Tiki, I'm a moderator at the site you're referencing (Check post #24 again, notice the edit.).
Originally Posted by
Tiki
The more I read over there, the more pissed off I get. These people use bots on multiple accounts and up until recently seemed to be more interested in the computer game/Zune type of prizes. They were ordering them and selling them on Ebay. They don't appear to have a clue as to what FF miles were until recently, then they discovered they can use miles to get gift certificates for shopping via points.com. So now they are targetting miles as a prize. LSC monitors that forum and that is probably why they have the new restrictions in place.
You almost seem
upset that people are interested in prizes besides miles. Humorous, I must say. However, at 28,000 points, and retailing for $319 (And selling on eBay for upwards of $150 (not including shipping)), Windows Vista Ultimate is a much better deal than forking over close to 50,000 points for an amount of FF miles that can net you $105 or so in Amazon.com gift cards. And even the Zune is a better deal than the FF miles. 38,500 points for a 30 Gigabyte first generation Zune MP3 player that will sell for between $100 and $150 on eBay? Better deal than the miles once again.
Don't be upset with us because we understand simple math better than you.
The crowd at CN is for the most part quite an educated crowd. The member who asked what FF miles were is a new member. He joined this January, and is not representative of the general population of the website. You can laugh at him (feel free -- he's been nothing but an idiotic member anyways.), but you'd be wrong to say that in doing so you were laughing at the entire site.
Now, excuse me, but I must go and continue having a good laugh while the members here become enraged at the CN community. Yes -- you are all FF mile "experts" here. But I'm willing to bet that in the past few months, half the members of CN have gotten more miles from Club Live than you "experts" here have. It's about being resourceful. We work with what we have to work with. Those making the bots educate themselves and the public, and hey -- we get free Zunes, software, and FF miles with it. Can't beat that, can you?
And make the games "bot-proof"? LOL. Oh, thank you! I needed a good laugh this morning. We can always make bots that act just like a human for simple games like those on Club Live. Easy. Club Live is caught in a dilemma though. If they try to make the games more bot-proof, they're only going to frustrate more legitimate sucke-- err, players, hence the speed captchas. But that's easy to bypass too. Cheat Engine, speed hack Firefox. The games will run at an increased speed, but you type at your same old speed. Overall, the game thinks you're just typing super slow. Therefore, no captchas. But, back on topic here, if they try to make the games more bot-proof, they'd end up having to increase the number of captchas dramatically. You don't want that, do you?
(And by the way, I type 135 WPM. No, that's not a lie. So don't think that you're the only people affected by the speed captchas. We're just smart enough to say "Hey, this is stupid," and find ways around them.)
Also, just because I know you guys here will get your panties in more knots at me saying this: The topic starter didn't even use a bot to get those 75,000 FF miles. He used Tamper Data (Google it. You
do know what Google is, right?) and figured out exactly what to edit to trick points.com into thinking he redeemed for more miles than he really did. While it would take you guys probably half an hour to click and fill out redemption information for that many miles, he did that in... oh... about 12 seconds.
Cheers.
-sc4fpse