Basically just because you like something it should stay even though it has a huge negative impact on the game? You have heroics that give a lot of credits which bots can't do. vs Slicing nodes that now give a lot of credits which bots can easily do 24/7. If they made slicing nodes give materials only, you can still get all your credits from heroics and all the other stuff you haven been saying that is just as good as slicing. You would still even be able to get your "run around and click game objects" fix after the change. So why exactly are you fighting to the death for slicing? Makes absolutely no sense when there is no meaningful gain.

My whole issue is why even have slicing nodes give credits anymore if at the end of the day the credit selling bots are the ones mostly getting them. People even admit that they are camped by bots so why increase the credits they give? If anything they should be changed to give materials instead. People bring up heroics and say they give more credits. If that is the case then why the need for slicing nodes to almost triple in credits? Especially when most of the game population doesn't even bother with slicing nodes and is most likely running heroics. It seems like a very silly change just to help credit sellers and increase inflation. It has no real benefit to almost everyone playing the game.

If heroics give out good credits and its what most people actually do then why even have slicing nodes give credits? Credit selling bots are the ones mostly getting the slicing nodes along with a very small amount of people that farm them. If the large majority of people don't even bother with slicing nodes and there is other things like heroics giving out good credits. Why raise the credits you get from slicing nodes or even have slicing nodes give credits anymore when it has no positive impact on the game?

I think the absolute best thing to do overall for the game is just have slicing nodes give materials. It will wipe out slicing bots and all gathering professions with be perfectly balanced. I'm sure some people will be against this since slicing currently gives pure credits. If it is a matter of getting credits then just increase the credits that dailies give or have something else give credits that wouldn't be easy for a bot to do. The best way of dealing with /controlling bots is making it so what gives the credits or most amount of credits cannot easily be done by a bot but rather someone actually playing the game.

There is actually an item dupe exploit that has been going on since 4.0 which is having a huge impact on the economy.

I've been watching server population like a hawk since KOTFE release. First of all the servers never hit the population burst that they did with the previous expansions. Is that because people did not like what they seen for the expansion or people were playing a few days and left is up for debate. There has also been other major game releases. The population burst KOTFE did have has been dropping the past 2 weeks. This past weekend Harbinger was at standard during peak hours before the companion nerf was even data mined. Using the companion nerf as a means to claim the population drop is nonsense. This is also all backed up by torstatus data so stop making things up.

After watching some videos people posted in the feedback thread. People are making little mistakes that are making this much harder for them to do. First of all when you zone into the flashpoint and drop down the duct there will be a glowing console on the left side of this room. You click this to get buffs that will help you do the flashpoint. If you do NOT click this you are doing HARD MODE. If you are doing hard mode you are suppose to die and have difficulty doing it because that is the point. When you are near the end with the platforms that have 2 golds and other adds that come. DO NOT focus on looting items or using them on the boss. People are looting items and channeling them on the boss while they are getting overwhelmed with mobs and getting tore up. There is NO NEED to loot or use the item right away. There is no rush or timer. Simply KILL EVERYTHING FIRST priority being aoeing the group of 4 adds once they come. Once you have all the mobs dead then loot and channel on the boss. If you are playing a healer then set your companion role to DPS. You don't need a tank to take a beating you need DPS to get things killed as quickly as possible especially for the platform area where you can get overwhelmed.

They haven't made any changes changes towards fighting bots/spam in the past 2 years. Prior to that maybe they did something but nothing I remember. Hell the security chests have been plagued with bots since launch and they never done anything. They weren't even banning bots in a timely manner when reported. Some of the same bots have been going for 8+ months until their recent "taking down a credit selling ring" took them out. Not sure why you are going on about F2P accounts when I never said they don't use F2P. I simply said not all spammers use F2P accounts. Point is if they have to pay that isn't going to change anything. UNLESS they also banned them quickly so that it paying to spam wasn't worth it. Even then that still wouldn't matter if they were committing fraud. I didn't post no solutions? I guess you just skimmed it like everyone does. Very easy solutions to cripple the farming bots which is root cause of the spam. Sites can't spam and sell what they don't have. Things to deal with spammers. To be honest it is hard to give a solution to this when you don't know how Bioware's systems are set up and what they are able/have resources to do.

