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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
RMT has started - where’s the action?
kerrai
Member, Alpha Two
RMT has already started in the alpha. There are a number of players on Vyra alone who are there to farm and sell gold, mostly by taking advantage of static gathering respawns. If you check the major RMT services from other games you’ll see Ashes listed there.
It’s insane to me that MMO communities are so fundamentally broken that we’re here already. Obviously it’s alpha so who cares, but at the same time it’d be nice to see Intrepid sit up and take immediate notice and be heavyhanded about this. Your game population will never be smaller, so it should hopefully be easy to track this down and ban for it. If you don’t establish a strict code of conduct early it’s just going to get worse and quickly.
It’s insane to me that MMO communities are so fundamentally broken that we’re here already. Obviously it’s alpha so who cares, but at the same time it’d be nice to see Intrepid sit up and take immediate notice and be heavyhanded about this. Your game population will never be smaller, so it should hopefully be easy to track this down and ban for it. If you don’t establish a strict code of conduct early it’s just going to get worse and quickly.
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Comments
How will you test your RMT detection stuff if you make too much effort to completely prevent RMT?
And why would you actually do the banning part in the Alpha phase, particularly this Alpha phase, without being really sure of the targets?
Give the Anti-Cheat staff some time.
"For what...?"
"Just about everything, really."
I respect this take. However, I think there’s actually something more important at stake here than perfecting RMT detection, and that’s changing the culture and making the community mindful of how Intrepid will run things. As we saw with exploiting, Intrepid took a soft approach. That resulted in rot. More exploiting, more griefing. Guilds on Vyra are still using the Fishing and Lumberjacking declarations to grief. No punishment handed out.
If RMT is handled the same way, it will flourish. So yeah, work on RMT detection, but you have to also be swift and take decisive action so that the community learns. It’s a careful balance for sure but if either side of it is neglected it’ll be bad for the game.
Ignoring the problem won't make it go away. Calling it out brings attention to the problem and he didn't name names or list sites. I think he did it right here.
stupid comments like this make important discussions lose their relevancy, why the fuck you just listed all the large guilds you know even from different servers and made a fucking baseless claim that they are involved in RMT? the fuck dude just stick to facts you actually know of if you care about the issue
But yes action against RMT needs to start Now, asap before this becomes a bigger issue, I'm waiting to see what intrepid stance will be on this
2. Its an alpha, they're still building the detection methods and analytics.
3. Static spawns are a placeholder system.
They're working on it. Banning RMTers is kind of irrelevant rn. And on top of that they can already start gathering a lot of info on these transactions.
What people NNED to understand - and only about 3 posters on these forums currently seem to - is that Intrepid are not after the same outcomes now as they would be when the game is live.
If Intrepud see behaviour that would be considered exploiting, or if they see RMT behavior, their first thought isn't and should not be "how do I stop this".
Rather, their first thought, last thought and every thought in between should be done only with the live game in mind. They should be looming st that RMT (and exploiting) and working out how they can best use this opportunity to make the live game the beet it can be.
With the would-be exploit, the key was to not ban the players that are finding the more obscure exploits. You want them testing the game now, because every exploit they find is one less exploit in the live game. Sure, some people may not vet that, may he passed off that they are still in the game and may leave the test or what ever - but at the end of the day that is swapping g one productive alpha tester for someone that is trying to play the game as opposed to testing it.
Same with RMT. Doing anything about it now is pointless - as pointless as buying from a third party website during an alpha phase that will have wipes. rather, the ONLY thing Intrepid should be doing is working out how they can use this opportunity to reduce RMT once the game goes live.
If a few people get upset that there is stuff for sale during this alpha test and leave, that is a price worth paying if Intrepid are able to lower the amount of RMT in the live game.
but back on topic if iwas the devs i would let it go for a little bit and just track the gold purchases and after a little bit ban hammer them all and posts names/guild associated with it as future deterrent.
Why?
Is there an issue with buying gold on a test server in order to facilitate testing something that requires gold?
I'm not supporting gold buying/selling, but banning the buyers even on a live server has literally never worked. Not even once - it exists as a tool to appease players, not deal with RMT. Why start doing that on a test server where there is no economy of any kind of importance?
What they should be doing is looking at the networks that sellers are using, as they are already likely similar to what they would attempt to use when the game is live. They should be looking at how those sellers came about the gold and items they are selling. This is because in order to deal with RMT, you don't focus on the buyers, you focus exclusively on the sellers and make selling cost them more than they could reasonably hope to make.
to deal with RMT you go after the buyers people are less likely to risk accounts they poored hours into getting a perma ban for RMT, gold sellers dont typical put real hours into farming gold they have bots do it for them and along as they sell enough to make a profit they keep doing it. Take away the buyers the sellers run out of people to sell too and when it not profitable they just move to the next game.
this is also why u post offenders publicly aswell people dont like being placed on a shame wall so it also acts as a deterent especially when u add guild tags to it aswell
Not once.
Also, gold sellers do not run bots. Gold sellers buy thr gold off of others who may or may not be running bots. If you go to your favourste gold sellers website, you should be able to find a link there to sell to them.
This is why you go after gold sellers rather than buyers. If they spend $100 on some gold that they expect to sell for $300 (or buy $100,000 worth that they expect to sell for $300,000), and the developer yeets that gold from them leaving them both out of pocket and with nothing to sell, it doesn't take too long before they leave the game and focus on more profitable ones.
