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Defeating gold sellers, how will we do it?
Marzzo
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One
*edit
It seems people here believe perma banning gold sellers and/or buyers is the best solution. Thus, it seems people in this game are just as delusional as every other community. It will fail, and the economy will be destroyed in one week.
A massive amout of people are duping gold and buying gold in New world currently. And the ban is only 24 hours. Do you know why it is not perma ban? Because Amazon can't ban 50% of their whole playerbase.
But please intrepid, try to use the wisdom of other companies on how they battled gold sellers.
Why do people buy gold?
Ah, yes. The 50 hour grind to finally aquire that epic sword you wanted for so long. Many years ago it would not be a problem. You had seemingly endless time to simply grind it out. But today, with college, jobs, kids, partners, it won't really be possible. Not fast enough anyway. The next patch will most likely come out with new, and better items before you get the change to get and use this one for long enough to feel worth it!
And what really bothers you is how unfair the game is. You only have 1-2 hours a day at maximum to play each day. And even that is stretching it since you simply cant play every single day. How can you compete with people who put in 20-40 hours a week, when you only get to play 5-10 hours a week? What is also unfair is that you dont want to spend time grinding when you finally get to play! You simply want to log in and do what you think is fun. Dungeons, raids, pvp. But those activities feel unfair to you, because everyone is running around with so much better gear than you. That 10-30% stat advantage, is in your eyes, completly unfair.
Why not simply just, buy the required resourses for that sword for a measly 300$? I mean, many years ago, 300$ was an insane amount. But today? It is simply a few days of work. By doing basic calculations you can conclude that 300$ is a lot less worth than 50 hours of grind.
You also deserve it. Why should a nerd goblin that sits in his mothers basement have advantages over you ingame just because he has no life and you do? Since you work a lot harder in real life, you feel like you deserve to skip some peasant grind in a game. The grind is simply there for kids or adults with way to much time on their hands anyway. You have been doing the same, harder and more meaningful grind outside of the game. To provide for your family and dreams. While the nerd goblin simply wastes his life grinding.
You decide to simply buy a couple of million gold from a gold seller. Its easy for you to not get banned. Just do that lil sneaky trick everyone else does that buys gold. Currently the best method is to kill the gold seller in the outside world and loot his 150K stack of herbs. But you have to do it fast, because IS will restrict the amount of resources that drop from PvP in the next patch to combat gold selling. But, its okay, there are so many other ways they dont know about, and new ways are created every day!
Summary
People love playing the game, but hate all the grindy parts.
People feel like they deserve it.
Some statistics
*In runescape, over 50% of the community bought gold for IRL cash. About 25% were regular gold buying customers.
*40% of the runescape playerbase were bots or gold farmers, answearing the huge demand for gold.
*In world of warcraft, the same thing applies.
It is extremly naive to belive AoC will be different. Almost delusional. For this reason, our community has to make a choice sooner or later before release on how you want to combat gold sellers. Ingame moderation will not work. Since it has never worked for any game.
What is the problem with gold selling though, it does not affect me???
When demand rises, so does supply. See this as a law.
If AoC is popular, a lot of people will play it. And a lot of people want to buy gold for real life money. This will create a supply of goldsellers to match the amount of people willing to buy gold. It will also make bots more popular.
Suddenly, you are no longer competing ingame with other normal players. You know, normal gamers that play for fun or to compete etc.
You are competing with people who play AoC as a job. And oh shit does this screw up the economy. Suddenly, a massive amount of people will spend 16 hours a day simply farming anything that has any value to later sell it for real life cash or crypto. resulting in prices dropping drastically on every single gatherable resource in the game.
Your 4 hour a day daily grind of that rare ore that was so profitable back in the day? Lol, completly worthless. You need atleast 4-5 sixteen hour shifts to make the same amount of value. That legendary sword that once required massive amounts of materials to make? Suddenly it is cheaper that a bronze bar.
