Kalgore said:fixing gold spam on subscription based games isnt that hard.
1: Make it so only lvl 10 and above can talk in a global server wide chat. This stop trial account sform being used. EQ2 did this and gold spam in channels disappeared.
2: You can limit the amount of gold a lvl 1-9 can trade to others. This means you8 have to have apaid subscription to trade bought gold unless you sit there for 3 hours trading a few gold pieces at a time.
That's a great start. I also don't see why they couldn't put in some database flagging. Everything should be logged and have some flags pop for things like Player level <10 and currency >X. There are plenty of ways to stop the bots, but much of it will involve manual intervention. Being that this game is going subscription model, I think we'll all expect a good GM presence and bot/gold spam filtering system.
It is important not to mix up "bots" / "multiboxing" / "gold seller" / "gold farmer" ect.
Sure they CAN go hand in hand, but they don't have to. I am a gold farmer as well. Every MMO player is. To some degree.
I like the idea of restricting trade channels, or all but say / guild channels, to a level that is NOT part of a free demo. Make those spam guys pay for the game, pay a sub AND level the toon that will be banned like 10sec later. Make their spam more expensive then it is worth for them and we will be fine.
Not sure anyone pointed this out. I kind of read thru most posts.
Gold spammers and farmers were associated with "bottom feeders" which I agree 100%, but it takes Buyers for sellers to exist.
The Buyers are also Bottom Feeder losers as well. They can't play the game legit and earn something. They need a pay to win option.
Don't just ban the seller, make sure you Perma ban BOTH parties.
The whole go after the buyer thing, yeah that doesn't work, gaming companies have tried that for years and it is simply much more detrimental to their bottom line than its worth. Too many players when getting suspended or banned for purchasing gold with RL money, immediately claim that there was no purchasing of the gold he simply gave it to them... and without evidence beyond a reasonable doubt (they aren't gonna dig into their financial history) they are just gonna unban them because, its more dangerous if the person was telling the truth to keep them banned.
The key is to make a ban sting on the seller, if it costs 50$ for the game, and 15-20$ for the first month's sub, that means it's gonna cost you 65-70$ just for 1 account. Try to bot and get caught, and bam you're losing more than you're gaining, and they will stop even trying. For the "Free to play til level X" system, I believe that there needs to be a guild that you are automatically joined to when you are under that system, and you may only talk to that guild, and your group. You may not send tells or talk in chat channels that would allow you to spam your gold spammer BS.
Warlored said:Rallyd said:Bots are only a common occurence in F2P titles, any game with a subscription/box price up front, immediately weeds out most of them, because they can't afford to get banned, it affects the bottom line to a point where it is no longer financially feasible to continue.
Gold farmers/sellers fall under the same restrictions, however I'm sure we will see some of it, but if you were paying 50$ for a box, and 15-20$ for a sub just to spam your website and get banned in a day, how long can you do that?
The reason this garbage has inundated our games is simply because of F2P, that honestly is it. F2P = roach motel, no consequences for ban.
Sure maybe Bots and spammers are more common in F2P but I would have to disagree with it not being just as much a problem in subscription titles too. Every game I've played it has been a problem to some degree.
WoW, FFXIV are a couple that come to immediate mind.
It's a problem regardless and should be planned accordingly because being proactive is the best approach in my opinion.
as a former player of WoW yes there were bots and farmers but they were very quie about it and you had to look for them on line... That was till they started the free trial then it went nuts you couple report 100 ppl in an hour and 200 more would start up (obviously exaggerated numbers). EQ have very few farmers bothers till they made you able to trade money between players it was progressivelay worse after that point. Short of no in game economy there is not much you can do to eliminate this problem just need players to report s spected farmer bots and have them banned. Ban any trading on non paid accounts and no chat group except say and group there will be no store. There are many ideas on dealing with this but the only real fix is players policing themselves. No F2P will help as well but might turn players from the game.
The solution to Gold sellers is simple but company greed prevents it. Ban the BUYER and SELLER. A good server log can be set to flag characters transferring large amounts of gold around. Follow the logs and IP ban everyone associated with trading from the account from start to finish. Of course mistakes will happen occasionally put in a good appeal process.
One of the worst things any developer can do is punish the entire playerbase for the faults of a few. Making the game less fun, engaging, and interdependent for the sake of attempting to prevent what cannot be prevented. SquareEnix tried this with the first iteration of FFXIV and it was a disaster of epic proportions.
