Permanent Bans - 08/15/11 - 08/21/11

The point remains that you'd think banning 15,000 hackers in a month would make a noticeable dent in the hacker population, but based on his observations that's clearly not happening. That means either the hacker population is larger than we thought, or the hackers are really persistent enough to make new accounts/characters in a rather robotic fashion (if account or character is banned, execute new account/character creation to go back to hacking).

Except 7,464 hackers in a week isn't actually that big of a number.
With 16 servers, currently, that's an average of 466.5 bans per server per week.
That's an average of 66 characters per server per day.

Using your figure of 15,000 a month, that's only 937.5 per server per month.
Figuring a 30 day month, that's 31.25 bans per server per day.

Consider the fact that there are well over 15 million characters across all servers. If you figure that even 1% of all characters are hackers and/or bots, that would add up to 150,000 characters. At a rate of 15,000 per month, it would take ten months to remove all them, assuming they don't go and create more characters (which they most definitely do).

They're not banning hackers. They're banning FM spambots. You know, the level 1 noobs standing there advertising meso-selling sites? When they get banned, new ones instantly come to take their place, so a GM can easily ban a thousand each workday (50-100 in each server), and generate this pointless list. Of course you see no dent in the hacker population, it's not targeted at all.

Please prove that they aren't banning hackers.
Garbled character names do not automatically translate to FM spambots, and I have plenty of screens to prove that.

Okay you got a point there, since it's possible for one person to set up multiple computers to bot. The bolded though, are you freaking serious? That's just insane, spambots being like cockroaches or ants.

All it takes is a script.
Or, ya know, making that your job. Or second job. Or whatever.