I know that there may be other threads similar to this but I think many people just read the first post then reply. Therefor I made this thread because I tired of seeing the same clueless information and solutions. I hope that as many people as possible will see this thread and learn some things on credit/gold sellers and the current situation with them in SWTOR. This also applies to all mmorpgs and not just SWTOR. Lets start off with the credit spammers. These guys have no credits and they don't transfer credits in any way. Their only purpose is advertisement, to get buyers to their site. Once the site gets a sale, they will then contact their "suppliers" aka "credit/gold farmers". The supplier will then deliver the goods and the site will pay them around 30%-50% of the sale. Now for the credit/gold farmers. These guys are the root cause of the spam, inflation, farming things that effect regular players, and pretty much everything bad. They can be American, Russian, Chinese, Japenese, etc. They do it because it is possible to make a lot of money no matter where you are from. Basically get it out of your heads that it is always some poor Chinese guy in a slave camp trying to make enough to eat. They use bots/hacks to farm credits/gold. They find dupes to mass produce credits/gold. They phish accounts to steal credits/gold. They may even be legit players selling off some of their credits/gold. Any way that they can get large amounts of currency they will do it. Normally 90% of the credits/gold comes from botting. They can bot credits/gold in many different ways. In SWTOR's case their biggest/easiest source for the past few years has been security chests.Specifically using a bot with teleport hacks to gather chests quickly on higher level planets. Now within the past few months, these bots have expanded on a MASSIVE scale to teleport farming the HEROIC 4 [breakthrough] quest instance in Belsavis. It seems that they farm it untill quest reset cap then go offline or use another set of bots. Therefor they may not be online all the time. If you notice an abnormal number of snipers in Belsavis all around the same level these are the bots. They start at level 43 and max out at level 53. Harbringer being the highest population server has the most of them. Anywhere from 30-40 bots during the day and another set of 30-40 bots during the night maybe even more. If you have noticed an increase in spam over the last few months especially the past week. It is because those spammer web sites now have a bigger supply of credits due to the massive bots in Belsavis. Also combined with the fact that less people are currently playing so they are spamming everyone to death to get as many sales as possible. Bioware's "Taking down a credit selling ring" was on these credit farmers that are teleport botting the quest phase in Belsavis and security chests. They did in fact wipe out these bots and they were gone for at least a week. They made no changes though and it appears they aren't going to constantly ban them quickly. The bots are back now and have been going for a week. Which leads me to the title of the thread "What is the point in taking down a credit selling ring?" because doing 1 banwave along with a forum post and nothing else isn't going to change anything. Is there changes coming to stop these bots? Is there changes coming to help prevent spammers? Are more customer service employees coming to keep banning them quickly? If not then what is Bioware going to accomplish? A thread full of people on this forum praising them when most hadn't seen or even know what they truly done? Publicity from sites reporting how they took down this credit selling ring? There hasn't been any changes in the past few years to deal with bots/spammers. It also doesn't help that reporting these teleport farmers usually resulted in "thanks for your report, we will look in to it." and watching them continue on for months. It is time Bioware started making changes to fight/control botters and spammers like most other top mmorpgs do. They can deal a big blow to those belsavis bots farming the quest instance by simply removing the credits from the mobs. They can deal another big blow by either changing Security chests loot so that they don't give credits but items that would be useful to actual players. They could also just remove security chests (at least on high level planets). They wouldn't need to be gone forever, they could reintroduce them later in a way that bots can't take advantage of them. Those 2 easy changes alone will crush a majority of the site spammer's supply which will end up reducing spam. As for changes to prevent spamming itself, the first steps should be making it require as much work as possible for the spammer to get an account ready to spam. For example things like raising level requirements and requiring certain class quests be completed. If possible they should make it so that after a certain amount of people "report spam" it checks to see when the account was created and current level. If the date is within the past month and/or the level is low it should automatically ban them or not allow them to talk in general/whispers at least. Whatever Bioware decides to do it is better than them doing nothing about it for the past few years. Realistically you are never going to 100% remove spam/bots. The goal is to minimize it as best as possible. Some things people keep throwing around won't change anything. For example... All of these spammers aren't using F2P accounts. They can't mail, mass whisper, and spam general faster than 1 min on F2P accounts. Even if they have to pay to advertise it makes no difference. They'll gladly pay to spam when they are making tons of money off of it. They might not even be paying in the first place and committing fraud instead. They don't have the resources to do this and it is just plain stupid doing it this way which is why no one does it. They also aren't going to give players power to do it since who would they give it to? What if they abuse it? What if they aren't online when spammers are? No big MMOs these days give players this kind of power. Why have players do this when Bioware can and should do something to handle it? It won't change anything because they will just undercut Bioware's price just like they undercut when the Cartel Market came. Not only that but I think straight up selling credits is bad for any mmo. Yes it would stop "buy credits" spam and farmers at the cost of butchering the game. Then you would have farmers pimping out accounts and spammers advertising accounts and other account services. There is a reason why no other big MMOs do this and that is It is completely dumb to ban actual players. The servers would be even more empty right now. You go after the spammers/botters who are the ones actually causing problems.