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
Where do you draw the line?
Stop trying to bring in alternative situations irrelevant to what this topic is about.
Let me spell it for you: people buying ingame gold with real life money.
Not exactly, but kind of. It depends on their tracking systems and how they work. But just right off the top of my head a couple of tracking methods would be Intrepid buying gold themselves and tracing the accounts starting with the account that sold them the gold. And then investigation of a farmer account that they have either observed or has been reported and tracing that account's transactions. But they could have other ways of tracking.
When they start tracing the accounts through whatever means, they shouldn't just "happen" to spot the buyers. The buyers will be readily visible as they start the process of tracking a seller's or farmer's account. Those buyer accounts get banned. If they raise the "I got set up defense" then they can do what I said in my previous post.
Edit: lol george
Yes, they do.
So, instead of going after the tens of thousands ofnpeople that do this, and expending resources on each and every one of them in an effort to not have an excessive amount of false positives, lets instead go after the less than half a dozen companies selling gold.
Then, once they have been chased from the game, let's reassess.
Players can't buy gold if no one is selling gold.
If experienced gold sellers aren't able to be financially viable in Ashes, they won't sell gold there.
Intrepid can make it so gold sellers can not make a profit in Ashes, but only if they are the target.
Punishment never 100% works as a deterrent. Saying you just want to punish gold buyers is saying you are accepting of gold sellers operating in Ashes, and anyone smart enough to not get caught is allowed to buy gold at will.
That is what you are saying.
I am saying I don't want gold selling in Ashes, and that Intrepids primary focus should be on reducing it from happening, rather than punishing when it does happen.
If you want to say that punishment will stop it happening, feel free to point to an example of this.
And yes, once more you pretend that none of us has said "ban the sellers". We have said that. You are the only one writting paragraphs as to how it will be done, as if IS would just ban the account used for /zone "I sell gold".
And yet you keep going on about going ez on gold buyers "because if there isnt anywhere to buy from, nobody will buy".
This problem will never be solved, as long as AoC is a GREAT MMO THAT PEOPLE WANT TO PLAY.
The moderation will be ongoing.
Ban the buyers. Ban the sellers.
You dream if you think that the GMs will "dismantle the selling companies" and that buyers wont be able to buy anymore.
Ban the buyers. Ban the sellers.
Now plz... stop creating weird scenarios such as donations to mayors or draw inrl crime parallels.
I cant believe people engage you and reply to you. I cant believe I do.
So here it is, one last time and I am out of here:
We need active GMs on every server to constantly deal with gold selling.
Ban buyers so that we dont have to feel cheated.
Ban sellers so that the buyers cant buy.
Allocate serious resources on this.
It will be an ongoing task.
End of story.
I am fighting the fight. It's not hard when you are on the side of right, and common sense. There are not ENOUGH people in this thread yelling at the top of their lungs that we will not tolerate cheating in a competitive game like this.
Thats a completely fair point. Maybe take a look into chat logs to see if a deal is being made? Although I could see that being an invasion of privacy. Or have it where its a system to Donate to that persons bid kind of like a campaign sponsor
It isn't irrelevant at all.
If Intrepid do not I itially make the effort to hunt out gold sellers, how do you expect them to find gold buyers?
Literally the only other way is to tag large transfers of wealth. This means every valid transfer of wealth needs to be able to be shown to be valid, or there is a risk of it being assumed to be gold buying/selling.
This is what most other games do - tag every transfer of wealth over a certain amount, and then investigate starting from the top, and just getting as many done as they can each week.
Since most games don't have people dedicated to this, they just use CS when they have the time, the number that are actually in to is often very low.
This is how those people that we all know are buying gold , but never get banned get away with it. They wait until there is an issue that will take up all of CS's time happens, and then they buy as much gold that week as they can (using burner accounts) knowing that CS are not likely going to get the time to investigate any that week.
You say you want GM's on every server - to do what exactly? As in, what is their function, and how do they perform it?
You'll no doubt say that they are there to ban gold sellers - how are they going to find them?
You're just doing your usual bit about being all enraged at things, shouting about what you think is a solution, but being completely blind in that enraged shouting to the nuance of actual reality. This is 100% on brand for you.
