Ashes of Creation will have Pay To Win

Real money trading (RMT) or buying in game currency with real world money is going to be available to anyone with expendable income.

If you have a legal way to stop people in real life making deals with their own money that affect the game please post below.

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

I read one post that talked about how the Chinese tie their social security numbers to their accounts (crazy).

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George_Black

I have played L2 which had gold selling. Some ppl got banned. Some people got scared. Some people got away with it. Best mmo ever. Every other mmo since doesnt come even close. They are all boring, npc vendor gameplay, full of ez daily quests and instanced content, quick dash to lv cap and then mindless repetitions for small incremental power boosts.

I dont care if gold selling is a problem in AoC. I dont expect it to be a big deal due to the commitment to ongoing banning of rules breaking. I dont care for a guarantee of solution.
In addition, the world will be vast. How often will you lose to a cheater who got gear with $?
Who cares.

Warth

Okk

George_Black

You are not the first to post this. You might be the 20th. So let this thread die. Make room for design conversations.

Voeltz

There seems to be a large influx of timmie posts lately..

First of all, pay to win and gold farming/selling are two different things. Ashes will NOT have pay to win, but it will have gold sellers just like every other MMO. It is inevitable. The question is will it be a major problem? As long as they do a good job of monitoring their servers and removing such people from the game, It will not be. This is an issue that can never be truly resolved so all they can do is minimize it as best they can.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em

Yes just sweep the PWT under the rug. Nothing to see here.

George_Black

Pathetic attempt to slander an up and coming studio. Nothing to see here. On your bike now mate.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em

Please keep the discussion on topic.

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

Ludullu

As Voeltz said, p2w is not the same as rmt. A big solution I could see is an rmt report section where players could flag dudes who they don't know who suddenly have insanely rare/expensive gear. At which point GMs could track their logs and then track the gold/gear they have. If Intrepid has proper tools in place, this whole process should be fairly straight forward.

And nodes creating small communities would lead those new decked out people to stand out from the crowd. I've seen this kinda work in L2. I say "kinda" because I mainly played on private servers and in their case it was really p2w (cause it was just admins selling gear), but you'd always know if a completely new dude came onto the pvp scene with good gear because the community was small and big changes like that always stood out.

Pretty much imagine a small village that suddenly gets a completely random dude with a lambo that starts living there. No one knows where the hell he came from or how he has a lambo. AoC's nodes will kinda work the same way. With gear being really limited (especially the top stuff), you'll know most of people with great gear, so if there's suddenly a completely new face wearing amazing gear - it's gonna be a red flag.

George_Black

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

Please keep the discussion on topic.

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

You dont need to know that son. None your business how cheaters get caught.
I just told you that in L2 gold buyers and bots got banned. Take my word on it or baselessly dispute it, showin logic absence.

George_Black

Im not the negative one Luke. Dont whisper me.
When some1 tells you "It's going to be fine, it worked well in another game." That should inspire you with confidence, not suspicion. You cant go around saying AoC will be p2w without considering the negative shade you throw at the game for all people to see. That's baseless missinformation, harmful to any undertaking.

Robtzu

The only way to get rid of gold farmers and bots is to have the studio sell it themself cheaper than the gold farmers. Since there is a no p2w pledge that will not happen.

Ludullu

Robtzu wrote: »

The only way to get rid of gold farmers and bots is to have the studio sell it themself cheaper than the gold farmers. Since there is a no p2w pledge that will not happen.

Doesn't WoW do that and it still doesn't help cause bot sellers can always just sell cheaper? And this dance can continue until literally everything in the game costs nothing.

Mag7spy

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

Real money trading (RMT) or buying in game currency with real world money is going to be available to anyone with expendable income.

If you have a legal way to stop people in real life making deals with their own money that affect the game please post below.

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

I read one post that talked about how the Chinese tie their social security numbers to their accounts (crazy).

What do you get for lying on a forum, why do you want attention so badly?

BaSkA_9x2

Sorry for the following repost, but it'll be my last.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

Real money trading (RMT) or buying in game currency with real world money is going to be available to anyone with expendable income.

Sorry but your argument (RMT = P2W) is ludicrous, it makes me laugh every time. According to your logic, Elden Ring and Dark Souls are P2W, all you need to do is buy a Steam account from someone who has all the best gear. Even CSGO is P2W, since you can just ask people at the start of a match how much money they want to throw that match. Hell, literally every game ever made is P2W, since everything and everyone has a price. No point in coming to these forums, why even play any games at all since they are all P2W, according to your logic.

Let's make something clear: P2W is when the official game company/developer/publisher sells any type of convenience, advantage, time skip, in-game currency, power, etc. for real money in an online game. If you don't understand what P2W means, then you might think that spending real money with RMT and breaking the game's rules is also P2W - and you'd be wrong. If RMT was not against ToS, then maybe that'd be an acceptable argument, but that's not the case here.

In ashes, RMT means cheating. You might buy gold for real money from some random person and "win", but then you'd also get banned and sadly you can't "win" if you're permanently banned.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

If you have a legal way to stop people in real life making deals with their own money that affect the game please post below.

The ToS is a contract. When you create your account, you accept those terms. If you're caught RMTing (or breaking any other rules), you're banned/punished for breaking said contract.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

Plenty of ways to detect RMT and even more ways to detect bots if the game is designed in a way (logs enough information, for starters) to help detection of both. If you want to learn a few strategies on how to detect bots and RMTing accounts, simply read books on computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

I read one post that talked about how the Chinese tie their social security numbers to their accounts (crazy).

This is common in Korea and Japan, probably China as well, and you usually need both a government ID and a phone number. However, the reason why they do this is to region lock their games (and players) since IPs are easy to bypass. Still, it's quite easy to play region locked games from outside said region, all you need is a bit of money and a bit of curiosity.

Ashes won't be region locked (as long as you pay for the subscription for that region), so the work needed to make this work for every country would be absurd and pointless, so it's not an option.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em

BaSkA13 wrote: »

...computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Is this the intended solution for Ashes of Creation to stop pay to win?

Ludullu

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

Is this the intended solution for Ashes of Creation?

We won't know their solution because knowing it would help botters counter it.

LuKe_NuKeS_Em

I agree letting the public know the solution would help people counter it. Advertising the game as having no pay to win and not explaining how that is going to be the case isn't ideal either.

CROW3

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

Real money trading (RMT) or buying in game currency with real world money is going to be available to anyone with expendable income.

If you have a legal way to stop people in real life making deals with their own money that affect the game please post below.

1. This isn't P2W.

How do you prove that a trade in-game was legit or the result of RMT?

2. For gold-selling, unless you've identified a seller's account, or have established a white-hat seller account and flush out buyers, it's pretty hard to prove.

Is there a tenable solution that the community would find acceptable?

3. If you want to stop gold-selling, I'd start setting up 3rd party gold buying sites then ban the accounts for any buyers that show up.

Edit: Btw - you may want to think about editing the title of this thread since it's completely misleading based upon your misunderstanding of P2W.

Hinotori

LuKe_NuKeS_Em wrote: »

I agree letting the public know the solution would help people counter it. Advertising the game as having no pay to win and not explaining how that is going to be the case isn't ideal either.

They already have explained it... it has a cashshop full of purely cosmetic items and they'll have GMs and systems in place to stop RMT.

PenguinPaladin

Probably the biggest difference between ashes and other mmos is that gold buyers are going to be banned as well as gold sellers.... taking away the "customers" should help stop those trying to profit.

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