EVE devs vs. gold-farmers

[coloumb]

Originally posted by: fallout man
I really wish that this kind of thing had been done back when I played WoW.

In summary: EVE devs figure out how to predict gold-farming accounts through behavior, and throw down the ban-hammer on 6200 paying accounts overnight.

Article with graphs and lulz is here.

The main issue with WoW is that it's too easy to just create a level 1 character and make the run to Stormwind or Ironforge easily avoiding any danger along the way.

What Blizzard should do "lock out" the starter areas - require you to perform all of the quests before you can leave and prevent anyone from entering the area. This might not cut down on the # of spam bots - but at least it would make it more annoying for them.

In addition - TRIAL accounts should not be allowed access to trade chat, banks, guild vaults, mailboxes, auction houses, nor be able to trade anything [gold/items], and not be able to join any guilds.

 

[Dorkenstein]

"Hello dear, has you some time buy isk? Please welcome!"

Whenever I got those eve mails, I almost felt like they were talking to me personally.

 

[leeland]

bm for home

 

[DarkForceRising]

Heh, if you thought this was awesome, you should have seen the stuff a while back that CCP did.

There was some glitch where if you configured factories a certain way, you could get unlimited resources out, but none had to be put in. Naturally, people used it for all the high-end expensive items that were hard to get. So (if memory serves), CCP fined or destroyed the Corporations involved (or something), and then brought in a fleet of vessels owned by CCP and actually BLEW UP THE FACTORIES. Anyone else would probably have just deleted the factories in some database somewhere. CCP actually blew them up.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I always knew those Icelanders were power trippers. Must have to do with living on a small (island?) ocean country.

 

[CurseTheSky]

The fact that they put an arrow with "Unholy Rage" on their graphs is what makes this awesome. I don't play or follow EVE, but I'm too used to Blizzard trying to make things humorous that all but the occasional references just makes me roll my eyes. It just seems like they're trying too hard at this point. "Unholy Rage," on the other hand, made me laugh. Kudos for CCP.

It reminds me of what the devs in an older MMO called Asheron's Call did. Like many other games, people developed macros to kill / loot monsters while they were away from their computer. The devs initially did random macro tests ("Please repeat this statement to me: ..." or "Please jump three times and then spin in a circle."), but the macro runners built in gongs (a warning bell) to alert them when they got a message. Unfortunately, the devs never really did beat the macroers, but they had some fun along the way.

The game was famous (among the players) for random live events, in which the devs would login as lore-related NPCs and play out a scenario, such as a villain attaching a town, or two NPCs fighting for one reason or another. In one of the events, a love-struck and crazed (dev-controlled) NPC went around greeting some live and at-the-keyboard players in towns, while attacking and killing other players that were obviously macroing. There was a screenshot somewhere of a bunch of macroers hidden away in a dungeon, the NPC charging in and killing them off, and one of the macroers screaming "LOG OUT LOG OUT OMG LOG OUT," or something to that fact.

Then again, this also came from the game where during a different event, messages of an evil NPC (again, dev-controlled) being spotted in different parts of the world were broadcast, with players rushing around trying to kill him. One player on my server happened to stumble upon him before any other players could catch up and tried to take him one on one. The player was known across the server for trash-talking in PvP and whatnot, and was somewhat hated. The NPC eventually killed him, and followed up by looting his corpse. Funny stuff.

 

[fallout man]

Originally posted by: coloumb

In addition - TRIAL accounts should not be allowed access to trade chat, banks, guild vaults, mailboxes, auction houses, nor be able to trade anything [gold/items], and not be able to join any guilds.

Some of these things are implemented in EVE. For example, a trial account can't train skills or fly hauler ships that would be the obvious thing to train for a trial-account mule.

Originally posted by: CurseTheSky
The fact that they put an arrow with "Unholy Rage" on their graphs is what makes this awesome. I don't play or follow EVE, but I'm too used to Blizzard trying to make things humorous that all but the occasional references just makes me roll my eyes. It just seems like they're trying too hard at this point. "Unholy Rage," on the other hand, made me laugh. Kudos for CCP.

Even though the Zero Punctuation guy doesn't dig EVE, I think that "Unholy Rage" was an homage.