AoC will currently be 100% pay to win, but how do we stop it?

How do we stop people from buying items, endgame boosts, pvp boosts for real life money?

How will we stop people from buying billions of gold and using them to buy best in slot gear for their whole guild?

How will we stop people from real word bribing themselves into positions of power in the game or maybe even to corrupt stage 5 city leaders?

How will your guild compete on a server where all top guilds use their credit card?

I have never seen a game manage to do this? Do you have any ideas on how to stop this?

For example, in wow today, 99.99% of every single messege in trade chat is boosts in some form. In just 10 minutes, there are 100+ boost offers. Almost every single one of them will either offer you to pay with ingame gold, or with real life cash (on discord ofc). This is extremly common. How should we combat this?

This is what you will see 1 month after launch of AoC if we don't do something.

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Comments

Jahlon

Well you are 100% wrong, because Ashes has no pay to win, so that is a horrible way to start your topic.

A game is "pay to win" when you can purchase all that crap from the developer/publisher directly. What you are talking about isnt' "pay-to-win" you are talking about cheating.

Many games have a handle on keeping the gold-sellers in check. The problem doesn't reside with the gold sellers, it resides with the gold buyers. How is Ashes going to handle this? Simple.

They are going to ban hammer gold buyers (cheaters) as well as gold sellers. Its only going to take one or two high dollar backer accounts getting banned hammered before people wise up to gold buying.

Plus they are going to aggressively monitor and remove gold sellers, so that helps.

Plus a $15 barrier to entry for every account, that helps as well.

unknownsystemerror

Came for the clickbait. Was satisfied.

Caeryl

What do you mean cheating the game shouldn’t be the standard we base our opinions on? That’s absurd! (/s)

A big wtf from me OP, you got some weird thoughts

Marzzo

Caeryl wrote: »

What do you mean cheating the game shouldn’t be the standard we base our opinions on? That’s absurd! (/s)

A big wtf from me OP, you got some weird thoughts

Sorry to bitchslap you with reality, there is a massive chunk of the population of any mmorpg that uses real world money in this way. How would you stop it?

Marzzo

Jahlon wrote: »

Well you are 100% wrong, because Ashes has no pay to win, so that is a horrible way to start your topic.

A game is "pay to win" when you can purchase all that crap from the developer/publisher directly. What you are talking about isnt' "pay-to-win" you are talking about cheating.

Many games have a handle on keeping the gold-sellers in check. The problem doesn't reside with the gold sellers, it resides with the gold buyers. How is Ashes going to handle this? Simple.

They are going to ban hammer gold buyers (cheaters) as well as gold sellers. Its only going to take one or two high dollar backer accounts getting banned hammered before people wise up to gold buying.

Plus they are going to aggressively monitor and remove gold sellers, so that helps.

Plus a $15 barrier to entry for every account, that helps as well.

Naive, it has never worked for wow, runescape or any other game. Infact some devs even want people to do this. It is pathetic that you think banning people actually will work? It never has for anyone?

unknown

This content has been removed.

Marzzo

unknownsystemerror wrote: »

Came for the clickbait. Was satisfied.

My wise man, if banning people wont work (it never ever has and will never work) how would you solve it?

Marzzo

Tsukasa wrote: »

There is already P2W through multi-boxing planned for this game.
People laugh, but RMT will happen. Everything is possible.

Recently I've heard of two people(or more) hiring a Chinese(?) group to grind for them the high-end gear.
One of them is named Dethroned, he was in my server in Archeage so I remember his name at least. Look for his Reddit post in r/archeage and you'll see him in the comments trying to justify his actions. I couldn't find the post myself.

Similarly, a guild or group may fund a single person or make him a Mayor. Whether or not they are being paid, Intrepid can't find out.

People are extremly naive if they think people wont use their credit card to skip 500 hours of grind/content. If it is possible to trade items, or group up with other people, there will always be tons of people using that epic credit card.

This fucks up the game, extremly inflated economy and every single achivement is devalued since you can buy all best in slots for real world cash.

Do you have any idea how to stop this?

Jahlon

You seem to think banning people doesn't stop it. It does indeed stop it.

There is no way you will stop 100% of all illicit acitivites. If we could do it for a video game, we could do it in the real world and we would live in a Utopia.

Its about response and reaction. While they are planning some preventantive methods, and they have publically annouced you are going to lose your account if you do it, there will be people who try to push the system.

If Intrepid holds the hard stance of permaban it will deter people from doing it becuase they dont' want to lose their account. Sadly most other developers care about the bottom line and they keep their $30,000 whales happy.