Cool, you want to ban buyers and sellers. How do you find them and not get innocent people mixed in with that?
I have a solution - do you?
Nah, you haven't.
Since the problem is that there are many, many valid ways a transfer of wealth happens in Ashes and these players should not face a penalty for just playing the game, you've not actually presented a solution that is viable.
It should be perfectly valid for me to be able to give you a large sum of gold on the agreement that you will wear a specific cosmetic that you own for a set period of time. I would never do that (well,, depending on the cosmetic, I guess). I should be able to pay you too attack another players caravan, I should be able to pay you to join or not join a siege, I should be able to pay you to lose a military node mayoral arena, I should be able to pay a mayor to make a specific decision.
The point isn't about the scenario, you should stop focusing on that. This game is built on the idea that political intrigue is a core aspect of the social game. Bribery is a core part of that intrigue. As such, there will be literally countless viable reasons for players to want to transfer wealth between each other.
To any person looking at a transfer of wealth, a bribe in game looks exactly the same as a player buying gold. Looking through logs and such is not a valid way to detect if this is happening, because if I were planning on giving or taking a bribe, I would make the arraignments in a way where there are no logs of it
A solution to the problem need to account for all viable transfers of wealth, and I have not yet seen one that would not require literal hours of a persons time to investigate - likely limiting the number of investigations a week to less than a half dozen, and most of which would not result in action being taken.
I assume you're talking about the being targeted with illegal gold to get you banned scenario.
You can do all those things you listed. What you shouldn't be doing is repeatedly falling for getting paid by burner accounts that you have no idea who they are, no idea why they're bribing you or paying you for some bullshit like wearing a costume, and no idea how they're level 3 but paying you 50,000 gold. When the illegal gold gets traced back to you and you use the defense that you're being set up with stolen gold, you already understand what's going on because you used that defense. The GM warning you and letting you know you're being targeted and to stop accepting money from random burner accounts is just icing on the cake.
The money should always be confiscated. Anything tangible that was exchanged by the player should be returned to the player, but the money deleted even if it sends the player into a negative gold balance if he's already spent some of it. If you got bribed to do something, and you do it, but then the gold is taken from you because it was illegitimate, that sucks. But next time you're not going to take a bribe from a level 3 named Toby who refuses to tell you who he actually is. The ban should be at the GM's discretion. Anyone worth bribing in the game is probably an affluent player that would demand the person bribing him to get on his real character, tell him who he is and why he's bribing him. Anything less would be weird. A legit player is not going to keep falling for the same shit. At some point this is no longer coincidence and the player should be banned.
You're talking about a ridiculously rare scenario. The problem essentially solves itself. The money is always confiscated. So if the guy is actually buying gold he's not getting what he wants and is wasting his real life money. If the GM shows up and the player is like "AWW BRUH, THEY GOT ME WITH THE ILL GIVE YOU 50K IF YOU WEAR THIS OUTFIT TRICK AGAIN MISTER GM I PROMISE," that's fucking bullshit. Get the hell out of here. With the fact that a player that this is used against is not going to be banned the first time, that means the person doing this to him has to do it AGAIN. He has to create and sub another account, use a different payment method, potentially use a completely different computer, buy more gold, and go through the whole process again of getting this guy who's now fully aware of what's going on, to accept his gold from a low level burner account named MrNiceGuy that he's never seen before in his life. And the guy doing this doesn't know for sure that even this time is going to get the guy he's targeting banned. He doesn't know for sure if he can even trick the guy again to accept the money after what happened the first time. But he has to pay for the new account and gold up front.
Barely anyone is even going to be targeted with this scheme. Such a ridiculously small amount of players compared to total player base.
We don't know how easy it will be to do things in a way where there will be no logs of it. The caravan system maybe, maybe other things. But we don't know. The caravan system might not be viable depending on how they do it. But there will probably be ways. Either way, that's where we want them. We want them to have to use exotic strategies to launder money, especially ones with risks of failure like caravans. Anything that makes it harder to sell gold and gives players more chances to potentially observe and report.
Imagine you work for Intrepid. Your job is to find and ban people that buy gold - because Steven isn't always the smartest.
