LathanRiose Devers
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Posted - 2007.11.12 18:50:00 -
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Edited by: LathanRiose Devers on 12/11/2007 18:52:46
You are looking in the wrong direction for a solution to this problem.
As long as its possible to buy and sell things, transfer isk, it's going to be possible for isk sellers to operate. There is no way CCP can manually look at every transaction in the game, or even all the slighly odd ones. How many stations have a shuttle being sold for 9mil in them? There are simply far too many transactions to hope to spot and stop even a small number of suspicious ones.
It is impossible to remove the mechanics for making isk and transferring isk, the game's economy and existence depends on these. Its also extremely hard to tell 100% if someone is a normal player or involved in isk buying/selling. Plenty of players have weird names, lots of people put up silly contracts/sell orders hoping someone will accidentally buy something for 100 times its value. It is nigh impossible for CCP to distinguish clearly enough between legit and illegal actions / players in the amount of time they have to look at each case. Therefore it is not possible to seriously dent isk selling by manually banning/hurting perpetrators.
This is like the police thinking they can stop drug use by locking up drug dealers. No drug addict has ever given up a habit because their dealer has been put in prison, another one fills their place almsot immediately or they simply go somewhere else. Obviously the police need to lock up drug dealers, but has almost no overall effect on the drug trade each time one gets locked up, overall it is simply far to vast to be affected by something so small. CCP is like a police force with 5 men, against a drug trafficing operation with 5000. They cannnot hope to seriously dent the isk selling/RMT trade because there are too many people doing it. All the players out there thinking they are being shining vigilante knights blowing up macro miners or farmers are wasting their time, I doubt they even hurt 5% of of the farming characters out there. The reason is this, isk selling/buying is limited by buyer demand, not by the amount of isk the farmers can make.
Isk farming is an extremely scalable operation, if they have an increase in demand of 10%, they will simply make, buy, or reactivate a few more accounts to cope with demand. Yes there is an overhead of time in seting up a decent ratting/mining character, but they probably have dormant accounts or likely a huge a isk surplus to cope with this. My guess is no real money transfers are ever stopped by a lack of isk to sell, there are too many farmers, with too much isk in the bank, and isk "production" is too scalable for demand to higher than supply for a short time. You people need to understand this: RMT in EVE is not limited by the amount isk sellers can make. Stopping them altogether is not possible, hurting them only hurts their profit margins.
Because of the economics of it, the only way to stop isk selling/buying it is to kill the MARKET for isk sellers i.e. people buying isk.
Without people willing to buy isk for real money, there is no such things as RMT/isk buying. It would evaporate overnight if no one wanted to buy isk for money. CCP needs to be much harsher on people caught buying isk to limit demand, as limiting supply is useless. Perma banning accounts, possibly multiple accounts of a single player, removal of all in game assets and isk, halving skillpoints, and a forum / page naming and shaming all those caught are all ideas that could deter people from buying isk.
In summary, stopping isk farming, laundering and transfer is not possible through policing, or game design. Manually hurting/punishing offenders will only dent the operation, because there will never be enough manpower / time to seriously affect it. Deterrence through much harsher punishment for those caught BUYING isk is the only way to seriously dent the RMT market in eve. Farmers and sellers will disappear, becase they have no one to sell to.
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