I understand your logic. It's a strategy to stop gold selling, a viable one. I just think an even better strategy is to ban both the buyer and seller.
The reason I don't think going after the buyer will work is because it never has.
Do you have any examples of companies actually going after the buyers, without going soft on them?
I haven't played all MMOs, but in none of the ones I have played or heard about has there been a concerted effort by the developers to crack down on buying gold/items. Aka, removing the market for the gold sellers.
RL examples like alcohol, drugs, prostitution etc. don't apply here, if that's what you are alluding to. It's a game, and one that only succeeds when people play within the rules, like all other games. Most people know and understand that at some level, even those who cheat. Cheat in poker? Yer out. Same goes for sports. Take performance enhancing drugs or sandpaper the baseball? Yer out.
This same notion of "it only works if we all follow the rules" applies to wider society just as it applies to a game.
Yet people still don't follow the rules.
The reason I bring up the war on drugs specifically is for the same reason there are no developers that have made a concerted effort to just go after gold buyers - developers know it won't work, because they have looked at real world examples of how to stop black market activity, most notably the 50 years of said war.
The big difference between an MMORPG and RL drugs and such from an enforcement perspective is the level of control and knowledge the devs have (or should have). Ingame they are gods. There is no ingame transaction or action or chat they don't know of and can't track. It's a simple matter of them allocating the resources to check and act on it. The TOS means they can act on it and ban people without a lengthy and costly legal process.
Which leads us to the real reason to do it. I think the developers have a moral imperative to also go after the buyers. Life isn't fair. Cheating is often rewarded, unfair as it may seem. Games are an escape from that, and Ashes promises to be one where the rules apply to everyone equally. It's one of their big selling points that we don't get P2W, and people buying gold or items is certainly that. If Intrepid wants to stay true to their promises, I think they have both a moral and an ethical obligation to ban both buyers and sellers aggressively.
So it's hard to stop what isn't produced here and comes through our wide open border.
And yet countries with more open boarders have fewer issues.
And yes, penalties are indeed worse for sellers (the fact that you have to clarify this isn't a good thing, honestly).
Again though, I am not talking about strict, lenient or anything like that, I am talking about where the resources are put to use - and in the US< for decades, they were put to use catching users and ignoring sellers.
And now you have a problem that is too big to fix, and where all political pundits try to blame the other side.
Again, the reason this same thing didn't happen anywhere else is because everywhere else focused more on the sellers than the US did. It isn't a political thing, it isn't a boarder thing, it is simply a failure of the law enforcement policy of the early 1970's that was not changed for several decades.
This is a pointless discussion to be in though - and is exactly why I said I do not want to get in to this discussion.
The relavent facts are;
The US has had the worst success in combating drugs of any nation over the last 50 years.
The US focused it's resources early on in trying to arrest as many users as possible.
Other countries focused more on getting dealers.
Other countries had more success.
The thing is, this can be applied to things like Silk Road, it can be applied to the black market in North Korea, it can be applied to alcohol sales during prohibition. It is a universal truth.
There will always be a buyer, until you get rid of the seller.
As such, any resources spent on anything other than trying to catch a seller are wasted resources. Sure, ban the buyers as you come across them, but they are not worth wasting resources on as every seller you get means 100 or 1,000 (or more) less buyers.
I don't know if you realize this or not, but most countries secure their borders, relatively speaking compared to the U.S. The ones that don't probably don't have to. The U.S. southern border ranks as one of the most legally and illegally crossed borders in the world. It also ranks in the top 5 of most dangerous borders in the world, including borders such as between North and South Korea and India and Pakistan.
We have issues with our border because it's close to countries that are unable to control their own territory effectively. Drugs, crime, cartels, human trafficking all operate very near and through our border. And even more than that.
The fact that some countries can get away with not securing their border is a testament to the fact that they don't have to because of the countries they are bordered by. If there were people and substances coming through their border that was killing their citizens, you and I both know, nearly every country in the world except for the U.S. would secure that border immediately. The citizens would demand it and hang in the streets any politician that refused. And rightly so.
We invaded Afghanistan because an attack originated there that killed 3000 Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year by drugs coming from the southern border and we do nothing. I lost a friend of 20 years this year from those drugs.
Sure go after the sellers. They're in Central and South America and other various areas of the world. Or just secure the border so nowhere near as many drugs get in. Our government has been unwilling to do either, and yes you're right that has led to increased focus on the buyers. That has saved countless lives. But you're right, it's a losing battle when the problem could be struck in the heart and ended immediately if we had leaders that actually gave a fuck about the citizens they represent.
It's freakin Noaani man lol. I could start talking about a subject that I KNOW he already agrees with me on. And he'll disagree and start arguing. I enjoy the conversations sometimes, sometimes I don't. But he just starts bringing up shit like the war on drugs as if that's an exact parallel to gold selling/buying, which it's not. Which then forces me explain why it's not and next thing you know here we are.
