UNDERCUTTING....

[Wolfie]

I don't understand how people talk about a Free Market like it should actually exist in MMO's. A free market would tell me that if I can find a bot to do what other players spend hours doing, its the other people who are the suckers. If SE wanted a free market, they would allow 3rd party programs and tell people who can't code or purchase their own bot to suck it. We want a controlled economy that encourages people to do the work instead of cheating. I don't care what your real life opinion is on Economics, this is not the real world. We want people to actually enjoy doing work enough to pay a monthly fee and in turn help this game survive.

If SE wanted us to "do the work instead of cheating", then they would disable all inter-player trading, and all currency and purchases would be done via NPC interaction. The moment you allow players to trade or interact with each other, they're going to find a way to "exploit" the trading system to get the highest benefit. That is a tenet of how any economy works, whether its real life or virtual.

The reason why bots are banned is simply because SE is not okay with the idea that players can automate their gameplay. There are some MMOs that allow it, some that have come up with ingenious ways to thwart it, and some that opt to simply ban them. But banning bots does not make the rest of the economy any less of a free market.

And finally, if you think that virtual economies don't have parallels to real world economies, then you my friend are extremely uneducated. People write their Ph.D. theses on virtual economies, and the same laws and phenomena that happen in real world economies also happen in virtual economies.

[Themule]

If SE wanted us to "do the work instead of cheating", then they would disable all inter-player trading, and all currency and purchases would be done via NPC interaction. The moment you allow players to trade or interact with each other, they're going to find a way to "exploit" the trading system to get the highest benefit. That is a tenet of how any economy works, whether its real life or virtual.

The reason why bots are banned is simply because SE is not okay with the idea that players can automate their gameplay. There are some MMOs that allow it, some that have come up with ingenious ways to thwart it, and some that opt to simply ban them. But banning bots does not make the rest of the economy any less of a free market.

And finally, if you think that virtual economies don't have parallels to real world economies, then you my friend are extremely uneducated. People write their Ph.D. theses on virtual economies, and the same laws and phenomena that happen in real world economies also happen in virtual economies.

LOL...not even going to respond.