Integrity sensored? Conspiracy?

[Jerbob]

I don't think we should not have these things just because RMT abuse them. They should do something about the RMT themselves, or take steps to make them less abusable. I don't want to see another case of bad apples ruining something that works perfectly fine with legitimate people.

I agree with this sentiment entirely. Of course, the difficulty is that it requires consistent, direct action against the abusers of those systems. That's something I'd like to see more of.

I personally believe that a large portion of things that violate the ToS aren't actually detrimental to the game and it's players overall as a whole, in fact quite the opposite, though of course some things certainly are detrimental, painting them all with the same brush seems very off base.

I can’t agree with this unfortunately.

For each thing that violates the ToS, we should ask whether it confer an advantage upon the user, no matter how small, that cannot be precisely replicated by another player without the same setup. The answer to this, for the vast majority of cases, is going to be yes - an advantage is gained. Why go to the trouble of using some tool if there is no benefit? Perhaps there are a very small number of purely aesthetic things that don't confer a benefit other than "ooh shiny", but these are going to be vanishingly small in the greater context of ToS violations. And, of course, anything that improves shininess while simultaneously increasing game engine performance is an advantage to the player too.

The benefit can be minor - hypothetical examples like something that speeds up moving gear around various inventories, or streamlines some aspect of the user interface, etc. One could argue that there's no mechanical benefit to these examples, but that's not true. They save time. They save faffing around in menus. Most critically, they allow the player to allocate their attention to more important things. It's a small thing, but lots of small things together make a huge difference.

And I think we all know that some of the ToS violations that a lot of people use as a matter of course are not just time saving things. They make a mechanical difference to how people can play the game - they simplify actions, speed up this or that, add new functionality, improve other functionality.

These "small things" are intrinsically damaging because they are objectively, absolutely unfair. An advantage is gained by possessing them over players that don't. A distinct, measurable advantage. And they stack up to make a very significant net advantage.

Beyond that, they are absolutely affecting the development of the game. SE has to watch us to see how to balance new content. If people are cheating to make the game easier, SE reasonably ramps up the challenge. Now the game is harder for people who aren't cheating. The gap widens. The cheaters gain a further advantage. More cheats are developed. More cheats are seen as "mandatory". The scale of the cheating increases. The gap widens further.

This is particularly true when a given aspect of the game is a bit clunky, and people cheat to streamline or bypass it. If people talk about how Aspect Y of the game is terrible and needs fixing, if they make enough noise about it, there's a chance something will be done about it. If the majority of the population takes it upon themselves to cheat in order to avoid Aspect Y, nothing will be done to fix it. And the minority who aren't cheating suffer, because Aspect Y becomes yet another source of advantage for cheaters.

I hear a lot of justification for why Thing X isn't cheating. The cold hard fact is that Thing X always grants an advantage. That's why people use it. That is cheating, and gaining an advantage is damaging to others and to the game as a whole.