Empathic Psychopath
Cult of the Crayon
3
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Posted - 2012.04.12 11:21:00 -
[1] - Quote
I can't admit to looking at every single response to this but I've skimmed over a lot of posts and one thing that sticks out like a sore thumb is the level of "WE MUST PUNISH" and general righteous indignation. I notice quite a few people saying they'll happily pay for a merc corp to go chase botters...why not do it yourself if you feel so strongly, or are you too busy care bearing?
People need to get off the "punish them forever" bandwagon that is so popular in the US these days (and look how many people they've imprisoned in their own country purely as punishment rather than rehabilitation) and start looking at this rationally. If someone tried botting, got hit with a temporary ban and decided it's not worth the risk (i.e. no more botting ever) then why the need to name and shame? Given that said ex-botter is probably playing legitimately since they obviously haven't left the game (paying for a sub or playing to pay) then continuing the punishment after the initial ban will just p1ssthemoff and CCP loses a customer, so from a commercial perspective it's kind of dumb. If people continue to bot then hey, simple solution - perma ban all their accounts (i.e. what already happens now).
Hard core botters are mostly RMT based corps with very few actual people who have been around a long time and will be there as long as the game mechanics and code base allow this. It takes nothing to set up a network of bots and there are so many ways of disguising where your PC(s) are located it's not funny. Given that the incentive still exists for massive scale botting (i.e. RMT dollars) then in my view there are only 2 semi-realistic options to fix this.
One is to change the EVE client to remove the possibility of code injection and/or mess with OCR bots by keeping things on the screen dynamic enough for that type of bot not to work. Chance of this happening? Not high given the complexity involved - if it was easy do you think CCP wouldn't have already done this by now? We aren't talking about simple tweaks here. And of course any changes to the client need to be made carefully so as not to completely wreck gameplay.
So, what's the other way? To paraphrase the current debate about "solving" drug problems, start treating this as a health issue rather than a criminal one and you will probably get better results. I'm not saying that botting isn't criminal within the context of EVE, certainly it results impacts both players and CCP alike. But like the drug trade, if you take away the incentive (i.e. the stupid amounts of money to be made for doing virtually nothing) then you'll see the botters eventually disappear once the effort vs reward balance swings in favour of effort. To do this, CCP would need to start selling ISK directly to players. I'm not talking about buying plex then trading for iskies in-game. I'm talking about paying real money to get iskies. The trick is to sell it at a rate that is low enough to make botting not worthwhile for the RMT crowd, but not so cheap that your create massive inflation due to currency oversupply. Essentially you just replace one RMT organisation with another (CCP!) but when you think about it, conceptually this isn't really that much different from selling graphics cards for plex.
Other than that, I guess all that can be done is continue to catch the RMT bots and perma-ban when found.
My 0.05 ISK worth :) |