You cannot prevent real money trade in an MMO. What you can do is have an active GM system in place to quickly take care of these situation when they pop up. This is where modern MMO's fail terribly.
I've never heard of a MMO failing due to botting or gold sellers. I'm confident that the team at VR have enough experience dealing with this kind of behavior to know of ways to mitigate the negative effects they cause. Between them building the game so that the client is as simple as possible in order to keep most of the abusable stuff server-side, possibly even getting the server to check if any client files have been altered, and them hopefully having a large, strong GM force, I doubt we'll have any huge issues with these kind of things.
Happytrees said:I've never heard of a MMO failing due to botting or gold sellers. I'm confident that the team at VR have enough experience dealing with this kind of behavior to know of ways to mitigate the negative effects they cause. Between them building the game so that the client is as simple as possible in order to keep most of the abusable stuff server-side, possibly even getting the server to check if any client files have been altered, and them hopefully having a large, strong GM force, I doubt we'll have any huge issues with these kind of things.
People have to understand that gold sellers are not always botters. You need to research that more. Its players like you and me that tend to sell stuff to these people, knownly or not.
They provide services, and also sell you some out of game items.
If an external service offers you game time for 10 dollars per month, and in game offer you it for 18.00 per month, and you know from a friend its safe but risky.
Not saying its right or wrong, but all games worth a ****, are doing this and its very hard to control. Sometimes the resources are quite a bit to spend in order to stop these people from doing it.
I have yet to see a game completely fail because of this.
If your refering to swg? they didnt fail because of that.... look deeper into it.
What VR should do is have a harsh penalty for cheaters/exploiters and botters most games i have play for the first offense you get bann from the game for 3 days. To be honest this is not a punishmment all this does is let the player catch up on his sleep. What i wouldd love to see is first time offenders be bann for 7 days min and to have all gear and gold taken aways from all toons on said account and if they have multiple accounts i am sure the devs have a way of seeing this and can apply the penalty to the other accounts as well.
Endalmir said:Hieromonk said:A new EULA can make VRi rich on all the people paying $50 bucks for the game, and getting banned from it. After getting stung a few times, these gold farmers will simply move on to more profitable games.
You may be underestimating the profit margins found in reselling virtual currencies. Spending tens of thousands of dollars on accounts and subscriptions is nothing but a line item at the end of the year. Many of these operations bring in multimillions USD from a single semi-popular game. I've lived in China on and off over the last decade and once I've seen a tiny outfit being run in the backroom of a China Mobile reseller shop in Guangdong province, in a room not much larger than a closet, it had two guys running what looked to be a few dozen WoW accounts across a half dozen monitors. This is a drop in the bucket to the larger operations running out there.
Quite the opposite.
You are underestimating what I know & need to look deeper into my suggestions for nixing such activities within the game. It is a matter of economics.
Secondly, nice story but it really doesn't matter what you have seen.. (farming dens are well documented by the way), it only matters if they can make money within a game. Pantheon is not an easy game, combat won't be repetitive and efficiently macroed, nor an easy leveling game. It is oldshcool hardcore MMORPG that will take years to traverse Terminus..
Farmers & Botters will have some serious time invested into their characters.... with a strict EULA, VRi can perma ban these accounts, or even ban the use of that CC# again for further accounts, etc. Make it too risky for them, and have that risk unfolded within a new type of EULA for MMORPG. Giving VRi more control over player accounts, etc.
BANNING.. means these farmers and hackers have to start all over and re-invest into Pantheon, both with $$ USD and their TIME into their character. Time that they can spend elsewhere in another game, making higher profits...
edit: Understand, my suggestion was only one of the several I would put in place. I have no fear of botters and farmers in Pantheon. VRi can use the community to police the servers, with a good system of guides and GMs, etc.. My earlier post was one of economic burden for these types.
Hieromonk said:Endalmir said:Hieromonk said:A new EULA can make VRi rich on all the people paying $50 bucks for the game, and getting banned from it. After getting stung a few times, these gold farmers will simply move on to more profitable games.
You may be underestimating the profit margins found in reselling virtual currencies. Spending tens of thousands of dollars on accounts and subscriptions is nothing but a line item at the end of the year. Many of these operations bring in multimillions USD from a single semi-popular game. I've lived in China on and off over the last decade and once I've seen a tiny outfit being run in the backroom of a China Mobile reseller shop in Guangdong province, in a room not much larger than a closet, it had two guys running what looked to be a few dozen WoW accounts across a half dozen monitors. This is a drop in the bucket to the larger operations running out there.