You are given a list each week of the top 10 largest exchanges of wealth in the game, and your job is to investigate to determine if they are legit or not (honestly, you won't get through 10 a week).
So, you have the full transaction list of the whole game, you have in game text based chat logs, but nothing else.
How can you tell if me handing another player 20,000 gold was legit or not?
I am smart enough to conduct all discussions about this in voice chat outside of the game, and I am clearly going to use an alt to transfer the money. I don't trust that player, they may well take screenshots of the whole thing so I don't want it to be able to be traced back to me at all.
So, that player spent weeks talking to me in Discord about taking a bribe, and when we decided on it, I said that money was coming from an alt - because of course it is.
Lets assume I just made a temporary alt to trade the coin with this player (though this entire thing does give me an in to trade contaminated coin - but we aren't going there with this). So, you can see that the transaction was between me and this person, but that is the only transaction - or indeed interaction - that you can see between me and this player.
You need to determine if there was a reason for this transaction, or if I sold that gold to him.
So, what do you do?
Maybe you ran around in circles enough? Maybe you can explain how old you are, how many hours you play and why you got to the impression that "Baning" Sellers and Buyers is a good thing. Why is it, that you think you are loosing (because you are whining so much that this is my impression), because someone wants to buy a mount and does not have the time to spend so many hours in a game? Why is it, that you think you are loosing, because someone buys an epic Weapon in the game? Why is it, that Pay to Win, as you call it, is a bad thing? As long as you can reach everything and more through gaming, I do not see a problem at all.
If not everything in the game is buyable, but everything is craftable with special Materials you can get from somewhere and it is bound to you (e.g. an Epic Drop from a DungeonBoss, that you can break into parts and use for somthing that can be crafted for you, like a Weapon or Armor as you like and need it? Noone could buy that, no matter how much gold they have.
And yes, Gold selling and buying should be restricted in some way, so that it does not get out of hand. But rather have an open, controlled Market than an uncontrolled Black market.
Are you genuinely not aware of how gold sellers and buyers ruin the game, or are you just trying to justify it to yourself and others?
Almost nothing is bound in Ashes, so I don't know where you are going with that whole thing about bound materials and not being able to buy epic gear. And asking why pay to win is bad? Really?
Allowing gold buying and selling affects the game in several ways, but the three big ones are hyper-inflation and rampant exploiting by people who don't give a shit about the well-being of the game, only about making money, and finally a reputation for being extremely unfriendly to new players and rampant cheating in the game.
You say it should be restricted in some way... how? By allowing a few and only banning half the people doing it? Holding "Buy and Sell Gold Weekends" where everything is allowed, and then not on weekdays?
This gold selling issue has already been mostly solved in another game...Black Desert Online
In BDO, all player trading is disabled. You can't trade items, weapons, armor, jewelry or gold from one player to another - the only way sellable items can be transferred is through the in-game auction house. This auction house also has price floors & ceilings, to further discourage any RMT trading (IE: buy my trash shield for 3 million & I'll Paypal you $100)
This no-trade system is extremely harsh, but there are almost no gold sellers in BDO. There's no chat spam, there are no farming bots - these people don't even bother, because the game will not allow them to transfer what they have (including duped items!)
No system is perfect, but this is the best one I've seen yet. Everything on your character is earned by you exclusively...either by farming the item, or grinding enough gold to buy the item off the auction house.
Please consider & thank you for reading
So, they have essentially disabled half the games economy, for no actual gain.
All you can do, from my current point of view, is track the sellers and farmers accounts to see where the gold goes. If it's coming from one of those tracked accounts it's very likely the gold is illegitimate. You wouldn't know that with 100% certainty because there could be instances such as the one you raised of a player using a burner account buying gold and handing it off to another to try to get them banned. Or probably an even rarer instance where a gold seller is just giving away his stock for free for some reason.
So no, nothing's 100%. But it's very likely 99%+. When it's caught the GM deletes the gold, rights the wrong in the best way he can and enforces whatever ban policy Intrepid chooses. A lot of players, especially ones that aren't in the KNOW, just regular random buyers are going to be like fuck, I got caught. And that's that. More savvy cheaters who read reddit or something might raise the "set up" defense, and of course in the extremely, ridiculously isolated incidents where the set up actually happened, those players will raise that as a defense too.
