How do I get into AoC RP?

It seems like so many people here on the forums are able to get into RP already with AoC and it's not even out yet. All I keep seeing is this talk of playing in Verra and how they'll go about getting a freehold, what will happen if their freehold node is attacked, or enjoying another aspect of the freehold system.

Which seems so weird to me considering that they currently stand on a bidding system which will be heavily exploited by RMT and gold farmers to the point of even all large guilds not getting one, unless of course they got some RMT'ers chipping in.

And its also weird because I seen a lot of these same posters talk about the rampant RMT in other MMOs, in the same day.

I just want to RP, to make believe, have fun, and pretend like we'll be able to interact with the systems on any level but mostly unsuccessful sieges(due to siege declaration prices and the despise of PvP) and bench rentals at absorbent prices. Help me live in this wonderful fantasy of y'alls.

Honestly I just wish freehold acquisition was done identical or similar to the mayoral system for node type, combat tournaments for military nodes, speedrun quests for the religious nodes, elections for the scientific nodes and even bidding for the P2W'ers on the economic nodes.

That would make it more in depth, more fitting for different kinds of players, less exploitable by RMT, more engaging, still encourages sieging(with the limited supply like it is now), still encourages teamwork, and overall is just more immersive so I can get into this RP everyone else is on about.

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Liniker

imagine being this emotionally invested in a game you know nothing about

you made like 4 threads over the last year complaining about RMT but you can't take 2 minutes to look up Intrepid's pan or make any suggestion that actually makes sense

PherPhur

Liniker wrote: »

imagine being this emotionally invested in a game you know nothing about

you made like 4 threads over the last year complaining about RMT but you can't take 2 minutes to look up Intrepid's pan or make any suggestion that actually makes sense

I'm emotionally invested in not having a system that BEGS people to RMT, that climb up on their lap and give them that UwU look in the eyes while it fondles their family jewels.

Right now you're making me a bit concerned cause I see you post constantly all over the forums and you're telling me that I "know nothing about this game" and "don't make any suggestion that actually makes sense". Cause thats the first time I've heard something like that in well over 10 identical posts to this on 2 different AoC Youtube channels, the subreddit(which got like 30 something upvotes and lots of comments), discord and here.

Actually I've been told "yes it's a problem", because it is to anyone that doesn't want to RMT themselves, wants a shot at a freehold, and would be considered a veteran in some MMO communities that knows how rampant RMT is. Do you know anything about the game or how Intrepid says they're going to handle things?

Because it takes like an ounce of info and a few short steps of critical thinking to come to the conclusion that you can't stop non botted RMT unless you start swinging the ban hammer at anyone giving out free money or items. They are regular players playing the game how it was meant to be played, and having a private financial transaction that no one other than people like the IRS has access to.

And I've been told yes, that is a great idea, let it mimic the mayoral system, by several people. I haven't heard it's an idea that makes no sense though. And who knows, maybe there's a better way, but that way sounds pretty great to me for the reasons I mentioned. But you? You got any ideas or you just wanted to come here, degrade me and make yourself look like an idiot.

Dolyem

I'm not against a mayoral system, but honestly I have some faith in Intrepid to set up a team to deal with RMTs, so I'm not against bidding on it either. I'd even be supportive of using the siege system where you have to collect all of the materials and pool them into a deed of sorts. That could even cover building the first building.

PherPhur

Dolyem wrote: »

I'm not against a mayoral system, but honestly I have some faith in Intrepid to set up a team to deal with RMTs, so I'm not against bidding on it either. I'd even be supportive of using the siege system where you have to collect all of the materials and pool them into a deed of sorts. That could even cover building the first building.

MMOs have tried and tried, Jagex has spent over 20 years trying everything they can think of to stop RMT and they can't. They have probably the most sophisticated anti botting of any game that exists, but non botted RMT is unstoppable.

Please just think it through with me for a minute. How do you stop a human being, from sitting down, farming for mats, selling them on the AH, doing whatever they need to do to get gold like the game intends, then taking that gold and having a private transaction with the player Liniker through lets say paypal, or cashapp.

It is federal illegal to pry into those databases and gain access to that transactional information. You don't get to just waltz up to paypal and be like "yo, could I get information from all your transactions, I really could use it for my game?", they're going to ask you "where's your warrant".

Intrepid cannot just start banning people for giving someone else money, material, items, ect for free unless they want to make it against ToS to do so, which they will not. Now that's not just a terrible idea, it's game breaking. These gold farmers tell you in the chat section on the website to trade them something of value and they overpay for whatever it is, or they just trade you some materials and gold and say in game "there you go Dolyem, hope that helps".

