You can take a real world analogy of all this and it makes complete sense as well. Take for instance cigarettes.
Cigarettes in the US are legal for adults. They can choose, if they so desire to go to a market and plunk down a hefty amount of money to ruin their health and feed their addiction. Various government entities didn't like the fact that people were making a personal decision to ruin their health and decided they were going to "protect" citizens from themselves. They decided to take a 2 pronged attack against the "scourge" of tobacco use.
1. Education. They spend tax payers money to promote ads and packaging and barriers to procurement of the tobacco products. They spend this money to encourage users to not use tobacco, to "protect" the citizen from themselves.
2. Sin taxes. Since the non-tobacco using, tax payers object to having their wallets raided to support the nanny state governments efforts to "protect" tobacco using citizens from themselves, governments have instituted "sin taxes". The "sin tax" is a effort to demonize a legal product and make it less desirable to users ,by both making the product more expensive, and self supporting in the governments efforts to "protect" us.
In all this they never asked the tobacco user if they wanted the governments "protection" or if they minded paying more for their chosen habit. It was a adults personal decision to make, most if not all didn't ask for the government to poke their nose in the adults personal business.
This manipulation, well intentioned as it may have been on the governments part, created additional problems than if they had just let it alone.
1.The taxes generated from taxing the "sin" of tobacco put the government in a precarious spot. They were themselves were addicted to the money generated from taxing tobacco, they are even more hooked than the tobacco user. In their task to stamp out tobacco use, they find they can't actually truly wish it stamped out, they need the money.
2.A symptom of the governments "tax addiction" was them repeatedly raising the taxes to the point that it became profitable for others to skirt the taxes. They in effect created the black market. Tobacco users didn't want to pay quite so much to feed their addiction, if someone offered to sell them tobacco cheaper than the 'official" going price they leaped at the chance. Since tobaccos government price is well in excess of 1/2 tax, this left a hefty profit range for black marketeers.
3. Government not wanting black marketers to compete with them outlaw the practice. Outlawing it, they have to enforce it, which in turn takes, you guessed it.....more money! Rather than realizing there is a sweet spot on a reasonable tax, they raise the tax even more, to spend even more enforcing it even more, a vicious cycle ensues and the casual tobacco user is caught in the middle.
So insert the following words for the others in this tale:
Government = Cryptic/PW
Black marketer = Botter
Tobacco user= casual player
Tobacco = Gear/refinement resources
Cryptic created it's own problem by trying to "protect" us and creating a bot/black market in the process. Now they complain about the "bot problem" and once again in the name of "protecting" us they rather punish us. Bots are not the problem, they are the symptom.
There have been several creative ideas in the forums that players have expressed, some of them rather simple to empliment, some more complex. Some of the ideas have a flaw in them, because the player has a un-noticed bias so they weight it in their favor of desired game play.
Once again, bots are they symptom, not the problem, if Cryptic can self examine and come to that realization they will stop lurching from "solution" (nerf), to the follow up "solution" to correct the problems created by the last "solution".
One of the player bias solutions I see is this these:
AD/RP should be only in epic dungeons and daily/weekly quests. kk, problem, that may be good for you, you have gotten to end content or are more than a casual player, you have "arrived".
What about the mid range or starting player? What about the casual? Oh and the "group" bias is showing! Half or more of the player base are casual players. More than half hate PvP. Half or more don't do dungeons..some even despise them or PUGs etc. What about THEM? How do they get RP/AD? Thats why the leadership thing was put in, in the first place, so they could generate a trickle of AD and chest rewards without devoting 6 hr. a day to the game, That they could be a casual player and while not be BiS be at least in the running to content.
If Cryptic would stop "protecting" us, and let actual market dynamics take hold, the financial encentives for bots to even exist would dry up.
Try this:
1. Remove the Zen/AD 500 ea cap. Zen buyers will lap up AD if they can get a better exchange rate than 500. They will soak up the "excess" AD in the game and buy what they want with AD "in-game". They will be buying Zen (something Cryptic should like) to buy AD (something that players with excess AD should like) to buy stuff on AH (something that bulging bag players should like) and they will buy vendor items like GMoPs, thus destroying "excess" AD from the market.
