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Alpha Two testing is currently taking place five days each week. More information about Phase II and Phase III 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.
Idea to combat RMT.
Phoenix77
Member
As the title suggests I came up with an idea to combat rmt as an extra layer on top of what intrepid already has in place.I think if they state that they openly sell gold etc. at unofficial websites but the moment you buy from them you instantly get perma banned people will think twice before buying anything because they won’t know if it’s legit or a trap.what do you guys think?
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Comments
Then they should also block any transactions from cards with banned accounts.
None of this will "Solve" the issue, but it wont hurt.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
A wall of shame won't work at all, because most gold buying and selling is done on burner accounts - let alone burner charaters.
Often times, those burner accounts are paid for with single use cards and spoofed MAC and IP addresses. Blocking single use details is literally not going to do anything.
At best, the actions you are talking about here will have an impact on the dull end of RMT - the casual player wanting to keep up with their friends.
The problem with the suggestion is how easily someone like myself could weaponize it.
There is only a single signal of an RMT situation that a developer can detect - a one sided trade. However, there are many reasons these trades could happen (giving friends or guild mates gear or money to buy gear, swapping wealth between accounts owned by one player, trading gold for information or actions in game - the list is really quite long).
These situations can all be manufactured by players - if Intrepid were going to take action based on in game activity, I can make it look like your account has taken part in that activity and get you banned.
So, Intrepid have no real way of knowing who is involved in RMT, and if they try to ban accounts anyway, players can weaponize that.
As to the OP's suggestion, the big issue is that websites sell gold for many games, not just one. Players that are going to buy gold in Ashes are likely already buying gold in other games, and will stick with the same website when Ashes goes live.
If Intrepid say they have set up a websire to sell gold and will ban anyone that buys off them, all you need to do is make sure any website you buy gold from has been around for a while, or sells gold in other games.
Actual footage of Noaani wreaking havoc just because he can.
It's in the details that your logic breaks apart. If the only serious measure you were to employ was tracing trades, yes, it would produce too many false positives to be viable and sustainable without backlash.
But in all these threads you consistently severely misrepresent how much effort is required to generate enough value to be worth trading and make it worth investing labour into - even if that labour costs a hundredth of your hourly salary.
It's not that easy to make an account produce enough value to effectively create tradeable commodities, and each new account gold sellers have to level up makes their operation less tenable.
If it is too easy to farm gold on fresh accounts, you make it less easy. And no, that doesn't have to mean tons of roadblocks in the player economy, just enough to make re-creating farming accounts unsustainable.
Not to mention you can also just trace the transactions of those new accounts more carefully.
If you keep tracing suspicious trades back to the gold farmers, banning farming accounts, and perhaps identifying and banning a few major gold mule accounts that weren't able to sell off their earnings fast enough, the RMT "business" bleeds money *and* can't meet the clientele's demand, eventually making fewer people bother to seek RMT sites and push them to just focus on real relationships with players to get what they want instead. A few resilient stragglers might always remain, but you just keep following them enough to make them inconsequential to the economy and too unreliable for the average "customers".
As opposed to what? Hidden mafia conglomerates of "guild members" hired by guilds for money?
(That would, in my book, be closer to an intercontinental sugar daddy relationship than RMT, especially if it's more for the benefit of entire guilds than any individual self-enrichment. At that point the "gold farmers" are just equivalent to soulless players and their guild leaders happen to wield unethical power over them. That's more of an abusive friendship than a business relationship. If the guild leader isn't making a real-money profit, I consider it a life wasted, not an economy balance issue. And if they are making a profit, the trades must inherently be unequal enough to be measurable again. Not to mention that, if they're making a profit on top of paying their sugar baby farmers, that would have to mean they'd be charging their guild members hundreds of dollars each, every month. How would Intrepid not end up hearing about this from some spiteful guild member within weeks?)
So what clandestine elite RMT customer base did you have in mind?
We all know that RMT is ultimately tolerated to exist in mainstream games (that would have the funds to stop it) because the companies running them prefer keeping the account revenue (Yes, some accounts are paid with fake money, doesn't matter at scale - and don't forget any confirmed buyers' accounts they get to quietly allow to continue playing!)
