Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Got a couple suggestions that would need testing and tweaking but...
How about, the only way to gather resources is by hiring npcs to farm them for you. The maximum number of resource gatherers you can have could be determined by things like: rank/position, skill level in craft, by gold needed to unlock the henchmen, by completing a particular quest or quest set, by starting your own business, by completing crafting milestones/achievements to unlock new henchmen - such as selling 100 swords, etc. (The whole idea behind this, is to limit the gathering potential and thus gold farming potential based on how developed the character or business is)
Once you've gotten all your henchmen, they will gather resources for you as you instruct them too around the clock. The developers can tweak gathering rates and the advantage to having a million hours versus a handful of hours will no longer exist. Everyone operates on an equal playing field as far as gathering rates go. Then it comes down to what resources you want your gatherers to focus on gathering because labor to get it is finite.
Another way they could do it, you have to hold a territory to lay claim to the resources in that territory. Only those who are citizens in said territory can farm resources there. (This emphasizes the importance on holding nodes - people have to actually play the game and defend nodes, to earn the right to farm the area. Which gold farmers don't do.)
-follow goldseller /chat spammer backwards to the actuall farmbots > permaban
-gold buyers:
First time buyer - atonement status: Ban for two weeks, all characters on that account get a BIG and good visible mark over the character and chat like "CHEATER" for one month after the ban, account has no access to action house, private trade for one month after the ban.
second time buyer - banishment status: Ban for one month, all characters on that account get a BIG and good visible mark over the character and chat like "CHEATER" for two months after the ban, account has no access to action house, private trade, dungeons, kicked from the current guild and banned to rejoin for two months after the ban.
third time buyer - purgatory: Permaban
Not sure if this is you realizing you walked yourself into a corner or not. I doubt it. But I think we've beaten this topic to a pulp. Anyone still reading is probably like yeah ban gold sellers, but ban okeydoke and noaani too.
As I said in the rest of that post, these people that sell gold to gold sellers may well try and go it alone if gold sellers decide any specific game isn't worth them operating in.
If these people do that though, they are doing it without the safety net that gold selling companies offer.
This is what I was talking about way back when I said this...
Not exactly a corner when we are going back to something I have already talked about, even if only briefly (as I said in the above post, there was no need to go in to more detail at the time).
As to your last point, if people are reading this and not interested, that is on them - not either of us.
We can go back and forth on economic principles, if there's no sellers theres no buyers, if theres no buyers theres no sellers, if you wipe out one group of sellers and there's still a market, new sellers will form. blah blah blah. At some point you just have to start banning everyone involved and change the behavior as best you can. And even if you can't get rid of it completely, you call it punishment just for the sake of punishment. Excuse me? There's also something called justice. Even if Intrepid can't get them all, most innocent and fair players would be happy to know that at least cheaters are banned, Intrepid is trying, and justice is being served.
I'm not even a 100% fan of the idea because of the side effects, it's just an idea. The bigger idea behind it is that hopefully Intrepid is designing the game in ways that do make it harder to be a gold seller, such as that idea, and others that people have said in this thread.
I don't recall saying this, can you show me where so that I can either correct myself or clarify.
The reason this isn't all that viable as a means of slowing down gold sellers is because the price of gold (and thus profit) is tied to how hard it is over all to earn. If gold is generally harder to earn, then the price is generally higher.if someone that sells gold has their account banned, it would increase the price gd sellers are willing to buy gold for, which will convince more people to sell gold that wouldn't have done so at the lower price (it is, after all, quite hard to say no to selling something you don't need for several thousand dollars when you have been out of work for a few months).
The other thing to keep in mind in regards to level vs earnings is that a good portion of the highest earning players in most MMO's make most of their money via trading, not from being a hugh level player killing things.
This is why I'd like to know where I need to either clarify or correct myself, as the speed of leveling is t really something that will have an impact on things here, imo.
In a general economic sense, if you have a buyer you will have a seller. This is 100% true.
However, this falls down when it comes to skills. If it were always true that if you have a buyer you will have a seller, there would never be skills shortages, as a job is just selling your skill to a buyer.
Yet, most of the world is suffering from some form of skills shortage. Civil engineers are in short supply, the UK has a massive shortage of truck drivers, etc.
Operating a black market is a skill. Make it so that the people with this skill don't make enough profit in Ashes ( as I have been saying), and they will not operate in Ashes.
If you don't have people with this skill running it - again as I have said - then you probably will have some other unskilled people step in and give it a go - but their lack of skill in black markets (assuming it isn't me that steps in - which is unlikely) will see hem be an easy target.
