Greetings, glorious adventurers! If you're joining in our Alpha One spot testing, please follow the steps here to see all the latest test info on our forums and Discord!
Options
AoC will currently be 100% pay to win, but how do we stop it?
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
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.
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.
0
This discussion has been closed.
Comments
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.
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?
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?
My wise man, if banning people wont work (it never ever has and will never work) how would you solve it?
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?
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.
Don’t be a dumbass. “Massive chunk” yeah that same 1% of the player population with $1000s just laying around to waste on redoing their whole account when theirs gets banned.
IS is not just banning gold sellers, they’re gonna ban gold buyers, they’re implementing systems to track gold laundering schemes, they’re actually going to dedicate people to tracking down cheaters.
They should be banning bot trains and multiboxing trains, so hopefully on that stance they’ll wise up to the dangers of allowing scripting that way. But besides that, there’s nothing else anyone could do to prevent some assholes from cheating to mass produce gold. But the biggest deterrent to mass produced gold is a lack of braindead farming areas with infinite respawns.
Jagex announced that almost 75% of all runescape players (millions) sometimes used real world cash to buy stuff ingame. Currently, atleast 30-40% use bots and other cheats to win. Saying this wont happen is so naive and childish.
I do understand you can fight illegal pay to win. But you will never stop it. It is naive to think this is something only 1-2% will do. More realisticly, 5 to 30% will do this (based on wow, runescape and other MMOs i played. Even if 5% do it, it is still a big problem.
Permabanning means you lose money. Devs dont want that. If they notice a big chunk of the community is real world trading, some devs might think twice about permabanning. Im not saying this is what will happen but it can happen.
So in your opinion, permabanning everyone who seems to sell/buy gold for real world cash is the solution?
Hey, there are people willing to play your character for less than 1dollar an hour. People with a lot of cash, and high schoolers with 30$ to burn will all have the option to just buy their way into endgame content. You cant ban people for it.
Jk
Virtue is the only good.
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.
I personally dont care tbh. Gold cant buy skill and experience. Hiring someone is another thing.
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.
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.
Virtue is the only good.
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
That particular case you were referring to was a very weird one with a very stupid player. The guy bought his account from the most known rogue on the server, at a time when it was extremely rare to have both twin blades of Azzinoth. Even though the guy who bought the account changed the character name, it was so obviously a bought account even if you didn't see the guy play.
Do you remember Shaks and Zuezo from WoW? Zuezo was a rogue who got 2 blades of azzinoth in the first expansion(a rare artifact at the time). He then sold his account to shaks to the tune of $9500 Shaks sucked at pvp, Blizzard noticed, and banned his account. Everyone was happy but Shaks. Hahahah
But, oh wait.. That's not p2w. P2w would be being able to buy an advantage over others through real life currency and there's nothing of that sort in the game atm.
As for multiboxing, I personally don't have anything against it. So long as people are not using it to gain an unfair advantage, having multiple accounts under the same IP could just mean that multiple members of x family enjoys playing the game. I for example have a mother, a stepfather and two sisters who all enjoy MMO's very much.
There's always going to be people trying to bypass what's allowed in the game world in order to gain an unfair advantage over others but I have no doubt that Intrepid will do whatever they can to minimize this as much as possible.
In both cases, going after the end user is a waste of resources - and is onlt used so that the people tasked with taking on the specific fight have something to point to when asked how successful they have been (and then only when they are unable to have actual real success).
The way to achieve actual success is to cause the supply to suffer.
If a game developer sets up a decent tracking system built in to their back end, all a developer needs to do is identify one account in a RMT's web (by, say, buying an item from them), and with that information they will be able to backtrack every account involved.
The developer could well take action on the account that traded the item to the buyer, but if they are able to track the entire web, the developers are able to actually cause issues for them.
Most RMT is actually active players selling gold or items to RMT organizations, who then sell it on to other players. There are very few RMT organizations that actually farm their own product.
So, all a game developer needs to do is create a few accounts on each server the RMT company is active on, give that account a max level character with some good items, and then contact the RMT organization saying they want to sell a large amount of gold.
