Corrupt developer career path

Wilhelm and his sidekick Syncain are mad at me. No, they don't just believe that I'm wrong, then they would just unsubscribe my blog and leave me like we leave the homeless who explain government conspiracies to pigeons. But for some reason he had to write 1360 words about my 740 and 1280 words, to somehow debunk my idea that game devs are corrupt.

His first argument is "where are the stories" of scandals? The answer is simple: there are no scandals because it's not illegal. If for example a CCP dev would come forward and say that t20 is still handing out rare blueprints, the only thing that would be broken is his NDA. Neither t20, nor CCP games would be guilty in any wrongdoing, criminal or civil. Hint: t20 was not fired after he was found giving out rare blueprints. So being a whistle-blower ends in nothing but being blacklisted and maybe even sued with nothing but some bad PR for the company. Not many saints will speak up.

You have to understand that video game players waive all their rights when click that Yes button. None of the promises and claims of game companies are enforcable. I can't just point at some dev statement and demand refund. There was a pretty big P2W scandal in Black Desert that clearly and openly promised that they will never implement certain kinds of microtransactions in the Western Game (that's why it was buy-to-play instead of free-to-play like in Korea) and then they did just that and refused refund based on fine print. The players were so outraged that they pushed a mass chargeback campaign and the company just issued legal threats. I don't know how many people actually chargebacked and if the publisher actually sued them or let it slide, but it's besides the point. The point is that the current video game law(-lessness) means that none of the ethical standards in our head have any legal standings. At best you can bang your drum as a player. No dev will risk his employability to stand up against completely legal practices, just because they find it distasteful.

Secondly, let's consider the size of the RMT market. A researcher found 2 BILLION dollars worth of RMT in 2007!!! Imagine the size in 2017. Nosy Gamer estimates $400K per year RMT in the niche game EVE just on player auctions, a place where small time nobodies openly offer their ISK to anyone wanting to buy. We are talking about billions of dollars stolen here! Do you with a straight face claim that billions of dollars are stolen from the companies without internal help? Let's say every corrupt dev makes $100K from corruption. From a billion dollars, you can pay 10K corrupt devs. These are numbers.

Wilhelm calls me ignorant for demanding bugfixes and claims that some bugs take long to fix. However in the referred Ghost training issue, CCP not only fixed the code very slow, but didn't even warn players not to exploit. Also, stopping Ghost training would be trivial: every Ghost training account is non-payer Alpha that doesn't log in. What damage would it be to ban every Ghost training accounts and then later unban if the player petitions and GMs finds that his case is innocent enough and takes away the illicit SP? But no, CCP did nothing until there was a huge scandal on a bug that happened once already in 2009.

However he asks an important question, which warrants this post, instead of just ignoring him and stopping following his blog like I do with that useless Syncaine. What is the corrupt developer career path? Do I mean that little kids walk around dreaming "one day I'll be big and rig video games and make millions of dollars from RMT"? No. Ladies and gentleman, let me provide the career path:

1. Non-profit exploiter: he is a simple player with no connections to anyone and making no money. He just cheats for himself. He is the guy who uses wallhack in an FPS game or runs a homemade bot to grind honor all night in Alterac Valley for his own account. He does it either because programming is hard and challenging. Or because he is a dirty little punk who wants to look l33t front of his peers.
2. Small time RMT-er: most exploiters outgrow it when they go to college. But some realize that his bots and exploits can net him some side money on player auctions. Or selling "roses" to guildmates. He is a little fish in the pond, but he is already making some money. This is still not illegal (besides some trivial amount of tax evasion that no one prosecutes), running bots and selling gold is not against the law. At worst he can be banned.
3. Protected RMT-er: one day our little botter goes home and finds his 64 clients disconnected. In his e-mail accounts there are the standard "dear X, we found violation of ToS..." mails from the company. In his main character's e-mail address there is a mail from an unknown sender: "Sup X, i pwnd u. U can be dumb and just toy with proxies but it wont hepl. Or... you can be smart and send 50% of your income to this bitcoin address and your bots will never be banned again".
4. Connected RMT-er: knowing to be safe from banning, he is now running 256 accounts, 24/7 on 8 computers that cover all his room. He quit college or at least doesn't care about failing exams anymore since he is making more than any entry level jobs can pay with his degree and sees this as a career now. He regularly chats with his dev "protector" who once asks him if he wants to play with the big boys. There will be an entry price and he has to give out personal info to be sure he is trustworthy ("full API pls") but then he won't have to grind gold with lousy bots anymore. He gets access to portions of the source code and 0 day exploits, so he can make much more gold to sell. Also, forget player auctions, the crew has its shop with its own well-established buyers and small-time resellers doing the busywork. They also teach him how to launder serious money so the tax authorities won't break his door one day. Either by dark web concealment or with legitimate front business.
5. The final step: he now makes more than his dad and learned how to kung-fu both in software and money. Then the final call arrives from the familiar face on skype: "hey dude, our dev team has an opening. Interested?" By saying yes, the video game industry just found another developer who will work enthusiastically for half wage, between horrible conditions.

Now I'm not saying every or even most developers are like this, especially on the art field where there is little opportunity to rig. However these punks run the show and upkeep the low wages, high hours and abusive environment to prevent any clean guy coming to their turf. They are ready to take formal pay cuts to keep applicants away, they rather work long hours to cover for an empty position than fill it with someone clean. If someone needs to be hired and they don't know a guy, they make sure it will be a newbie with zero experience who is simply too incompetent to realize what's happening right under his nose. If he turns out to be too smart to be kept in the dark and too honest to be recruited to the crew, they just bully him out. So the industry will finally devolve into what it is today: a bunch of crooks surrounded by incompetent yes-men hired right out of college in a toxic hellhole living on pizza, laughable formal salaries and slave hours, knowing that their RMT will make them able to retire by 30.