The game was becoming increasingly overcrowded with [gold sellers'] bots, exploiting bugs and scamming legitimate players out of items and their accounts, he explains. RWT [real world trading] was the source of the majority of rule-breaking in habbo and without removing it; RWT could have ruined the game.
Tuckwell says that while real world traders claim they are running legitimate businesses, in reality it is akin to organized crime.
There is a whole industry built up around it, exploiting cheap labour and involving illegal activities. The majority of bots that we ban from members have been paid for with stolen credit card numbers.
Such accounts don't earn us habbo credits, they cost us habbohotel coins in bank refund charges - money that could be better spent on creating new content for our players; money that could help us increase the level of support our players receive. Also, in the longer term, if we had continued to experience these problems with account fraud, then it could have led to us no longer being able to accept credit card payments from legitimate players.
His point is taken up by Brad Wilcox at Sony Online Entertainment, which handles the EverQuest games as well a large portfolio of other MMO titles.
We're affected by the cost of dealing with the credit card fraud, and the contacts that are generated by the customers who have fallen victim to the compromised accounts and are just tired of the 'spammers/botters' within the game, he says.
