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Would removing gifting and direct sales eliminate all kinds of RMT?
Kionashi
Member
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?
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
Care to elaborate?
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?
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.
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
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?
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.
You will never remove RMT, you can only suppress it. People will sell things of perceived value, that's just the way people work.
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
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.
[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.
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:
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.
Make note that none of the times I mentioned RMT here in the last hour was referring to bots. It's non botted RMT by real people from poor countries that's the issue. Botting most likely won't be alive at all in a couple decades due to digital fingerprint recognition. Even bots trained on human data has non human like patterns.
Selling a rare sword for 1 gold is not against the rules. Nor will it be because people give stuff away for free all the time, many times to strangers. In my time in online games I have found some people absolutely adore giving away stuff, lots of times very expensive stuff.
That's the problem, "behaviors that indicate breaking of RMT policies" isn't different from some regular players behavior. At least up until a certain point, and in that case the gold sellers just make a new account and switch their VPN server and MAC address to wipe all their flags. It's the cost of doing business.
The behaviors are hard to distinguish ESPECIALLY in AoC, where trading and funneling gold/resources to single people is going to be a huge part of the game.
Read a couple other posts in this thread today. Testing phases will have a completely different demographic of people playing than when the game goes live, entirely different.
Neither did I.
Agreed, it is not against the rule, but if that is consistent behavior it will become a recognizable, suspicious pattern.
Also agreed, but the behavior doesn't change. Account of goldfarmer X goes offline to avoid pattern recognition, the goldfarmer switches to another account, but the guy still is going online on 5am and playing till 8pm only farming with no more progression. That is also a recognizable pattern: Non-progressive gameplay with regularly switching characters that than behave like a previously online character. Independent of VPNs and MAC addresses the suspicious ingame behavior observed by the system just hops to another character.
Agreed, but that is exactly the point. What are the chances of a huge number of goldfarmers buying into the alpha on the offchance that they might be able to manipulate the pattern recognition software of a game that might become a good target for RMT exploits later on?
It might just be me not understanding the technicalities fully but for now I just don't see how it would be a likely that RMT will be so prevalent in the game that is warrants the amount of panic or insistance on change as it is currently the case. Ultimately, it will probably die down after a few weeks like the "guilds will zerg story archs into any directiong the see fit" or "corruption is too strong/weak" dramas.
Outside of that its the devs banning people participating in RMT to the point no one want to risk it.
Farming a ton of valuable stuff by hand is not illegal. Selling that stuff for mass gold is not illegal. It's only when you give that money away and get real money in return is it illegal. But the game client and developers can't see the real cash transactions.
In ESO I used a minor dev mistake with daily crafting writs, that stayed in game for 3 months, to amass a huge amount of potion mats. More than I could use in years. Had I wanted to monetize what I collected it would have been worth over $500 from just my one account, and I wasn't that serious about it.
I imagine RMT figured out how to bot the crafting writs, but even if they didn't, there were addons that allowed you to do 10 characters worth of writs in 30 min. Selling your crafting writ proceeds from 10 characters was a lot of gold. Ballpark $20-50 a day for one account. (note I stopped playing ESO 3-4 years ago, so none of this is valid anymore)
When it's your job to make money off of a game, you find a way.