Dog, am I not being clear? Let me spell it out I guess.
- Most botters probably plex their accounts*. Their plex consumption probably does indirectly drive sales of plex by increasing it’s sell value, but they aren’t putting money directly into CCP’s pocket.
- Botters/Cheaters cause players to stop playing, which costs CCP a significant amount of paying customers
- Note that one single botter/cheater can sour the game for multiple players
- This is a PvP centric game; so players are far less tolerant of botters and cheaters here than they might be a PvE game where they have a smaller effect on player experiences and outcomes
- Real players help create a social critical mass -they bring friends in and help keep existing players playing
- CCP loses additional revenue because of the players that chose to buy isk from the RMT’ers instead of CCP.
- Thus, even though botters are buying plex through the in-game market, this is significantly overshadowed by a loss of cash-paying, real players that leave because of them and a by loss of direct plex sales.
- Thus, CCP is financially incentivized to get rid of botters. And judging by the chart, this appears to be the case. Unless they are straight up lying to us, they have put some serious effort into cracking down on botting.
I don’t know how you seem so convinced that CCP wants botters. I know that the interests of the devs don’t always align with the interests of the players, but I’d bet money that this is a case where they do align.
*Note: Yeah, why would they pay actual money when they can just have a bot run for 15 hours or so? I mean, some cheating players might -who knows. But RMT organizations who are trying to make as much real world money as possible definitely wouldn’t.