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Alpha Two Phase III testing has begun! During this phase, our realms will be open every day, and we'll only have downtime for updates and maintenance. We'll keep everyone up-to-date about downtimes in Discord.
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.
COMBATING RMT
Gardosien
Member, Alpha Two
Always a issue in mmo... I would suggest making emblems Bind on pick up. Final item needed in craft, you put emblems in trade window, crafter hits craft button at bottom of window to craft item... Would not stop RMT but curve it,, and the more we can curve it, the better off we are.. Maybe do the same with novice mats needed... .. People can just earn it.. That being said meaningful PVP open world that drops emblems from zone your in, or issues you points to purchase them via pvp vendor... So grind d pve, or go have fun pvp..
ALL EMBLEM GEAR WOULD BE BIND ON PICK UP.. You see a larger number of players trying h to buy a crazy amount of higher their gear. NOT ALL, but many safely 50% used rmt services.. Let's Curve it.. When your player base is questioning if a whole guild is RMTer ,
You got a problem!
ALL EMBLEM GEAR WOULD BE BIND ON PICK UP.. You see a larger number of players trying h to buy a crazy amount of higher their gear. NOT ALL, but many safely 50% used rmt services.. Let's Curve it.. When your player base is questioning if a whole guild is RMTer ,
You got a problem!
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Comments
All while the rmts can now simply rmt through gear (supposing that direct money trading will be gone).
TESTING IS FUN.. The complaints you talk about may be specific emblems,, which can be adjusted but over all we have not experienced this farming in both riverlands and anvils.. For a complete set of t3.. T3 lev 3 should be hard...
And also, don't forget that you're talking about lvl20 gear. Anything of higher lvl will be more expensive, will require more emblems and those emblems will come from harder mobs. The player filter, with BoP emblems, would be too hardcore even for the hardcoreness that Ashes is going for.
Making emblems BoP wouldn't do much to fight RMT. It'd add an extra lay of things to do when you craft or get an item crafted. There's already enough layers to crafting. Plus those who don't craft but spend more time killing mobs for materals now have less to sell to the market. So the RMT seller just make the gear then sell that lol..
So making crafting harder.
Take more things off the market.
Lessen the value of mob grinding.
Emblems would be vendor fodder or are dropped like common granite.
To maybe curve RMT a minor amount?
Doesn't make sense. I highly doubt it would even dent RMT.
1 click crafting in trade window is not hard,,, it makes it easier for crafter... and requires person to have ALL the mats, including ones from vendor. (In addition, will have less crafters getting ganked in town in PVP)
Mob grinding would still hold same value for the player seeking the items, less value for the RMT'er boting to farm emblems.
90% of the Gold bought is most likely used to buy High End gear, Making this gear Bind on pick up, with the emblems being Bind on pick up, would Curve RMT by more than just a little....
You gave plenty of reasons to turn down emblems being Bind on pick up(many of the flawed ,from someone who has farmed all his own stuff and not even lev 25 yet), but zero suggestions on how to curve RMT... I am all up for better ideas...
I'm not saying you can't gather your own mats and craft your own stuff. Even if emblems were BoP it'd still possible. That's not my point.
The full process of crafting from gathering, processing, to crafting, is tedious. Lets not add to it. Not the 1 click to Craft the gear... You ignored the 100 clicks before that..
If you can't sell Emblems for X value on the market because they are BoP, then you vendor them. If the market value is actually higher then that vendor value then you lose that difference in value. So there'd be less value in grindng mobs.
People buy gold for all different reasons, buy consumables, materials, gold, ect. Not just for high level gear. Maybe now it's for the high level gear because the state of alpha but that'll change.
I would be for some gear being BOP that's crafted and your idea of a crafter providing a service to craft an item is a good one for allowing BOP items in this game. BUT I don't think that would do anything against RMT, people would still just buy the materials to have the item crafted they want. THIS would help with the gear saturation in the world, eventually there will be gear everywhere and it'll devalue everything else.
Ways to combat RMT.
1. Box price. Intrepid said there won't be one, I believe this is a critical mistake. The box cost is extra overhead for any bot farm small or large.
2. No game cards.
3. Use an identification verification system. My unpopular opinion, but this would cripple every farm operation. Breaking this would go from violating a games policy to identity theft.