And Intrepid would have to deal with that on a case by case basis, of how often they're going to let someone raise that defense. The vast majority of players will not have issues where they just can't help themselves but to somehow keep receiving money from gold seller accounts. Unless they're doing it on purpose.
In L2 gold was switching hands between friends and players all the time. "Got 3kk? I Need to buy those gloves for the set." /trade
Beautiful gameplay with real interractions between people.
1) So many ppl got banned for buying gold. So many sellers dissapeared for...? getting banned. The developers know how to get things done. Not even once did I woke up to find myself, friends or guildies banned by mistake.
2) I reject the BDO model. It limits player interraction forcing all players on parallel paths that never meet as if playing....? a solo game.
The developers CAN enforce the rules without ruining MMOs by removing systems due to fears of cheating, as long as they keep commiting human resources on the task, instead of doing voice acting, creating cinematics and other non mmo essential features.
Ban the buyers. Ban the sellers. Ongoing battle. Happy community. Except for ppl with unrealistic demands or people totaly disconnected with the concept of mmo (spoiled by all the story mode/instanced challenges) types like wow eso ff14.
I wouldnt play your game if this was your enforcement just like I am not going to play another mmo game that ruins the social aspect of mmos with:
No gold /trade
Daily currencies for npc vendors
Bind on pick up/equip item nature
I first logged in on July 2015 and even though I HATE pvp only - pve only maps, I loved Cyrodiil. Cyrodiil was PLAYABLE back then.
Beautiful fights. Beautiful classes. Beautiful builds. But then what happened?
Cheaters appeared and everybody was QQing. Whose fault was it? ZOS. Zos was at fault for not building proper UI and gameplay designs because they said "fvck that, the Skyrim moders will do our work, and relaxed the access to their code for all to tinker with.
Then they put in place a bunch of crap to combat cheaters. Cyrodiil has been unplayable ever since. Low ping, disconnects, rubber banding, unlimited loading screens, skills not working and HP/MP being depleted who knows why..
And guess what? Since you couldnt play they decided to change combat model. Even today they throw everything they have no sets that deal dmg for free. All you have to do is press a button that meets the conditions of the set and there, your target gets damaged without you actually trying.
For everybody runs around with massive amounts of health and use left click in the general direction of their target waiting for their gear to shoot a magic missile with big dmg.
I trust that the priorities will be to protect the gameplay designs, instead of being afterthoughts.
That is then point I am making. Trading coin between players is in itself not rare. Doing so with no in game clues as to what the trade is about is also not rare - even if each specific situation is very rare.
As to how you suggested the situation could be dealt with, the first thing to point out is that you are assuming Intrepid will know which accounts are gold sellers. The only way to know that for sure is to buy gold off them. You can look at transaction logs all day long, but there is no other way to know.
It may be tempting to say something like "you can assume an account with multiple transfers of wealth off of it to be a gold seller", and this is technically true. Thing is, this means you are letting everyone go if the gold seller only uses each account 2 or three times (add $5 to your order for additional safety measures, but hurry, it is a limited offer!)
At the end of the day, until you have successfully identified a gold sellers account, you can't assume any transfer of wealth is RMT. As soon as you have positively identified an account t as being a gold seller, you then either send your resources after buyers, needing to spend hours on each in order to get to an actual account (and may still not get one), or you send those same resources the other way, and hunt the gold seller (who will never trade inventory to an account they do not control - making the assumption that all accounts upstream until you hit a purchase transaction are the gold selling company).
This is why I don't get the arguments against it. Arguing against my points of going after gold sellers rather than buyers means you need to do one of the following;
Assume Interpid have infinite resources (or at least more to spend on this than any other game ever has),
Put more importance on dealing with buyers than sellers,
Assume Intrepid can look at a transaction and know it was RMT without knowing if either account is a gold seller, or if any money changed hands.
Since I don't think any of the above, I see no real reason why they wouldnt put all of their resources in to hunting the seller and their entire network - assuming have identified an RMT transaction with 100% certainty.
Now, they have a buyer there, and as I have said before they should take action on that account if it is dropped in their lap. I've never said they shouldn't if they know there was an RMT transaction taking place. However, in order to know that, they have to know there was a seller, which is a far more valuable target to go after.