Drug addiction is a serious physiological dependency that creates legitimate victims who suffer withdrawals and a downward spiral that they can't escape.
RMT trading is players intentionally introducing their own P2W driven by not wanting to spend time ingame earning it themselves.
Buyers are not victims, they're perpetrators.
Drug addicts are victims.
Yeah. In Noaanis defense, there are parallels there between the two. It's an interesting discussion and I don't see him as 100% wrong. But the critical element is what maouw just described, to me at least.
Buyers are not victims, they're perpetrators.
Drug addicts are victims.
This is true, and in the post where I first mentioned it, along with saying I didn't want to dive deeper in to it (that never works, I know), I did say addiction (and thus all that goes with it) are not something that can have a parallel joined between the two. This is also why I have not tried to connect them in this way (neither has Okeydoke).
This is also why I said the parallel is among all black markets, not just drugs. The effects on all black market activities (of which I have outlined a few) all follow the same path..
It is not a coincidence that cases of the unique "service" provided on Silk Road (not the game...) went down drastically when that market was shut down. Potential buyers simply had no access to potential sellers, and so such transactions simply couldn't happen.
If there is a seller, there will be a buyer. If there is no seller, there is no buyer.
That last part is fairly basic - I'd be interested to hear how people think buyers will buy if there is no one to sell. Since sellers are the ones that need to invest money in securing product, and time in creating a network with the attempt to avoid detection, it isn't something people can just "do".
While I do understand people wanting to deal with what they perceive as the issues with gold selling (spam and people having unearned gold), I am surprised at how many people fail to see these two things as symptoms of gold seller activity, rather than as the root problem.
If you treat just these two things, you may end up with less in game spam, and gold sellers are likely to work more in the shadows. They will still work, and people that buy gold will still have coin they didn't earn, but YOU won't know about it (a collective you to people that want to go after buyers). This seems to be what people want, based on this thread - less concorned about the activity, more concerned with not being able to see it.
On the other hand, if you get rid of the sellers (make the game unprofitable for them to operate in, as I have outlined before), then you have no spam, you have no people having coin they didn't earn, and you have no sellers working in the shadows.
Someone will jump in and say that if there is a market, someone will fill it. To this I say an emphatic "probably". But, it won't be the companies that have deemed the game unprofitable, meaning it is likely going to be an amateur attempt, and Intrepid should be able to stamp that out easily enough.
I agree with your perspective that 100% effort should be put into stopping the sellers. I would assume that's their plan anyway. I don't know why you'd go any less than 100% in trying to stop the sellers. I just know that unless Intrepid has some kind of incredible system to detect and ban sellers BEFORE they're able to make any sales, the problem remains. Especially with only a 15 dollar up front cost to get in the game. Now maybe they do have a plan like that. I think it's very possible to stop sellers fast. I think a lot of games just don't even try.
But for the buyers that slip through the cracks, that were warned of the consequences and knowingly decided to cheat anyway, instant perma ban.
If there is an argument to be made to me more lenient with the buyers (at least for a first offence), it's only that they are far less likely to come back if you terminate their account while, for the sellers, it's just a operational cost for their "business".
The buying players, although cheating the system, can be reformed if given a second chance. The sellers cannot: their whole plan is to exploit the game system in the first place.
Another way to fight the gold sellers, from a design point of view, would be to make as little game systems dependant directly on gold, or any other easily obtainable and trade good. For example, you can't pay the upkeep for your estate for a flat some of gold, it has to be paid in gathered, and refined, resources. It's not a perfect close system, but it put extra steps that ensure that actual playing player participate and profit from the system. Some mechanics, usually solved by, or used for, draining gold out of the economy can instead be locked behind tasks to be performed, you can't buy a solution with out of game money: you have to play the game. Time is the ultimate currency. If no mob drops gold directly but are part of tasks that award gold, you slow down the acquisition of gold. Maybe only citizens of a node can access the quests that pay in gold. If gold farmers need to form their own city to make any gold to sell out of game, that city can be raided by other players. It's another steps to turn the parasite into psudo-players
But the ban hammer must be heavy and fall at need too.
That GWOT OP seems to be a justification for the "design for the worst in people" mentality that has pretty much been what WoW did (and pretty much wrecked that game for anyone but the mini-maxing droogs who seem to scream the loudest).
Playing AoC should be considered a privilege.
Ban gold sellers and buyers. It should not be all that difficult to automate an audit of a player's resources and locate suspected violators.
Blizzard has started requiring 2FA for certain things. Required that for play in this game and ban both the account and the phone the 2FA goes through.
Yes. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but my assumption on the WoW forums is that it's pretty much the shills for the RMT carry groups doing the complaining.
You've worked long and hard to create a game that's NOT WoW. Please don't assume that you have to cater to the mentality of WoW players to govern behavior in it.
