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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
The thing is, this is a whole different level of issue compared to gold sellers.
Nobody that knows what will be valuable in the game will buy gold. People will buy raid spots with loot priority. And currently, there is no system stopping you from doing that.
Yes there is. The report a player system.
Oh lord, i think I have been unclear. Try to follow me here:
1. I want the best gear in the game
2. I ask a booster guild for their discord (all communication is handled outside the game)
3. I pay them for them to invite me to their raid, and for them to give me all the items I want
There is no way to prove the guild is not simply playing with me. Everything I am doing inside the game is legal, but behind the scene, I payed real money for an in game advantage.
Also, look at this:
1. I dont like your guild
2. I contact a pvp guild that is very good outside of the game
3. I pay them IRL cash to siege your city until you give up and leave the server, giving me your spot.
There is still no way to prove anything or report me for anything.
This is the issue I am trying to solve, stop denying this. This happens in every single MMO in the world right now.
Help me solve it instead.
Considering there is a fairly long timer between when sieges can occur - once a month for castles, 20-50 days for nodes, depending on size - I doubt this would get out of hand enough to "force" someone to leave the server. If someone paid a guild to siege your castle, say, and that guild won, they would own the castle. You could then siege the back a month later, if you wanted, to regain control of it. Then yet another month would have to go by before that guild could be paid again to siege your castle. Even for a tier 3 Village node, including the declaration wait timer, you'd be looking at ~45 days between when a hypothetical paid guild could siege you again.
Also, you're using the term whistleblower incorrectly. The GMs would not be whistleblowers in any of your examples. A whistleblower would be someone in the guild doing the boosting itself, who reports on that guild to the GMs.
Players report them. IS looks into the reports and poses as player buying services from discord.
Raid ends, IS staff permabans all the raid.
Same scenario with the PvP guild.
Word gets out. Players report the activity. IS reads reports. Pose as player, buy services. Ban guild.
Is AoC p2w and should you make titles AoC p2w? No
Should you discuss the creative ways people in this life make use of their inrl money? Up2u.
Dont make "AoC p2w titles" when the game clearly isnt.
I see, you are correct and I agree with you. Based on the wiki though, it says that sieges on nodes have a month cooldown. Can't see anything about size mattering. Maybe I missed it?
The solution you proposed is exactly the same one I proposed. This solution though, is not bulletproof. It is naive to think "word will get out". Also, the hard part is proving that there is IRL money attached to the deal in the first place. It is very easy to avoid.
And by doing these threads, maybe some genius will come up with a solution that is better than mine, or yours. As it stands now, people can easily impact a server greatly with third party services.
Whether the content of the topics has merit is debatable.
It seems you cant seem to agree that misleading titles are not to the benefit of the game you care about.
Ima leave you with that.
Per the wiki:
Once the siege scroll is brought to the node and is activated, the declaration period begins and a countdown is initiated for players in the region to see. This countdown runs for a number of days equal to the stage of the node being sieged.
Village (2 days)
Town (3 days)
City (4 days)
Metropolis (5 days)
If the node survives, there will be a cooldown before the node can be sieged again:
Village (20 days)
Town (30 days)
City (40 days)
Metropolis (50 days)
Guilds participate in Castle sieges in an effort to capture and occupy one of the five guild castles in Ashes of Creation.
Sieges occur once a month.
I see. Thanks for your insight. I have updated the whole post to highlight the issue I am trying to tackle.
You are correct. I have updated the title and post to better reflect the issue I am trying to tackle.
I can do something about it - you're gonna have to flag for us to go into war - you're gonna need to get those 250 players, you're gonna need to pay those 250 players. I will have my 250 players and we will see who wins. If you win, you win - it wont stop me from waiting a month to seige a war back onto you, r u gonna pay again to those players?
1 person, 1 guild isnt gonna have full control on an area for a long period of time anyways. There is so many checks and balance to handle many issues. Also you bringing down a metropolis intentionally, wether we know you paid someone in RL or not is gonna have some in-game ramification reputation wise, to you and those involved [ Guild(s) or individuals).
you can pay them, but you still gotta fight me and win that fight.
noody gives a shit about this issue other than you. This game isnt suited for you or any mmo or online game that has any sort of competitiveness - bye felicia.
loosely phrase - ima pay Ninja or a Pro player to beat you up in-game and take your loot! yay!....
cool - you are worrying aobut a 1% of the player base.