Who are you denying this for? Are you a gold seller, gold buyer, or are you really just that desperate to shill for corporations and rationalise the status quo to feel better about nothing being done against it?
The big question is, can we make integrity marketable enough to be worth it for Intrepid...
Integrid?....Intrepidy or Intreprity? Intregrity? (Intrepidy actually rolls off the tongue.)
Also, can we talk about Ashes's population caps? There isn't any room for farm accounts on Ashes server realms. Players would lose interest in droves if it became common knowledge that the reason they can never join their favourite streamer's full realm is because every time an account gets banned, a farmer fills that slot again.
There's a lot more player retention in keeping the game free of farmers than in games with less limited server populations.
There's additional incentive at every corner for Intrepid to keep their servers clean of corruption.
I agree with your assessment of the OP's suggestion though...Either a lot of effort for little pay-off, or unlikely to get anyone to bite. Luckily, I've offered the real solution again. =P
Intrepid has a small department that uses pre-made accounts to "buy" gold from gold seller websites and then ban the seller once the transaction is complete. It could be in small amounts of $ so it's not the most costly and if it's done enough and as efficiently as possible then it will reduce the incentive for gold sellers if there's no way for them to know if they're selling to a real player or getting the honeypot.
I imagine there are some flaws in this so feedback is encouraged.
However, the more you talk about it, the less likely it is to be implmented.
The most effective tool developers have against RMT of obfuscation. That is why I pick holes in others suggestions that have obvious holes, but do not offer my own up.
That, and the fact that I have been asked to not talk about the idea I had over half a decade ago by someone working at Intrepid.
Edit to add; Ashes server caps are a non-factor here. Every game has population caps, and Ashes are far higher than any MMORPG other than EVE.
You are also correct that RMT is tolerated in many games, but not just due to the account revenue they make. The cost of banning accounts is astronomically high in and of itself. Most companies do a cost/benefit assesment and determine that since so few players leave a game due to RMT if there is no in game spam (this is what most developers have found - players tolerate RMT moreso than they tolerate RMT spam), it just isn't worth it for them to spend the money to ban the accounts.
I'm not saying this is Intrepids decision - I "don't know" anything of what they have planned, and wouldn't talk about it if I did. I am simply talking about how things have gone in the past - if Intrepid are to do anything different than previous developers, it does kind of need to come from us players leaving the game and stating RMT as a reason.
I can imagine they did, but I'm not actually sure how much this should apply here. I think if the plan can be foiled by the farmers thinking along, it's not a sufficiently solid plan. The endless arms race and information warfare is a strategy you employ in a battle that can't be won, like the battle for cyber security as a whole, where there is an infinite potential for security holes and profit. Games are so much smaller. Consistently put enough hard-coded inconveniences and punishments in the way, and anyone actually putting in the work in spite of the roadblocks is just sinking money into paying people to play the game without enjoying it.
The problem I see with this approach is that public communication is a crucial part of a satisfactory solution. If you're not telling people how you're solving trading, any hint of trading they do see is going to make them jump to the conclusion that you failed.
I remember people talking day in day out about 2 money trading spammers back when Trion launched the ArcheAge localisation. Granted, their chat moderation was insufficient, but my point here is that even if they were shutting down RMT in the background like crazy, it doesn't take much for the bad publicity to catch on, if you're not doing anything visible to create good publicity. So if they are working hard enough to ensure that RMT won't really have a chance to catch on, there's a substantial benefit to making it explicit.
Keep in mind while reading the rest of this post, this topic is both broad and complex - I know of two people that have written their PhD thesis on the subject, and have no doubt there are many more. The notion that you or I could know how to "fix" RMT in MMORPG's is ludicrous.
Also keep in mind I am still not going in to what I have said in the past on the matter, due to being asked not to (informally, but by someone I both like and respect). As such, this post is more pointing out issues and things you may be potentially missing, based on your above few posts.
First, it isn't a developers decision to enter in to the arms race of RMT reduction. It is just how things things go.
Second, while MMORPG's are indeed so much smaller than cyber security as a whole, they are still complex. MMORPG's are the most complex entertainment software that exists. Additionally, cyber security as a whole has the resources of banks, insurance companies, software giants, governments and much more behind it - Intrepid have significantly smaller resources.