Sometimes when I write stuff on this forum I think about it later and ask myself did that make me sound like a dick? My opinion on zero tolerance insta perma bans is not based in a sadistic desire to see people punished, although there's not much better than seeing cheaters held to account.
It's based on the fact that once a gold sale happens, much of the damage to the game is done almost immediately. And it's not easily reversible. In many cases it's near irreversible, even if both the buyer and seller are banned.
The buyer starts laundering the money, using it for legitimate trades with other players, perhaps buying an apartment or a freehold spot that another player wanted and was near buying legitimately, using it to buy gear that tips a fight in his favor he otherwise would have lost, making another player die and drop resources, any number of minor and major things. Ripple effects. Multiplied by 100 people doing it, or 1000, or 5000.
Barring some miracle, we all know gold selling is going to happen to some extent. I think you have to deter it and reduce it at all costs. If everyone knows they have one freebie, and maybe multiple if they're not caught the first time, it's just a matter of fact that more people are going to be willing to try it. They might eventually be caught, but much of the damage is permanent.
Just because buyers have much more to lose, the ban should be something to dread. This would cripple the market more effectively than playing whack a mole with sellers.
Are you bored with the forum pvp in this topic yet? Just ban the cheaters, account and IP.
Sometimes when I write stuff on this forum I think about it later and ask myself did that make me sound like a dick?
Sometimes I say things that I know make me sound like a dick, but I just lean in to it
It's based on the fact that once a gold sale happens, much of the damage to the game is done almost immediately. And it's not easily reversible. In many cases it's near irreversible, even if both the buyer and seller are banned.
This is why preventing it in the first place is the best idea.
Banning buyers is reactive, and only deals with that one player.
Banning sellers is proactive, and prevents others buying when they otherwise may have.
The point about catching players that would cheat in other ways is actually the only real valid argument I have seen for going after buyers - but I would think such players are asked to easily be caught via honeypot operations easily enough.
I think that banning a buyer deals with more than one player, or it often may. Why? Players have friends, often guilds of them, and friends of friends. The grapevine is often efficient. When guildie Donald gets banned, the other guildies hear and are now afraid of buying. They tell their pals who also are reluctant to buy and the sellers lose their market. If the sellers have no market, that's is when they go away, so perhaps going after Buyers will be more effective than going after Sellers.
Supply and Demand....go after both sides of the equation, not just one (as those who have used comparisons to the US 'war on drugs' have already demonstrated).
Just because buyers have much more to lose, the ban should be something to dread. This would cripple the market more effectively than playing whack a mole with sellers.
Are you bored with the forum pvp in this topic yet? Just ban the cheaters, account and IP.
l
Sellers have more to lose.
They often have $10k+ in stock at any point in time per server.
So, a buyer stands to lose some progress in a hobby, a seller stands to lose a small fortune - assuming they operate on multiple servers.
I think that banning a buyer deals with more than one player, or it often may. Why? Players have friends, often guilds of them, and friends of friends. The grapevine is often efficient. When guildie Donald gets banned, the other guildies hear and are now afraid of buying. They tell their pals who also are reluctant to buy and the sellers lose their market. If the sellers have no market, that's is when they go away, so perhaps going after Buyers will be more effective than going after Sellers.
Supply and Demand....go after both sides of the equation, not just one (as those who have used comparisons to the US 'war on drugs' have already demonstrated).
In my experience, what usually happens here is that these people just use a different seller.
Rather than it being "Donald bought gold and got banned, don't buy gold", it tends to be more "Donald bought gold from xyz.com, don't use xyz.com".
These people are oblivious to the fact that xyz.com and abc.com are the same company.
The other thing to take in to account - and this is quite likely in a game like Ashes - people use burner accounts to buy gold. I've known of guilds that have an account dedicated to being a middleman for anyone in the guild wanting to buy gold. They list something on the AH, the mule buys it with the bought gold, and immediately moves it to a guild bank (different guild), and then pass it back to the original guild later on.
This leaves developers in a situation where there isn't a lot they can do that has any real impact.
The point about catching players that would cheat in other ways is actually the only real valid argument I have seen for going after buyers - but I would think such players are asked to easily be caught via honeypot operations easily enough.
Buying gold is cheating, that's valid enough reason to ban someone, even without the chance they'd cheat in other ways. Unless we live in wacko world and up is down and somehow cheating is not cheating unless they're going to cheat again.
lol about leaning into it, that was funny. heh
I thought about the burner accounts that buyers may use earlier today. Haven't really sorted through all the ramifications of that in my mind yet. IP bans? I guess vpn's make that impossible? Not sure. Hardware bans? Obviously contact/transaction tracing between that burner account and whoever else. But it is kinda like, is Intrepid really going to do all of this? Like even if they said they were, could you really trust they are. And it does feel kind of hopeless in a way, all the tangled webs.
All the more reason to me to ban the hell out buyers when found and confirmed. But that's just me.
