The csrs are mostly incompetent people who don't even play or understand their own game. The developers are not - not saying they're all corrupt chinese operatives or whatever, but, there is a huge divide where devs know their shit and senior gm ruinyourday does not.
I think an easier explanation is that the organized groups have connections where they either kickback (conspiracy theory) to be let go if they don't push it too far, or they have compromise agreements and police themselves to lesson the strain as a form of "its gonna happen anyway this is better than the alternative" approach. I buy the latter because we know this is exactly the stance taken by holly with macroquesting.
Yeah both very plausible.
I've spoken on discord to the SG botters before. Not sure if they are the ones that do it on every server, but I would assume so. They were American and sounded very retarded. They couldn't type or speak coherent sentences. They spoke like how you would expect someone living in the deep south who only finished 4th grade to speak. It could have all been an act though to convince me they were retarded, who knows.
I've gone pretty deep in to the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories when it comes to the connection between botters and DBG, especially since I used to be a degenerate who played 18 hours a day for years so I would spend weeks fucking with the botters on every server and noticed just insanely weird things.
While botters giving kickbacks to DBG staff is very plausible, considering we've seen corrupt DBG staff before on the TLP's, from my experience I think the following 2 is more likely to apply to most cases:
1. The botters automate a ticket system. When you mess with them, they send in 100+ tickets on you and maybe even get the other botters on their team to do the same. When someone gets petitioned hundreds of times, not having evidence of what you are claiming they did no longer becomes a problem. The person will most likely get suspended. I think this is why a lot of people who mess with botters instantly get suspended.
2. Some of the botters help DBG dev's with coding issues or various EQ related things. I'm not sure how many of the botters do this, but we know for a fact at least 1 did. The guy who wrote the original MQ compile that worked on TLP's back on phinny and then continued to write MQ compiles all the way up until about mangler/aradune period worked with DBG devs. His IRL friend also plays EQ and leaked discord DM history of him conversing with several DBG dev's about different game issues as well as DM's with one of the GM's. It was very clear they were fully aware of his botting. He obviously got protection in exchange for help on game issues.
Zaide
your Quarken podcast was really good, I listened to the entire thing and I haven't finished a full podcast in a long time. The guy definitely has a gift for telling stories. Wish I could go back in time and run with his crew.