Just ban people buying gold
This does actually work, until too many start buying gold. A subscription game requires subscribers. If 35% of the AoC community buys gold, IS will simply have to live with it. They literally cant financially sustain an MMO if they ban 35% of the player base lol.
How do we stop this? Pick your poison below:
*AoC starts selling gold themselves. When WoW and runescape started selling gold themselves for regulated prices, the amount of people who bought gold for irl cash decreased by 50%. In runescape, you can buy a million gold for 0.1$ from a farmer. But people still prefer to buy it much, much more expensive from Jagex. This is done in the form of bonds or membership tokens (You can buy game time with ingame gold)
*Restrict free trade and every single way to obtain items from other players. This usually kills the game.
*Ban everyone who got a suspicious amount of gold from any source. This usually reduces profits AoC can make by about 30%. Potentially killing the game. Remember, an MMO does not have crazy profit margins. This is not the news. AoC wont make 50-100% profit every year. A realistic metric is 5-10% profit and depending on how many whales buy cosmetics, 10-20%.
Now choose what path you want to walk down:
*Dont do anything about it, destroying the economy of the game
*Ban everyone that buys gold, removing a large portion of the player base (also costs a ton of cash to pay people to do this)
*Restrict player item drops and free trade massivly
*Let Intrepid studios sell a regulated amount of gold themselves via bonds/token.
Which system worked best for these other games?
Well, the developer selling gold themselves ofcourse. I know, it is a hard pill to swallow, but really it is the best way to go. Ill explain why:
*Since so many people will buy gold anyways, and we can never stop it, it is better for us to give our money to IS instead of giving it to gold farmers.
*IS can sell a regulated amount of gold which does not impact the economy that much. It can also be fine tuned to work well within the game. Third party gold sellers will eventually press down the price to unsustainable amounts.
*It causes morally wrong things to happen. How? Well, you know when you walk out into the world wanting to kill other gatherers to make a quick buck? Suddenly you are killing a mother who is just trying to provide for her family IRL. This happens in runescape all the time.
*It also drags in quite a lot of players to the game. This is because you can tell them the game is free to play if they just play the game. Obviously, these "free to play" players will spend money in the game, thanks to cosmetics. People will "feel" they want to support such a great free game.
Instead of screaming as a monkey and countering arguments here, try to come up with better solutions to the gold selling problem we will have in the future
Please, understand that large MMO:s have been fighting gold sellers for decades. Runescape, wow, FF, ESO have all been defeated by this system. Nobody has managed to beat it without causing community rage. The systems above are those that have been tried and worked. Albeit with great drawback.
It seems people here believe perma banning gold sellers and/or buyers is the best solution. Thus, it seems people in this game are just as delusional as every other community. It will fail, and the economy will be destroyed in one week.
A massive amout of people are duping gold and buying gold in New world currently. And the ban is only 24 hours. Do you know why it is not perma ban? Because Amazon can't ban 50% of their whole playerbase.
But please intrepid, try to use the wisdom of other companies on how they battled gold sellers.
Why do people buy gold?
Ah, yes. The 50 hour grind to finally aquire that epic sword you wanted for so long. Many years ago it would not be a problem. You had seemingly endless time to simply grind it out. But today, with college, jobs, kids, partners, it won't really be possible. Not fast enough anyway. The next patch will most likely come out with new, and better items before you get the change to get and use this one for long enough to feel worth it!
And what really bothers you is how unfair the game is. You only have 1-2 hours a day at maximum to play each day. And even that is stretching it since you simply cant play every single day. How can you compete with people who put in 20-40 hours a week, when you only get to play 5-10 hours a week? What is also unfair is that you dont want to spend time grinding when you finally get to play! You simply want to log in and do what you think is fun. Dungeons, raids, pvp. But those activities feel unfair to you, because everyone is running around with so much better gear than you. That 10-30% stat advantage, is in your eyes, completly unfair.