All I know is that if Intrepid doesn't have plans to put a serious dent in cheating, boy did they pick the wrong type of game to make. As soon as players realize it's nothing more than a cheating arms race, of who can cheat better and harder, who has more real life money to burn for in game advantages, game will die.
Of course this is all dependent on how important and advantageous in game gold is. We don't really know that yet. Everything I've read leads me to believe it will be pretty important, but we don't know.
The point about catching players that would cheat in other ways is actually the only real valid argument I have seen for going after buyers - but I would think such players are asked to easily be caught via honeypot operations easily enough.
Buying gold is cheating, that's valid enough reason to ban someone, even without the chance they'd cheat in other ways. Unless we live in wacko world and up is down and somehow cheating is not cheating unless they're going to cheat again.
I've tried to be clear about this, and have stated it outright several times in this thread.
I am not saying players that are caught buying gold shouldn't be punished. They should. I have said that several times in this thread, along with my belief that a first offense should be a two week suspension (in line with cheating in almost all professional sports - which is rediculous), and if found to be doing it a second time, a permanent ban is warranted.
But again, that isn't what I am talking about. I am talking about where Intrepid should devote its resources.
I'm sure we all agree that resources are finite.as such, Intrepid can't be every where, at all times. They need to pick and chose where to put those resources to work - where they will get the biggest return on them.
That is, without a doubt, going after sellers.No one has even out up an argument as to why this may not be the case - the only real responses have been versions of "but ban buyers too!".
If Intrepid had unlimited resources, this would be a different discussion (however, it would also be a purely theoretical discussion at that point). Since they have finite resources, the discussion is about where those resources should be spent.
I look at you realizing the issues that developers have with this, multiple accounts, how hardware bans won't work, how IP blocks won't work etc, and how I can sympathize with your feeling of how hopeless it could get.
But then you follow that up with saying that ismore of a reason to go hand on the buyers caught, and I had a literal head-desk moment.
Again, gold sellers are companies. Multi-million dollar companies.
These companies need to make a profit on each game they are active in. If developers make it so these comps is are unable to make a profit in Ashes, as I outlined in my first post in this thread, what do you think these companies will do?
Do you think they will remain active in Ashes while running at a loss?
This is the bit that takes the feeling of helplessness one gets when looking at the realities of trying to ban the buyers, and turns it in to a feeling of not just hope, but damn near expectation that a developer that actually wants to do this would be able to make it happen.
When you suggest going soft on buyers you give sellers more to work with. Why do you suggest soft bans? Why do you keep going?
You know there is literally no actual evidence at all that a harsher penalty is a deterrent, right? Not just in gold selling, but with prison, fines, everything. There is a reason most counties that don't have privatized prisons are working on rehabilitation with shorter penalties, rather than increased penalties - this works, harsher penalties don't.
Sellers don't need more or less to work with. If they exist, they will sell every coin they get their hands on.
You can't stop that by punishing buyers.
As a logical exercise, can you explain why you would go after buyers that are in the hundreds, as opposed to sellers, where there are usually only two or three companies per game working?
I mean, you have a giant, big, easy, effective, immobile target in front of you, and you are advocating for going after the much harder agile, small, insignificant target so that... what, you can get warm fuzziness because someone got banned yet there is no appreciable effect on the sale of gold in the game?
lol. You're not going to get me to think that perma banning buyers is not a good idea. It's a good idea on principle alone. Any other direct or side benefits aside, which I have talked about at length, it's worth doing just on sheer fucking principle.
If in your finite resources scenario, it truly was so much more taxing on Intrepid's team to ban buyers than sellers, then yeah I think a bigger focus should be on taking down sellers.(I've already said I think in general more of a focus should be on sellers anyway.) But I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case, at least not that cut and dry. Just in the process of taking down a seller, Intrepid would probably find buyers too, without exorbitant amounts of extra detective work needed.
And those buyers should be perma banned lol. Straight up, just my opinion
Your sports analogy too is an interesting discussion point. We'd probably go in circles on it and I really don't want to. But its not an exact parallel either, in my opinion, just like the drug war analogy. I think there are things to take away from both analogies, but neither are holy grails of it must be like this in online competitive mmorpgs too.
it truly was so much more taxing on Intrepid's team to ban buyers than sellers, then yeah I think a bigger focus should be on taking down sellers
Since all the tricks sellers can use to avoid being detected are available to - and used by - buyers, it stands to reason that one buyer is as much effort to track down as one seller.
As such, since there is one seller to many hundreds (thousands) of buyers, I take this to mean that you finally agree with what I have been saying.
Even if Intrepid were to just perma-ban everyone that bought gold, literally all that would mean is every time someone bought gold, they would add $15 to the cost of it - and that $15 would just be known as "Steven's cut".
What principle is it that this is working towards again?
The way to stop it is not to "ban" gold sellers accounts. As has been said, this is an expected cost of business. The way to stop it is to ban accounts that are loaded with inventory.