Then the developer trades the gold to the organization on every server, takes the money (and maybe donates it to charaity or something), and then ban the accounts that have previously been flagged as being a part of the organization. This one move gets rid of the accounts these organizations use to buy and sell, but also their inventory accounts, along with all inventory they are holding at the time (inventory that they have paid for).
As is the case with drugs, this kind of thing won't stop third party RMT. What it will do, however, is cause those organizations so much trouble (and financial loss) that they will move on to another area. In terms of RMT, that means they will move on to another game - and that is as much of a win for this game as one could hope for.
The reason companies don't do this is because very few companies develop tracking tools in to their games server software, so there is no way to easily trace the full web of accounts involved. In most games, the only accounts these organizations put at rish are the accounts used to buy and sell - so they simply make those accounts disposaible.
Comparing a “All brainless farm” game like Runescape to a “adaptive content with exhaustible resources” game that Ashes is being designed as shows some serious ignorance on your part.
It’s not naive to have enough sense to know that one of those environments isn’t a botting paradise.
Obviously some people will bot Ashes and cheat by buying gold, but just because the devs can’t stop literally 100% of them doesn’t mean the game is somehow P2W in any way shape or form.
Your argument is inherently wrong because it twists the words you’re trying to pretend are accurate all while you cry “you’re big dumb baby if you don’t agree”.
If you give out your account info to someone who’s claiming they’ll do it for less than a dollar per hour, you’re the naive one. I’m hard pressed to think of a more obvious scam than that. If you think nuking gold buyers won’t help, if you think deleting potentially months of work won’t deter someone from being an ass again, then what exactly do you suggest? Do you want Is to do nothing and just make it P2W in their cash shop?
A better question, what’s the point of this thread? All you did was ignorantly claim botters existing makes a game “100% P2W” and then offered nothing of value
People explained to you the steps IS is taking to prevent gold sellers and botters, and you just cried more
I don't understand why you disengage from the problem. All I askes in this post, is how do we stop it?
In wow, which is more simular to Ashes this problem is still huge. 99.9% of all trade chat messegas are literally boosts in some way or another
In terms of chat, it isn't impossible to get rid of (or essentially get rid of) this kind of chat spam.
EQ2 had the same issues all other MMO's had 15 years ago. They had as much spam as WoW ever has.
The developers implemented a chat filter - the details of which have never been made public, obviously - and overnight the chat spam essentially disappeared. We would get a message once every few months make it through that spam filter, which would then be blasted for about 90 seconds until it too was filtered and never seen again.
If SoE were able to implement a successful chat filter 15 years ago, other companies that actually want to get rid of chat spam have no excuses now.
That said, it stands to reason that games that still have this kind of thing in their chat channels have developers that either want it, that don't care or that are incompetent.
Or in WoW's case, all three.
But how do we stop people simply using paypal to progress? Or how can we lower the chances of it happening?
See my other post in this thread in terms of buying items and/or coin.
In terms of paying someone else to play your account to progress for you, what I've seen is that these accounts tend to end up being used by these same RMT organizations as the accounts they either buy or sell with, and so these people tend to be weeded out of the game eventually anyway.
How is Ashes remotely like WOW, besides being labeled an MMO. People have already told you that there are already multiple plans in place to stop botters and goldsellers from flourishing.
The biggest prevention besides banning and tracking is the lack of brainless grind areas with inexhaustible resources. WOW is nothing but those places with unchanging spawn patterned and unlimited potential gains for bots.
Leave a bot train on autopilot in WOW for a few hours and you can almost calculate the exact amount you’ll come back to.
Leave a bot train in Ashes for a few hours and all the mobs might have disappeared after the first 30 minutes.
A node could have leveled up nearby and now the enemies advanced by five levels and have killed that bot train by the time you got back.
The studio is already doing more to handle bots than most studios do just by designing their game this way. Obviously they won’t go through the specifics of how they’ll track goldsellers and botters, but they’ve confirmed multiple times they aren’t just going to ignore botting and goldselling since they absolutely can ruin a game