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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Comments
https://massivelyop.com/2017/06/01/ashes-of-creation-hires-five-new-team-members-shows-off-snowy-environments/
That company doesn't appear to be in business anymore. Their founders and ceo have all moved on to different companies and Panopticon no longer has a website or twitter. Looks like they went out of business some time in 2018.
Did Intrepid get or learn what they needed from them? Or was it all scrapped?
Most of the footnotes reference articles or interviews that are pretty old, 3-4 years. The GM related and enforcement related comments are more recent, like a year ago, in an interview with Jahlon.
In this other livestream
While this is a point of interest, I don't personally believe it has an impact on the discussion.
Since all that companies products will do for Intrepid is provide visualization for the data they collect, it is still a case of having to throw staff at it in order to get anything done.
Essentially, it is a more advanced version of what I did using ACT on the portion of the EQ2 server logs from 2009 that I had a copy of. I'm not saying it won't help, it just isn't some magic bullet or anything.
Like 89% of all statistics on the internet, the numbers in the OP are completely made up and pulled out of his rear.
The company that was bought by Altair was Panopticon Software, founded in Sweden. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon_Software
I can't find anything about what happened to Panopticon Labs. They were solely focused on the gaming industry and cheat/fraud prevention in it. I hope they got bought out by someone and didn't just go out of business.
You may well be right there.
When I originally heard Intrepid were using Panopticon, I made the assumption that it was the one I was already familiar with - that did have some products that I could see potentially fulfilling the role they were looking to fill (tools that are overkill for that role, to be fair).
However, it would seem it is likely they were instead talking about Panopticon Labs.
I can't say I am saddened by that company closing down. One stop shops for security are rarely good, long term. I would much rather Intrepid either build or buy the tools needed and do it all themselves.
With one stop shops like that, if it is discovered how to get around it in one game they operate in, it will work on all games they operate in.
If a gold selling company operates in one of their games and works out how to avoid detection, that is basically an invitation to sell gold in every game they operate in.
2- There is a way to prevent gold sellers and other similar mechanics but I'm not sure if it fits AoC's design.
Essentially Intrepid would have to control the market prices and how trades work with or without making currency account bound.
The other option would be to make currency have weight by either having a maximum personal carry while having markets linked to your bank.
Something very interesting about having control of the market with a set in stone price range for the item is guilds could have their own price for their members at their own guild bank which could provide money for the guild through its members purchasing directly with a not for resale system on it.
This would also prevent those market sales where people sell things for 1,000,000 gold to hide a gold selling or laundering mechanic.
Just a few of idea's before I get carried away on this.
These ideas don't work at all.
If currency has weight to the point it discourages gold sellers, it will also discourage regular trading. If this happens, players will come up with an item that has an intrinsic value that can be used to trade or barter with in lieu of coin.
The only way to get rid of gold sellers by changes to the game is to not have trading at all in your game. No player to player trades, no market or auction system, nothing. As long as there is the ability for players to buy and sell from each other, to give to each other or even to drop items on the ground for others to pick up, gold selling gold will exist - unless you specifically attack gold selling
Basically, attempting to alter your game to get rid of gold sellers will see them leave your game due to no o e playing it because it is a shit game before they will leave due to not being able to operate.
I guess if you want to, you could call gold sellers leaving your game because no one is playing it a win.
it's why I said I was not sure if it fits AoC's design.
You could still have trading between players if currency was account bound, you just wouldn't be able to give currency in a player to player trade larger than your personal carry. Node trades via market would be linked to your bank/stash.
The weight of the currency could also be a physical thing as transporting goods such as currency would also need to be caravans. This way you do not run around with excessive amounts.
Going off the calculated market prices for the items and discounted via guild store ( at guild hall/freehold ) specifically for the guild members, it creates a dynamic playstyle for the games design. There is no stupid mail system that just e-mails items to each player, it's relatively done at the market and through caravans so there is lots of risk still involved with markets outside of your node.
I would rather normal markets with freedom but let's face it, there is a risk for gold sellers in AOC to make it an indirect P2W. It could happen at any stage in the game from early years to later when tolerance is more loose.
Idea's
What effect would this have on gold sellers though?
Keep in mind, gold sellers still operate in games that literay don't have player to player trading. Limiting it like this would annoy players, yet not even slow gold sellers down.