Banning the account of a client-facing account that only ever has one transaction worth of product on them at a time means nothing to a seller. Banning the accounts that have tens of thousands of dollars of inventory on them? That forces a company out of a game. Even better if it were Intrepid that sold them all that inventory.
Banning buyers is doing nothing at all to the gold buyers or sellers, it is doing nothing at all to the bystanders that may buy gold one day, the only people it does anything for are the people that want punishment for punishments sake, as opposed to wanting a fix to the solution.
As an aside, in your story from a page or two ago, you got the lesser punishment, and were given the chance to rehabilitate. Perhaps reconsider your stance of not offering the same to others here. You seem grateful for it, why deny that chance for others?
If Intrepid has some way to handle sellers, to take them completely out of the equation, then this is all a moot point anyway. You can't ban buyers if there are no sellers for buyers to buy from. Done deal. That'd be amazing.
I'd love nothing more than for that to be the case. If it ends up not being the case, and sellers keep coming back and making sales, then you should be perma banning buyers from the get go. If sellers cant be annihilated completely, then the only true enforcement method is against the buyers.
I got the established punishment. Diversion program is available to all first time offenders, at least in my situation as it were, in my state.
And no I don't think that's an exact parallel to cheating in a video game either.
If Intrepid has some way to handle sellers, to take them completely out of the equation, then this is all a moot point anyway. You can't ban buyers if there are no sellers for buyers to buy from. Done deal. That'd be amazing.
Pose as a player wanting to sell gold to gold sellers (this is how they get hold of gold - they don't farm it themselves, generally).
Sell a small amount to them in order to identify one end of a gold sellers network.
Monitor that character to see where the gold goes. Create map of accounts used by the gold seller.
Do the above on all servers.
Sell a large amount of gold on all servers to this gold seller, and then ban all accounts as soon as it is received on all servers.
Then, you have a gold seller that has just spent tens of thousands of dollars on product, but no longer have product and no longer has a network.
It doesn't take too many of these before all gold sellers pull out of the game. You don't even need to stop them, you just need to make it unprofitable.
---
You got the established punishment - but that established punishment was the lenient option. If people that established the punishment for that had the mindset you have here, the established punishment would have been drastically different.
I do agree on your point about it not being an exact parallel to a game though, imo real life should be harsher, as the potential consequences are far more severe.
To be clear, I do want buyers punished - but with warnings before a hard ban.
Warnings are standard practice right? Maybe even give players a way to work off their "warrant" level.
Scratch that, it'll get abused to no end.
If that outline works in a timely enough manner the issue is solved. If it's not that outline, but some other plan that works then the issue is solved. If it's that easy, then many other games have egg on their face and should be ashamed of themselves. I'd love all of that to be true. It could be. We'll see.
We definitely need some more cheating related questions asked in the live streams about how they're going to deal with it.
Real life is harsher. Having to have random drug tests, go to AA meetings once a week, and meet with a counselor once a week sucks way more than getting banned from a video game because I'm a fuckface cheater. The horror. What ever will I do? Go cheat in another video game, one that doesn't bother enforcing rules. Pity my soul.
Comments
The big difference between an MMORPG and RL drugs and such from an enforcement perspective is the level of control and knowledge the devs have (or should have). Ingame they are gods. There is no ingame transaction or action or chat they don't know of and can't track. It's a simple matter of them allocating the resources to check and act on it. The TOS means they can act on it and ban people without a lengthy and costly legal process.
Which leads us to the real reason to do it. I think the developers have a moral imperative to also go after the buyers. Life isn't fair. Cheating is often rewarded, unfair as it may seem. Games are an escape from that, and Ashes promises to be one where the rules apply to everyone equally. It's one of their big selling points that we don't get P2W, and people buying gold or items is certainly that. If Intrepid wants to stay true to their promises, I think they have both a moral and an ethical obligation to ban both buyers and sellers aggressively.
And yes, penalties are indeed worse for sellers (the fact that you have to clarify this isn't a good thing, honestly).
Again though, I am not talking about strict, lenient or anything like that, I am talking about where the resources are put to use - and in the US< for decades, they were put to use catching users and ignoring sellers.
And now you have a problem that is too big to fix, and where all political pundits try to blame the other side.
Again, the reason this same thing didn't happen anywhere else is because everywhere else focused more on the sellers than the US did. It isn't a political thing, it isn't a boarder thing, it is simply a failure of the law enforcement policy of the early 1970's that was not changed for several decades.
This is a pointless discussion to be in though - and is exactly why I said I do not want to get in to this discussion.
The relavent facts are;
The US has had the worst success in combating drugs of any nation over the last 50 years.
The US focused it's resources early on in trying to arrest as many users as possible.
Other countries focused more on getting dealers.
Other countries had more success.
The thing is, this can be applied to things like Silk Road, it can be applied to the black market in North Korea, it can be applied to alcohol sales during prohibition. It is a universal truth.
There will always be a buyer, until you get rid of the seller.