With that said, your comment that "nfact some devs even want people to do this" Tell me, which developers want people to cheat through 3rd party services?

You are blurring the lines between sanctioned pay-to-win through a developer owned cash shop where they get the profits from P2W mechanics and 3rd party systems, which no developer wants. What the fuck developer wants to make a 3rd party rich?

Your agument is so weak, you can't even attack it becuse it falls apart on contact.

Caeryl

Marzzo wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

What do you mean cheating the game shouldn’t be the standard we base our opinions on? That’s absurd! (/s)

A big wtf from me OP, you got some weird thoughts

Sorry to bitchslap you with reality, there is a massive chunk of the population of any mmorpg that uses real world money in this way. How would you stop it?

Don’t be a dumbass. “Massive chunk” yeah that same 1% of the player population with $1000s just laying around to waste on redoing their whole account when theirs gets banned.

IS is not just banning gold sellers, they’re gonna ban gold buyers, they’re implementing systems to track gold laundering schemes, they’re actually going to dedicate people to tracking down cheaters.

They should be banning bot trains and multiboxing trains, so hopefully on that stance they’ll wise up to the dangers of allowing scripting that way. But besides that, there’s nothing else anyone could do to prevent some assholes from cheating to mass produce gold. But the biggest deterrent to mass produced gold is a lack of braindead farming areas with infinite respawns.

Marzzo

Caeryl wrote: »

Marzzo wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

What do you mean cheating the game shouldn’t be the standard we base our opinions on? That’s absurd! (/s)

A big wtf from me OP, you got some weird thoughts

Sorry to bitchslap you with reality, there is a massive chunk of the population of any mmorpg that uses real world money in this way. How would you stop it?

Don’t be a dumbass. “Massive chunk” yeah that same 1% of the player population with $1000s just laying around to waste on redoing their whole account when theirs gets banned.

IS is not just banning gold sellers, they’re gonna ban gold buyers, they’re implementing systems to track gold laundering schemes, they’re actually going to dedicate people to tracking down cheaters.

They should be banning bot trains and multiboxing trains, so hopefully on that stance they’ll wise up to the dangers of allowing scripting that way. But besides that, there’s nothing else anyone could do to prevent some assholes from cheating to mass produce gold. But the biggest deterrent to mass produced gold is a lack of braindead farming areas with infinite respawns.

Jagex announced that almost 75% of all runescape players (millions) sometimes used real world cash to buy stuff ingame. Currently, atleast 30-40% use bots and other cheats to win. Saying this wont happen is so naive and childish.

MioMios

You will always be able to buy something off someone as long as there's p2p trading

Marzzo

Jahlon wrote: »

You seem to think banning people doesn't stop it. It does indeed stop it.

There is no way you will stop 100% of all illicit acitivites. If we could do it for a video game, we could do it in the real world and we would live in a Utopia.

Its about response and reaction. While they are planning some preventantive methods, and they have publically annouced you are going to lose your account if you do it, there will be people who try to push the system.

If Intrepid holds the hard stance of permaban it will deter people from doing it becuase they dont' want to lose their account. Sadly most other developers care about the bottom line and they keep their $30,000 whales happy.

With that said, your comment that "nfact some devs even want people to do this" Tell me, which developers want people to cheat through 3rd party services?

You are blurring the lines between sanctioned pay-to-win through a developer owned cash shop where they get the profits from P2W mechanics and 3rd party systems, which no developer wants. What the fuck developer wants to make a 3rd party rich?

Your agument is so weak, you can't even attack it becuse it falls apart on contact.

I do understand you can fight illegal pay to win. But you will never stop it. It is naive to think this is something only 1-2% will do. More realisticly, 5 to 30% will do this (based on wow, runescape and other MMOs i played. Even if 5% do it, it is still a big problem.

Permabanning means you lose money. Devs dont want that. If they notice a big chunk of the community is real world trading, some devs might think twice about permabanning. Im not saying this is what will happen but it can happen.

So in your opinion, permabanning everyone who seems to sell/buy gold for real world cash is the solution?

Marzzo

Caeryl wrote: »

Marzzo wrote: »

Caeryl wrote: »

What do you mean cheating the game shouldn’t be the standard we base our opinions on? That’s absurd! (/s)

A big wtf from me OP, you got some weird thoughts

Sorry to bitchslap you with reality, there is a massive chunk of the population of any mmorpg that uses real world money in this way. How would you stop it?