I'm not here to solve all the details, it's a general idea for the community and intrepid to build off based on the original post. Better than letting gold sellers and bots ruin the game like most MMORPG'S.
If they're not allowed to hand off large amounts of currency directly to players, it deters gold sellers. It makes tracking that kind of mechanic relatively easier as well if they try to mule it on several characters to the same client/account.
I don't really want to bother wasting my time repeating the previous posts in detail but controlling the market and trading mechanics is how you deter/prevent gold sellers and bots from ruining the game. Having currency easily transferred and laundered just supports gold sellers and bots.
I'm not sure ruining the game before gold sellers can ruin it foe you is a viable strategy. Especially if what you are doing to ruin the game wouldn't have an impact on gold sellers.
I'm obviously all for doing what can be done to get rid of gold sellers - but there is no point in doing something in an attempt to get rid of them, if that thing isn't going to even have a minimal impact on them.
Putting gate on how much coin can be transferred between players will not have any impact at all on gold sellers. Since most transactions for people buying gold are less than top end transactions (raid level gear, real estate etc), this will piss players off well before it would impact gold sellers.
I mean, even if a large transaction was desired all, all a gold seller and buyer need to do to get around this is to make multiple trades, or to trade something with a high intrinsic value, but low weight.
Your point about controlling the market and trading mechanics being the way to combat gold sellers is demonstrably incorrect. As I said earlier, you need look no further than BDO for proof of this.
The game has no player to player trading at all. Not limited trading as you are suggesting - there is literally no mechanic to trade between two players.
Yet gold selling still exists.
Coming up with ideas is great. The thing with that is - not all ideas work. This idea doesn't work, so let's either refine it so it does work, or try and come up with a new idea that does.
When, where & why?
I've bought gold (~20 USD worth of it) in ... *cough* a popular game when I started fresh on an established server without transferring existing characters (to play with a different group of friends), just to jumpstart things coz:
- It's not a new game experience that I felt like I needed to preserve, but rather a process to grind through, so I didn't care about ruining it (by cheating).
- At the time it's extremely inefficient and time consuming to grind up a basic livable fortune from start.
- The ban hammer was not extremely strict.
I've bought gold ($10 or $20ish?) in Uncharted Waters Online (international ver.), to jumpstart my character coz:
- I've played FAIRLY for years on the Japanese server, but forced to quit due to a blanket IP ban intended to combat RMT (they basically banned all foreign IPs).
- Some years later I started playing on international for a short while (coz nostalgic), but inflation was already rampant. Gold's dirt cheap in terms of RM, and it takes forever to make $10 worth of gold as a new character.
I've bought gold LEGALLY (in-game gem store) in GW2, to get my character up to speed when I resumed after a long break, and to spare myself from long & tedious grinds necessary for attaining ascended gears.
I've bought gold LEGALLY (RM -> plex -> gold) in Eve Online to use as seed-capital when I started in-game trading. Eventually as I got in-game rich I started doing the reverse (gold -> plex -> subscription time).
In all cases, my motivation boils down to trading real money for time, and pay-for-convenience.
You cheating bastard!
ppl cheat for all kinds of reasons, and a shit ton of ppl will cheat when given the opportunity. They just don't tell you. (from The Honest Truth about Dishonesty)
What would've deterred me?
- An absolutely strict & high-profile ban hammer starting from day 1. The risk/consequences need to be heavy, known, well advertised.
Then in the first game's case I wouldn't have started fresh on other servers, and in UWO I would've quitted the instant I noticed the insane inflation. But hey, I wouldn't have bought gold!
- An alternative. In GW2 & Eve's case, developer regulated gold selling. Btw both games are still well & alive.
How did I receive my in game gold after I bought it?
*cough* the popular game - Multiple unfair trades. Once they had me sell them 5 bandages for 200g each on the auction house in order to transfer 1000g. Although that's years ago already and their devs ought to have implemented ways to detect this by now?
UWO - Direct trade. Apparently ban hammer was non-existent
Know / heard of any other RMT methods that might be relevant to Ashes?
Heard that in Eve Online, in order to avoid detection (coz apparently all trades are logged & analyzed), RMT would transfer value in the form of pvp loot:
e.g. Seller trades in game gold for multiple plex (or other high value items), load into cargohold, undock, warp to prior-agreed location. Buyer then kills seller (on death, 50% of cargohold item drops, the rest destroyed), loots the wreckage, return to station, sell the 50% loot for in-game gold.
