Anti Gold Seller Policy
Kneifer
Member
Hello,
I have heard Steven talk about this issue in livestream but I am afraid that it is not enough to monitor trade and bot activities. One should not underestimate the ingenuity of gold farming organizations. There will be cat and mouse game, which is a permanent spending of resources on part of the GM's.
But I might have a good idea to reduce the danger of inflation caused by Goldsellers without much extra effort. To work, the following 3 rules need to be as transparent and we'll known as possible, so that potential gold buyers are aware that they are causing an inflation that hurts the entire server population.
1. Punish both sides:
Make it illegal to buy an in-game advantage for real money and punish also the buyer. For example, you could delete the illegal bought content and give the buyer 24h corruption rebuff.
2. Make them snitch:
Pay busted professional gold-farmers for information (including evidence) about their previous customers to punish those who broke the first rule.
3. Become your enemy:
Allow trusted personal to pretend to be profit goldsellers as well and let them advertise in the same way as the real goldsellers. If a goldbuyer approach to them and breaks rule 1 you have the proof to punish him/her.
These rules try to create friction between gold sellers and buyers. If a goldbuyer gets busted he/she doesn't know it is because rule 2 or 3. But you can be assure, that he/she is less motivated to do it again after getting caught and punished. To create even more friction fake news always are an effective option.
What I mean by that it does require less effort to go to third party forums to pretend to be player who was scammed by a real goldseller implying rule 2 or 3. Or on the other hand pretend to be a satisfied goldbuyer, who successfully bought from someone reffered in rule 3.
I can understand that some are critical of such shady tactics. It may well be that new algorithms are so effective at filtering out gold sellers that they are banned before they become profitable for the operators. But if this it not the case and an unknown amount of currency is fused into the market every week, the in-game market is in danger of becoming unbalanced. This trend of rising prices without real counter-valueS is very difficult to reverse - if only with means more radical than the above 3 rules.
Therefore I think it is a good idea to publish 3 rules. If the algorithms prove to be powerful and goldsellers are not able to bypass them, the rules can exist without getting enforced and work as deterrence.
This is my first post in this forum and I would love to contribute more to the success of AOC.
Sincerely,
a jobless math/economy student
I have heard Steven talk about this issue in livestream but I am afraid that it is not enough to monitor trade and bot activities. One should not underestimate the ingenuity of gold farming organizations. There will be cat and mouse game, which is a permanent spending of resources on part of the GM's.
But I might have a good idea to reduce the danger of inflation caused by Goldsellers without much extra effort. To work, the following 3 rules need to be as transparent and we'll known as possible, so that potential gold buyers are aware that they are causing an inflation that hurts the entire server population.
1. Punish both sides:
Make it illegal to buy an in-game advantage for real money and punish also the buyer. For example, you could delete the illegal bought content and give the buyer 24h corruption rebuff.
2. Make them snitch:
Pay busted professional gold-farmers for information (including evidence) about their previous customers to punish those who broke the first rule.
3. Become your enemy:
Allow trusted personal to pretend to be profit goldsellers as well and let them advertise in the same way as the real goldsellers. If a goldbuyer approach to them and breaks rule 1 you have the proof to punish him/her.
These rules try to create friction between gold sellers and buyers. If a goldbuyer gets busted he/she doesn't know it is because rule 2 or 3. But you can be assure, that he/she is less motivated to do it again after getting caught and punished. To create even more friction fake news always are an effective option.
What I mean by that it does require less effort to go to third party forums to pretend to be player who was scammed by a real goldseller implying rule 2 or 3. Or on the other hand pretend to be a satisfied goldbuyer, who successfully bought from someone reffered in rule 3.
I can understand that some are critical of such shady tactics. It may well be that new algorithms are so effective at filtering out gold sellers that they are banned before they become profitable for the operators. But if this it not the case and an unknown amount of currency is fused into the market every week, the in-game market is in danger of becoming unbalanced. This trend of rising prices without real counter-valueS is very difficult to reverse - if only with means more radical than the above 3 rules.