Why not simply just, buy the required resourses for that sword for a measly 300$? I mean, many years ago, 300$ was an insane amount. But today? It is simply a few days of work. By doing basic calculations you can conclude that 300$ is a lot less worth than 50 hours of grind.
You also deserve it. Why should a nerd goblin that sits in his mothers basement have advantages over you ingame just because he has no life and you do? Since you work a lot harder in real life, you feel like you deserve to skip some peasant grind in a game. The grind is simply there for kids or adults with way to much time on their hands anyway. You have been doing the same, harder and more meaningful grind outside of the game. To provide for your family and dreams. While the nerd goblin simply wastes his life grinding.
You decide to simply buy a couple of million gold from a gold seller. Its easy for you to not get banned. Just do that lil sneaky trick everyone else does that buys gold. Currently the best method is to kill the gold seller in the outside world and loot his 150K stack of herbs. But you have to do it fast, because IS will restrict the amount of resources that drop from PvP in the next patch to combat gold selling. But, its okay, there are so many other ways they dont know about, and new ways are created every day!
Summary
People love playing the game, but hate all the grindy parts.
People feel like they deserve it.
Some statistics
*In runescape, over 50% of the community bought gold for IRL cash. About 25% were regular gold buying customers.
*40% of the runescape playerbase were bots or gold farmers, answearing the huge demand for gold.
*In world of warcraft, the same thing applies.
It is extremly naive to belive AoC will be different. Almost delusional. For this reason, our community has to make a choice sooner or later before release on how you want to combat gold sellers. Ingame moderation will not work. Since it has never worked for any game.
What is the problem with gold selling though, it does not affect me???
When demand rises, so does supply. See this as a law.
If AoC is popular, a lot of people will play it. And a lot of people want to buy gold for real life money. This will create a supply of goldsellers to match the amount of people willing to buy gold. It will also make bots more popular.
Suddenly, you are no longer competing ingame with other normal players. You know, normal gamers that play for fun or to compete etc.
You are competing with people who play AoC as a job. And oh shit does this screw up the economy. Suddenly, a massive amount of people will spend 16 hours a day simply farming anything that has any value to later sell it for real life cash or crypto. resulting in prices dropping drastically on every single gatherable resource in the game.
Your 4 hour a day daily grind of that rare ore that was so profitable back in the day? Lol, completly worthless. You need atleast 4-5 sixteen hour shifts to make the same amount of value. That legendary sword that once required massive amounts of materials to make? Suddenly it is cheaper that a bronze bar.
Just ban people buying gold
This does actually work, until too many start buying gold. A subscription game requires subscribers. If 35% of the AoC community buys gold, IS will simply have to live with it. They literally cant financially sustain an MMO if they ban 35% of the player base lol.
How do we stop this? Pick your poison below:
*AoC starts selling gold themselves. When WoW and runescape started selling gold themselves for regulated prices, the amount of people who bought gold for irl cash decreased by 50%. In runescape, you can buy a million gold for 0.1$ from a farmer. But people still prefer to buy it much, much more expensive from Jagex. This is done in the form of bonds or membership tokens (You can buy game time with ingame gold)
*Restrict free trade and every single way to obtain items from other players. This usually kills the game.
*Ban everyone who got a suspicious amount of gold from any source. This usually reduces profits AoC can make by about 30%. Potentially killing the game. Remember, an MMO does not have crazy profit margins. This is not the news. AoC wont make 50-100% profit every year. A realistic metric is 5-10% profit and depending on how many whales buy cosmetics, 10-20%.
Now choose what path you want to walk down:
*Dont do anything about it, destroying the economy of the game
*Ban everyone that buys gold, removing a large portion of the player base (also costs a ton of cash to pay people to do this)
*Restrict player item drops and free trade massivly
*Let Intrepid studios sell a regulated amount of gold themselves via bonds/token.
Which system worked best for these other games?