If Intrepid did manage to get rid of all of the larger gold selling companies, I actually fully agree with banning any account found participating.
Without the larger gold sellers in the game, players would no longer have the notion of buying and seeing gold in their faces all the time. As such, it shouldn't seem like a normal part of the game to anyone, and so no one has any basis for arguing against a full ban at hat point.
The basis of me saying a full ban for accounts found buying gold is based purely on the fact that gold sellers operating I a game makes gold selling in the game seem normal, and developers need to look at that as their own failing, nor the failing of players. Based on that, if they get rid of the larger gold sellers, and selling gold isn't normalized, the above obviously ceases to be true.
If gold selling isn't in your face all day, people participating in it are going out of their way to do so, and so a full ban is warranted.
Again though, only after all of the larger players have been chased from the game.
And you follow it up with what I can only summarize as it's not a good idea because it would have to target the players you don't want targeted, some kind of protected class of cheater. You literally say "hey looks like we got an idea that would work here to some extent, too bad we can't use it to help fix the problem because it targets cheaters, no not those cheaters, these other cheaters." Additionally, there ARE gold sellers that farm their own gold, so the idea works in essence either way.
There's nothing to clarify or correct really unless your cat got ahold of your keyboard and knows how to type.
Honestly, you just seem like you're trolling or that you're an actual gold seller of some sort, or intend to be. And your ideas of what's going to fix the issue, you don't know if those are going to work. No one does. It's impossible for anyone to know. Same with anyone else's ideas. But yours are half measures instead of full blown war on cheaters.
Why don't you create a multi million dollar project of your own, and then see if you want to try to fix problems with experimental half measures.
Tell you what, walk through this mental exercise with me. We both create identical multi million dollar games. Both launched at the same time, equally competent devs, everything equal for this mental exercise. Except mine has publicly declared zero tolerance full blown war on cheaters, and yours is using experimental half measures, with leniency for first time offenders, maybe even second time, I can't even tell with you, maybe even permanent leniency. My game is using all the same measures your game is using, but even more.
Which one do you think is going to be the healthier game with less cheaters? Mine may end up being far from perfect in regards to cheaters, but it is undeniable that my game will attract less cheaters and yours will attract more. Absolutely undeniable, given that the enforcement is actually enforced and not just status quo "enforcement."
There's nothing a gold seller fears more than strict and enforced penalties against their buyers. Because you have the status quo. And then you introduce a zero tolerance, aggressively enforced ban policy for cheating. Instantly, a portion of the player base is taken out of a gold sellers profit potential. Instantly, a bunch of players who otherwise may have bought say, "well I'm not risking that shit." So the pool of buyers that a seller can tap into is instantly reduced. Furthermore, because those players are gone from the pool of buyers, demand is reduced. And the prices that gold sellers can charge are reduced. All of which reduces profit potential.
Again if Intrepid has a system to detect and eliminate sellers before they sell, great. No one knows that, and no one knows if it will even work.
The crux of my whole argument in this thread is not for individual ideas or experimental ideas or economic principles or UK truck drivers, wars on drugs, weed smoking grandmas. The crux of my argument is that the time for half measures is over, especially in a competitive game like Ashes.
If this were how it was happening, a slow leveling speed would be a viable barrier - one that can be overcome, but would add to gold sellers issues in trying to operate in Ashes.
The thing is, that isn't how it works.
Gold sellers almost never level characters up at all. Since they are not leveling characters up at all, adding a slow leveling time to the game isn't going to hurt them at all.
I'll quote myself in the post you pointed out to show that this is indeed what I said - but clarification is always good.
Now, that is the post you are talking about, and if you read it in it's entirety, you can see that I am not actually saying it is a good idea. I am saying it would be a good idea IF gold sellers were generating the coin them self rather than buying it.
Now, you may ask yourself "but a slower leveling speed would stop the people that are selling gold to gold sellers, so would still work".
To this, I say that players reasons for selling gold and the situations they are in when they do so are varied.
Many players sell gold when they are done with the game. An increase in leveling is obviously not going to have an impact here.
Many players generate the bulk of their gold via trading and playing the market. An increase in leveling is obviously not going to have an impact here. In terms of people actually going out of their way to make coin to sell, this is BY FAR the most common thing for people to do.
That leaves a very small number of players left that sell additional coin they earn via playing the game, yet feel they do not need. These are the only group of people that a slower leveling speed will have an impact on.
Since the question was framed around whether or not Ashes slower leveling speed than other games will have much of an over all impact on gold selling, taking the above in to account, it should be clear that it will AT BEST have a minimal impact.