As such, any resources spent on anything other than trying to catch a seller are wasted resources. Sure, ban the buyers as you come across them, but they are not worth wasting resources on as every seller you get means 100 or 1,000 (or more) less buyers.
We have issues with our border because it's close to countries that are unable to control their own territory effectively. Drugs, crime, cartels, human trafficking all operate very near and through our border. And even more than that.
The fact that some countries can get away with not securing their border is a testament to the fact that they don't have to because of the countries they are bordered by. If there were people and substances coming through their border that was killing their citizens, you and I both know, nearly every country in the world except for the U.S. would secure that border immediately. The citizens would demand it and hang in the streets any politician that refused. And rightly so.
We invaded Afghanistan because an attack originated there that killed 3000 Americans. Tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year by drugs coming from the southern border and we do nothing. I lost a friend of 20 years this year from those drugs.
Sure go after the sellers. They're in Central and South America and other various areas of the world. Or just secure the border so nowhere near as many drugs get in. Our government has been unwilling to do either, and yes you're right that has led to increased focus on the buyers. That has saved countless lives. But you're right, it's a losing battle when the problem could be struck in the heart and ended immediately if we had leaders that actually gave a fuck about the citizens they represent.
There will always be a seller until you get rid of the buyer too. It works both ways.
Banning the buyers also removes people that would likely cheat in other ways too if they could.
Two cheaters, one stone.
Drug addiction is a serious physiological dependency that creates legitimate victims who suffer withdrawals and a downward spiral that they can't escape.
RMT trading is players intentionally introducing their own P2W driven by not wanting to spend time ingame earning it themselves.
Buyers are not victims, they're perpetrators.
Drug addicts are victims.
This is true, and in the post where I first mentioned it, along with saying I didn't want to dive deeper in to it (that never works, I know), I did say addiction (and thus all that goes with it) are not something that can have a parallel joined between the two. This is also why I have not tried to connect them in this way (neither has Okeydoke).
This is also why I said the parallel is among all black markets, not just drugs. The effects on all black market activities (of which I have outlined a few) all follow the same path..
It is not a coincidence that cases of the unique "service" provided on Silk Road (not the game...) went down drastically when that market was shut down. Potential buyers simply had no access to potential sellers, and so such transactions simply couldn't happen.
If there is a seller, there will be a buyer. If there is no seller, there is no buyer.
That last part is fairly basic - I'd be interested to hear how people think buyers will buy if there is no one to sell. Since sellers are the ones that need to invest money in securing product, and time in creating a network with the attempt to avoid detection, it isn't something people can just "do".
While I do understand people wanting to deal with what they perceive as the issues with gold selling (spam and people having unearned gold), I am surprised at how many people fail to see these two things as symptoms of gold seller activity, rather than as the root problem.
If you treat just these two things, you may end up with less in game spam, and gold sellers are likely to work more in the shadows. They will still work, and people that buy gold will still have coin they didn't earn, but YOU won't know about it (a collective you to people that want to go after buyers). This seems to be what people want, based on this thread - less concorned about the activity, more concerned with not being able to see it.
On the other hand, if you get rid of the sellers (make the game unprofitable for them to operate in, as I have outlined before), then you have no spam, you have no people having coin they didn't earn, and you have no sellers working in the shadows.
Someone will jump in and say that if there is a market, someone will fill it. To this I say an emphatic "probably". But, it won't be the companies that have deemed the game unprofitable, meaning it is likely going to be an amateur attempt, and Intrepid should be able to stamp that out easily enough.
But for the buyers that slip through the cracks, that were warned of the consequences and knowingly decided to cheat anyway, instant perma ban.
I missed this comment while writing out the above post, I did address it there knowing it would be bought up - I just missed that it had already been.
The buying players, although cheating the system, can be reformed if given a second chance. The sellers cannot: their whole plan is to exploit the game system in the first place.
Another way to fight the gold sellers, from a design point of view, would be to make as little game systems dependant directly on gold, or any other easily obtainable and trade good. For example, you can't pay the upkeep for your estate for a flat some of gold, it has to be paid in gathered, and refined, resources. It's not a perfect close system, but it put extra steps that ensure that actual playing player participate and profit from the system. Some mechanics, usually solved by, or used for, draining gold out of the economy can instead be locked behind tasks to be performed, you can't buy a solution with out of game money: you have to play the game. Time is the ultimate currency. If no mob drops gold directly but are part of tasks that award gold, you slow down the acquisition of gold. Maybe only citizens of a node can access the quests that pay in gold. If gold farmers need to form their own city to make any gold to sell out of game, that city can be raided by other players. It's another steps to turn the parasite into psudo-players
But the ban hammer must be heavy and fall at need too.
Playing AoC should be considered a privilege.
Ban gold sellers and buyers. It should not be all that difficult to automate an audit of a player's resources and locate suspected violators.
