Resource Scripters : what to do about their ill-gotten vast resources ?
How about, in order not to have them benefit too much from whatever they have already stocked up through resource scripting, how about the Developers change the resources tree in a way that resources prior to the anti-cheat code will loose their worth and get replaced by newer resources that will only be available after the anti-cheat code goes live ?
For example, just to make myself understood, let's consider iron ingots.
Let's say that now, to make an item some 10 iron ingots are needed.
The Developers will now create a "new" item, it can use the same icon of the current iron ingots as well as the same name because all previous items of the same kind will now get a tag "old" and become, for example, "old iron ingots".
So, all current iron ingots will become "old iron ingots" while the new mineable iron ingots will be just "iron ingots".
Now, let's go back to the shield, the 10 iron ingots requirement will now ONLY apply for the "new" diggable iron ingots, not for the old ones. Should players want to use the old ones, they will need to use more of those, say on a 10 to 1 ratio. That is, to make the shield players will either need to use 10 new iron ingots or 100 old iron ingots.
Basically, resource scripters will be at a disadvantage and players digging and chopping anew will be back in business.
Slowly, over time the new resources will completely take over the old ones and solve the issue, completely. Of course, this change considers the stopping for good of resources scripting as it would not make much sense to introduce new resources to replace the old ones if then scripting could continue for the new resources as well....
Sure, this change will also hurt those players who legittimately digged and chopped their resources but it would not hurt them as much as it would with the scripters who got large stocks of resources to benefit from.
If it was possible to pin point all resources scripting accounts and just delete the resources from them then I think this would probably be the best way to handle the situation but, unfortunately, I do not see this as much possible.
Several scripters use a dummy, disposable account to script their resources and then transfer them to a legit account which do not script and so, it is quite hard to find where the resources ended up to to delete them.
Hence, no solution can be perfect and any solution has some cons.
Letting the scripters continue to benefit from the tens, hundreds of thousands of resources which they got through scripting though, I do not think would be right and something should be done to deal with this problem.
I think that devaluing, though gradually, the worth of the current resources to have new ones slowly take over and replace them (once the anti-cheat code is fully 100% up and running) might perhaps be a good and reasonable way, all in all considered, to deal with this issue.