Hell, I'll offer up my services now - I intent to be a red player - someone feel free to pay me, find his character and I will corpse camp him for X amount of days depending on payment..... that could happen too right? but is it really gonna happen tho?- DOUBTFUL.
---- Hell let me flip this one more time - how do we prevent streamers who brings their audience and ruin your metropolis for fun?
Asmongold and his 25k+ followers? Sodapoppin and his 30k+ followers?
the reverse is true - classic wow had a major concern of streamer server and lots of stream snipers made their lives miserable as well... they too can just roll up onto your metropolis and ruin you for no reason - paid or not. ITS THE GAME - DEAL WITH IT IN GAME.
Yes, your 250 man group may be able to stop it. The problem comes when small guilds are trying to defend their smaller stage 3-4 nodes.
The point is, how could we stop IRL transactions to give different kind of advantages. Does not have to be sieging a metropolis. It can be anything.
What are you talking about? What has me trying to stop the use of cash having power in this game to do with me being suited for this.
With all due respect, try to be respectful.
And it's not true nobody gives a shit about this. I have played the most popular MMO:s in these recent 10 years and this issue has been a true problem for a large part of the community.
Do you play wow by any chance? Have you seen how many people utilizing boosts to achiv the rarest titles, achivments and gear? Its a pretty large amount. Do you think that is nice? All im trying to do is finding a way to stop it.
Unless a developer is willing to start going into some heavy litigation, such that they could subpoena bank records and the like, and spend thousands of dollars to fight against a whole bunch of people who likely can't even afford court fees, then there's no magical solution like you seem to want.
There's only a couple real ways to find groups doing this RL money.
1. Someone in one of the groups providing boosts decides to snitch on the rest of the group - and hope they don't get banned in the process alongside the rest of the guild.
2. Someone who bought a boost provides Intrepid with the payment information and provide proof of the boosting. Intrepid would then have to verify everything as best they could on their end, and even then it might not pan out.
3. Intrepid pays an employee to try and setup stings for any groups that might potentially be boosting for RL money. Doable, but unless they have specific, likely targets for this sort of thing, it would probably only be done rarely.
There's not much else that can really be done. Players can report suspected groups to the devs, and the devs can investigate, but again, without actually starting legal processes so they can subpoena bank records, there would almost never be real, verifiable proof.
guilds dont matter. A guild can run a city but there are still players outside of that guild who is tied to that node and will defend it as well. no matter what the outcome will be 250 v 250. News will spread out in 3-5 days a war is breaking out and players around the server will try to que up for it.
bro I've been playing mmo since 1999 - Ultima Online. I've seen many issues - the one you're crying about isnt one of them. Streamers influence is more of a bigger issue then someone rich kid with daddy CC paying someone off.
Honestly no difference paying someone offline to boost them vs paying that same player in-game. Eventually once you have your main and an influx of money, people always pay in-game to boost their alt. you're crying about someone paying with cash instead of in-game currency. The outcome is still the same.
Same goes for buying a loot drop.
Now player A has the loot from the Raid instead of Player B from the Guild.
The amount of loot on the server is the same though, it just shifts hands in-between players.
It's less of an issue than botting and RMT networks will ever be as it doesn't dillude the market, it merely shifts the items inbetween players.
It shifts those items from skilled and dedicated players that already have that item to a player that simply swiped his credit card for it. Effectivly devaluing every single achivment in the game in the long run.
Since you could practice and grind for 100+ hours to become good enough to get this item. Or just spend 30$ and get it.
Boosters already have the best items in the game.
So the items land in the hands of "worse" players. That's more of an advantage to everybody else.
It's devalued either way, since they could also buy it for Ingame Gold. No item that can be traded will ever be a status symbol, as someone who hasn't participated in a single fight could theoretically obtain them, if he managed to accumulate enough wealth through professions, flipping markets etc.
Third Party RMT just adds a different way of purchasing them.