There is never a time when they would have a buyer without having a seller, and going after the seller is always more valuable.
So, why spend hours chasing after a single account, when those same resources would be able to uncover an entire network?
That right there is my point.
We all agree that going after sellers is the best option - but it seems people have either not realized or completely ignored the fact that you can't identify a buyer without also identifying a gold seller. As such, since you identify both at the same time, and since we all (mostly all) agree that we live in the real world where resources are finite, I don't see how there is any argument at all with going after the seller first.
It would be such a monumental moment for mmo's. The games would be so much better, especially for people who love the economic side of mmo's. There's no other genre of video game where there even is an economic side of the game. Mmo's are all we have. So if someone had an idea that removed gold selling and made the economic side of mmo's, and just the whole game itself a more authentic, cheat free experience...I can't think of much better.
If the game ends up being like WoW classic where my friend ordered some gold on a website and within minutes it was mailed to him, something's gone wrong. It was just like that, I asked him about it yesterday again just to confirm after all this discussion in this thread. No ban, no warning, no confiscation, nothing. He never got contacted about it. He didn't even have any hesitation doing it. I don't know what research he did beforehand, probably not much knowing him. But I remember the night he told he was doing it and a little while later he was like ok got my gold. He of course is not the only one.
I just don't see the sellers being wiped out so easily. I see it more like George that it's going to be an ongoing battle, gold sales will be made, and cheaters should be banned when found to be in violation of the TOS. At a bare minimum the gold should be confiscated and deleted from the game. It's illegitimate and is only making the game harder for everyone else who plays fairly. But the cheater really should be banned just out of principle, and to create deterrence for other would be cheaters. Which it would. Just because it doesn't deter all doesn't mean it doesn't deter some. When buying gold is a 40, 50, 60, 70 percent chance of having your account banned, it's going to be reduced a lot. People are going to be like holy shit these people are serious fuck this. Some will at least. Screw the rest.
I know you have your scenarios of well the sellers will just use fresh burner accounts to protect their customers. Good. Anything that makes it harder and more expensive to buy and sell gold, because again, barring some miracle I don't think it's just going to be wiped out. Whatever is left standing after whatever plan is implemented, needs to make it as hard and expensive and RISKY as possible for the buyers, farmers, and sellers. Even if Intrepid has very few resources to track down every single buyer, the THREAT should at least be there that if we catch you you're banned. And when they catch you you should be banned lol wtf.
Buyers should not be given a free pass just because Intrepid devotes all resources to playing a never ending game of wack a mole with gold sellers who just keep coming back because they're making money. And I think that's the way it would turn out unless someone has that incredible plan that just repeatedly wipes sellers out before they're able to make any meaningful amount of sales. I could be wrong. Maybe they do have that plan. Whatever Intrepid does I hope it works.
I don't want to see anyone banned. I would love if there's a system that's so good it makes it impossible to cheat, saving cheaters from themselves, sounds amazing. I just don't see that being the case.
I haven't even gotten to anything specifically in your post and my post is already a book. Typical. So just real quick, I don't agree that there are dozens or hundreds of valid situations where a gold seller account is making transactions with innocent characters. We've already talked about this. I just don't agree. If some idiot is that dumb that he's constantly interacting with gold seller accounts and not realizing it, and he has a valid sounding reason for that, he can be warned and educated to stop being so dumb.
I'm not assuming Intrepid will know which accounts are gold sellers by default. I never have. Not sure why you're saying that. I know they'd have to infiltrate the network by buying gold themselves, or potentially by tracing the dots from a reported and confirmed farmer account. I've said all this before in this thread.
I don't agree that it takes hours to confirm a buyer account when it's linked to a known gold sellers account through a transaction of currency. I know there's very rare situations that could happen where the guy didn't actually buy gold, but it's nearly guaranteed he bought gold. Isolated incidents would have to be dealt with case by case.
I feel like I'm just repeating myself, things I said 8 posts ago. That's all for now.
I do agree that more focus should be put on sellers, and certainly if it's truly bearing fruit ramp it up, go all out. But you still ban cheaters.