That is why in my post in reply to you I said that it would be viable IF gold sellers were the ones generating the gold (we had previously established that they were not).
You are either purposefully misrepresenting what it is I am saying, or are woefully misunderstanding it.
I have said many, many times that if Intrepid are hunting for gold sellers and come across a gold buyer in the process (or someone that sells gold to the seller), then sure, take action on their account. However, if the gold sellers are operating somewhat openly in the game, the games developer/publisher need to recognize that this player only had an opportunity to do that because that developer/publisher failed the player base and allowed the gold seller to operate somewhat freely.
This doesn't create a protected class as you say, as no one is protected.
It is the developer manning up and admitting that they are not doing a good enough job (any game in which gold sellers can operate freely, the developer/publisher is not doing a good enough job).
I have also said many times that it is not worth it for Intrepid to spend resources going after buyers directly, as that will have no lasting impact on gold selling activity in a game. Going after gold selling companies will have a lasting impact, and so this is where the resources that Intrepid set aside for fighting gold selling should be targeted. If I remember, you even agreed with this point - yet somehow still claim I am trying to create a protected class.
Stop being disingenuous.
Your solution here seems to be to treat the cause of the problem and a symptom of the problem with the same vigor. You seem to not understand that if you don't treat the underlying cause of the problem, the symptoms will not abate. If you do treat that cause, the symptoms will dissipate.
You also seem to forget that gold sellers are, first and foremost, companies. They have employees, they pay taxes. As such, every activity they participate in needs to be profitable. If you want to get rid of them, you simply make it so that it isn't profitable. As a basic premise, find a fault in that.
Now, with my idea of identify gold sellers > create map of network > sell them gold > ban all accounts, this will obviously cost them a lot of money. Not the money from the accounts, but the money from the gold you just sold them. Doing this once may not (I'd even say likely won't) cause a gold seller to leave your game. Doing it a number of times, however, would.
So, if you are unsure this tactic would work, let me know which part of it you think would cause it to not work. Do you think gold selling companies do not need to make a profit? Do you think they could still make a profit if Intrepid went hard enough with banning their accounts?
I mean, it's not like you could ever say that they could hide so that Intrepid can't find them. These companies need to have a player facing aspect to them in order to conduct basic business - no developer or publisher has any valid excuse for saying they can't find gold sellers in their game if they are operating.
As a final point - you claim there is nothing gold sellers fear more than penalties against their buyers. This is untrue - once you have bought gold, they don't care - they have their money. If your account gets banned, the most likely think for players to do (other than not coming back to the game) is to get a new account and buy more gold in order to make leveling easier.
What gold sellers fear is losing inventory.
We agree on some things, disagree on others. In the end, we'll see.
What corner am I in here?
You misunderstood something I said earlier, that is all this is. That is why I clarified.
Perhaps I should have said it was a shit idea because of reasons rather rather it would be a good idea if it weren't for reasons, but hey, that's what happens when you try to be nice - people misunderstand more readily.
But when you see an army of bots, in any number of games, New World most recently, who is that? Does it even really matter. Perhaps they aren't the "gold seller" company (but in some instances they most probably are), so that would make them "gold farmers." Yet they sell their gold to the "gold seller." This makes them gold sellers as well to me. They're all part of the same system. And that goes for "player" gold farmers too.
You seem incredibly focused on just banning the "gold seller," as in the guy running the website that facilitates everything. I'm right there with you on banning them, but everyone else should be banned too when caught. Not even sure how there is disagreement. Convinced you're trolling.
Fact of the matter is, the idea works. I can even point you to an article where a gold farmer specifically states that having to relevel his account every time its banned is one of his hurdles. It works.
You're backed in a corner again homie. But please, keep trying to explain to me how it's a "shit idea." Amusing watching you embarrass yourself. But you know what my favorite part is, making someone who goes around on this forum trying to make people look and feel stupid, feel stupid himself.
In my experience, this definition can be a few things. If it is only three or four characters, it is likely just a gamer that enjoys the challenge of multi-boxing. This is perfectly within the rules of most games, Ashes included, as there is probably no automation with such groups - even if it may appear that there is.
These people are likely spending more money on their setup than they make from it - they are doing it purely for the challenge.
If it is more than five characters, then it is likely something untoward, but probably more in relation to botting than gold selling.
It may well be a player that saw gold sellers advertising that they buy gold, and so attempt to farm it like this. Since it is a VERY popular misconception that such groups are gold farmers, it is often people's first attempt at farming gold (no surprises there).
