Gold Sellers & Bots kill games - what's the plan?

Caww

I think the subscription model will help tone-down the bots that gold sellers use. I bring up the topic after having a horrific experience the last several months elsewhere (NW) trying to out run bots to harvest and block gold seller spam in chat. I'm hoping this community will help stress that some kind of solid system to really reduce this behavior is important.

I know it is early times but it seems that coding and processing needs to be part of the whole development thing and not an after-thought with no way to address the issue once the problem starts. This is no different than any other grey market problem and is always against the TOS but still, if someone could figure out how to really tamp this down then the game would be so much better for the effort and the in-game market place really mean something.

Anyone know if comments have been made by AoC staff over the last several years? Thanks

CROW3

Yeah - the gold seller meta-conomy is silly these days. Here’s a blurb from the wiki:

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Security_systems

bloodprophet

One of the other things that will help out is Node chat vs world chat. There are no plans for world chat or trade like in other games. So you can't stand in one city and spam everyone.
Hopefully live devs will help as well.

https://ashesofcreation.wiki/In_game_chat

George_Black

Active, involved GMs. Strong bans.
I hope for solid IT team.

Talents

While GMs help stop the basic bots spamming gold websites, I hope Intrepid still invest in systems that can accurately track large quantities of gold being traded. Most the "hardcore" players don't use the shady websites posted in game chat, but rather use the same websites that sell gold for hundreds of other games, and in my experience games rarely ban those players unless they buy absurd amounts of gold.

CROW3

Eliminate the abstraction of a currency and implement a bartering only economy. 🤪

No watchdogs needed.

Atama

CROW3 wrote: »

Eliminate the abstraction of a currency and implement a bartering only economy. 🤪

No watchdogs needed.

No such thing. Something always ends up being currency. Look at Path of Exile; there is literally no such thing as money in that game. Everything is barter. When you make transactions with NPCs, you are trading things like potions, scrolls, and gear back and forth.

Yet it is still currency. If 4 healing potions are worth one identification scroll (hypothetical, I'm not going to go look up actual PoE values) then that's now the same as 4 quarters equaling a dollar.

I realize your post was a jest, but I wanted to point out that not only it is possible, but it has been done. And yet, RMT (real money transactions) are still a thing in PoE. People will farm "orbs" (which are items used to upgrade gear that end up being the de facto currency traded between players) and sell them for real money.

I'd post links to web sites that will sell you PoE currency for money, but I don't want to promote such sites even to criticize them. Just do this link:

https://www.google.com/search?q=path+of+exile+gold+sellers

You'll see plenty of web sites where they offer to sell you currency, even though the game has no actual gold in it.

CROW3

Yep. It would be extremely hard to implement a bartering system with NPCs, because the concept of value would be deterministic instead of dynamic.

Even though I’m messing around, I think there are still other ways to creatively ‘disarm’ gold-sellers as opposed to making the fences higher ( so to speak).

tautau

Don't have a universal server-wide currency. Instead, have each node issue its own currency, perhaps upon achieving level three. All nodes which are vassals of that node would also use the same currency. Then, if and when that node is sieged and defeated, the currency becomes valueless and literally disappears from the server, and from everyone's possession, poof!

- So, the gold sellers' inventory also goes poof, gone!
- Talk about a motivation to defend your node, right? If the node perishes, so do your liquid savings.
- Talk about a reason to destroy an enemy guild's node, make them all paupers overnight.
- This is consistent with 'real life'. For example, when the Confederacy or Imperial Tsarist Russia collapsed, their currency became valueless.
- The server economy would become quite interesting, some players would become money-changers and some items (potions, mounts, weapons and armor) would be used in standard trade. This would be similar to trade in pre-European North America.

But to answer Crow3's question, if there were some ways to devalue to gold-seller's inventory and stay consistent with the game, either using this idea or a cleverer one, that might keep them from spending real money to buy game currency that might go 'poof'.

Atama

tautau wrote: »

Don't have a universal server-wide currency. Instead, have each node issue its own currency, perhaps upon achieving level three. All nodes which are vassals of that node would also use the same currency. Then, if and when that node is sieged and defeated, the currency becomes valueless and literally disappears from the server, and from everyone's possession, poof!

Resources are universal. If currency doesn't cross between nodes, people will trade wood, stone, ore, leather, herbs, etc. Those will always be valuable. There was also a generic energy thing that pretty much all enemies dropped in Alpha 1 which was used in most crafting recipes and came in different tiers. I don't know if that will continue to be a thing later on or if it was a placeholder. But that would certainly be a kind of currency. There's really no way to avoid it.

Now, the game also will have hunting certificates which are only valuable in a particular region, and will more-or-less do what you say. I'm not 100% sure that they will lose their value when a node delevels, but since NPCs appear and disappear when nodes advance and these are turned into NPCs I expect that it will be the case.

Dolyem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PbdyJ_ybSI

Boanergese

The game will have a crafting system. Gold is not the only resource in the game. You can player kill, so just hunt down the bots and kill them. They aren't going to seek revenge. Having no free or trial accounts will cut down some of the spam. Intrepid could also go after the websites and try to have them shut down. I am sure the developers will do their best. Additionally, the markets are regional and not universal. So, the gold sellers would have to go to multiple cities. This isn't going to be like World of Warcraft where all the player base is in whatever city is the player hub of that expansion.