Blizzard has started requiring 2FA for certain things. Required that for play in this game and ban both the account and the phone the 2FA goes through.
Yes. There will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, but my assumption on the WoW forums is that it's pretty much the shills for the RMT carry groups doing the complaining.
You've worked long and hard to create a game that's NOT WoW. Please don't assume that you have to cater to the mentality of WoW players to govern behavior in it.
It's based on the fact that once a gold sale happens, much of the damage to the game is done almost immediately. And it's not easily reversible. In many cases it's near irreversible, even if both the buyer and seller are banned.
The buyer starts laundering the money, using it for legitimate trades with other players, perhaps buying an apartment or a freehold spot that another player wanted and was near buying legitimately, using it to buy gear that tips a fight in his favor he otherwise would have lost, making another player die and drop resources, any number of minor and major things. Ripple effects. Multiplied by 100 people doing it, or 1000, or 5000.
Barring some miracle, we all know gold selling is going to happen to some extent. I think you have to deter it and reduce it at all costs. If everyone knows they have one freebie, and maybe multiple if they're not caught the first time, it's just a matter of fact that more people are going to be willing to try it. They might eventually be caught, but much of the damage is permanent.
Are you bored with the forum pvp in this topic yet? Just ban the cheaters, account and IP.
Banning buyers is reactive, and only deals with that one player.
Banning sellers is proactive, and prevents others buying when they otherwise may have.
The point about catching players that would cheat in other ways is actually the only real valid argument I have seen for going after buyers - but I would think such players are asked to easily be caught via honeypot operations easily enough.
Supply and Demand....go after both sides of the equation, not just one (as those who have used comparisons to the US 'war on drugs' have already demonstrated).
Sellers have more to lose.
They often have $10k+ in stock at any point in time per server.
So, a buyer stands to lose some progress in a hobby, a seller stands to lose a small fortune - assuming they operate on multiple servers.
In my experience, what usually happens here is that these people just use a different seller.
Rather than it being "Donald bought gold and got banned, don't buy gold", it tends to be more "Donald bought gold from xyz.com, don't use xyz.com".
These people are oblivious to the fact that xyz.com and abc.com are the same company.
The other thing to take in to account - and this is quite likely in a game like Ashes - people use burner accounts to buy gold. I've known of guilds that have an account dedicated to being a middleman for anyone in the guild wanting to buy gold. They list something on the AH, the mule buys it with the bought gold, and immediately moves it to a guild bank (different guild), and then pass it back to the original guild later on.
This leaves developers in a situation where there isn't a lot they can do that has any real impact.
Buying gold is cheating, that's valid enough reason to ban someone, even without the chance they'd cheat in other ways. Unless we live in wacko world and up is down and somehow cheating is not cheating unless they're going to cheat again.
lol about leaning into it, that was funny. heh
I thought about the burner accounts that buyers may use earlier today. Haven't really sorted through all the ramifications of that in my mind yet. IP bans? I guess vpn's make that impossible? Not sure. Hardware bans? Obviously contact/transaction tracing between that burner account and whoever else. But it is kinda like, is Intrepid really going to do all of this? Like even if they said they were, could you really trust they are. And it does feel kind of hopeless in a way, all the tangled webs.
All the more reason to me to ban the hell out buyers when found and confirmed. But that's just me.
All I know is that if Intrepid doesn't have plans to put a serious dent in cheating, boy did they pick the wrong type of game to make. As soon as players realize it's nothing more than a cheating arms race, of who can cheat better and harder, who has more real life money to burn for in game advantages, game will die.
Of course this is all dependent on how important and advantageous in game gold is. We don't really know that yet. Everything I've read leads me to believe it will be pretty important, but we don't know.
I've tried to be clear about this, and have stated it outright several times in this thread.
I am not saying players that are caught buying gold shouldn't be punished. They should. I have said that several times in this thread, along with my belief that a first offense should be a two week suspension (in line with cheating in almost all professional sports - which is rediculous), and if found to be doing it a second time, a permanent ban is warranted.
But again, that isn't what I am talking about. I am talking about where Intrepid should devote its resources.
I'm sure we all agree that resources are finite.as such, Intrepid can't be every where, at all times. They need to pick and chose where to put those resources to work - where they will get the biggest return on them.
That is, without a doubt, going after sellers.No one has even out up an argument as to why this may not be the case - the only real responses have been versions of "but ban buyers too!".
If Intrepid had unlimited resources, this would be a different discussion (however, it would also be a purely theoretical discussion at that point). Since they have finite resources, the discussion is about where those resources should be spent.
I look at you realizing the issues that developers have with this, multiple accounts, how hardware bans won't work, how IP blocks won't work etc, and how I can sympathize with your feeling of how hopeless it could get.
But then you follow that up with saying that ismore of a reason to go hand on the buyers caught, and I had a literal head-desk moment.
Again, gold sellers are companies. Multi-million dollar companies.
