Cameron Freerunner
   |
Posted - 2011.06.09 18:04:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: Sala Kyss
The funniest thing is that the eve devs have a whole host of tools at their disposal, they just choose to ignore it or overlook it. I refuse to believe anyone that has the ability to develop a game like Eve can be so blind as to what botters are doing. Its not that hard to spot, and its not that hard to find them. What they need to realize is, are they willing to lose the majority of their legit customer base who get frustrated at this game which botters are ruining. Look at 0.0, half of it is owned by the DRF who are notoriously known for botting and RMT. The economy has already begun to feel the effects of 23/7 isk making. If things like this keep up, I smell the next Lineage 2 coming around.
It's amazing that so many smart people don't recognize what CCP is actually doing. They're doing what any law enforcement agency (or intelligence agency) would do. Roll-up the low level, non-professional botters with regular bans. Use the info gained to find and investigate links to professional botters, their websites, their resources, their chain of command, etc. Let them operate without hinderance or any clue that they're being investigated. Instigate sting operations to buy ISK OOG, log all info, watch the money move through the system. Since many of the RMT groups are in fact RL criminal operations (not that the RMT is itself illegal, but tax evasion, money laundering, credit card fraud and related crimes are), connect with RL law enforcement, lawyers/courts, and credit card companies to get access to more information (IPs, real names, etc). Move against them in RL with real legal authority.
CCP would have to be filled to the brim with morons if the majority of actions they took were aimed at banning bots and spending endless man-hours (which cost money btw) 'investigating' every ISK transaction or mining op in game. Even if it yielded botter bans, they'd be on an endless treadmill because the core problem is located in RL not the game.
Clearly all that isn't enough, as it is unlikely that the legal authorities in some countries are going to do anything. That's what the client coding initiatives and such are for. This isn't a one size fits all solution to botting. They're coming at it from every direction.
In the end, though, it's unlikely to remove botters from the game permanently. If they haven't already, botters will probably begin introducing random behaviors into their code. Stuff like moving to different belts, docking up for short periods of time, fake chats, using jump clones to setup several 'farms' of bots and moving between them regularly. If they were really smart, they'd be taking notes on people like ninjaspud and the other bot killers and introducing behaviors based on the appearance of those characters in local.
Its a losing battle really. But it can be fun to gank bots anyway. |