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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
Just like in real life not all criminals are jailed, you cant expect 100% of exploiters to be banned.
Unless you ask for a super police-state which would oppress freedom in order to prevent criminals, which in the game would translate to crushing player to player interactions and rewarding economy.
Personally I am not concerned about gold sellers ruining the game, when for years developers have done so much worse:
P2W boosts/cosmetic trade
Ez game, no challenge, no competition (even in markets)
No player to player trade, just Auction House.
Asking for more measures than:
1)Active GMs
2)Banning subscription accounts for exploits
is killing the game
Active in game GMs will help with that greatly.
Oh boy, that's going to make it tough to control then. I was going to suggest the EVE / WoW system of letting players sell for sub time, but that works better in total hardcore (EVE) or where most of the stuff people buy is cosmetic (WOW).
Kinda sucks that's something game designer have to work around.
The only evidence we have for AoC not doing this is the harsh tone Steven Sharif takes when talking about such behaviors. That and the fact that intrepid is a private studio that is not going to feel pressure from share holders makes me feel fairly confident that the admins will be able to do their job.
I also heard Steven say they had a system that flags a account when someone random obtains a large amount of wealth to be investigated. Like if a million gold just got traded to you a GM would have to look into why? Sounds like a cool system.
Of all of the MMOs I have played I am the least worried about gold selling in AoC based on what I have seen and read.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Name the gold selling site into somthing alike the real old gold sellers.
Note down any account that PMs or visits their fake site.
Perma Ban them in a massive wave.
Make sure its known what you did.
People will be too scared to buy gold now.
Not knowing if the gold seller is real of another bait by the GMs.
Repeat the processes at random times to keep the fear active.
I really really like this idea, I don't buy gold in any mmos I play but I'd be far too nervous to risk buying gold if I knew the devs were doing this.
cool Idea but I feel like all this would do is help create a monopoly among gold selling sites where 1 or 2 with good reputation buy and sell all gold, as people are scared to go to cheaper sites in case it is a set up. although maybe a monopoly among gold selling sites wouldn't be a bad thing. if one site controlled all gold movement that site could take a lot bigger cut out of the transactions, driving the price of gold up while decentivizing more farmers from joining by paying them less for their gold. In that way it would be a smaller part of the in-game economy.
On a side note, I speak Spanish and have spoken with many different Venezuelan gold farmers in Classic WoW just in casual conversation, and it's hard to not feel bad for wanting to get them banned. In WoW bans are rare, but they still live in constant fear of getting banned because the account they have is their livelihood and what they use to feed their families. Ultimately I think bans for both sellers and buyers need to still be a priority for the health of the game, but it's hard to distance yourself from the personal aspect if you get to know the farmers.
I see this Gold Sellers vs MMO company battle in this case Ashes of Creation not sure who is going to win.
Yes Ashes of Creation stand towards gold sellers can be very aggressive against them that does not mean they will be able to weed them out.
Plus accounts in this game cost 15 dollars....so there is that risk vs reward thing. 15 dollars sounds really low risk to me not sure how much money gold sellers make but guessing it is more than 15 dollars.
I suggested in the post for the company itself to start selling gold but now I see that would be a terrible idea cause of things like Econmic Nodes Election process (bid) and well think it would be problematic to the trade and economic structure of this game.
unfortunate doing that would not be legal i think.
Not sure how the US law is in that case but i am pretty sure it would not go well in EU.
IF they account ban everyone who advertises gold selling, it will be pretty hard to get people to buy gold from you.
They most likely put a system in place that flags anyone who makes a big transition.
Suddenly receiving a big amount of gold in X time makes you highly suspicious.
IF the Gold giver doesn't receive anything in return and there is no logs of party's meeting before, then its a gold selling case 99% sure.
All they have to do then is monitor both accounts for some time.
As the Gold seller keeps selling more gold, they get a nice list of buyers they ban all at once.
In the end there will be gold sellers at launch, but i don't think they will survive long.
The Gold sellers work on profit and if the selling of gold brings less then the cost of buying superscription for new accounts, then they will just leave.
