Would removing gifting and direct sales eliminate all kinds of RMT?

The more I think about it the more Im convinced that removing (or not implementing) direct sales in AoC is the best solution to eliminate all kinds of RMT

I was thinking How do people could make RMT? Of couse If Im grinding for an epic sword, and then post the sword in an external website and when a real money buyer sends the money I gift him them the sword or direct sell it to them at 1 gold. Easy transaction, someone just bougth power in game.

But of course simply preventing people from selling their stuff would be silly because It would render the economy useless, so how to allow people to sell their stuff for profit?

Easy, just present it on the market in an auction house. Instead of selling it at a fixed price you set a base price and every citizen of the node would be able to see and bid for the item no matter how big or small it is.The "sale" will last 7 days at minimum in the end the one who bid the most will get the item.

Advantages
* Since everybody can bid for the item and there is a fair time between the post and the actual sale, there would be no way for people to set a price of 1 gold at 3 AM so the RMT buyer can get it before everybody else, simply because everybody will have enough time to bid for it and set a reasonable price for the item rendering the RMT useless.

* It would actually help newbie vendors to automatically adjust their prices depending on offer and demand because when the demand is high the citizens will aggresibly bid more for the items and when demmand is low there will be no bids and will send the message to the vendor that the prices are too high.

Disadvantages:
* It would prevent people from getting their money right away, and would force them to plan in advance when they want to sell their stuff because they will have to wait a week for the money to reach their pocket.

* It would prevent guilds from giving away items to their members since everybody would have to pay for it.

* Buyers would be forced to plan in advance when trying stock up for crafting, I don't think is the end of the world though since in most of the time there would be tons sales about to end at all times in any decent sized node, at least for the common materials.

I think implementing that system to exchange all kinds of stuff, from crafted items to freeholds and mounts, would kill all the RMT avenues without really hurting the game's economy and even could enable cool interactions during guild wars, like bidding aggresibly high quality gear on the market to prevent rival guilds to get them before a castle siege takes place.

What do you guys think?

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Comments

Songcaller

Not it won't.

Kionashi

Neurath wrote: »

Not it won't.

Care to elaborate?

Songcaller

There are many ways to rmt from account sharing to auction house manipulation which don't rely on direct trade or gifting.

Rmt is a major money intake and thus it is difficult to combat said paradigm. Why should everyone else get a shell of an economy just because others want to bypass the economy?

Noaani

If the OP's suggestion were implemented, the way RMT websites would operate is that they would get the person buying gold to list a basic item (a stick or some such) on the auction house, and the RMT seller would then put in a bid at the value of the RMT transaction.

And hey, if you want to come along and bid 5001 gold for tht stick instead of the 5000 price the RMT seller bid, have at it.

Kionashi

Noaani wrote: »

If the OP's suggestion were implemented, the way RMT websites would operate is that they would get the person buying gold to list a basic item (a stick or some such) on the auction house, and the RMT seller would then put in a bid at the value of the RMT transaction.

And hey, if you want to come along and bid 5001 gold for tht stick instead of the 5000 price the RMT seller bid, have at it.

Damn....fair point... my argument crumbles like a cookie on milk XD

I guess you could find people who makes unreasonable propositions and have an eye as potential RMT...but that could be done with other systems too

Korela

Well, if you can't buy an item directly, you still can buy the time of your "close friend" who'd farm for it on your account. BDO-like RMT economy moment.

Noaani

Kionashi wrote: »

Noaani wrote: »

If the OP's suggestion were implemented, the way RMT websites would operate is that they would get the person buying gold to list a basic item (a stick or some such) on the auction house, and the RMT seller would then put in a bid at the value of the RMT transaction.

And hey, if you want to come along and bid 5001 gold for tht stick instead of the 5000 price the RMT seller bid, have at it.

Damn....fair point... my argument crumbles like a cookie on milk XD

I guess you could find people who makes unreasonable propositions and have an eye as potential RMT...but that could be done with other systems too

To be fair, trying to come up with solutions to problems is a good thing.