These people often realize (after leveling and gearing a group of characters) that this isn't actually a very good way to make gold, and so many of them just give up. I would wager more of these people give up than get banned - though obviously we have no way to check this.
There are probably people that have scripted a full group to run autonomously, and if you managed to get this to work it is perhaps a good means of passive gold income for an otherwise regular player. However, you would make more money using that hardware mining crypto than farming gold and selling it, so it is not a viable means of real profit.
I'm not sure why we are talking about botting though, as it is not inherently related to gold selling or gold sellers.
You are right that I am indeed focused on dealing with the gold sellers, not their suppliers or customers.
Using the analogy of cancer (it is an analogy, none of them are perfect - they wouldn't be an analogy if they were). You do not treat the symptoms of cancer and leave the cancer itself alone. This is early a stupid thing to do, I am positive you agree.
The ONLY time you would treat the symptoms and not the cancer itself is if you are sure there is no chance of success in dealing with that cancer, so you can improve the quality of life that is left.
If there is a chance of dealing with the root of that problem, then you ignore the symptoms, and go hard against it.
As such, the very first accounts Intrepid ban in Ashes for RMT should be an attempt to pull gold sellers out of the game, root and stem. A piecemeal attack on the whole thing will never work, it will just see them operate in a more fragmented, harder to track manner - as we have seen in almost every MMO to date.
I find it fascinating how you are obsessed with an outright ban on accounts found to be involved in RMT. It's like the notion of a burner accounts just doesn't register as being a thing.
I refuse to accept that you think Intrepid would follow the coin off of an account, you are smarter than that, surely.
If that is what Intrepid decided to do, a crafty person such as myself would create an alt account (using a one time credit card, computer that has never been involved with the game and a private VPN), and use it to buy a hundred dollars worth of gold.
Then I would walk up to your stall, and buy everything you have for sale. All of a sudden, I got your account banned for only a hundred dollars because as far as Intrepid can see, you just bought gold on an alt account and then spent it on all the crap you had for sale in order to get the coin from your burner account to your main account.
I KNOW you don't think that is a good idea - giving players like myself that kind of power. Since that isn't something you want, I really just can't see how you think banning accounts is a valid tool against RMT when the only accounts you can ban are burner accounts anyway.
This is also, again, why a slow speed of leveling isnt an issue. For the most part, you aren't going to be able to identify actual play accounts of people involved in RMT without also handing players the above power.
You keep saying I am backed in to a corner. I am not - you are simply looking at a corner thinking I am there, while I am tapping you on the shoulder, trying to get you to turn around so you can see where I actually are.
I see nothing in your flailing post that effectively addresses either. And you declare yourself a ninja that is actually not cornered and is tapping me on the shoulder lol. Reminds me of my 6 year old niece showing me magic tricks. Very cute. Taadaaaaaa.
Automated bots should be banned. They absolutely are related to gold farming/selling in many cases and will be banned in Ashes whether they are gold sellers/farmers or not.
Cancer, go after the root and stem of course. Generally you want to remove all the cancer or it spreads, and no one wants cancer just left in their body. Remove all cancerous elements when found and confirmed. It's just better, like objectively.
The only really interesting or pertinent thing in your post is the scenario of people purposefully transferring bought gold to other players for the purposes of getting them flagged as a gold buyer and banned. This isn't something a gold farmer/seller would do himself, more so something one player who doesn't like another would do.
Ideally, the built in tracking system would track how and where that gold was transferred, a player stall in this instance. Ideally it would show what was bought and for how much. If everything was traded at market value, if the items that were bought match up thereabouts to the in game gold value, then the player stall owner probably wasn't engaged in gold buying. If what was sold was a worn hammer and 6 gathering herbs for 20,000 gold, then whatever GM or dev is looking into it knows that this was probably a gold buying/selling transaction.
Will Ashes have a tracking system as robust as this? This day and age, this type of game, it should. It could. It's just a log, kept for the integrity of the game. But it requires devs that want to take problems seriously instead of sweeping them underneath rugs. We'll see.
You could even have players that just randomly trade bought gold itself to other players for the purposes of getting them banned. Obviously there should be an appeal system. And unless a GM or dev knows with near certainty that a player is guilty, that player should not be banned. Zero tolerance, aggressive enforcement is only for when GM's are reasonably certain that a ban is deserved. Suspect players/accounts should be kept on a watch list and at a certain point coincidences are no longer coincidences.