These companies need to make a profit on each game they are active in. If developers make it so these comps is are unable to make a profit in Ashes, as I outlined in my first post in this thread, what do you think these companies will do?
Do you think they will remain active in Ashes while running at a loss?
This is the bit that takes the feeling of helplessness one gets when looking at the realities of trying to ban the buyers, and turns it in to a feeling of not just hope, but damn near expectation that a developer that actually wants to do this would be able to make it happen.
You know there is literally no actual evidence at all that a harsher penalty is a deterrent, right? Not just in gold selling, but with prison, fines, everything. There is a reason most counties that don't have privatized prisons are working on rehabilitation with shorter penalties, rather than increased penalties - this works, harsher penalties don't.
Sellers don't need more or less to work with. If they exist, they will sell every coin they get their hands on.
You can't stop that by punishing buyers.
As a logical exercise, can you explain why you would go after buyers that are in the hundreds, as opposed to sellers, where there are usually only two or three companies per game working?
I mean, you have a giant, big, easy, effective, immobile target in front of you, and you are advocating for going after the much harder agile, small, insignificant target so that... what, you can get warm fuzziness because someone got banned yet there is no appreciable effect on the sale of gold in the game?
If in your finite resources scenario, it truly was so much more taxing on Intrepid's team to ban buyers than sellers, then yeah I think a bigger focus should be on taking down sellers.(I've already said I think in general more of a focus should be on sellers anyway.) But I don't think that's necessarily going to be the case, at least not that cut and dry. Just in the process of taking down a seller, Intrepid would probably find buyers too, without exorbitant amounts of extra detective work needed.
And those buyers should be perma banned lol. Straight up, just my opinion
Your sports analogy too is an interesting discussion point. We'd probably go in circles on it and I really don't want to. But its not an exact parallel either, in my opinion, just like the drug war analogy. I think there are things to take away from both analogies, but neither are holy grails of it must be like this in online competitive mmorpgs too.
Since all the tricks sellers can use to avoid being detected are available to - and used by - buyers, it stands to reason that one buyer is as much effort to track down as one seller.
As such, since there is one seller to many hundreds (thousands) of buyers, I take this to mean that you finally agree with what I have been saying.
Even if Intrepid were to just perma-ban everyone that bought gold, literally all that would mean is every time someone bought gold, they would add $15 to the cost of it - and that $15 would just be known as "Steven's cut".
What principle is it that this is working towards again?
The way to stop it is not to "ban" gold sellers accounts. As has been said, this is an expected cost of business. The way to stop it is to ban accounts that are loaded with inventory.
Banning the account of a client-facing account that only ever has one transaction worth of product on them at a time means nothing to a seller. Banning the accounts that have tens of thousands of dollars of inventory on them? That forces a company out of a game. Even better if it were Intrepid that sold them all that inventory.
Banning buyers is doing nothing at all to the gold buyers or sellers, it is doing nothing at all to the bystanders that may buy gold one day, the only people it does anything for are the people that want punishment for punishments sake, as opposed to wanting a fix to the solution.
As an aside, in your story from a page or two ago, you got the lesser punishment, and were given the chance to rehabilitate. Perhaps reconsider your stance of not offering the same to others here. You seem grateful for it, why deny that chance for others?
I'd love nothing more than for that to be the case. If it ends up not being the case, and sellers keep coming back and making sales, then you should be perma banning buyers from the get go. If sellers cant be annihilated completely, then the only true enforcement method is against the buyers.
I got the established punishment. Diversion program is available to all first time offenders, at least in my situation as it were, in my state.
And no I don't think that's an exact parallel to cheating in a video game either.
Pose as a player wanting to sell gold to gold sellers (this is how they get hold of gold - they don't farm it themselves, generally).
Sell a small amount to them in order to identify one end of a gold sellers network.
Monitor that character to see where the gold goes. Create map of accounts used by the gold seller.
Do the above on all servers.
Sell a large amount of gold on all servers to this gold seller, and then ban all accounts as soon as it is received on all servers.
Then, you have a gold seller that has just spent tens of thousands of dollars on product, but no longer have product and no longer has a network.
It doesn't take too many of these before all gold sellers pull out of the game. You don't even need to stop them, you just need to make it unprofitable.
---
You got the established punishment - but that established punishment was the lenient option. If people that established the punishment for that had the mindset you have here, the established punishment would have been drastically different.
I do agree on your point about it not being an exact parallel to a game though, imo real life should be harsher, as the potential consequences are far more severe.
Warnings are standard practice right?
Maybe even give players a way to work off their "warrant" level.
Scratch that, it'll get abused to no end.
We definitely need some more cheating related questions asked in the live streams about how they're going to deal with it.
Real life is harsher. Having to have random drug tests, go to AA meetings once a week, and meet with a counselor once a week sucks way more than getting banned from a video game because I'm a fuckface cheater. The horror. What ever will I do? Go cheat in another video game, one that doesn't bother enforcing rules. Pity my soul.