4. Proactive campaign targeting sellers directly off sites. (probably already doing)
5. Reactive campaign going after both buyers and sellers from data. (probably already doing)
6. Passive campaign targeting dataset changes that are out of bounds.
i. could be watching someones exp gain, gold gain, material gain, ect data can be watched for flags. (I think they are doing something like this from what I've heard)
At the end of the day no lock is unpickable, but you can make it so hard it's just not worth it. Sure some will get around all guards, but much less overall. And the consequences for getting caught are higher, and the cost to start again raises the overhead. This would drive up prices of sellers, less people would be willing to pay the higher costs, not just because the cost but also the buyer can face the same consequences as the seller.
Use an identification verification system. ,, GOLDEN KEY to combat RMT imo
Not saying the other mats, just emblems. And again 1 click crafting in trade window for final product
Get process stuff, get emblems, get mats, from vendor.. Find Crafter, open up trade by bench, add Crafting fee and mats. and click the little box that says craft. He hits craft and accept on his end, gets the gold, and done. Would be easier than what we do now.
1) people will get all their own mats, including items from vendor
2.) Crafters risk is lowered from being ganked
3.) Person having item risk is lowered, from someone stealing mats.
4.) RMT is curved, BOP items
Worked in Game called DAOC for over 20 years,
Some great ideas , you got!
Never going to get kill RMT, I think goal should be to do everything you can to curve it. As long as it does not break the game. But this type of (final craft) in the crafting system has proven to work in other games. for multiple decades.. No need to to reinvent the wheel if something has worked for 20years+ why not really think about trying it imo...
PS send your grey granite my way, the amount of zinc, i need is silly! I will take my chances turning it into sand
The OP has a suggestion, but the question needs to be asked if this suggestion will remove all value of trading with other players. If the answer is no, then this suggestion has no impact on RMT other than to potentially shift it. It won't kurb or lower it if there is still value in trading with other players.
Since Ashes is a game where the economy is a central aspect of gameplay, there needs to always be value in trading with other players. This means you can not design your way out of RMT in this game - leaving detection and taking action the only real tool Intrepid have at their disposal for dealing with RMT.
i:identification verification system"
Golden Key...
.
There's just a limit to what detection tools can do. There's probably 5 or 10 comp/data sci devs working on them, and they're against an army of attackers. Ashes design is a bot farmers wet dream...
Intrepid likely isn't going to have the manpower to limit RMT to an amount that keeps the game in balance. Being able to tell without a doubt that someone exploited, or made a RMT purchase isn't easy, regardless of the tools they've developed to detect it. Some important data has be made known to the client, all that data on the client will be readable by the client. Someone with the know how will find ways to abuse that, passively. This is likely what we see with the overlay tool rumors (i say rumor, I haven't seen them). If you make everything server authenticated then you end up with lagging UI interfaces and actions. Anyone who has played FFXIV before RealmReborn you know what I mean. Sure it's a way to secure it... to the point of uselessness.
RMT will even exist on the the ID verified servers could call it a premium server, but the cost will be 10x more or higher.
So no, you can't get rid of all of it. We'll only know when it releases. If there's bots and rmt transactions, the economy will be fucked, the pvp will be fucked, all that will fuck the pve.
You probably need to give more examples, since some of the ones that have, couldn't do it if they had the same systems as Ashes, and many of the ones that seem to be 'unable to', can't do it because they tried but there was one system that had a gap.
Things like 'fight fixing' and other anti-competitive behaviours that come up in persistent competitive games still attract RMT, and Ashes doesn't work very well if it implements the multiple limits on free trading required to lock it down for more 'regular' RMT because of those.
Remember that for a thread like this, it's Steven you need to convince, not posters, most posters don't think the current way will work either.
I ask because every game I can think of that has an economy somewhat on par with what Ashes is intended to have (EVE and Archeage - there quite literally are no others) had to reply on tools rather than game design to have any effect at all.
ID systems are tools, not game design.
I don't think anyone suggested those. Might have missed it though. Blocking cloud services could though. Running a bot farm on remote computers makes perfect sense. Block linux probably isn't even legal at this point. And wouldn't do anything.
Cloud services, yeah. I understand but Linux, not sure if cheaters massively uses it.