So the biggest thing is you need to discourage buying. If this type of plan like you're saying can discourage buying due to high ban rates among buyers than that can absolutely work, but buying is not always so easy to flag because it's not necesarrily a single large transaction- it can be spread out over time and from multiple seller accounts to avoid flagging systems. Sellers in general are much easier to recognize, since they spend hours upon hours farming and never really do anything with it but trade it off to non-connected characters, and if they sell through a website the gold gets passed through a chain of characters before arriving at a buyer, where this chain can include item trades as well instead of just pure gold, and gold is combined and split apart, connecting multiple buyers and sellers. in the end it can be very difficult to differentiate between people who are participating in RMT's and others who end up participating in normal economic activities with said buyers, with the former innocentes then getting caught in false positives (in other words it can be difficult to tell where the RMT chain ends). it's easier to just recognize sellers and ban them, but without a base cost to start an account the impact can be minimal (helps drive the price of gold up but not necessarily removes the seller). Suppose the average transaction is for $20 USD worth of gold, if you recognize a seller within 6 transactions and ban him he's still made $120 minus $15 of game time and $5 of that month's internet cost so $100 USD of profit. Even if it takes that seller a month to level up a new toon and grind the gold back up to what he lost, that's still more money than the venezuelan gold farmers I've talked to can make in their home countries. And this is talking best case scenario where you're catching them early and the accounts require significant play time to get back to a point of beign able to farm decent amounts of gold. Due to the "desperate" economic conditions many sellers find themselves in in their home countries, it's really necessary to eliminate the buyer base, because eliminating the seller base is near impossible. My source is a video I watched a few years ago about Runescape and RMT's as well as just chatting with venezuelan farmers in classic WoW, so don't take my words as expert opinion, just sharing what I believe to be true.
I've watched how Maplestory's been handling their gold sellers - but in maple most of the population is playing on the one server with no economy. This year they just went ham on bans in the normal servers and the price of mesos went flying upwards. Heaps of people got caught in the crossfire though.
I heard meso prices earlier this year were:
3 USD = 1 bil mesos
now they're more like:
30 USD = 1 bil mesos
Keep in mind maple is a F2P game - so it's easier for RMT traders to make accounts.
I logged into the game a few months ago and there were noticeably less bots around leafre.
Not sure if this is coz of ban hammer, or because of the anti-botting rune system.
I did find one map in the corner of edelstein that was being vacced by a fleet of flying kannas but they were doing weird rotations and edelstein is not an efficient place to farm mesos.
Altogether this suggests Nexon has managed to squeeze them into awkward positions.
As for spammers, occasionally one will pop up in Henesys, but when I returned ~30 mins later he was gone - I'm guessing auto-ban from multiple players reporting him.
What do you mean? like innocent people got banned?
yeah there were a bunch of angry posts appealling bans
This is completely backwards.
You don't defeat an illicit trade by attacking the consumer - you need to take out the suppliers. If no one is selling, no one is buying.
In order to do this, you need to understand how most gold seller websites work.
For the most part, these organizations are middlemen, they buy gold off of players, and sell it to other players. Despite what is by now an intrenched opinion of gold selling organizations and such in MMO's, they are not the people running bot armies in the few games out there that don't ban them. These bots are run by regular players, who then sell to the gold sellers. These people are essentially opportunists rather than entrepreneurs that are driving things along.
The driving force are the organizations. They offer to buy, and they offer to sell. Get rid of them, and you get rid of the issuse.
So, to get rid of the issue, what you do is you pose as a player wanting to sell to these websites. Sell them some gold on a few servers, and trace where that gold goes. Steven has said that they are building monitoring tools in to the game specifically to deal with this.
Then you pose as someone wanting to buy gold on those same servers, and purchase an amount off of them.
At this point, Intrepid should have a complete picture of the organization on each server they do this on. They should be able to see the accounts used to take possession of the gold from other players, the accounts that gold is stored on, the accounts used to sell to players, and the accounts used to transfer it between the other accounts.
Then all Intrepid need to do is suddenly have a large amount of gold to sell to these sellers, make the transaction, and ban all of the accounts in question. This means that the gold selling organization not only lose their infrustructure of all the accounts they use, but also their inventory - including the large amount they just purchased from Intrepid.
While they may then attempt to rebuild, it will only take a few instances of this happening before these organizations realize that Ashes is simply not worth their time to attempt to be active in, and they will move on to another game.
cx
Aww man, that site is no more
Also, why the necro?
The system can use this one behavior profile and compare it to all other behavior profiles it has recorded and put anyone with a high matching rate under active surveillance and possibly ban them.
With each new gold seller exposed the system gains more information on what is "normal player behavior" and what is not, making it better and better at filtering out anyone who seeks to exploit the system.
should i spend 30 min to find and mine a few more iron to complete my task, or should i just buy them at a low price?
Indeed it would - but then players just wouldnt tell their guild they bought gold.
And IS will see that the freehold changed ownership for like 1 gold.
There seems to be an abundance of animosity among everyone, including Steven, which ruins people's perspective. There is a large inclination towards negativity and hostility around here. Why insist that everyone has to go through tedious gold farming?
Intrepid and Steven are likely to drop the ball and fail, there's too many bad vibes around
My guess is that they drop the possibility to buy freeholds for gold.