Don’t be a dumbass. “Massive chunk” yeah that same 1% of the player population with $1000s just laying around to waste on redoing their whole account when theirs gets banned.

IS is not just banning gold sellers, they’re gonna ban gold buyers, they’re implementing systems to track gold laundering schemes, they’re actually going to dedicate people to tracking down cheaters.

They should be banning bot trains and multiboxing trains, so hopefully on that stance they’ll wise up to the dangers of allowing scripting that way. But besides that, there’s nothing else anyone could do to prevent some assholes from cheating to mass produce gold. But the biggest deterrent to mass produced gold is a lack of braindead farming areas with infinite respawns.

Hey, there are people willing to play your character for less than 1dollar an hour. People with a lot of cash, and high schoolers with 30$ to burn will all have the option to just buy their way into endgame content. You cant ban people for it.

tugowar

Asking for a friend, where do you find these people willing to play your account for one dollar an hour?

Jk

Wandering Mist

I agree with @Jahlon that there is no way of stopping gold selling entirely. There will always be a small selection of players who are too lazy to put in the work or are so obsessed with being the best that they will do whatever it takes to win, even if that means buying in-game gold illegally.

That said, game design does play a big part in preventing rampant gold selling or bot abuse on a large scale, and no I'm not talking about handing out punishments. Poor game design and excessive grind is more likely to cause players to break the games ToS even when they usually wouldn't. Blizzard recently announced they had banned 74,000 accounts for botting in WoW Classic. It's not hard to see why there are so many bots being used even for a game that has a subscription model.

https://www.wired.com/story/world-of-warcraft-classic-russian-bots/

This article goes into more detail but the TLDR is that the game is so grindy that in order to participate in end-game content you NEED to spend hours upon hours of grinding and farming materials for consumables. It's not fun, it's not engaging, it's just tedious, so of course a lot of players will resort to using bots or buying gold illegally to by-pass it.

Endlessly banning these botting accounts isn't going to do anything. In order to reduce the amount of botting you need to look at the cause of it and fix that. Blizzard actually did do this way back in the day with The Burning Crusade expansion where they introduced daily quests which increased the amount of gold players can make, thus reducing the grind.

Looking at Ashes of Creation, I believe that if you make the system fair with limited grinding, you will naturally see fewer people feeling the need to obtain gold illegally which will then reduce the amount of gold sellers in the game. After all, demand drives supply.

The other thing to note is that a lot of gold sellers use hacked or stolen accounts to do their work, and it is up to us (as well as the devs) to keep our accounts safe.

Damokles

If you want to do something against it then just kill them all on sight.
I personally dont care tbh. Gold cant buy skill and experience. Hiring someone is another thing.

Plateau

This is how I see AoC shaping up in regards to botting/RMT.

The game will be hella grindy. (This could change over time, but from what I've heard in the last 2 years, AoC is heavily focused on long-term, "meaningful" goals. AKA grinding.)
As people have pointed out, that gives players a lot of incentive to run bots/scripts or to pay others for gold/work.
Intrepid will try mightily to stop this, but of course it's a never-ending war with escalating technology.
Most players will follow the rules to avoid being banned, but somewhere between 5-15% of players will break the rules at least once.
Only half of them will get banned. Maybe more, as Intrepid continues to improve it's detection systems. Small transactions will obviously be safer.
A significant chunk (maybe 20%) of the gold/materials in the game will be farmed by bots
The majority of players will not know or care about any of that. Only the people who are looking for it will be annoyed by it.

So basically, yes, it's a problem. And Intrepid will deal with it, using traditional methods. And they will have partial success.

But is it something that any of us should be concerned about? I guess that's a personal decision.

I would prefer to argue about the grindy systems which affect me directly, rather than debate the illicit ways people try to avoid grinding.

tugowar

@leonerdo I like your assumptions.

The spot where it bothers me is the guy who peaks out but didn’t work to get there. He paid somebody to grinders account, he bought gold, whatever it is, he has all of the best stuff and he didn’t earn it. That bothers me, especially in a game where legendary gear is truly meant to be obtainable by only the few. If that guy got there with any abuse of the system, he needs punishment in my mind.

insomnia

OP, you come of as being quite arrogant and only want 'yes sayer' in your topic. You don't seem to be able to handle anyone that dosen't agree with you.
This did remind me, of a video i saw, where someone had bought a wow account way back. It was a very skilled rogue player who had those illidan blades who had sold his account. The new player wasn't nearly as skilled... If you got gear you should only be able to have, if you are skilled and you lack the skill, something is up

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