I just happen to be in a situation where finding issues in a suggestion is essentially my profession.

Ludullu

If Azherae was active on the forum rn, she'd say "this won't work" and would elaborate on it, but would be right.

Veeshan

Pretty much n o mechanics will prevent RMT, only thing that would is devs policing the shit out of it banning anyone who does it so no one want to risk it

Depraved

Kionashi wrote: »

The more I think about it the more Im convinced that removing (or not implementing) direct sales in AoC is the best solution to eliminate all kinds of RMT

I was thinking How do people could make RMT? Of couse If Im grinding for an epic sword, and then post the sword in an external website and when a real money buyer sends the money I gift him them the sword or direct sell it to them at 1 gold. Easy transaction, someone just bougth power in game.

But of course simply preventing people from selling their stuff would be silly because It would render the economy useless, so how to allow people to sell their stuff for profit?

Easy, just present it on the market in an auction house. Instead of selling it at a fixed price you set a base price and every citizen of the node would be able to see and bid for the item no matter how big or small it is.The "sale" will last 7 days at minimum in the end the one who bid the most will get the item.

Advantages
* Since everybody can bid for the item and there is a fair time between the post and the actual sale, there would be no way for people to set a price of 1 gold at 3 AM so the RMT buyer can get it before everybody else, simply because everybody will have enough time to bid for it and set a reasonable price for the item rendering the RMT useless.

* It would actually help newbie vendors to automatically adjust their prices depending on offer and demand because when the demand is high the citizens will aggresibly bid more for the items and when demmand is low there will be no bids and will send the message to the vendor that the prices are too high.

Disadvantages:
* It would prevent people from getting their money right away, and would force them to plan in advance when they want to sell their stuff because they will have to wait a week for the money to reach their pocket.

* It would prevent guilds from giving away items to their members since everybody would have to pay for it.

* Buyers would be forced to plan in advance when trying stock up for crafting, I don't think is the end of the world though since in most of the time there would be tons sales about to end at all times in any decent sized node, at least for the common materials.

I think implementing that system to exchange all kinds of stuff, from crafted items to freeholds and mounts, would kill all the RMT avenues without really hurting the game's economy and even could enable cool interactions during guild wars, like bidding aggresibly high quality gear on the market to prevent rival guilds to get them before a castle siege takes place.

What do you guys think?

or
you can log transactions and then detect price disparities and investigate those accounts. if you are selling me a rare sword for 1 gold, intrepid can detect this and investigate. the buyer would still have to buy it for a price similar to market price or trade materials and stuff. materials are probably harder to detect so maybe thats how people are going to rmt

Imnotkio

I don't know man, ppl keep talking about rmt but I really can't imagine it being a big problem.

If you can track and store all kinds of data, have a script that analyzes every transaction, its value imbalance and social history between parties, and flags it as suspicious or not, and then have a team of humans to analyze flagged transactions, it would be pretty hard to miss the most problematic rmt.

You would end up with small fish probably but nothing that would jeopardize the integrity of the game.

All that matters is if Intrepid is willing to spend the resources necessary to implement this kind of system. When I see a company spend big resources to try and stop rmt and fail, then I would be worried. The thing is, it's not profitable for them to do it, so why would profit-driven shareholder-pleasing companies do it?

ClintHardwood

Runescape tried removing all direct trade and there was still RMT. They simply moved on to botting directly on an account or selling entire accounts.

Vaknar

Unfortunately, there are many ways people will use and abuse systems for RMT. We don't want to discuss how we plan to combat this, for the sake of security - but we take this issue very seriously ^_^

PherPhur

Vaknar wrote: »

Unfortunately, there are many ways people will use and abuse systems for RMT. We don't want to discuss how we plan to combat this, for the sake of security - but we take this issue very seriously ^_^

Publicly disclosing that you will be setting up honey pots was the wrong move Intrepid. Now people know to find a supplier and stick to them, so as to not land in your honey pot looking for better deals.

