@Dot_Warner cheating was going on when Richard ran UO and Mesanna wasn't even an employee then. EA has always been about the money and as long as the green rolled in they did nothing. The only time EA told Richard to do something was when UO started bleeding accounts and forced UO to create Tram because they did not want to wait for the UO Team to come up with other ideas, it was a fix it yesterday thing and again it was all about the money. EA allowed items and accounts to be sold on EBay it was Sony that got that shut down not EA. The current UO Team is doing nothing more than all the other UO Teams did because EA got the cash. If Mesanna were to enforce the ToS UO would close due to lack of MONEY (subs) and BS would be fired for allowing it. It is called
Of course cheating was going on when Origin still ran UO. Cheating will occur in any game that doesn't actively try to stop it. That is where
every producer before Mesanna's tenure differs from her. She encourages it. "Any way you want to win..."
EA didn't care about sub loss pre-Trammel, Origin did. In EA's plan, UO wasn't supposed to survive past two years. They'd figured a year tops. Is EA greedy? Duh. They've allowed UO to continue so they could milk sentiment for the last 20 years. Though I have a bad feeling that once that 20 year milestone is reached, and BS's contract expires, we may be in for a harsh lesson in just how little EA actually cares. (I will be happy to be wrong!)
Re: RMT. Assuming EA "allowed" Ebay sales assumes EA
knew/cared. Garriott wasn't against it, nor is he now...but then he's turned into a greedy 'lil bastage...but I digress. Back before Ebay booted digital sales, the entire market was an unknown. Who'd have thought people would clamor to buy goods that weren't in any way tangible? Later teams, after EA moved UO to Redwood, took a different tack on RMT and made it a no-no. Draconi's team actively tried to fight against it with house deletions and such, with varying degrees of success. But at least they did it visibly...
Since SA, the teams have only paid lip service to stopping cheating. Calvin had his mythical, smoke and mirrors spreadsheet, the Punk Buster debacle and weird "Wild, Wild, West" delusions. Skalski claimed to have some "plan," but he wandered off shortly after his brain-dead idea for a cheater's only shard. Mesanna just plays dumb - claiming to not know the difference between multiclienting and multiboxing, amongst other fairly obvious cheat-related things.
Is money the reason Mesanna gives cheaters free reign? Most certainly. I'm sure she doesn't want to be remembered as the person who killed UO...even though she surely will be as she slowly runs it into the ground with buggy, rushed publishes, empty promises*, rampant cheating and her idiocy with EM item distribution. (*High res graphics, new account management system, new NPE, Steam, nearly every promise relating to the governor system, knighting all the Virtues,
lack of even cursory advertising,
lack of even a little buzz about the 20th six month before it happens, etc.)