1 Bots for a player = Profit for player and EA
4 Bots for a player = 4x Profit for player and 4x profit for EA
Granted the player isn't technically making real profit... most the time...
But EA makes profit either way. More features, more land more, useless pixels that are dubbed "rare" = more Bots which = more money plain and simple. Why ban that when it's not really hurting anyone. It's actually making them money.
I totally disagree.
Cheating in the game, as I see it, can hurt other players game play (players who do not cheat).
How ?
In PvP it gets players to loose a fight (hacks and fighting offensive/defensive scripts). Pretty much an obvious inbalance here...
As in regards looting scripts or resource gathering, or Bulk Order Deeds or Library Collectibles or Heartwwod Quests, it hurts players not cheating, because it devalues the time spent in the game by all those players who do not cheat.
If a player has to take time away from their life to gather items in the game, their time has a value which is embedded into that item which was obtained through investing that time.
But if there are players capable of getting those same items through scripts, those items will be possible to be priced much, much lower than it could be for those players who actually had to spend their time to get them.
Eventually, the more rampant scripting is, the cheaper those items will become thus simply making it not worth the time to get them for those players who do not cheat.
Just to make an example to explain the point I am trying to make, if rampant scripting brings down the price of a barbed runic sewing kit to 500,000, given the time it is needed to invest into getting one without scripting, a player who "might" have wished to get a barbed runic sewing kit on their own, without cheating, might be better off just spend the same time doing else in the game, more rewarding, and just buy the kit for 500k gold....
This means, that cheating can effectively make a whole lot of activities in the game "not worth their time" for players who do not cheat when playing.
That is, a lot of players might be better off not mining, not chopping wood, not collecting Bulk Order Deeds, not doing Heartwood Quests, not doing Library Collectibles and on and on and on.................
Basically, a whole lot of activities in the game which players "might" be willing to enjoy and play with, could be not worth the time it takes to get them done and players not cheating, because of scripters, might better just do else in the game in that same time frame and buy what they need from scripters.
I think this as VERY wrong and bad for the game itself since it reduces the number of activieties that players might be willing to do in the game and, perhaps, alienate some players from the game, eventually, causing loss of subscriptions.
So, and this is my point in the discussion, it is entire debatable whether cheating in Ultima Online is in the end "profitable" for the Company that owns the game.
Because the cheaters might subscribe more than 1 account and bring in more revenues but other players who do not want to cheat might be deterred from playing or from returning to the game because of the rampant cheating and so, the end tally from subscriptions lost rather than gained, could be at a losing balance thus meaning less profits rather than more.......
But, at least to my liking, there is also more to how cheating can effect my gaming long term.
If I do not enjoy nor want to play games where others can cheat, and I feel that not enough is done to stop cheating in a game that I happened to be playing with others, this might well deter me from even considering any future release from that particular game Company that I felt was not strong enough against cheating, in the one game I played of theirs........
So, I am not sure how much cheating in a game can be profitable in the long run......