the BOTNET style RMT funders. The reason why this becomes a problem is that the former are still playing the game, if they loose their account they have lost something valuable to them. The later are not playing a game they are running a business, a real business with real money implications. A banned account means almost nothing to them. You can not reasonably use in game logic to an out of game business.
But there is a bigger problem. Some games have been very good at taking down botters, or making their lives generally unproductive. This has led to an even more severe problem to proliferate: hackers. As in game strategies of breaking the system gets harder, out of game strategies become comparatively easier. As that happens more of these groups switch to that as a primary technique. As much as most people here loath to refer to WoW it is a excellent example of a game that made great strides against the success of gold farmers, only to see the even more dangerous problems of hacked/lost accounts. This gave rise to the increase of defensive measures (authenticators of various kinds), because of the need for these defensive measures.
As of right now EvE does not have these measures in place. As much as it is terrible to say, discouraging botting is asking for trouble thats even harder to work out.
So is there a solution? Kind of.
In order for RMT to function it requires two things, a buyer and a seller. The seller is hard to defeat, because of all that was stated above, but without a buyer, RMT is nothing.
The best defense against all of this is stop people from buying from third party ISK sellers. Education of new people as to the purpose of buying and selling PLEX (just by reading this thread I can see a lot of people have a fundamental misconception of how PLEX works), and coming together as a community and decided that having a game that doesn't have these problems is worth getting 300mil for 15 dollars instead of 10.
It isn't about killing the botters, its about starving the business. (But you should still kill the bastards whenever you can).
In other news, I would like it if some sort of anti hacking system was implemented, but thats besides the point.
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