Well, the developer selling gold themselves ofcourse. I know, it is a hard pill to swallow, but really it is the best way to go. Ill explain why:
*Since so many people will buy gold anyways, and we can never stop it, it is better for us to give our money to IS instead of giving it to gold farmers.
*IS can sell a regulated amount of gold which does not impact the economy that much. It can also be fine tuned to work well within the game. Third party gold sellers will eventually press down the price to unsustainable amounts.
*It causes morally wrong things to happen. How? Well, you know when you walk out into the world wanting to kill other gatherers to make a quick buck? Suddenly you are killing a mother who is just trying to provide for her family IRL. This happens in runescape all the time.
*It also drags in quite a lot of players to the game. This is because you can tell them the game is free to play if they just play the game. Obviously, these "free to play" players will spend money in the game, thanks to cosmetics. People will "feel" they want to support such a great free game.
Instead of screaming as a monkey and countering arguments here, try to come up with better solutions to the gold selling problem we will have in the future
Please, understand that large MMO:s have been fighting gold sellers for decades. Runescape, wow, FF, ESO have all been defeated by this system. Nobody has managed to beat it without causing community rage. The systems above are those that have been tried and worked. Albeit with great drawback.
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Comments
But if AOC quickly and efficiently permaBANS both the buyers and the sellers, word will soon get out what will happen. AOC cannot wait a month to start the bans, they have to do it from the start. This will discourage the practice so that the loss of playerbase will be minimized.
Also, the type of player who buys gold because they do not have the patience to play, to really play the game....they are they type of player who is going to quit pretty soon anyway. Since we lose them soon, no great loss if they are banned!
So if those bad players are banned, the rest of us who honestly want to play the game for the long term will stick around rather than quitting due to the gold buyers, thus maintaining the player base.
So, hopefully, PermaBanning for gold transactions will be healthy for AOC and AOC revenues.
It's also a fact that RMT will be present in Ashes, simply because selling gold can be more profitable than working a regular job in many countries.
However, I believe that some of the premises and arguments you made are empirical, not factual. For instance your "Just ban people buying gold" (counter) argument is not a fact.
I'm only speaking for myself, but if Intrepid introduces any sort of WoW Token or Old School Bond, I'll stop playing the game shortly after, simply because this does not stop RMT and because I consider it to be P2W.
This isn't a "solution", and maybe there isn't one, but the best decision I can think of is for the developer to invest money in systems and people to accurately and effectively detect and ban gold buyers, gold sellers and botters.
In any case, I don't agree that the community has to make a choice on how to combat gold sellers, Intrepid does. Hopefully Intrepid will find a solution that's good enough to prevent RMT from ruining their game.
Are you more into open world gameplay and trust your friends to procure items? Tough luck, better get back in your house and start producing gold for 5h a day.
There wont be player set up stores since somebody could sell 1 wooden arrow and give for 10000000 ingame gold, so get rdy for another global auction market npc interraction since npcs dont care for dollars.
Forget about players transporting goods on caravans between nodes that you can loot, maybe even forget about materials dropping upon death, something which I am sure a lot of players will like, players that want "no challenge, only story gameplay" (but that's off-topic and of you build upon it you derail the thread, dear forum user).
Forget about open world raiding drops and boss carcass gathering, since players could offer $100 like they did in Tera Online, to loot the boss, and get rdy for bind on pick up and auto group distribution of items.
All in all forget about a lot of player to player interraction if you want to tackle an extremely small amount of population in a vast server of 100 something nodes and 8-10k players, that is willing to pay $$ to get ahead, something they can do in many ways, like pay a couple of welfare dependand people that want to sit home all day and play games. They can pay such people to play their character and progress for them.
Unless you want IS to limit your account access to only one internet point on the entire planet and slap you with a million verification steps.
The seller would have to settup another account, manage to produce another large amount of gold and then find another customer.
All this makes it harder for another cheater to appear in your server people. Another cheater that you wont come across.