And it's not much of a scare tactic, you can't stop non botted RMT in AoC, it isn't a matter of a technical limitation, manpower, budget, or methods. Unless you want to prevent the ability of people to give free money to strangers, which I would strongly suggest against, then you've already lost.

All non botted RMT'ers have to do is pretend to be one of the countless people that already exist in an MMO, random gifters. They're so pervasive that I frequently will log into a game and be flooded with expensive gear, materials or currency, especially if I'm RPing as a girl.

They can also pretend to be associates of the buyer who communicate through Discord VC. I can give you a hundred scenarios. You'll catch some of the RMT initially but they'll quickly adapt to your methods. This isn't about designing a mouse macro detection algorithm for botters, in which you can ultimately win by technical superiority, this is about distinguishing authentic trades from inauthentic trades, at a certain point you're just going to have a high percentage of your related bans as innocent people.

Design the systems around RMT, don't waste resources on stopping it apart from their in game advertisements. Don't look at it as criminals backing you into a corner and forcing you to change what you had in mind for the game, use it as an opportunity to design more more enjoyable systems. And focus on the systems most susceptible to RMT, the systems that encourage it the most, i.e. freeholds.

There is 2 major suggestions flowing across various parts of the community, one I've seen repeated several times which is to swap the currency based bidding system with a reputation point bidding system, the other is my idea to swap the strictly currency based bidding system with something similar or identical to the mayoral election system for the different node types: elections, combat tournaments, currency bidding, ect.

Solvryn

Kionashi wrote: »

The more I think about it the more Im convinced that removing (or not implementing) direct sales in AoC is the best solution to eliminate all kinds of RMT

I was thinking How do people could make RMT? Of couse If Im grinding for an epic sword, and then post the sword in an external website and when a real money buyer sends the money I gift him them the sword or direct sell it to them at 1 gold. Easy transaction, someone just bougth power in game.

But of course simply preventing people from selling their stuff would be silly because It would render the economy useless, so how to allow people to sell their stuff for profit?

Easy, just present it on the market in an auction house. Instead of selling it at a fixed price you set a base price and every citizen of the node would be able to see and bid for the item no matter how big or small it is.The "sale" will last 7 days at minimum in the end the one who bid the most will get the item.

Advantages
* Since everybody can bid for the item and there is a fair time between the post and the actual sale, there would be no way for people to set a price of 1 gold at 3 AM so the RMT buyer can get it before everybody else, simply because everybody will have enough time to bid for it and set a reasonable price for the item rendering the RMT useless.

* It would actually help newbie vendors to automatically adjust their prices depending on offer and demand because when the demand is high the citizens will aggresibly bid more for the items and when demmand is low there will be no bids and will send the message to the vendor that the prices are too high.

Disadvantages:
* It would prevent people from getting their money right away, and would force them to plan in advance when they want to sell their stuff because they will have to wait a week for the money to reach their pocket.

* It would prevent guilds from giving away items to their members since everybody would have to pay for it.

* Buyers would be forced to plan in advance when trying stock up for crafting, I don't think is the end of the world though since in most of the time there would be tons sales about to end at all times in any decent sized node, at least for the common materials.

I think implementing that system to exchange all kinds of stuff, from crafted items to freeholds and mounts, would kill all the RMT avenues without really hurting the game's economy and even could enable cool interactions during guild wars, like bidding aggresibly high quality gear on the market to prevent rival guilds to get them before a castle siege takes place.

What do you guys think?

You will never remove RMT, you can only suppress it. People will sell things of perceived value, that's just the way people work.