Personally I'd think, that this should also be contained as much as possible, but its far more important to suppress the corporate RMT gold selling economy, that is generating their gold through bots.
If we use the current most popular MMO:s (wow, ff, EsO, and guild wars) we can clearly see that gold selling with the use of bots is not how they earn gold that they in turn sell for profit. Bots in todays MMO are almost irrelevant.
How these third party groups earn gold is by selling services ingame and also flip the auctionhouse by manipulating server wide prices .
The big problem is this situation:
1. Once you reach max level, you could farm/grind for 100-500 hours to reach a stage where you can tackle endgame bosses. Or you could pay 100$. A big chunk of the community does indeed utilize these services.
2. Since there now is a 1-5% of the community getting payed IRL cash to boost 10-20% of the community having insane top tier gear becomes the norm. A majority of the community has gear that is meant for a minority of the community. It becomes expected of you to have this gear, since everyone else has it. This raises the bar of entry to different stuff in the game. People with better gear will be prioritzed over people with worse gear for groups.
3. Not only that, this P2W noobs, wont be able to perform. They will be stuck doing noob content. But, they have elite gear. Which trivializes most of the content meant for their skill level.
4. The more popular the game becomes, The more effective the boosting sites become. This results in the servieces becoming even cheaper. In the end, it is a nobrainer to simple spend 50$ to skip all that cancer grinding process and get to the fun part.
5. In the end, the game looks like wow. Where 50% of the community has gear that only 5% of the community actually can complete. When noobs with elite gear battle with other noobs, the noobs with the best gear will win.
The spiral gets worse and worse from here. but i dont feel like typing anymore haha
It's so weird, your arguments I mean. Just because I have a leader of men badge, just because I am top 0.8% in WoW and top 0.5% in LoL DOES NOT mean anything in this context. We are gamers, both you and I, and we both want ashes to succeed. Thats all that matters.
The problem I am trying to solve, has very large scale impacts on the game. In a few very popular MMO:s, it is expected of you to buy stuff for real life money because everybody else does it. You literally will have to work 5 times as hard as someone who does use their credit card. This can in the end make the game less fun for many.
I do understand this issue is hard to solve. But it is not impossible. There are solutions. What I am looking for, is someone smart enough to find a solution. Someone a lot smarter than you or me, who clearly are too stupid too find a solution or too lazy (since you say it is impossible).
But you do you I guess
The thing they're pointing out that you aren't seemingly to get, is that this issue literally IS impossible to solve, in any realistic sense.
Boosting for in-game currency is not and has never been against the rules in any game. The only way to stop this would be to stop the trade of currency within the game completely. Then you would have to stop the trade of resources and items, because people would start to use those as alternative currencies. If there's no trading, you have no economy, there goes a good chunk of your game.
Boosting for RL money is against the rules, yes. But these payments are made outside the game, where the developer has absolutely no influence. These types of transactions are referred to as "under the table" because nominally, they can't be seen. Unless someone snitches on the deals - effectively bringing them aboveboard, or "above the table" - they will remain hidden. The only other possible way to see these transactions would be using the legal system to subpoena payment records, which you generally cannot do without VERY good reason and/or proof.
Since you seem to like using WoW as examples for things, look at the recent Gallywix situation. They dealt with billions of gold through their services. But if you've listened to any of the interviews some of the people involved have done, the amount of actual RMT done was comparatively tiny. Yes, it happened, but out of the hundreds/thousands of transactions they did, the number of RMT transactions was very low - almost everything they did was directly handled within the rules of the game, with in-game gold.
Yes, Intrepid could assign a GM to try and pose as a potential buyer of services, and they very well might do that. That's not really a hard concept to think of. However, it is also likely to be a pretty big waste of time, compared to the number of results they get from doing so. Should they still do it? Perhaps, if they feel it is a worthwhile investment of time/resources for the issue. But also put yourself if their shoes: If you owned a business, would you want to hire an employee full-time to prevent something small once or twice a month, if the entirety of their job consisted of that?
Ashes is not pay to win.
Life is.
Intrepid can't change the fact that life is pay to win, and so any aspect in which lifes version of pay to win intersects with Ashes is out of Intrepids hands.
What's your price?!