Is it worth ruining this games systems and gameplay opportinities when:
a) cheaters can always cheat even by restricting /trade
b) this is a MASSIVE MULTI player online rpg and one cannot have a big impact
c) players can report and IS promised ingame GMs to make life harder for cheaters.
You know what will also make people stop playing the game? NOT perma-banning both gold buyers and gold sellers. If the economy falls to shit because they DON'T perma-ban both buyers and sellers, players will leave for sure. If they completely change the system from the current free trade of goods and gold to something like BDO, they will lose as lot of players. If they start selling gold themselves, I am probably out too.
I am certain a lot of people feel the same way because of how heavily Steven/IS has been against those very things from the start. They will lose ALL their credibility if they go back on their word on the P2W.
Some of the game systems will also help mitigate the damage a little. We do get the option to kill any obvious bots or gold farmers and take their loot. If they fight back, even better; no corruption. We have more localized economies than most other MMOs, which can mitigate some of the damage. But we certainly also have some systems where organized guilds can get a bunch of good gear and sell them via RMTs.
It all really comes back to the first point. Aggressive banning of people who buy gold/items. Imagine someone like Asmongold get banned on stream from it. It would send a message for sure. I use him as an example because I seriously doubt he would do it.
What I would do if I were Steven, is I would wait until the gold sellers would a little established, then on different accounts I would buy and sell gold. With these two points, you can uncover a web of accounts that gold sellers are using (many use several dozen accounts on each server of a game to attempt to obfuscate their activity).
Once you have a good picture of the entire web of on all servers, using a number of accounts again, sell them a large amount of gold (they buy gold, they don't generate it themselves), and then mass ban every account.
Do this two or three times, and the people running these businesses will consider the game to be too high a risk to be associated with.
This is far more impactful than reporting characters or accounts spamming gold selling services, as those accounts are never associated with the sellers themselves. They are either stolen accounts, or accounts bought using credit card details of people that have bought gold and so can't be linked back to the actual gold seller and their accounts. Basically, reporting spam does nothing other than potentially temporarily getting rid of spam - it has no impact at all on the gold seller.
Also, attacking the people buying gold from gold sellers isn't really going to work. There will always be a buyer, unless there is no seller.
2. Utilize a background median price transaction system to flag accounts (see below).
The correct thing to do is just perform blanket IP bans. I do not mean a few IP's, what I mean is whole countries, mobile IP's, and various exit nodes affiliated with proxy services that practically every YouTuber shills (or shilled) at one point in time as a VPN. This might sound harsh, but I know plenty of websites that do it. This isn't a perfect solution, but it does curb much of the problem.
Another way to go about is to implement a background market system that logs trades across the entire game and determines an average price of an item that we aren't aware of. This has also been done (I am playing one right now: Starbase). Functionally what this does is presents a median value for items in a trade, and if the variance is too great (ex. trading junk loot or items worth 1/100th of the gold being traded) then both accounts are automatically flagged for review, and trading/item drops are taken from them until the review is completed.
of five gold selling companies I know (which account for around 30 different websites selling gold in various games, all of which take steps to appear Chinese), two o them are from the US, two from the UK, and the other other one is from a small country in the EU.
So, unless the countries being banned are the US and the UK, this will have no actual impact at all on gold sellers.
I know everyone loves to think that gold sellers are Chinese, but this doesn't hold true in reality.
Almost all gold sellers buy their product off players, mark it up and sell it to other players. Again, the perception players have of these companies and the reality of them are very, very different.
This is why it is profitable for players that find exploits to not report them, but rather to make actual thousands off of them (in the case of two players I know, actual hundreds of thousands of dollars - one of these later on posted about what happened on a now defunct forum called EQ2flames).
This is also why a bug bounty system in an MMO simply has no hope of working.
Solved.
You play on the private servers or nah?