There is no banning that, if Intrepid tries stopping non botted RMT the only thing they're going to be doing is working on straight paranoia and banning a lot of innocent people.

None of this is my own 2 cents, this is just the way the MMO scene works right now, it's why I asked in Intrepids feedback section on freeholds to just "call some other major MMO devs security department and ask them about RMT". In case for some weird reason they think they can stop it, unlike anyone else who has tried.

You can't stop non botted RMT, all you can do is build around it.

Also, using materials might be better? Idk, there's a lot of extra variables there. Not nearly as routed around RMT though, and not nearly as fun IMO.

PherPhur

I have a friend who lives down in Indonesia who gets paid $4 a day for 12 hours of work, right now they're farming Diablo 4, him and a 12ish person team he just joined. He takes care of him, his wife and his daughter off that money.

I just felt I needed to throw that in there because even a lot of people on reddit think that the only RMT is coming from bots. Non botted RMT is massive, a major major industry in countries like Indonesia and Venezuela where their currency holds such little value.

Mag7spy

ChipsAhoy007 wrote: »

I have a friend who lives down in Indonesia who gets paid $4 a day for 12 hours of work, right now they're farming Diablo 4, him and a 12ish person team he just joined. He takes care of him, his wife and his daughter off that money.

I just felt I needed to throw that in there because even a lot of people on reddit think that the only RMT is coming from bots. Non botted RMT is massive, a major major industry in countries like Indonesia and Venezuela where their currency holds such little value.

You don't get it, this si just going to be looked at you whining about freeholds using RMT as your reason.

You can apply RMT to any part of the game since there is trading, you are just choosing to being it up about freeholds now since it is convenient for you lmao.

If you think they can't stop it and will fail like all other companies and not be able to enforce it just say everything in the game will be RMT hell.

PherPhur

@Mag7spy

For my reason?? Mag7spy let me say, long time fan. Surfed this forum for a couple years now, seen you post a lot, happy to have you as a member of the community. But that is hardly only my reason.

You know what I want? I want my friend in Indonesia to have a job and be able to take care of his family. Honestly every time I write about this stuff and throw out my story of him so that people are reminded of non botting RMT, I don't feel 100%.

I don't want him to make his living ruining a game though. I'm torn about it but I have faith he can find another line of work.

You aren't the first person to say what you're saying either. Steven himself said almost this exact same thing : "You can apply RMT to any part of the game since there is trading"

This isn't just about freeholds because I want a freehold and I'm poor, man all RMT is horrible, Steven don't want it, I don't want it, and over half the community don't want it. And I'm definitely not poor. 2 reasons why I'm focusing on freeholds.

1. They beg for people to RMT more than any other feature in the game, they are limited, bided for, and non instanced housing is more desired than I've seen anything in an MMO

2. You can DO SOMETHING ABOUT RMT AND FREEHOLDS! I say that with excitement. They could actually just do one small change and NOT ONLY still allow people to RP with gold and their freeholds(RMT still gonna screw them, but let them believe), but it allows non RMT housing to other players, in a more in depth, already existing mechanically, and appealing way to different types of players.

What I'm talking about is what I wrote at the very top, mimicking the mayoral system. It's fitting too. So the military node is going to fight to the death to decide mayor but bid out the limited housing like some kind of civilized people? Let the scientific node vote, let the economic node people RP with their money and lose to RMT'ers lol, let the religious node speedrun quests.

You know if you got a better Idea for dragon eggs lmk, they are limited too, probably going to be as or more desired than freeholds, and bided for on the AH. I said on the reddit post I'd keep my mouth shut about the rest of the areas effected by RMT, but if the community insists lets go for it. It was quite late and I was very tired when I wrote this part. Dragon eggs aren't similar to the major problem of freeholds and RMT because their initial acquisition is not bided for.

LegendaryIII

It has been a long journey, but finally you have accomplished your every goal...
After weeks of adventuring, you have learned all there is to know. You are amongst the elite, you are a true Warrior.

You haven't made many friends, but the few you have, are as family. Your Armour and weapons aren't as flashy as others you have seen. You've heard tales recounting the slayings of dragons, ogres and really big flowers, but you have never had such encounters.

Those battles are for large companies of men, you prefer to wonder the wilds on your own. Still, your friends and you always wanted a FreeHold to call home. Which brings you to this very moment.

The town stands before you.

Certainly your mates and you would prefer to own land near a great metropolis, but what if a rival army should attack? No, you cannot afford to lose what little you have.

Here, you can help this town prosper. Perhaps this forgotten little hamlet could one day grow into the greatest city in this kingdom.

