Re: Trial Account Restrictions (Bumming Me Out)
I was just thinking this morning that I would totally trade a 30 day account code for NIC and/or goods. I think the devs went with codes so they could eventually put something like what Eve has into the game, wouldn't make sense on any scale at this time because the economy is fragile.
Your logic for gold farming is sound, but there is also the 'blue water' concept. If your a gold farmer, you have a ton of competition in games like WOW and Rift, which keeps prices very low. While there may not be a current NIC market, if you were to get in now and start building up a NIC nest egg, WHEN the game gets older, there will be a market and you will be in position to capitalize.
I would say they are adequately paraniod vs unbelievably. They already found and shut down one farming operation. If you don't expect the game to survive and thrive, then its unbelievably, but the devs and a whole bunch of other players assume that the game will continue and grow in popularity, so its believable that a crafty gold farmer would believe this too.
It wouldn't surprise me to know that said farmer is already in the game and invested a couple hundred $$'s in multiple accounts just gathering EP, but not putting any effort into actually farming yet. But that really has nothing to do with bulk trial account farming
About catching them though. Your totally correct about being able to automate the detection algorythms, but the farmers are programmers too, and losing free accounts doesn't mean anything, but they will slowly learn how to avoid detection. For as big as WOW is and the quality and quantity of programmers Blizzard has, you would think that they would be able to detect and catch gold farmers too. Selling game currency is a huge business. "Gold Farmer" is so generic a term, but they are usually teams of programmers hacking clients, injecting data streams, and just about any other black hat cracking/hacking activity you can think of.
Security through obscurity, or Perpetuum is too small for them to notice, never a good practice.
I wouldn't mind seeing 15 day unlimited trials codes again from players in addition to the unlimited restricted trial accounts. That way players that are really interested in getting friends in can still do so. Its the 'unlimited' part of the trial codes that really causes the potential issue.