I really like this idea. Flagging for review is important. I mean reviewing both accounts is an important step. A system like this will also flag people who help their friends to a good start in the game.
-Karp
I expect them to already have something like this. I saw an old video where they talked about building the game with combatting RMT in mind, and I sure hope they deliver.
My conclusion is full scale war. Perma bans, hardware bans, for buyers and sellers. Lawsuits where applicable against any RMT organization. Tracking tools to track suspected RMT transfers of in game currency. Live GM's literally staring at zone chat ready to right click on Aeadjkkalejk's name and click the ban button after he spams a gold selling message. It should be that fast and easy to ban. No zone/world chat in Ashes? Great, the GM's should have a tool to track all in game chat regardless, anywhere where a gold seller can advertise. I am very much anti Big Brother in real life, but very for it in game. BAN BAN BAN absolutely scorched earth warfare against these cheaters.
Many of the features and systems of this game REQUIRE people out in the world participating, making money for themselves, advancing their characters, playing the game. RMT will gut that. Intrepid needs to have a zero tolerance, aggressive enforcement policy.
Lastly you mention it being morally wrong to kill a gatherer/farmer who might be a gold selling mother trying to provide for her family IRL. I could give a flying fuck about that. She is owed nothing, SHE is in the wrong, ruining company's products, ruining games, ruining people's fun, ruining what customers paid MONEY for. She can get a real job. We owe nothing to people who break laws and break rules.
Those people get fucked, whats your solution for them? They get screwed by the inflation in the economy from all the bought gold. They're surrounded by play to winner's on one side and pay to winner's on the other.
It's the game creator's job to police their game. They need to do their job. Cheating is unacceptable.
Make the life of botters difficult with various mechanism.
For example: The more mobs of a type you kill the lesser the rewards. Make dungeons non-farmable. etc
Just basic, non-innovative stuff like this alone can keep the problem at a very low level.
Its just that you have to do things well.
The moment the gains stop justifying the effort, most people will give up on even attempting to gold buy or gold sell or bot.
I want GMs like that. I want cheaters banned. In fact, I want that so much that I am willing to pay for it. Make the subscriptions $30 a month if that is what it takes. We cannot realistically ask for BOTH a strong GM team AND a cheap subscription price.
What if...there were 'GM heavy servers' for $30 a month and 'normal' servers for $15 a month? I'm glad to pay the extra to be on a well policed server.
What do you all think?
A banned account doesn't mean the banned player is banished to the shadow realm of no return or has their hands amputated IRL. A banned player can just buy a new account and start over and most do, if it's an IP ban they can change devices or use a VPN to circumvent the ban.
Gold selling is "easy" to track and "easier" to stop, all that's required is a system that logs and records every single player transaction that occurs and stores it onto a live server linked to the player.
Exhibit A: In WoW, all mail is logged, every trade is logged and every AH purchase is logged. Moderators have access to every single transaction you have done as every single transaction is recorded onto your account and Blizzard retains a copy of this transcript at their disposal.
The problem then is man power, no game can have the required number of moderators to ban all of the gold traders.
Therefore, algorithms are used instead to trigger manual review. For example, a gold trader will normally have a mule account they use to store gold. Often, this will be multiple accounts with large lump sums of gold which they will keep circulating amongst accounts. A good algorithm would track this and flag the account(s) that are being used to hoard gold and trade it.
Additionally, some gold sellers will create scripts with dozens of accounts, VPN's, etc so that they can attempt to cheat the system that triggers manual review. IE, giving 100 botting alts 50 gold each to then spam to mules and potential buyers, etc. Sometimes they'll even give random players gold if they suspect they're under review, this is where banning the gold buyer is difficult as it's impossible to know if the person actually bought the gold or is being held hostage.
The solution that I would propose which is by far the best solution in my opinion, is deletion of all items and gold traded by the guilty parties over the account's entire history.
This would mean everything that the player traded in gold, items, etc would be deleted and would simply disappear from player inventories.