And for the record again, I'm fully onboard with your ideas of going after sellers, infiltrating their networks etc. Where we differ is that I think other cheaters, when found and confirmed, should be banned as well. I'm also on board in principle with in game mechanisms, like the steep money/level curve to curtail gold selling. It's very unlikely any one solution will work, including your approach. I'm more into a multi pronged, full scale war approach. And a strong deterrent where players know, if you're found and confirmed to be cheating, you're gone. That alone, without the devs even having to inject any resources, just words, would cut cheating by an amount that is certainly worth the time it took to type the words.
When I first mentioned in this thread that gold sellers don't farm their own gold any more, I did add the word "generally" to it, because it is generally true, but speaking in absolutes is never good. As such, I never said that no gold seller has in house farming, I said that generally they do not.
Do you see why you think you have me in a corner, yet I am behind you tapping you on the shoulder now?
As to leveling, yeah, maybe you can find a gold seller that said it was an issue in the early 2000's, back when gold sellers were generally doing most of their farming in house. I wouldn't doubt for a second that this is possible. What I doubt is it's relevancy to the market today.
Anything automated should be banned, I agree 100%. This has nothing to do with gold selling though.
The thing with some cancer treatments is, if you attempt to treat the root and the symptoms, you can fail at both. You sometimes have to pick one or the other.
In regards to gold sellers, if you start banning players that buy gold off of gold sellers, you will cause those gold sellers that you are really trying to focus on to go in to hiding. Not to cease operation, just to spend more time and effort (and thus more money) on hiding what they are doing.
What you have now done is given gold buyers and sellers a foolproof cover.
If I can trade known bought gold for items on the market in order to launder that gold, then gold can be laundered at will. Maybe I have 20,000 gold worth of iron ore for sale, buy 20,000 gold on a burner account, purchase my own iron, and then that burner account loses it via the caravan system to someone I happen to know.
When you are talking about tracking transactions off an account, you either give players the ability to get each other banned, or you give players and gold sellers an easy way to avoid getting banned. There isn't a middle ground here, sadly.
The thing with buying gold - you literally never know. Perhaps I simply gave you that 20,000 gold with nothing in return because your guild agreed to protect a caravan of mine every week for the next 6 months, and that was a down payment. Or maybe I bribed you to lose a siege, or to give up a castle without a fight, or I am supporting your bid to be mayor of an economic node. These are all perfectly valid things to do, and there are no doubt more perfectly valid reasons to just outright hand over large amounts of coin to another player in this game. If the conversations around them happened in Discord or even in game voice chat, there is literally no way the developers can look at that and know what is going on.
Either they see me give you 20,000 gold and assume it is legit, or they see me give you 20,00 gold and assume it is not legit.
An appeal system also won't work, because literally everyone will appeal it. All of a sudden you now have literally all the resources you have dedicated to gold sellers tied up in a handful of players that may or may not have bought gold, trying to sort it out.
While I agree that a multi-pronged approach is the best idea, that is kind of what the notion of attacking their entire network is built on. Gold sellers will already have a harder time in this game than in others due to the node system and raw material loss in PvP. This means that attacking their network is already the third prong.
Where leveling speed and earning expectations at different levels will fall flat is that again, you aren't going to be able to ban those accounts. In the same way I can launder money off a burner account via the above methods, I can also launder it on to a burner account to sell.
This leaves the level aspect of it as being fairly unimpactful. As such, since it is something that will overtly affect literally every player in the game, it is better to set this to what you actually want it to be for players to best enjoy the game, rather than artificially altering it for some misconceived notion of harming gold sellers.
Doesn't mean its the right idea for Ashes. But in essence, gold farming would only be effective in end level areas with higher level mobs, making it to where when a farmer/sellers account is banned, they have to level a new one all the way back up to effectively farm gold again. Furthermore, they would be competing against other players, as that's where the bulk of a game's players end up, in end level areas. They can't just go to some mid level area that players don't go to anymore. They would be more easily reportable, killable, and they'd spend more time looking for uncontested farming spots. The idea is 100% viable.
Aside from that, whether or not a gold farmer is in house and on the payroll of the company just really doesn't matter. They are still part of the organization and system. They can be looked at as free agents, independent contractors, whatever. They still supply the gold and they get PAID by the gold seller. The point is it doesn't matter. If you slow down gold farmers, you slow down gold selling. The idea works. Again, doesn't mean it's the best idea or the right idea for Ashes, but to just declare it non viable is wrong and is the corner you put yourself in. No, I don't feel a tap on my shoulder, not in the slightest.
