Quote Originally Posted by Angelhearth View Post
My guess to the root of the problem - and it's a guess - is that those that sold on the market board, the pros that kept within the rules, earned too much. I easily made 1-2 million a day, and I didn't even work hard for it. Those that really worked hard could easily make 5 million a day. SE saw this and found it to be unacceptable, so they decided to let the bots run free, to keep the prices down. This is a short term solution, as it will have unwanted consequences, something SE probably will find out, if they haven't already. In addition, if I understand it correctly, this isn't much of a problem on the Japanese servers, because the Japanese players are much more willing to follow rules than us westerners, who basically, in most cases, will disregard any rule, if we can get away with it, so SE don't really care much about it. To explain this means I have to get into the word 外人 (gaijin), something I'm hesitant to do, as it's a very sensitive subject for the Japanese.
SE still cares. It's just very hard to get a handle on the RMT/bot problem when players are so insistent on cheating.

Not that it's going to make anyone here feel better, but there's a severe botting problem in Classic WoW right now as well - but only on the NA servers. WoW players have the advantage of add-ons and websites that track AH data over time so you can see what's going on. Blizzard had a ban wave that hit 74k accounts back in June that caused the NA markets to adjust for about 2 weeks. Then the bots reappeared and prices started crashing as supply started skyrocketing again. Blizzard did change how some of the most heavily hit nodes spawned but that evidently just made a small difference until the bots adjusted again.

If Blizzard, with their aggressive and fairly well publicized anti-bot efforts, is struggling in their home market, is it any wonder that SE might be struggling with bots in the same market?

Ultimately, if you want to kill RMT and botting then you need to get rid of the players who take advantage of those things. As long as there are buyers, there will be sellers. If there were no buyers, the sellers wouldn't be able to stay in business.