Therefore I think it is a good idea to publish 3 rules. If the algorithms prove to be powerful and goldsellers are not able to bypass them, the rules can exist without getting enforced and work as deterrence.
This is my first post in this forum and I would love to contribute more to the success of AOC.
Sincerely,
a jobless math/economy student
1
Comments
If Ashes of Creation creates a fair system they will naturally reduce the amount of gold selling that happens. Yes there will always be a small selection of people who will buy gold regardless, but you can reduce is with fair gameplay mechanics.
The subscription helps limit gold-sellers because there is an entry cost.
The slower (by today's standards) leveling also helps.
The openworld PvP helps too. If you see botters/gold farmers, not only can you report them .. You can murder them and take their mats.
Things will need to be stored somewhere too. I suppose personal safe storage will be very limited otherwise there's not much point in losing mats in PvP or in sieges, so if there are gold sellers ... You can find where they store all their wealth, destroy it, and take it. I don't see why not.
A 'fair system' to prevent the needs for money is very vage.
In every economy system (where currencies exists) a demand for money exist, because you can trade it for everything you want. In WoW you have soulbound (not tradeable)gear - in AoC this seems not to exist. When you are able to sell good gear (scarce resources with low supply rate) the demand for currency is even higher.
Devs - when you create an economy, please don't be naive. There is a reason why in the real-world using fake currency is hardly punished.
To report & ban bot users you have to spot them, which is easier said than done in a giant open world. When they are active in the middle of the night, they won't have to fear to get grieved. I think many players will use the inventory of smurfs for safely banking their stuff.
As I said: If the gold selling business is profitable, it will exist and grow until it's starts getting problematic and GM's have to react. My suggestion tries to initially prevent problems like this from rising.
We all can only speculate because non of use knows how the game will be.
I dont want to shit on the game, I try to improve it by naming problems that I think will appear. I really hope the game will succeed.
Goldsellers will always look for ways to abuse the system. I personally see big abuse potential in smurfs who just work as banks.
Please correct me, if im wrong. If you have a full inventory, you can just start another copy of a game, login into another account's character(who is located near your farming position), trade your goods to the smurf and logg off the smurf to safe the goods.
When a buyer is found, he will get the goods, which are stored in the bank character.
My point of the treat is, that additional problem fixing (beyond the game mechanics) is not harmful. What do you think?
The other issue is when they have 500 people making 25 cents a day it's never going to be too hard for them to farm when the people buying the stuff make 100-1000 dollars a day.
I don't understand, whose people you are talking about. What stuff-buying people are making 100-1000 dollars are day?
Overall, the system is already in place, because if you, I, anyone notice bots, you know we are going for the kill, free gold I mean. I could see guilds having events like this, post in the forums or something, and have it an event to end the bots then grind to lose corruption.
EDIT: In a sense, Ashes of Creation allows the community to do something about gold bots. Not just we get to kill them, but we also get rewards from it, even though we get corruption. And I think this should be a guild cause if the bots don't fight, corruption at higher levels will be gained, so guild members to protect or have an announcenment a guild is going to take down some farming gold bots.
Three points to reduce gold-sellers (GS).
Also don't compare AoC to WoW.
If you think WoW actually makes an effort to get rid of their bot/cheat/GS communities, you're dead wrong, i'll even go as far as say they are glad they are present.
Unless the leadership gets corrupt or they sell the IP, it's never going to reach WoW levels.
OSRS' economy relies on bots now kekw
- you don't farm gold. You farm mobs that drop certificates, which value is based on supply and demand. These certs need to be sold in a Node, and its price will vary according to the distance from where you've got them. If you sell certs of polar bears in a sunny area, they will have higher prices, but then you must travel there, use caravan, risk dying
- If you keep flooding the market with the same cert type, their price will lower. If bots keep selling the same cert to a node, their price will lower, Intrepid will notice and also bot will get less money.
- PvP. If you notice a bot farming you can always risk killing it, become red (probably they won't attack back) and get its loot.