The rest of your post is just a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. I'm not talking about banning players that get caught up in shenanigans through no fault of their own or from other's ill will. All I'm talking about is when Intrepid finds a cheater, whether buyer, seller, or farmer, that they reasonably know is guilty, they should be banned.
Anything that pushes buyers/sellers/farmers more underground, into hiding is GOOD and makes gold selling less profitable. If buyers and sellers have to deal with all kinds of gimicky ways to launder money like exploiting the caravan system that is good. The more hoops a buyer/seller has to go through, the less buyers will be interested, the less gold selling will happen.
Many games have an appeal process for bans, it's normal.
In regards to the last 2 paragraphs, yes you can ban those accounts with proper tracking, tracking who they give their money to, which burner accounts, following the web, ignoring the likely innocent players, it can be untangled with proper tracking. It's not perfect, and sellers/farmers will find ways to launder like the caravan system maybe. But even that is not perfect for them, it's extra steps, extra time, a certain amount of resources are lost into the void when a caravan is destroyed. Other players have a chance to see suspicious looking caravan battles and report, other players have a chance to be the one attacking that caravan, fucking the whole thing up for the seller. You put these people on their hind legs, make it as difficult as possible, and the game will be better for it.
You assume that there's just going be this epidemic of players spending hundreds of dollars trying to get others banned. This day and age, it'll certainly happen some. But Intrepid doesn't have to ban players unless it knows for sure. And I don't think it will be at epidemic levels.
You know what is at epidemic levels? Gold selling.
Even if gold sellers did generate gold themselves still on some sort of scale, an increase to level still won't have an impact, because you still won't find their farming characters. And don't go saying it is the people farming in bot groups, that is beneath you - such groups wouldn't account for even 5% of the gold a gold seller would go through (gold selling is, as you say, an epidemic right now) which again, is why they no longer generate it themselves, generally. Those groups should be looked in to and potentially banned for botting, but nothing else should be assumed about them.
The absolute worst thing an increase in leveling speed would have on gold sellers is that the few gold sellers that may generate gold themselves, divided by the few of them that use he most inefficient method possible (bot groups) may have to either come up with a better method. Since that better method is something all gold sellers are already doing, this isn't much of a stretch, or much of an issue to them.
If this were something that could be done insolation, with no negative consequences at all for the rest of the playerbase, I would honestly say go for it. There would be no reaso not to if that were the case.
However, that is not the case, and in the post where you first suggested it, you even outright stated as much.
So, I don't believe it would have any impact at all on gold sellers, but if it did, the impact would be minimal and not worth the negative impact to the game as a whole.
Also, I don't think there would be an epidemic of players wiring to spend money to get other accounts banned, I just think someone doing this one time is one time too many.
If it is a tool available to me, I have no issue at all in waiting for a guild to spend months preparing a siege against my node or castle, to then have their guild leader (or PvP lead - or both) banned as soon as a declaration is made.
That would ruin the game faster and more thoroughly than gold sellers could. How many cases of this are you willing to accept?
It's funny, you say that gold selling is an epidemic in the MMO industy, yet are here arguing for Intrepid to fight it in the same ways as those games in which it is an epidemic.
Clearly, what other games are doing and have done is not working - yet you keep arguing that it is what Intrepid should do. If you thought for a second that what other games are and have been doing is not working and so a change to that is needed, you would have stopped arguing on page 3 or 4 - rather than argue for Intrepid to do the same for that time.
Along with building their game with mechanisms to fight and slow gold selling inherently. Someone asked a question along the lines of what other aspects of Ashes might be helpful to slow gold selling. I answered with a few different things, and then I mentioned "the idea." I didn't come into the thread with the idea, I wasn't trying to sell it as the best solution ever. It was an answer to a question. It is viable, no matter what you say, no matter how many gold selling companies you talk to for some reason.
It is an idea that can provoke thought. Even though the idea itself may not be right for Ashes, it can be tweaked in ways where maybe its more right. Such as making the curve not as aggressive. Where it makes level 0-20 areas non viable for gold farming but beyond that the curve remains normal. Can't even begin to tell you how many bots I saw farming in very low level zones in WoW classic.
Or the principle behind it can be used to think of other better ideas. You called it non viable outright, and you're just wrong. Objectively wrong. It could have the worst side effects imaginable, but farmers farm gold and the idea would make it harder for them, therefore its viable for the purposes that were being discussed.
Eventually you infiltrate a network, you find the burner accounts both active and inactive, trace the transactions, trace where the flows of money were coming from farmer accounts, ban the farmer accounts and now those farmers have to relevel new accounts. In a slow leveling speed game like Ashes, that hurts. No it may not catch the more exotic ways they have of laundering money, but it at least forces them to use those more exotic ways, which increases the chance that players notice it happening and report.