That is why even in thus thread you have people accusing guilds of being involved in RMT. Thise guilds aren't running the website, they are (allegedly) farming gold via general gameplay and selling it to those websites, whom are then marking it up and selling it to the population. That is straight up how the whole industry functions.
By far the weakest link in that is the gold seller after they have purchased the product. It isn't really even close.
Leave that 5-10% that you know are RMT un-banned to confuse them. Because you definitely missed some RMT accounts in the ban wave, and you don't want to tip them off to exactly which types of RMT activities you aren't catching.
But in the end, stopping the sellers by themselves is a lost cause. If there is money to be made, someone will try to make it. If you dry up the supply of gold by deleting RMT gold, then it just becomes more expensive....and therefore more profitable. Because there are DEFINITELY people that will spend a ridiculous amount of $$ for gold/items/advantage.
But by banning the buyers and striking fear into future buyers, you can shrink the population of prospective buyers. And that in turn reduces the economic impact to non-buyers. IE, less inflation and less RMT-sold undercutting crafting mats. It also reduces the number of RMT channels you have to track, making it easier to identify buyers. IE, if 1000g/day is sold by RMT to 100 different players, that's a lot to track. But if 500g/day is sold to 20 players, that's less impact overall, and it's easier to track.
I'm not saying you *shouldn't* ban buyers, I am saying that you ban them for cheating, knowing full well that it will have no impact on anyone else, and also knowing full well that the account you are banning is probably a burner account that exists to get banned.
They don't do "burner accounts", they buy gold on their main/only account to avoid grinding cash to buy enchants/etc, so they can get geared up for endgame faster.
There is more of this than you might think, people heading to G2G and spending a modest amount of $$ for convenience or avoidance of drudgery
See, it now depends on which games you are talking about.
Some developers are aware that their game inherently sucks and people want to buy their way past the dull parts in order to play the enjoyable parts, and they are ok with this happening.
In these games, the correct answer for what to do in regards to RMT is to only target the biggest offenders, and ignore the minnows. These games are in a position where they can't take action at all on the gold seller, because they have become an essential part of the game, so taking action on the largest gold buyers and making a big song and dance about it is all they can do.
That is the issue with trying to take what other games do in to account here. Different games and developers have different levels of tolerance for third party RMT. Intrepids stated stance is zero tolerance (iirc), and so the games your friends are playing may well not be the best examples to pull from - the way you are talking about it absolutely makes me think they are playing a game with a more-than-zero tolerance to third party RMT.
That is why I try and talk about what the RMT industry does. That is fairly consistent across all games. If Intrepid want to stop that, they target the gold sellers. If they target the buyers, those buyers will switch to burner accounts. Your friends may not have done that, but only because they didn't need to do that. If they played Ashes and wanted to buy gold, they would need burner accounts, and they would use burner accounts (at $15 a transaction, that is dirt cheap).
Someone on these forums once asked me why the gold sellers wouldn't use burner accounts, and if that makes buyers hard to catch why wouldn't it work with sellers. The thing is, they do, and it does. However, if you are trying to follow the gold buyers, you have thousands of people to track per server (in Ashes, probably ten thousand+ per server), each with potentially multiple burner accounts. Where as if you track the gold sellers, you have perhaps two or three dozen people and their function specific (bank, buyer, sales etc) and burner accounts to track across all servers combined.
Which one do you think would be easier?
Conspiracy theory warning:
But what if they made the testing environment so grind to "encourage" people to go to a gold buying site to test the game. And Ashes is selling the gold to generate some under the table cash for hookers and blow? ... maybe I should apply for a job there lol.
I first looked up the RMT late phase 1. I'm not surprised at all. It will never go away because as you said the the MMO communities are broken. There's big money in selling gold, it's a professional business. With the game being so competitive people will be getting every advantage they can, RMT is just a Pay to Win method. If it was a PvE game I think the game could still be successful with it if it was RMT as usual. But being a competivite PvP game most players will leave after they lose weeks worth of grinding to even just suspected RMT attackers. If I was a betting man I'd bet the RMT is going to win, but my crystal ball don't work, if it did I'd have won the lotto and started making my own dream mmo lol. So I hope RMT loses.
I disagree and so does Steven. RMT is relevant during testing for the same reason that exploiting and breaking the economy during the alpha is (which Steven has already addressed) - because it invalidates the feedback and data they receive during the test which helps inform their design and balance decisions and even focus of work.
You think this doesn't happen in some live games?
It is more common for it to be individual employees than the company as a whole, but yeah, it happens more than you would want to think.
Steven is often incorrect - and this is just one more case where that is the case.
Saying that people cheating or exploiting in the game invalidates data is akin to saying Steven expects no cheats or exploits in the live game.
If Steven were either smart or experienced as opposed to just having money (that is the only thing he has going for him), then he would realize that the data available from cheating, exploiting and third party RMT is invaluable. If many people are expoititing to avoid the same aspects of the game, the problem isn't that the cheat or exploit exists, it is that this part of the game is shit and needs to be made better.
On the other hand, if you have people cheating/exploiting to avoid a variety of different parts of the game, then things are looking much better. This scenario is what a developer should be aiming for.
This would be the best case scenario for gold sellers.
I do not agree. The only way to get a game without or with low amounts of RMT is player fear. That drives down demand. I think you look at RMT buyers as a monolith of people with infinite money and infinite desire to relevel, but those people are the rare minority.
How so? I'd assume the effect of a hardline against RMT would discourage buyers and make sellers have to work a lot harder. Won't stop it, but would drive it underground.