You touch the pouch, hidden within your tunic, reassuring yourself it's still there. Heavy, laden with gold. A thousand coin. It took a great deal of time for your small group to save, but now, the hardships shall pay off.

You step inside the makeshift Land Registry Office, stride up to the busy clerk. You announce proudly, and perhaps a bit too loudly; You are there to purchase a Parcel of Land.

The clerk looks you over, half-disinterested. From your mediocre gear he knows all he needs to know of you.
He asks you how much you'd like to bid, you triumphantly reply; "One Thousand Gold!"

This lowly servant... Of this insignificant town looks at you with indifference!!?? A thousand gold is more than this Lazy Peon would see in a lifetime! Confused, you stand there, unable to process the moment.

The clerk replies; "Come back when you have twenty. Next!!"

Twenty? Twenty... Thousand??!! For an empty slice of land in this middle of nowhere??!!

You stagger off, towards the local Tavern. Several others enter, it is obviously the most visited establishment in this backwater. You do not hear singing, or cheering, or even fighting. You enter.

Your eyes adjust to the dimness. Dozens of faces, sullen, dejected... The very place is a representation of your current state.

A man, deep into his mugs, looks up at you. Seeing your bewilderment asks; "How much?"
You register his words, his existence, but find yourself unable to formulate a response.
"How much did you and your mates save?!" he repeats.
"A thousand" you stammer.

"That'll buy you a lot of forgetting... and a room at the Inn down the way." "Get comfortable, it's the only home yer ever gonna know." A sad wizened smile crosses his lips.

He mutters to no one in particular...
"How does a poor miner like me compete with legions of gold farmers, and the "Nobles" that fund them?!"
He spits.

I reflect upon my journey, the hardships, the triumphs. My friends...
Dozens of "me", sit at tables, deep into their mugs.

I order a horn of ale, and ask where I can find the Inn.

Muttering to no one in particular...
"How does a poor Warrior like me, compete against legions of Gold Farmers and the "Nobels" who fund them?"

Liniker

@ChipsAhoy007 do you understand, that there is absolutely no chance, Zero, literal Zero chances of intrepid removing player to player trade and gold trade in AoC?

you are completely wasting your time what you are asking is the same of trying to ask them to remove leveling from the game, it's just not gonna happen man

you can either suggest ways of combating RMT, or accepting that you will 100% be able to buy literally everything with gold - this will not change

Kilion

Why even follow this project if you are not confident that the studio can deal with your biggest concern?

And I don't mean this as an attack or anything but seriously: If you already determined that there is no way that Intrepid can protect the game from exploits and that ruins the gaming experience for you, why would you care about this game at all instead of looking for a game that seems more promising?

PherPhur

Liniker wrote: »

@ChipsAhoy007 do you understand, that there is absolutely no chance, Zero, literal Zero chances of intrepid removing player to player trade and gold trade in AoC?

you are completely wasting your time what you are asking is the same of trying to ask them to remove leveling from the game, it's just not gonna happen man

you can either suggest ways of combating RMT, or accepting that you will 100% be able to buy literally everything with gold - this will not change

Alright so now you're just trolling or you did what I did when I wrote the last paragraph about the dragon eggs earlier, did it on too little sleep.

Sir I said nothing here about removing player trade gold. Not on this thread. We could get into that, about all the things on top of removing player traded currency that could really mess up RMT, but that's besides the point.

The point of this thread is: mostly removing the RMT aspects from initial freehold acquisition by doing what I stated earlier(refer to my very first post in this thread), consequently also making obtaining one "more in depth, more fitting for different kinds of players, more engaging, still encouraging sieging(by still having freeholds limited as they are now), still encouraging teamwork, and overall(in regards to the title of this thread) more immersive.

Dolyem

Going back to what I said earlier. If you changed the costs to resources and time/events spent to aquire a freehold, and made them all substantial, you would potentially be able to make freeholds less valuable to gold farmers, since they'd be able to more easily aquire gold for a guaranteed purchase, instead of sitting on a freehold they are trying to sell at a price that wouldn't be able to make the time worth it.

Another way to combat it is to monitor sites selling them, seeing what freeholds are being sold and monitoring the ones being shown, assuming there would be pictures since each plot is in a unique designated area in the open world.

PherPhur

Kilion wrote: »

Why even follow this project if you are not confident that the studio can deal with your biggest concern?

And I don't mean this as an attack or anything but seriously: If you already determined that there is no way that Intrepid can protect the game from exploits and that ruins the gaming experience for you, why would you care about this game at all instead of looking for a game that seems more promising?

I care about this game because it looks so friggin promising mate. Steven and his team gives me hope as game developers and as human beings. I just think setting up freeholds on a bidding system was naïve or an oversight.