Your scenario of players using burner accounts to get other players banned is so niche. Definitely worth taking into consideration and putting thought into. But very niche. It would require one player to have enough animus towards another to do it, that's probably not hard to find. But they have to be willing to spend money to get it done. They have to be willing to do that knowing it may not work. They have to be willing to spend money trying to get someone else banned, when it's actually them who might be banned if it goes south and is traced back to them in any kind of way. They need to use a vpn for the burner account, a different payment method, hardware identifier hiders potentially. And when it's detected by whatever tracking system, this idiot player's burner account will show up as having made only this transaction, unless this guy goes around doing this to other people, which is even more money he has to spend. In other words, it won't show up with strong ties to a gold selling network because it's not in a gold selling network, other than receiving the gold. It's some idiot trying to get someone else banned. Situations like that would have to be dealt with case by case. I'm not an advocate of willy nilly banning accounts when you're not sure.
It's a problematic issue, but by no means grounds to just stop enforcement against all the accounts with strong ties to actual gold seller networks, 99%+ of which is not some guy trying to get another guy banned. You're grasping at straws man. I acknowledge it as an issue, but I mean come on lol.
We saw it in New World where people would mass report enemy leaders and get them banned for sieges. The animus is there no doubt. But this requires so much more personal investment, time and risk. Your player stall example wouldn't even really work. It'd have to be an unsolicited trade that the victim accepts, which yes would look exactly like a basic gold buying/selling transaction. But Intrepid shouldn't ban accounts unless they're reasonably confident. Many players will get away with gold selling/buying. You ban the ones that don't.
Noaani and I are going back and forth so hard we're kinda ignoring anyone else. Yeah that's a somewhat viable way to put a damper on RMT. It wouldn't stop the RMT, but there'd be less reason to buy gold if you cant use it to buy end game gear. It's been ruled out though by the devs, which is good, the lesser of evils. Most gear in game will not be bind on pickup, it will be freely tradeable by players because the vision of the game is to have a vibrant, player driven economy, with near everything tradeable.
This wont work because the world is build around the economy and the importance of materials and crafting.
A lot of games put a lot of resources in to it - they just use those resources in the wrong place.
Blizzard - for all their many failings - put a shitload of resources in to it. More than Intrepid ever could. Probably more resources per player than Intrepid could. They have never made even a dent in gold sellers profitability.
The tools you talk about are things I expect.
Back in 2009, EQ2 released 60TB of server logs for the game to researchers.
While I never got my hands on the whole thing, I did get a hold of a few TB (I had to build a storage server just for it - which considering it was just plain text, makes it a LOT of data).
Using just ACT, you could use those logs to look up ever transaction a player has had - via the market, trading with other players, or even with NPC's. Someone smarter than myself would not doubt be able to use what developers had on hand 12 years ago to build a complete picture of all economic activity for any account they wish.
This is, having that data and those tools, and having the staff to actually look over the results - that is something completely different.
I have absolutely zero doubt that Intrepid would be able to select any account in the game, and look at every economic this any character on that account has ever done, and filter those results in any number of ways.
That still isn't going to tell them if that account that got created, was handed 20,000 gold and then used that to buy stuff you had up for sale was from you or from me.
I'm actually quite curious as to how you think it works. Do you think developers just flag large one sided transactions and then investigate? Do you think they wait for players to report gold sellers? Do you think they just follow bot groups?
Do you honestly think any of the above are an efficient use of resources?
The fact that you are saying you are not a fan of banning accounts unless the developer is sure is a good thing - but then you have to assume that there will always be players that can do enough to make it so the developers can never be sure.
Literally the only thing developers can be sure of are that if they buy gold, the account that hands it to them is a gold seller for that company, if they sell gold the account that receives it from them is a buyer for that company, and every account in between those two is likely a part of the network.
It is probably also true that any account that receives gold from that network is a player buying gold, but as discussed, it is easy to make that account a burner account, making developers unsure of anything past that one account.
Once again, this is why going after gold sellers network is a viable strategy (you have a chance of getting the whole thing), and going after players is not (you are likely to have more than half the accounts you ban be burner accounts).
Also, buying items off a players stall would work - if the player has enough value up for sale. If we are talking about a guild leader, there is a good chance they will be selling things on behalf of the guild.
Sure, you can't just pick a player at random and assume you are able to get their account banned in this manner, but you would be able to do this with most top end players - top end players do, after all, have access to the gear that is the reason many people buy gold in the first place. 99% of accounts that have strong ties to gold sellers are wither gold sellers, or burner accounts.