This would mean every coin, item or asset would have to be given a player ID that can be tracked indefinitely and should the player be banned or flagged the flagged items will be deleted regardless of where they are. How this could be done I'm not sure but destruction of the sold items and gold followed by the banning of the account is the only way to ensure that gold sellers won't earn profit.
It's the way it's supposed to be. The game company should charge enough money to fund their game running properly. In the case of mmo's, that requires live GM's. It should be that way by DEFAULT. I'm definitely worried about the 0 dollar box cost. 15 dollars up front because you have to pay for the sub, but that's still a low entry price to hackers/cheaters.
Too many companies get away with not policing their game properly. They actively sweep game breaking issues under the rug. They make the business decision that even cheater accounts are still money in the bank for them. And getting rid of them not only loses that money but costs them more in labor costs. I hope Steven changes the game. I think he and Ashes will be rewarded financially for taking a hard line against cheaters.
I am not sure what the wide spread consequences will be of this. However, i am sure Blockchain technology can help answering the technical side of this. Just a thought.
-Karp
Nothing against you Karp, but I just want to explain why it won't work despite seeming like a solution on the surface.
This is useless because in order for it to work a coin needs to be introduced, one that is mined and then minted. Since all video games have ways to earn gold at variable speeds this cannot work. Let me use a comparative example: A noobie can earn maybe some copper and a few silver per hour in theory by killing mobs. but a max-level player who is also killing mobs can earn many gold per hour because the mobs he is killing either have trash loot that he just sells to NPC's that is worth more, or the amount of currency they drop is far more. Either way, the compensation needs to be satisfactory with their own comparative overhead. A higher-level player will naturally need to spend more money to craft new or maintain more expensive items, for instance. The issue is that the coin implementation in video games means that your computer does the mining as you play. Minting the coins as NFTs and giving them to you for having played. An interesting proposition, but this has an outsized effect on the player; where the ones who have the best hardware now earn the most money per hour of gameplay. Further, this means that methods of earning lots of money quickly suddenly don't work. And worse, this encourages surreptitious gold-selling by any means necessary.
Let me use another example to illustrate what I mean:
You are a max-level player who has specc'd into the most lucrative crafting skills there are, and you have all the mats you need to craft the best player-made items in the game. You judge, as do those around you, that the time and effort multiplied by the usefulness of these items means that they sell for a massive premium. The game has no way to account for this because the subtle streams of income that we rely on to force currency velocity is stuck behind how many people are mining. Consequently, the players who can use your items will turn to players willing to commit acts of RMT because they have a glut of minted currency by way of their superior hardware. They may even have hardware farms dedicated to mining the coin (via multiboxing); which they turn around and sell to players like you who need something but cannot afford that thing.
So if your hardware makes it so that you can only mint a few silver per hour, but your level necessitates that you mint several gold per hour so that you stay competitive: what do you do? You buy gold.
My thought was just that a ledger should be kept of all transactions of any type of value. This would technically enable the idea by @drfate786 that all gold and items traded by a gold farmer/seller/broker should be deleted upon account ban.
I think a private blockchain run by Intrepid Studio could do the trick. However since this does not need to be distributed nor externally verified nor tamper proof, any list would do *facepalm*
-Karp
Blockchain and mining do not need to go together.
The game could set up a block chain system to keep track of all coin in the game if they wanted to (not saying they should), and not alter the method for acquiring in game coin at all.
My problem with this still remains the same. You aren't going to get one without the other just due to advocates for one going hand in hand with the other whenever you can monetize something (even if the money's entirely fake). I understand what you're saying, and I know it seems like I spun it as something else but Intrepid literally had to go out of their way to say this isn't happening because it opens the door to people demanding NFT's and coins and all sorts of other shit.
Yeah I thought so too 😃 But it still might not be necessary to use blockchain.
It isn't. Postgres exists. There is zero reason to utilize blockchain.