Thanks for making me feel like I'm not getting attacked. Definitely rough to go against the grain of conventional thought on the internet these days, even when that thought is based on a lack of thought lol.

To which I mean no offense, it's human nature to parrot what the crowds saying, and to be fair, they're usually right. In this case I don't know who started it, but it appears no one's given it much though since it's snowballed into some kind of "fact".

From what I can tell though, after much conversation about these topics in the last few days from all across the net, is that people associate RMT and the developer wars against it strictly with botting. Banning botters is an on-going struggle, and I DEFINITELY have faith Intrepid is going to open a can of woop-ass on botters. I expect full kernel level anti-cheat and trained server AI that can separate the digital fingerprint of bot movements from humans.

Non botting RMT is impossible to stop though. You can put a small dent in it, in a FEW ways(just a few), but nothing like you can botting, and ultimately it's unstoppable unless you make it SSF and in that case it's almost borderline a singleplayer game anyways. I hear Intrepids going to set up honey pots(and reverse honey pots I'm guessing), and that's one way, but they're like roaches, Intrepid doesn't have the manpower. That means they'll also have to buy gold, giving gold farmers money each time they do a reverse honey pot(does that have a name?).

Honey potting only removes players who haven't found a reliable supplier or is searching for cheaper alternatives. And honestly them announcing that they'll be setting up honey pots was.. not a smart move, if that was true.

A few of those other ways are

Having the seller or buyer confess
Ban any character or account giving away large amounts of free gold or items to "random" players, or make it impossible. Which is completely against the foundations of AoCs gameplay and would ban lots of innocent players. I wrote a whole large comment over on reddit about this
Start swinging the ban hammer in a full on state of paranoia at anyone they think is a RMT'er, hitting innocents and guilty alike.

If you want, if you're interested and care for a bit of a read I explain the ins and outs of those last steps in a debate I had on a AoC reddit thread I made regarding this whole post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AshesofCreation/comments/14p8p14/freeholds_owned_by_all_the_major_guilds_only/jqtwyox/?context=8&depth=9

I'm very aware of the industry and of the ins and outs of non botted RMT. It's not like catching bots, that's work better left for AI and teams upon teams of people who have spent countless hours of their lives studying it.

Non botted RMT is a somewhat simple game of cat and mouse, one where mouse always wins. For the most part, fighting non botted RMT is a waste of time and resources honestly. Just ban anyone offering their services in game and move on.

Best course of action is to just build the game in a way where RMT does the least damage, without sacrificing the fun. In some cases I believe you can even make the game more fun doing that. An example would be my very first post on this thread regarding the changes to initial freehold acquisition. I keep getting told its an awesome Idea, I'm not getting any pushback so far, and sounds like a pretty great idea to me. I'm very interested on Intrepid thoughts about all this, considering the creative directors staunch stance against RMT.

Edit: a thousand tiny edits, it's 3AM, I'm going to bed.

ariatras

RMTs will always be a problem. Most of the currency that gets sold is hacked in, not botted. There are some games, WoW for example, which doesn't have hacked gold (to my knowledge) but it has bots. And that's one of the best things you can hope for.

And yes, it will definitely be a problem. But honestly, it comes with the territory these days.
The only "solution" (and I use that term loosely) I can think of. Is making resources finite. Make gold an actual physical good. And you'll need to balance gold used for minting, vs gold used to adorn armour, shields etc. But that doesn't sound fun/feasible to me.

As for the way they handle Freeholds. Sure RMTs will probably influence who gets them. But I don't care that much, honestly. Sure, I'd love to have my own home, and build it fully from the ground up, rather then having a few standardised houses. But I also know, if many are available, it can often ruin the RP scene. Star Wars The Old Republic for example, when they introduced Strongholds and guild capital ships, RP moved over there, and became too compartmentalised, essentially killing the RP scene for that game. Which was substantial. Now, sure there's some RP, but it's not as widespread and mostly done in private instances.

Then there's Final Fantasy 14. There's a server Balmung (A lot of horny people, but still) in which the instanced housing isn't a problem. People still congregate. But one contributing factor to this is the fact that you can access those servers no matter where you are from. There is for example a pretty big EU RP scene in that game. But hardly anyone really plays on the player appointed RP shard for EU. I started there and RP is scheduled. On a roster. There's a Discord server to keep track. Run by some players. As a guild leader you can apply for the "roulette" and then you get scheduled in. Which is absolutely horrendous, but there's not enough players for RP out in the world outside those designated times, because they all play on the NA server Balmung or Mateus. So it's a mixed bag on whether or not it works.

As a final note. RP isn't about getting attached to the game, but your character.

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