Tobiaz
Spacerats
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Posted - 2011.06.11 23:05:00 -
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Originally by: Fiddles McGiggles If you start thinking of botting as a plague, disease, or infestation you'll understand that killing off the weakest botters (the ones that get caught) solves nothing. Why? Plagues, diseases and infestations all have some kind of "cure." Mainly: Pesticides and antibiotics. But do pesticides and antibiotics really fix the problem? In the short term of course they do. And in a few rare cases they have altogether destroyed a population of bacteria or pest. But in the long run there is a never ending battle to come up with stronger "cures". What pesticides and antibiotics do is kill of the weakest part of a population, maybe 95-99% of the weakest members of a given population. What is left is 1-5% of the strongest most resistant strain of that population. This is (un)natural selection. When that strain reproduces you have an entire population immune to the original cure. This begins the cycle going on today with antibiotics/disease and pesticides/pests.
Botting is a serious plague for all MMOs . And the typical solution is the ban hammer. Figure out how a bot works, or who is botting and ban a massive amount of them. Does this get rid of the persons behind the computer willing and able to use a macro to gain an unfair advantage over players that actually play? Those people will always exist. So banning that person only causes them to come up with more innovative ways to bot. And we see a cycle going on today with bans/botters. ItÆs the same in every MMO.
Banning wonÆt ever work to solve the problem. ItÆs only a quick fix until the next bot is developed. To solve a problem with out drastically changing the structure of an MMO you need to be equally innovative. Make an environment that doesnÆt foster botting. Incorporate botting into the game somehow. ThereÆs a lot of innovative ideas in these forums alone.
Banning botters just makes better botters. Stop doing it.
Since you're using using the 'disease/plague' analogy, allow me to put that argument in a different perspective: human's increasing capability in fighting diseases has been, by far, the most important cause for our exponential population-growth since the 19th century. Ofcourse the improvement of food-supply, sanitation, lowered child and birth mortality, they all helped a lot. But it were the diseases that have constantly kept our numbers down since we stopped being hunting/gatherers.
So by a better application of your 'disease' analogy CCP actually should fight botting, since it's keeping EVE's economy down. Even problems like overabundant supercaps could be partially attributed to bots providing the abundance of cheap minerals. Eradicate the bots and sure: the mineral will go up, and all T1 equipment as well. But the influence of basic mineral prices these days is heavily mitigated by so many additional factors it's not going to be a '70 oil-crisis scenario.
And you know: the problem with mining now is not so much it's boring, but the fact it's boring AND pays bad as well. Guess what will happen when mining becomes more profitable then grinding L4 missions? Likely the same thing as with the beginning of EVE: more people socially mining in gangs, enjoying themselves probably a lot more then grinding enless L4 missions.
But I doubt CCP will ever manage to completely eradicate all bots, especially the less visible ones like marketbots or some labslot-bot. The demand for them will remain and bots indeed do evolve, so they'll continue to play a cat and mouse game with the devs. But an ability to adapt does not equal invincibility. Smallpox has only existed deep-frozen in some labs for over 30 years now. And just because something can be hard to fight, doesn't mean you should give up. After all: leave a serious disease untreated and it may very well kill you.
[/moralizing rant]
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