Botting isn’t the uniquely linked to RMT. In many ways RMT is an indirect revenue factor for CCP, which has both gained and cost them. A complication did arise since CCP started boiling frogs in the sense of organised botting (as opposed to individual) started to develop a footprint in PLEX purchase patterns (volume). Sharp and wide decreases in bots would affect rate of purchase. To be honest, between the lines there is one of the reasons why CCP’s always been aptly slow in reacting to legitimate customers pulling stunts like sp farming, sp milking, organised offer / pack / specialty account initiatives like in pubbie groups, etc. It creates an offset.
Ever since CCP began their first experiments with GTC’s and later PLEX (there was a time where GTC’s sold for isk was illegal) RMT also went through changes. CCP carries a high persistant cost in the relation between RMT / Account hacking. The kind of cost which is much more direct on the books, and thus one which carries more weight. Which is another part of the reasoning on why it is simpler for CCP to once every few months do a little PR dance and throw out a simple devblog on bot bans complete with “your country needs you” type of dual messaging focus, and why security / rmt carries far and far more weight.
CCP’s been publicly quiet on the ratio between bot/rmt and security/rmt for a few years now. Prior to the silence it was different, with security/rmt providing the biggest cost & inertia factors.
Not worth it in the sense of applying the business perspective on allocation of resources. It’s the opposite end of a similar coin of “invest X get return X+y” in a bigger picture of venture management priorities. There’s no evi behind this, it is a matter of working with what you have towards goals set by ongoing directives and the cycles of those.
Botting is a problem, but from a cost management perspective it is first and foremost a perception problem. Which also carries costs and cost potential, but there’s tools which can handle that unless the scale of the problem were indeed to permeate everything in such a manner that the issue would become tangible. Let’s be honest for a moment, within the style and form of venture management why spend more on deep investments when the return is at best marginal in the books and most of the time at best skirts the edges of cost/benefit of revenue cycles, when you can do marketing and contain the perception problem because your customers have demonstrated time and time again that they want to believe and that they want to wait.
It’s smart use of cognitive behaviour. Humans think they are rational, while they are not, but they are great at rationalising. The difference seems to escape most.
It’s the same with content cycles and low hanging fruit of fixes and iteration. CCP knows full well that the generational patterns of EVE’s demographics always carries a very strong push element from within the organised dynamic (people go deep, invest a lot, they will embrace and push each other to accept in order to not have to write off the - emotional and other - investment, it also carries a very strong pull element not unlike the classic psychological case of the too expensive vacuum cleaner, and customers tend to develop a bias / overcompensate element in their consumptive behaviour because they aren’t a person in game, but an entity which lacks visual affirmation of identity concepts of the real world. In other words: CCP’s metrics also demonstrate how rewarding it is to bank on minimum product viability because the customer accepts it continuously.
In truth, the only times CCP has ever had to make an about-face was when a perception problem became greater than their ability to use messaging and triggering to more or less manage the direction of focus of the perception problem. Each time such a case arose, it was a consequence of CCP’s own actions, but never inactions. It’s no surprise CCP’s venture level was more than fine with splintering community messaging and pulling the equivalent of rewriting history by analogy of multiple times swapping out community toolsets.
Anyhow, I honestly don’t see reasons for CCP to alter its priorities and decision making. While admittedly it’s changing the old emergent dynamic EVE into an ST:O EVE it is still a game which carries enough room for emergent behaviour within the guided behaviour boxes / niches to enable deep gameplay for customers. It’s just a case of managing change. Perception is key. CCP’s venture level is simply smarter about it than its customers.
