Defeating gold sellers, how will we do it?
*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.
