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EVE Bans Exploiters; Dropping 2% of Users Cuts Average CPU Usage 30%
Earthquake Retrofit writes "Ars has a story about EVE Online banning thousands of accounts for real-world trading of in-game money for profit. From the article: 'Those who buy and sell ISK, the game's currency, are not only exploiting the game, but unbalancing play. That's why the company decided to go drastic: a program they called "Unholy Rage." For weeks they studied the behavior and effects these real-money traders had on the game, and then they struck. During scheduled maintenance, over 6,000 accounts were banned. [Einar Hreiðarsson, EVE's lead GM,] assures us that the methods were sound, and the bannings went off with surgical precision. ... While the number of accounts banned in the opening phase of the operation constituted around 2 percent of the total active registered accounts, the CPU per user usage was cut by a good 30 percent.' Looks like they got the right 6,000.' Further information and more graphs are available from the EVE dev blog."
Actually if you read the article they claim most of these accounts are started using credit fraud. Last I looked, you don't make money when you are a victim of fraud.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
In EVE you can buy In-Game cards to extend your subscription, if you have enough ISK, which the farmers most definitely have.
There is a legitimate in-game system for buying and selling ISK, it is a part of the market and doesn't break it. Farming is not a part of that system.
...so no, they don't get protected and bailed out.
EVE themselves allow players to buy gold with real money. You can buy 60-day GTCs (game time codes) which allow you to purchase 2 months of game time. EVEs own website allows you to exchange these GTCs for in-game currency. So if you want, you can buy as many GTCs as you like, sell them via EVE, and buy yourself the ship of your dreams.
With a large percentage of the gold farmers killed off, anybody wanting to buy gold will have to do it through EVE. The net result is that many more GTCs are sold, generating lots of extra revenue for EVE
Who knows, maybe if I explain this a couple hundred times more, people will finally figure it out...
CCP does not make a penny more when people get their isk through Gametimecards. The only thing that happens is that instead of 2 players each paying for their own subscriptions, one of them pays for both of them in exchange for ingame currency. The end result for CCP is exactly the same, in that they receive money for 2 player subscriptions.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Actually, just about any server now days has power management turned on by default, (and in the case of HP's c class blades almost impossible to turn off). If they reduce the load by 30%, assuming that they were running near peak capacity I could easily see them cutting their power bill by 25%, if not more due to cooling expenses.