2. Remove the 24k AD/day cap. Bots are the symptom of players seeking to get around this silly cap. They exchange items that have become alternate currency like GMoP etc. Cryptic is creating a underground economy with this silly cap.
3. Remove daily/weekly quest caps. Bots don't do quests. Bots do repetitive, repeatable actions. They are like the robot arms in the car factory making a couple of welds to a part of the car on the assembly line, then repeating on the next part. Bots do the grindy things that humans don't want to do, they are the toilet scrubbers of the MMO world. Yes, there are Group bots that sit in game and kill a certain mob repeatedly for drops, they are far less prevailant than the gather-bots however. And bots don't do quests! Remove the time restraints on quests and people (not bots) will do them (even the repetitive ones)! They may hate the grindy quests, but they will forgo the bots if you link the grindy quests with #4.
4. Make gear goals less resource intensive. If it takes millions of RP to level a players gear, they don't want to do that for a yr. they are either a botter themselves for the drops or they are supporting botters by buying the insane resource needs to level their gear. If a player can do something that is a tad grindy, like 10 times or 20 times not 360 they will do it themselves and not support the botters.
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theycallmetomuMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,861Arc User
I bought a shard of valindra for like, 2 or 4 mil back in the day. Not right when it first came out, but well before artifact sets were a thing.
I earned my AD by selling Gemmed Exquisite shirts and pants. I got the tools by buying them off the AH. I did THAT by making Elegant shirt/pants, WAY back in the day when those were selling for way more than the cost of production.
And since back then there were tremendous exploits, I guess I'm also a non-legit player too. Sad.
Oh by the way, when I say "Tough Decisions" what I actually mean is make a ridiculous decision that appears to solve a problem at the cost of making someone mad (eg the player base) and justifying your actions by saying that the fact that they're mad proves that it was the right thing to do. The ideology that you don't ever get anywhere in life by trying to make everyone happy, so a move that makes a lot of people pissed off means you're making the right choices.
Comments
Cigarettes in the US are legal for adults. They can choose, if they so desire to go to a market and plunk down a hefty amount of money to ruin their health and feed their addiction. Various government entities didn't like the fact that people were making a personal decision to ruin their health and decided they were going to "protect" citizens from themselves. They decided to take a 2 pronged attack against the "scourge" of tobacco use.
1. Education. They spend tax payers money to promote ads and packaging and barriers to procurement of the tobacco products. They spend this money to encourage users to not use tobacco, to "protect" the citizen from themselves.
2. Sin taxes. Since the non-tobacco using, tax payers object to having their wallets raided to support the nanny state governments efforts to "protect" tobacco using citizens from themselves, governments have instituted "sin taxes". The "sin tax" is a effort to demonize a legal product and make it less desirable to users ,by both making the product more expensive, and self supporting in the governments efforts to "protect" us.
In all this they never asked the tobacco user if they wanted the governments "protection" or if they minded paying more for their chosen habit. It was a adults personal decision to make, most if not all didn't ask for the government to poke their nose in the adults personal business.
This manipulation, well intentioned as it may have been on the governments part, created additional problems than if they had just let it alone.
1.The taxes generated from taxing the "sin" of tobacco put the government in a precarious spot. They were themselves were addicted to the money generated from taxing tobacco, they are even more hooked than the tobacco user. In their task to stamp out tobacco use, they find they can't actually truly wish it stamped out, they need the money.
2.A symptom of the governments "tax addiction" was them repeatedly raising the taxes to the point that it became profitable for others to skirt the taxes. They in effect created the black market. Tobacco users didn't want to pay quite so much to feed their addiction, if someone offered to sell them tobacco cheaper than the 'official" going price they leaped at the chance. Since tobaccos government price is well in excess of 1/2 tax, this left a hefty profit range for black marketeers.