Veeshan

Vaknar wrote: »

Unfortunately, there are many ways people will use and abuse systems for RMT. We don't want to discuss how we plan to combat this, for the sake of security - but we take this issue very seriously ^_^

aslong as you guys are ontop of banning/punihs people who do RMT it will greatly reduce it going on the issue with it not many company ban RMT or they hafve hard to doing so and if they do they dont highlight this to other that they can be banned for doing so.
If people think they can get away with it they do it but when there a risk involved there less likely too

PherPhur

@Solvryn

You can hit the botting side of RMT with a nuke using kernel level anti cheat software and AI trained to separate human from non-human by their digital "fingerprints" in game. The latter is almost done being developed and ready for implementation.

The non botting side of RMT that deals with people from poor countries like Indonesia and Venezuela who can sustain a family off 4$ a day is unstoppable.

THOUGH, it only affects systems tied in with player trading. You definitely do not want to remove player trading from an MMO, that's a death sentence, but you can take systems highly susceptible to RMT and redesign them to something else that still allows player to interact with each other in meaningful ways(like trading) and is still fun.

Kilion

As Vaknar already indicated, there will only be limited information available on how RMT will be prevented, but I suspect that - after reading the Wiki entry on security systems - Intrepid will employ some sort of pattern recognition software that will screen for abnormal behavior that does not make sense in terms of the game flow. That would include things like the selling of an epic sword for 1 gold. And since it would require insane hacking skills to make ingame activities anonymous, this system alone would probably prevent most RMT. Especially since the behaviors that indicate breaking of RMT policies would always stand out as the big idea is to trade resources outside the game for things inside the game to lower the price of ingame resources. To manipulate that over 50% of all active players in the testing phase would need to conduct themselves in ways that falsely train the pattern software and observing developers to think that is "normal behavior" (and the developers would need to forget all their previously gained experience as players) - and that I deem impossible.

[off topic] Of course the price for all of that is no anonymity inside the game, but since people don't really care about that in real life anyways I'd say a game is the wrong place to start woring about privacy anyways.

PherPhur

@Kionashi

You can't get rid of RMT like this for the reasons others have stated. AFAIK you only have about 2 options as far as messing with the way trading works to make any kind of a dent in RMT:

Have an economic algorithm that uses multiple sources of data to determine the average price of goods and disallow trades that are too unfair. Runescape did this and people lost their mind(couldn't lend/gift items or currency, RMT lol, get great deals, ect.) so they changed it back pretty fast
Remove player traded currency, moving the game to a barter system, limiting trade window slots and stack sizes, remove everything on the global drop table, and have fluctuating mob spawns, drop tables, mob density, ect. Also you have to remove the auction house. By doing all these things you can obfuscate the price of items so much, make the economy so unstable, that the business of selling "currency", if any item has managed to become currency in that climate(like runes in D2, but they were stable in value), would also be so volatile that many owners would just choose to do something else for a living.

PherPhur

Veeshan wrote: »

Vaknar wrote: »

Unfortunately, there are many ways people will use and abuse systems for RMT. We don't want to discuss how we plan to combat this, for the sake of security - but we take this issue very seriously ^_^

aslong as you guys are ontop of banning/punihs people who do RMT it will greatly reduce it going on the issue with it not many company ban RMT or they hafve hard to doing so and if they do they dont highlight this to other that they can be banned for doing so.
If people think they can get away with it they do it but when there a risk involved there less likely too

Conventional wisdom says you're right.

Though it doesn't really apply to me as a player, when I can make up like a hundred excuses for why that person gave me the gold or I can flat out just say "they just gave it to me for free". Which people do all the time in MMOs.

Give it a couple months and the sellers will have adapted too, giving cover stories(gold sellers on some sites already do this), splitting and tumbling their gold to alts and random players so Intrepid bans don't take all their currency.

Gold sellers will eventually end up giving some free gold to random players just to make Intrepid start harassing and banning random innocents if Intrepid wants to ban buyers.

And the honey pots, the ones Intrepid so kindly let everyone know about.. people will just ask for legit sources. Which a lot were probably already going to do in the first place.

Non botted RMT is a monster.

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