Magic Hat
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Posted - 2006.01.01 22:15:00 -
[1]
Ah but of course, the forums always have a few of the people that think they know exactly what's going on, casting their divine judgement (and carrying out the execution if they could too), without even witnessing events first hand or doing a few minutes of homework to see what is really going on. Or perhaps Mystic Mansions here is rather new to the MMORPG thing or jsut hasn't been paying attention to the things that have been going on.
Have no fear Ill shed some light! (Even though this post is probably wasted on you)
The ISK farming runs rampant, professional farming is an increasingly serious problem to MMORPGs accross the board. The casual player may not notice the individual farming operations, but the hardcore are well able to determine fairly accurately whether someone is legit or not.
Go ahead, fly around the 0.8-1.0 systems and visit the belts. Observe behaviour patterns for a few days or even weeks. Trust me, your eyes will open. Here are a few things to look for if you really need a clue (and it seems you do):
- Seemingly random or nonsensical names, often following a pattern, like the same word repeated twice, or sequences of digits appended. Usually lower case.
- (Same) starter corp.
- Clustering of similar type ships. Usually omens, apocs or retrievers in fixed patterns (4 ships + 1 hauler is a common one)
- Same date of birth, often only a few minutes apart from eachother.
- "Default" portrait. you know, one you didn't toy with at creation, looks straight forward like a statue.
- No response. even if you bump them 100km out of the belt, they just fly back to their can at their jolly 87m/s.
- If you do somehow manage to agitate them, the entire group warps off, hell, I have witnessed the ENTIRE ICE BELT'S MINERS (25+ 'people') log off all at once. Only to log back in at the same time again later.
- Seemingly 23/7 gameplay. Surprise: they work in shifts.
With RMR, CCP made a great steps towards putting a stop to this sort of exploitation of our game, severely limiting the abilities of trial accounts, forcing the professional farmers to use paid accounts, which in turn makes them quite tracable (and subsequently bannable).
I myself reported dozens of them already that were using escrow to launder farmed ISK. Ever notice the noobcorp people in starter systems putting up stuff like basic dmg controls for 500 million ISK, without description, or saying "Need help plz". If you ever wondered wtf they were thinking, think about it for a while.
With RMR, more game mechanics were implemented for us players to do something about it too, all within the rules of the game. Sure, the same mechanics can be used to grief legitimate players, but this sort of griefing is done no matter what game mechanics you add. Hell, people still use the age old "lock the newbie and trick him into firing" thing. 
I witnessed a refreshing wave of farmer killing all over the galaxy, and I applaud all efforts from anyone, player or CCP, to get rid of this pest.
Here's a few more facts:
Most of the farmers are chinese people. They work for sweatshops, supervising a macro or manually operating one, 1 guy per group of miners.
You're right, they usually dont have good knowledge of the English language. This is why things like warred gang invites work. It only works one time though, because they are not stupid, and the majority of them now adapted to this approach by blocking invites.
Just like they will adapt to the new game mechanics (jetcan flagging). Heck, they are already adapting by not mining to jetcans but just warping to station when hold is full. This slows them down considerably though.
Anyway, keep it up, Illegal Alien 
Oh, btw, The Sweatshop and Macroscope corporations were created by yours truly, and my like-minded friend here has been using our corps to fight the evil that is ISK farming. It's a drop in the ocean but every bit helps)
--
Looking at the big picture...
...and you're not on it. |