The success of this game will hinge on the player experience

WumpusAmungus

Long-time listener, first-time caller. Been following AoC's development since December 2020, but this is my first time posting on these forums.

In the last Development update, Steven said something that I was overjoyed to hear regarding real money transactions (RMT) and bots:

• “In games that I’ve played where the company or publisher does not enforce rules, it becomes the standard that you buy gold. If you want to be competitive. If you want to compete at the top tier levels in certain games and everyone’s buying gold, you almost have to buy the gold or you’re just not going to be able to compete with those people. And that’s a really shitty feeling to have.”
• “In order for that not to be the case, it is the responsibility of the publisher or the developer (both) to make sure we have stringent practices from a customer service perspective to enforce our rules, and to make sure players are aware if they partake in this, there is a huge risk in doing so. It’s not going to be a slap on the hand. It’s not going to be we told you once, we told you twice, we told you three, four, five six times... ok we’re just taking some gold away, thank kind of thing. We have got to ensure that it is feared to do those things because you know that Ashes has active GMs, it has active customer service, it has an active community team.”
• “From an enforcement, from a policy perspective, we need to be Johnny on the spot when it comes to botting or RMTing. Because the sanctity of player achievement within the game when valuing risk versus reward, those things have to accompany it or else it’s meaningless.”

Having active GMs is an absolute must in this game to ensure the player experience is unhindered due to bots or people buying gold to give them an unfair advantage. Reports of abuse must be acted on quickly, and as Steven said, it must be severe. Buy gold? Insta-ban. Simple as that.

There should be behind-the-scenes abilities for GMs and/or developers hard-coded into the game which allows them to follow the money to get to the root of an RMT network. Where did this person get the gold? Where did the person they got the gold from get it? Devs can't play whack-a-mole and just ban the end recipient. They must attack anyone and everyone involved in this (unless unwittingly) and make it very public that they took such action. Do X and you get Y.

CROW3

Welcome, Wumpus! Agreed on the active (and assertive) GMs.

Savic

yep a very active and responsive gm force is extremely good for game integrity on many levels. The RMT can be such a big issue that i hope they have good tools for checking on stuff like that too.

I have many friends who are women and they usually end up playing guy characters just to not get weird messages from guys all the time just from the games we have played over the years (let alone why these guys dont think its other guys who knows lol). As opposed to ffxiv, for example, since there is a known active gm force, with an assortment of anti harassment policies, they do feel more comfortable to say who they are and dont hide everything as much.

Asgerr

Breaking! This just in: a game will be good if it's good!

All joking aside, yeah the need for moderation from the dev team to prevent unwanted social player behaviour is paramount.