People straight up don't use their actu account to buy gold. Well, 99% of people don't.
Essentially, banning accounts in this manner is little more than a tax on stupidity. Now, I am all for that, but only to get rid of some stupidity. It wont have an effect on gold sellers, nor on 99% of gold buyers.
Let's imagine a player has a top end item up for sale, a one of a kind, really highly enchanted. It is listed for far too much, but it is the best item in the game, and has been for sale for months. This happened I Archeage, by the way.
Now let's say a burner account buys gold, buys the item and hands it to another player.
Was that this player buying gold to get the item, or the seller finally getting gold for the item they have been wanting to sell for months, and then just handing it off to a random passer by. Maybe it was me, just causing general chaos because why not.
Who gets banned? The account that bought the gold is obvious - it is the burner account. But there is no clear way of determining who the person behind that account is.
It isn't grasping at straws at all, and I honestly can't understand why you are still pulling this line.
It would require one player to have enough animus towards another to do it, that's probably not hard to find. But they have to be willing to spend money to get it done. They have to be willing to do that knowing it may not work. They have to be willing to spend money trying to get someone else banned, when it's actually them who might be banned if it goes south and is traced back to them in any kind of way. They need to use a vpn for the burner account, a different payment method, hardware identifier hiders potentially.
The person that does this has to be willing to take the chance that ultimately what happens is they buy their enemy gold and it's not detected or actioned on by Intrepid. There's a chance they spend their own money trying to get someone banned and all they end up doing is giving them free gold.
Are there people with nerd rage strong enough to do it anyway? I'm sure there are. But the field of candidates of who would actually do this really begins to narrow down. And the vast, vast majority of people don't have hundreds and thousands of dollars to just keep doing something with no guarantee. It has to be the most mega of mega nerds who are so blinded by rage they're willing to risk their own real life money in what ultimately might just end up as a gift to their enemy.
For these extremely isolated incidents sprinkled into an ocean of actual illegal gold buying, if a person raises it as a defense that he was scammed in this way, confiscate the money that was given to him. If he no longer has the money, track where it went, see what can be done, but ultimately put his gold balance into the negative at the appropriate amount. No ban here because its unclear. Just confiscate the money and give a warning to not accept random money from random people because the consequences get more severe and someone is actively trying to get you banned, and eventually coincidences are no longer coincidences.
Make any mail system to where people have to add others on to a mail eligible list before they can receive mail from them, or at least mail with attachments.
Player stalls, same deal. If issues arise where a player stall is being used to try to get people banned, confiscate and warn. Tell them to stop listing worn farmer hats for 100,000 gold and Dragon's Breath Lava Forged Great Swords for 1 gold. Whatever it takes. Warning and confiscation when bans are not appropriate because it's unclear what exactly has happened.
At the end of the day, we definitely disagree on some things, but I'm not sure what we're disagreeing about on some of the basics. Bans against buyers should only happen when Intrepid is reasonably confident. And no your less than 1 percent scenario is not grounds to just stop enforcement altogether. There are ways to deal with it and mitigate it. People who raise that defense get a freebie, the gold confiscated, rightly so. And after that, if it keeps happening, if they keep accepting random gold when they KNOW(supposedly) that someone is trying to get them banned because they actively raised it as a defense, it no longer flies.
All of that is just one theater in the war against cheaters. They should spend just as much if not more time going after the farmers and sellers. A lot of the buyers will be revealed just by happenstance while going after the farmers and sellers. Whatever happens, whenever someone is truly caught, buyer/farmer/seller, ban them. Not sure how that's controversial.
Is that about what you are saying?
Longterm it leads to a higher population when it's known the game is successfully permabanning them all. That attracts people for sure.
There are issues with this, fairly serious issues.
Let's say you are running for mayor of an economic node, and are asking for donations to that end. If a character you have not met trades some coin to you, you would think nothing of it.
Now, if I create an account (using a single use card, a computer that has nit accessed the game and a VPN), buy some fold and trade into you, that would appear to Intrepid as if you had bought gold (the use of a burner account like this is common).
Even if you are not running for mayor, there are other situations where being handed large amounts of coin are just what happens. It could be real estate, a bribe, guild or node politics, protection money, all sorts.
If someone is being egregious and openly purchasing gold, I agree, a permanent ban is the way to go. Problem is, that egregiousness is rare - more rare than people that would be willing to spend some coin trying to get a rival guild leaders account banned.