Quote Originally Posted by skorf View Post
That may be entirely true... but on most of the older ss's 95%+ of the people bot.

I bot, I admit it and having been on my server for over 3 years and having been in some form of leadership on my server for some of that time, I know the majority of the players on my server either personally or through reputation... and I can think of only 1 player who does not bot.

So if evony bans bots and no one finds a way around it... I know the majority of the server will quit (if that's evony's goal to get all botters to quit and shut down servers, then by all means go this route); now what likely will happen, people will find a way around it (like they always do) but before that happens, evony will lose some real players and coiners because people just get fed up... what happens is those accounts will just end up as someone else's alts. So evony implements a new system, someone finds a way around it (usually the people with the most accounts are the ones who will) a few people quit but those accounts just become the property of someone else and made into alts... leading to compounded issues for evony (just as much bandwidth being used and even less revenue generated).
Evony knows that all real players on older servers use bots. Their claims otherwise are non-sense. I was a long hold out, always said I would quit before I used one, but then it reached the point of quit or use it, and I started. Slapping old servers with a sudden actual enforcement, as you say, would be to immediately kill those servers and drive away most of those players. Worse, some of the more extreme of those players would simply go to new servers and do everything in their power to ruin those servers, and they have in the past proven quite resourceful in doing just that.

Reduction of the database size by eliminating dead cities and worthless data would be minor improvement and would certainly help, as would elimination of worthless items that cannot be used, but only minor as compared to the massive communication requirements from massive numbers of bots as compared to live players. That is why my suggestion remains to give us new servers that are 100% enforcement of the TOS, meaning no alts, no bots, no selling accounts, no hacked heroes, etc. On the old servers, find partial solutions to try to get things somewhat under control and let the servers then play out and slowly die.

I personally will reset my accounts on old servers and leave them if I feel there are new servers that rules will actually be enforced on and play there. Suddenly trying to show zero tolerance on servers that management made almost no efforts to enforce them for years, and allowed violation of the TOS to be the standard rather than the exception is not reasonable. And even if they successfully did disable all bots, all the time, and even after the massive armies starved, that still would leave grossly inflated heroes and resource stashes that were gained via botting, not the real game. So leave those servers with limited bandwidth, and those that want to try to play there with choking lag can continue until those servers are not paying for themselves.