Possible RMTers?

There's this group of 8 players I see fairly often at the AE.
all anon
all 50
no guild
no invention sets
no accolades
no vet badges, just AE, WW and inf badges
their names and how they are put together remind me of the names we see in RMT spam

If it's simply one guy who is stoked about farming, I figure Ok, what the heck.
I heard of one WoW guy who played even more accounts at once.

But something about this group just doesn't seem to add up.

Most characters I usually see have some kind of coherence between their name, appearance and powerset.
These appear to have none, as if everything was chosen at random.

It strongly suggests that they are RMTers, but it's hardly enough evidence for anyone to do anything about it.

If they're RMTs, it sounds to me like they're ones starting from near ground zero. Good RMT farmers have set bonuses, because it makes them significantly more efficient.

Well I've seen some of the teams I suspect to be RMTers traveling through Ouro. 3 Fire/Sonics, 3 Fire/Bubbles, 2 Fire/Kins all with triple-leadership toggles. They hardly need any set bonuses to be VERY effective at fighting anything.

Yeah, I've gotten some spam from a couple "new" sites (or new to me at least)...
And just last night I saw a toon running around, named something similar to - "hjmk cyhg" or something.

It could just be someone making a disposable toon to run some story arcs for Merits and then delete them later, or somebody's dual (or tri)-box tag along doorsitter/heal spammer.
Or someone with vetspecs making a disposable toon to get back part of their Inf "wasted" on creating (typically unsellable) Common IO's, like Holds or other Mez's - while working on Field Crafter? (Although, that would be a real waste of time for most folks these days.)
Or... Maybe all of the above - *shrug*

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville City of Heroes didn't fail, City of Heroes was killed. If a 747 dropped on your house, you'd say you were killed, not you failed to find a safer dwelling.

o'kay, this is just insane...

He must have some rockin' air conditioning.

The folks I chatted with, in fact, had some serious problems communicating in English. They hardly "detailed" any of this for me, and I'd love for you to actually quote where I said they did.

They also had the other hallmarks. They were running multiple accounts where the characters generally looked alike (in one case they were all identical), moving around as an autofollow cloud. They generally spent their time running the same well-known farm missions in PI, though one was an RV farmer (back when Heavies could be healed). Their characters were typically multiple Fire/Kins, sometimes named all the same except like ".1", ".2" etc at the end.

If these people weren't farmers, they sure were working hard to look like them.

The premise here is really basic.

Better characters farm faster and easier.

You said it yourself. Farmers want it easy. They can get the same farming done with 3-4 active characters and the other 4-5 characters idling somewhere. Futzing with 8 accounts every time you cycle the map, making sure none of them is hung on a curb somewhere, that's more effort, not less.

All the farmer has to do is take those basic characters and invest in them up front. They're making plenty of inf, and once they invest, they make the inf from then on faster and easier. The only reason not to do this is if they expect to be banned and so lose the investment. Even at the best PL rates we've seen with the MA, it makes no sense to do things to get your farming level 50s banned frequently. Have things changed? Are they devs banning the RMT farm caracters? I don't know. They clearly were not back around I11.

What do you think is cheaper to set up, and reduces the farmer's real-world overhead costs? Running 8 machines that can keep a character moving on follow without lagging out, or letting 4-5 instances of the game idle on crappy computers that just need to be good enough to run a couple of idle instance of the game at a time?

If you're a full-time inf farmer, buying IOs to trick out a character or four is really going to be pretty easy. Unless your activities are getting you banned, there's no reason not to do it. Just because you see plenty of them playing on bare-bones characters doesn't mean they're playing smart.

So keep laughing. It just makes you look like some juvie wiseacre who isn't actually able to defend his assertions. We're not laughing with you.