3. Government not wanting black marketers to compete with them outlaw the practice. Outlawing it, they have to enforce it, which in turn takes, you guessed it.....more money! Rather than realizing there is a sweet spot on a reasonable tax, they raise the tax even more, to spend even more enforcing it even more, a vicious cycle ensues and the casual tobacco user is caught in the middle.
So insert the following words for the others in this tale:
Government = Cryptic/PW
Black marketer = Botter
Tobacco user= casual player
Tobacco = Gear/refinement resources
Cryptic created it's own problem by trying to "protect" us and creating a bot/black market in the process. Now they complain about the "bot problem" and once again in the name of "protecting" us they rather punish us. Bots are not the problem, they are the symptom.
There have been several creative ideas in the forums that players have expressed, some of them rather simple to empliment, some more complex. Some of the ideas have a flaw in them, because the player has a un-noticed bias so they weight it in their favor of desired game play.
Once again, bots are they symptom, not the problem, if Cryptic can self examine and come to that realization they will stop lurching from "solution" (nerf), to the follow up "solution" to correct the problems created by the last "solution".
One of the player bias solutions I see is this these:
AD/RP should be only in epic dungeons and daily/weekly quests. kk, problem, that may be good for you, you have gotten to end content or are more than a casual player, you have "arrived".
What about the mid range or starting player? What about the casual? Oh and the "group" bias is showing! Half or more of the player base are casual players. More than half hate PvP. Half or more don't do dungeons..some even despise them or PUGs etc. What about THEM? How do they get RP/AD? Thats why the leadership thing was put in, in the first place, so they could generate a trickle of AD and chest rewards without devoting 6 hr. a day to the game, That they could be a casual player and while not be BiS be at least in the running to content.
If Cryptic would stop "protecting" us, and let actual market dynamics take hold, the financial encentives for bots to even exist would dry up.
Try this:
1. Remove the Zen/AD 500 ea cap. Zen buyers will lap up AD if they can get a better exchange rate than 500. They will soak up the "excess" AD in the game and buy what they want with AD "in-game". They will be buying Zen (something Cryptic should like) to buy AD (something that players with excess AD should like) to buy stuff on AH (something that bulging bag players should like) and they will buy vendor items like GMoPs, thus destroying "excess" AD from the market.
2. Remove the 24k AD/day cap. Bots are the symptom of players seeking to get around this silly cap. They exchange items that have become alternate currency like GMoP etc. Cryptic is creating a underground economy with this silly cap.
3. Remove daily/weekly quest caps. Bots don't do quests. Bots do repetitive, repeatable actions. They are like the robot arms in the car factory making a couple of welds to a part of the car on the assembly line, then repeating on the next part. Bots do the grindy things that humans don't want to do, they are the toilet scrubbers of the MMO world. Yes, there are Group bots that sit in game and kill a certain mob repeatedly for drops, they are far less prevailant than the gather-bots however. And bots don't do quests! Remove the time restraints on quests and people (not bots) will do them (even the repetitive ones)! They may hate the grindy quests, but they will forgo the bots if you link the grindy quests with #4.
4. Make gear goals less resource intensive. If it takes millions of RP to level a players gear, they don't want to do that for a yr. they are either a botter themselves for the drops or they are supporting botters by buying the insane resource needs to level their gear. If a player can do something that is a tad grindy, like 10 times or 20 times not 360 they will do it themselves and not support the botters.
I earned my AD by selling Gemmed Exquisite shirts and pants. I got the tools by buying them off the AH. I did THAT by making Elegant shirt/pants, WAY back in the day when those were selling for way more than the cost of production.
And since back then there were tremendous exploits, I guess I'm also a non-legit player too. Sad.
Oh by the way, when I say "Tough Decisions" what I actually mean is make a ridiculous decision that appears to solve a problem at the cost of making someone mad (eg the player base) and justifying your actions by saying that the fact that they're mad proves that it was the right thing to do. The ideology that you don't ever get anywhere in life by trying to make everyone happy, so a move that makes a lot of people pissed off means you're making the right choices.