The $10 classic thing and a game card pretty much allow them to put fake info in on an account, spam, and then get banned a couple days later. Even a single day at $25 (30 day game cards are $15) is cheap, considering there's always buyers to answer that spam with money.
Time wasted isn't a factor, either, considering they probably have people working 20 hour shifts doing nothing but creating accounts. At 5 minutes per account, they can have a single person's 30 bots covered pretty early in their shift.
Then the botter just adds the account info to their client, and it cranks out an erudite female wizard with a random name that they can spam with, and they probably have a few clients set aside for actual resource gathering, which isn't a bannable offense, even if it is obviously a botter. "Hey, he speaks chinese and has a bunch of characters on autofollow all farming nameds!" isn't enough for the investigations department to actually ban someone, since that behavior in and of itself is innocuous, and while we can spot the botters, banning them on such simple criteria only allows a witch hunt.
Then comes item and plat laundering, which is probably done through a huge number of accounts, and some characters having normal names so as to not arouse suspicion. Once it passes through a certain number of accounts, it's safe to sell. WoW gold sellers usually attach it to mail, but EQ2 plat sellers are a little more intelligent, preferring to have the buyer put a worthless item on the broker for them to buy. But, I've actually put crap on the broker to transfer money between my characters (since it's instant, rather than 30 mins to wait), so everyone with vendor trash selling for 100p can't be a guaranteed plat buyer, can they?
So, you have a bunch of concepts which are recognized as plat selling tactics, but by themselves, aren't indisputable evidence of it. Add to that the fact that it's sweatshop labor that is relentlessly making and using accounts at a cost that's negligible in light of the profit, and you have a problem that's difficult to solve.
What's to be done?
- Not everyone selling vendor trash for huge amounts of money is buying plat, so you can't just sweep and ban them all.
- Not every erudite wizard with a randomly generated name and farming nameds is doing it to make plat to sell (though they are in the staggering majority, I admit).
- Banning the spammers isn't really a solution, since they have new accounts ready and waiting.
- Raising the price of the base game is something a jerk would do.
- Requiring credit card verification for all accounts would hurt a huge portion of younger players, people without credit or debit cards (they do exist), and people who are still timid about using them online.
The general idea proposed on the official forums is "burn the witches" and while I'm sure you can spot plenty of plat sellers, innocent people will burn as well. I've actually been called a botter because I've spent hours outside HoS farming spongy to sell, and I'm sure as hell not one.
If you have any foolproof ideas, I'd love to hear them.
Far East accounts created too cheaply?