Given that Eve Online record ALL kills, and the records are visible to public, this may sound stupid. But the problem is new players actually do this all the time (undock with unnecessarily expensive cargo -> die -> lose everything), so it's not easy to tell whether a stupid kill is RMT or newbie-mistake.
But if 50% of players are buying gold, you cant just ban ...
That's true if you started loose and then suddenly tighten your policy.
If you enforce it strictly starting from day one, the only players you have are the ones who (willingly or forced to) play fair. And any players who join the game do so knowing that they have to play fair.
But if rules are only enforced half-heartedly, ppl will notice, and cheating will spread like wildfire before you know it. (broken windows theory)
Report! Reporrrtttt!
It's likely useless. The spamming accounts never have any traceable link with the selling / farming / holding accounts, and players who do get to see the SELLING accounts are the buyers. And for obvious reasons buyers never report. Well I mean unless you're willing to sacrifice an acc to be that undercover agent to report ONE selling account.
IMO, in MMORPG environments, where reward scales with time-spent-in-game, there'll always be players who're willing to trade RM for time. And Intrepid has to deal with this seriously, as RMT gold sellers DO ruin a game's economy. The methods I recommend are:
1. Strict enforcement starting from day one. Perma-ban for both buyers & sellers, and make the bans high-profile. Again the consequences need to be heavy, well known, well advertised.
It's a given that developers should be able to log all players' value transactions (and other activities) in game, and with modern computing power, data analysis tools & techniques, it shouldn't be that difficult to detect unfair trades which signal RMT (the exceptions, real "gift to a friend" usually comes with other clues, e.g. chat log, time spent in guild/party together etc. Meh in the worst case just flag it and have a GM investigate before banning).
2. Sell your own gold if 1 fails (e.g. GW2's gem which can be traded for cosmetics or gold, Eve's plex which can be traded for play-time or gold). I'm sure many will say that they hate this, but I'm not sure how much an impact will this have on the actual player base. The only example I can offer is Eve Online, which is also a sandbox open-pvp mmo that's alive & well despite having a publisher-goldshop.
A lot of what you are saying here are things I have argued in this thread.
Perhaps the main points I'd like people to take away from this are;
1, that people have reasons to buy gold that they cannjustify to themself (similar to how I have justified my intended use of a combat tracker- it may be against Intrepids rules, but it is not against my rules, and inplace my rules as being more important for me to follow than someone elses rules).
And 2, that gold sellers will find a way.
The method of buying over-priced items on the AH has fallen out of fashion. People that clIm this still happens only think so because they knew it happened years ago, and so assume it is what is happening with all overpriced items up for sale.
Direct trading is the method of choice in games with little to no enforcement, but mailing is also popular in some games.
PvP looting is a method I have assumed for a while would happen, but I was unaware it was already used in EVE.
With Ashes caravan system, large.amounts of wealth will be able to be transferred to other players fairly easily, regardless of any systems Intrepud put in place to try and prevent it.
The assumption that this would be viable (now confirmed, thank you) is a large part of my reasoning that the only way to stop gold sellers in any game is to make the activity unprofitable.
I have offered up a method in this thread that I think will work, which I am sure isn't the only way to go about things. What I am sure about though, is that the o ky way to get rid of gold sellers from a game is to make them leave, by making them operate at a loss in said game.
I have never seen anything at all that has even suggested anything else stands a chance of working.
It actually does have some impact through deterrence if done correctly. If your argument is it will piss off players... boohoo... oh no, people complaining because the game doesn't cater to their specific needs? what a travesty... better rally the like-minded troops and protest... lol
In regards to the refining? that's the point of bringing it up in this thread in relation to the original post, not reading a useless response with information we're both already aware of, lol. The whole point of the allowance range for personal carry and price points would be relative to each other with the fixed price points. It's something intrepid would have to design and work out. I'm definitely more in favour of items having a numerical value for weight in relation to encumbrances but that's just another thing they're not doing in this game. Proper design allows and encourages specific methods to encourage on another for deterrence to work. If the gold sellers and botters have their usual methods of farming gold, it doesn't fix anything.