Its something I would not have expected myself, and another compelling argument to ban them since they then save big time on server use. Now I wonder if they can just monitor accounts that use a high amount of CPU time?



I really do like CCP's approach here, they come across as serious with their anti-RMT stance, it sounds like just pure CPU load monitoring would drive up the RMT costs massively, couple that with the same sort of trial account restrictions SOE have done (another company that has been serious in this area) and I think its looking grim for the farmers.

I know it will always be there in the game, but driving them to select the easiest pickings (WoW, when they don't even bother to delete reported gold spam in game email messages with last the full 30 days it shows how little they care!), that's fine by me.

This is exactly what I was trying to figure out when I read the article. Things I could come with were:

1.) Constantly being on the system.
2.) Maybe to "stay away" from the main playerbase to not be noticed mining or whatever they were doing they would try to be in an unpopulated area which forced the servers to create resources for that area only for 1 person, vs a crowded area where resources were in memory for multiple people. (There is probably a technical game term for this ratio in the mmo programming world, not sure what it is).
3.) Maybe due to bad coding/bad patterns of the bot once it start to repeat its "loop" of what it does for money it could do it 20x to fast or something due to bad design.