Third, any inconveniences or barriers places in the way of RMT are also in the way of players. If you are making a decision to add something to the game that will slow down RMT but will frustrate players to the point where you know some will leave the game because of it, you are better off not doing that at all. A developer could just not allow trade between players, and RMT will die a sudden death - doesn't mean that is the right decision for the game.
Fourth, public communication can help, but this needs to be nothing more than stating how many accounts you have banned due to RMT. However, this only works if the number of accounts doesn't get too high - if it gets to about 2% of your total number of accounts (there are FAR more than that participating in RMT of some form), then publishing those numbers reflects badly on your game. I would imagine you wouldn't be playing a game if they are banning 5%+ of all accounts in the game every 3 months.
Fifth, due to the arms race nature of combating RMT, there will literally always be an active presence in your game. If you shut down one avenue, the sellers will open up another eventually, but there will always be multiple avenues at work in your game at any one point in time.
Sixth, RMT is Archeage was a joke. It was cheaper to buy directly from Trion (there wasn't a direct dollar to gold purchase, but there were enough things that were close enough). RMT in Archeage existed mostly to sell top end items, there was next to no market for gold.
Seventh, most players do not know what RMT activity in game looks like. They see people with names that aren't supposed to be pronounced farming a spot and assume they are RMT farmers - they most likely are not.
Eighth, banning an RMT sellers account isn't that much of a detriment to them. They don't have a need to level characters up at all. They are traders, they buy from one party and sell to another, they are not farming the gold themselves. RMT companies are not paying people to farm coin, they are paying people to buy and sell it.
Ninth, the three largest RMT companies last time I looked in to the industry each had more employees than Intrepid. Additionally, two of them are American, the other is European. If you talk to someone in game that is farming coin and get a response back thant makes you think they are Chinese, that is a dead giveaway that this is not an RMT farmer but is instead someone just wanting to farm coin and be left alone - or is otherwise just meming on the Chinese gold farmer stereotype.
This x100. Doesn't need to be anywhere near 100% of cases. Just make it well known that in this game, you're very likely to be banned if you buy gold, and demand will crash. The vast majority of dad gamers buying gold won't risk it if there's a 50/50 chance of a permaban, or heck, even 25%. In a game where it takes 100s of hours to max level, who would risk losing it all on a 25% chance? Not many people. This in turn makes it much, much less profitable or downright unprofitable to bot before that account gets banned too.
Didn't Steven say one tactic is the honeypot? Intrepid themselves can buy gold from these sites, and then keep track of every single transaction the character handing them the gold has ever made. You'll soon have a big list of accounts to ban. You don't need to catch/ban anywhere near 100% of cases to strike fear into the hearts of would-be buyers. They only buy with impunity in other games because they know at most they'll get a slap on the wrist 3-day ban and keep the gold on top.
To my knowledge, Steven has never said this publically - though my knowledge is by no means exhaustive.
What Steven has said is that he won't talk about what they have planned, because the more RMT operators know of what Intrepid have planned, the easier it is to circumvent it.
Again, for the third time in this thread, that is why I do not talk about this in terms of putting up ideas or suggestions, but rather point out the faults in peoples suggestions.
The fault in your suggestion, by the way, of attempting to find the sellers, and tracking back from there is that RMT networks are complex. Intrepid could maybe identify one level behind the actual trade account, but everything behind that would look like it could just be regular players playing the game. The accounts RMT operators have that are community facing are disposable - they expect the developers to find them and ban them, and they bake this fact in to the price they sell their product for (at one point, I was told that a specific RMT operator assumed 3.5 transactions per account before it would be banned in a given game, and expected more than 20 in another game). They were considering only selling product in that game with the higher ban rate in lots of $150 or more, in order to more easily cover the cost of new accounts - I do not know how things went from there as I have not followed up (it has been a few years, I have no intention of following up).
So sure, Intrepid can use this as an individual tactic, but it is a tactic to increase the price of gold, not to stop RMT.
You're right, no solution is perfect. But if they can ban enough buyers that you have a 20-25% chance to get banned when you buy gold, and that fact is very well known, then demand will plummet. I don't know many people who would risk a multi-100-hours account with that high a chance to get banned. The how they do it is up to them.
Burner accounts to buy gold will increase.
Most players buying gold regularly already aren't using their main account for it.