jmustful said:
And why would they mass ban (remove income from Sony)? From ones I've read, nobody has been permanently banned. Hmmm...what's your SOE employee number??
The way I see it is this:
1. There are threads on many message boards (class-specific and server-specific) related to warps, ghosting, /zone and the transfer of no-drop items. People are a lot more aware of ShowEQ, MQ2 and the types of hacks/plugins you can get for it. A lot more aware than they were a year ago, that's for certain. When I started (about a year or more ago) using MQ2 and docrack, and later /warp, people were unaware of these things even existing. Now there's lots of posts on public forums about people being caught warping/ghosting/etc.
2. If so many people are aware of MQ2/SEQ and what is possible with these programs/plugins, and Sony do nothing, it's bad publicity for them, and the normal non-cheating users may get upset and leave.
3. Banning people and bragging about it is good PR for Sony. This will help their image as a gaming company, which renews people's faith in EQ1 and other Sony games, like EQ2, SWG, etc.
4. The number of people who get caught cheating is low compared to the number of people who don't cheat, or don't get caught.
Lets try some theoretical numbers here. A year or two ago, Sony had 400 000 subscribers. Lets say that this total has dropped to 1 quarter of this, so 100 000 current subscribers.
Lets say the number of people using /warp and /zone stupidly enough to get banned is 1000 (a fairly generous number I think). Even if all these people are dual-boxing (hell even three-boxing), it only means 2-3% of their subscription costs they lose.
Good PR is worth 10 times that number. Simple as that really.
Note, the above figures are my guesses, unless you have hard figures about the number of subscribers, numbers of bannings, or anything else, don't bother picking apart the numbers in my example.
Blizzard regularly posts about the number of people they've banned. The number of people banned is a drop in the ocean compared to the number of people they have subscribing. It's the same for Sony.
Don't think that just because you have 10 accounts, Sony is going to care about the miniscule bit of money you send them every month.