So, yeah. Mobs won't be dropping gold, you can't farm gold if mobs don't drop them.
I really hope the ingame mechanics are complicated enough to prevent gold/certicifate farming from being lucrative. But keep in mind: the question, if gold farming is lucrative, depends on the real-life price you are getting for a certain amount of ingame goods. If it is difficult to farm gold the price for it will be high. When the price is high gold farming operator have incentives to develope more efficient ways to farm gold to earn more money. And when the game is out long enough, it is only a question of time when the gold-farm-operator boys understand ingame mechanics and player behaviour pattern to develope new ways to programm farming bots.
My point of this treat is that in my opinion it is an elegant way to handle this subject by takleing the seller-buyer relationship. Because why not?
If they're using alts inventories to store things safely, they're not going to be economically viable. We won't be able to hold much value ourselves, if we did, transport mechanics and caravans and storage would be obsolete, which is a core part of the game that drives conflict and economy.
Currently there's 0 gold-sellers in Ashes of Creation, so we'll have to wait until we actually have a gold-seller to see what they're doing, how, and what we can do about it.
I also don't expect this to be a hugely popular game, as amazing as I think it is... traditional MMOs are a niche market, for MMO-players. Most gamers run the hell away from a game that has PvP they can't turn off, let alone actual consequences to death, and needing to socialise and everything else that is hardcore and goes into a real MMO.
WoW is popular, but WoW has been around 15+ years, was already a hugely insanely popular IP from a hugely insanely and beloved (at that time) company. It found a way to sell an MMO-styled game to non-MMO players by making it incredibly casual and simplified... AoC is not that.
Will we have a lot of players? Hopefully, yes...
There are like, travel times, and carry limits and all these mechanics to force and encourage conflict .. I just don't see how some gold-farmer is going to survive on their own (even with other gold farmers). Just kill and loot it.
They can't teleport around and have infinite storage that can be turned into infinite profit. You have to actually do stuff, and for every reward there is risk involved. At every stage of the game, there is risk involved if there is reward involved.
I hope they are able to find a nice balance.
Maybe its a good idea to enlarge the inventory capacity with character level ups.
So alts inventories are less viable.
Hopefully there is a method that doesn't involve bag expansions in the store like in many MMOs
Probably streaming EverQuest...
They have no intention of selling conveniences like this in the cash shop.
Though I do believe we are able to upgrade (and customize) our backpack.
As to the thread in general - the best way to get rid of gold sellers in not to attack the players buying. This has been proven to not work in dozens of games, as well as in real life (gold selling parallels the drug trade quite well).
The way to get rid of gold sellers from any one game, is to make that game not profitable for them.
What many people don't realize is that gold sellers don't farm their own coin - they are far too smart for that. Most of the bots you see are players who are either farming gold for themselves, or farming gold to sell to gold sellers.
This is all gold sellers do. They buy from one player, mark the price up and then sell to another player (I knew a guy that bought a house outright with the proceeds from selling gold to a gold seller). Based on this, it should be fairly obvious how a game developer would be able to make it unprofitable for gold sellers to operate in their game.
For those that can't see it, sell something to a gold seller and then track it. It will go from the account that took possession of the gold, through probabaly two or three intermediary accounts, and then land in a holding account. This account will have possession of most of the assets the organization has on the server.
Then the develoeprs can buy some coin from the gold seller, and then back-trace the gold from the account that handed it too them, back through several intermetiary accounts until they trace it back to that holding account.
Do this on all servers, and create a map of all accounts used. Then sell a large amount of gold on each server to the company - and as soon as possession has taken place, and the money has been deposited (which should maybe be given to a charity), ban all accounts involved. This means the gold sellers have paid for all that gold, but have nothing to sell for it - on top of losing the accounts and anythign else the holding accounts had on them.
It would not take too many times of this happening before the organization decides that this game is not worth it.
After that, all that is left are non-organized gold sellers. People that have more than they need, selling to people that have less than they want. These kinds of things do need to be actioned on a case by case, account by account basis.