Quite the opposite.
You are underestimating what I know & need to look deeper into my suggestions for nixing such activities within the game. It is a matter of economics.
Secondly, nice story but it really doesn't matter what you have seen.. (farming dens are well documented by the way), it only matters if they can make money within a game. Pantheon is not an easy game, combat won't be repetitive and efficiently macroed, nor an easy leveling game. It is oldshcool hardcore MMORPG that will take years to traverse Terminus..
Farmers & Botters will have some serious time invested into their characters.... with a strict EULA, VRi can perma ban these accounts, or even ban the use of that CC# again for further accounts, etc. Make it too risky for them, and have that risk unfolded within a new type of EULA for MMORPG. Giving VRi more control over player accounts, etc.
BANNING.. means these farmers and hackers have to start all over and re-invest into Pantheon, both with $$ USD and their TIME into their character. Time that they can spend elsewhere in another game, making higher profits...
I have to agree with you Heiromonk.
malist said:Kalgore said:fixing gold spam on subscription based games isnt that hard.
1: Make it so only lvl 10 and above can talk in a global server wide chat. This stop trial account sform being used. EQ2 did this and gold spam in channels disappeared.
2: You can limit the amount of gold a lvl 1-9 can trade to others. This means you8 have to have apaid subscription to trade bought gold unless you sit there for 3 hours trading a few gold pieces at a time.
That's a great start. I also don't see why they couldn't put in some database flagging. Everything should be logged and have some flags pop for things like Player level <10 and currency >X. There are plenty of ways to stop the bots, but much of it will involve manual intervention. Being that this game is going subscription model, I think we'll all expect a good GM presence and bot/gold spam filtering system.
Logging sounds like a great idea - on the surface, but quickly becomes unwieldy, time-consumming, and very expensive. I don't think Pantheon wants to get into the data-warehousing business. Not to mention you then need massive amounts of storage, analytics tools, dedicated DBA/Data Analysts and more.
OMG this is a biggie for me as well......and in all honesty i never could understand why they werent banning more accounts. Sure i understand this effects the bottom line if your banning a portion of your subscription base. But here was the thing for me, if the game is truly successful, they'll be back. They'll keep dropping 50.00 for another digital download, and another chunk for the monthly sub. Doesnt than mean the company itself is actually making more money cause not only does the sub money come back, but they're selling more digitial copies to boot. BAN AWAY!!! its actually profitable to ban accts if the game remains succesful.
The other thing, and i cant remember what game this was, but with spammers you could right click their name and report them. If enough ppl (say 30-50 in the same channel) were to report the spammer, the acct was automatically flagged for no chat. A GM type person would then be able to check the logs at a time when it was more convient, and ban the acct.
I remember that same company complaining that a big problem they had was stolen credit cards, ppl would use them, spam a new acct for the weekend, and be banned by monday morning, all at no cost to the spammers. Once an acct is flagged, no more characters could even be made. Lets face it, alot of people are not smart about thier passwords either. I dont know how to fix those issues?
Watching 3rd party websites, i've done a whois search on many of the past gold selling sites listed in the spam, and its 99% of the time its a site registered in china or korea. I would think limiting those countries access would be a good start. I think there was a 20/20 or 60 minutes epsisode years ago that showed gaming sweat shops in china, that allowed kids to play as much as they wanted for free, as long as they turned over all the gold at the end of their playing session to the owner of the sweatshop (internet cafes). They even got bonuses for farming named gear and turning it in. This effects alot of people, well cause camps are farmed to death, people want/need gear, and you cant compete with a country of over a billion ppl when it comes to gaining access to parts of the game when farm central is set up 24/7.
The bottom line is..............people trying to enjoy a game, leave when it seems like its not being handled. Companies let the spammers/goldsellers/botters get away with this, and they're not there to improve the game or even enjoy it. Just steal from it, when it gets to the point that the good people leave, and the "bottom dwellers" are left........the game is dead. This doesnt have to be even a dramatic number at first, but its a slow death, spiraling out of control. The old saying, "its hard to be nice and then be hard, compared to being hard at first and moving towards nice" type of thing.
Last of all, free trials or friends passes, im sorry this has simply never truly worked. Sure it limits some things, especially, trial island type thing/or level requirements. But accts that have been gained access to thru fishing or because some just dont have a unique password, they just pass out friends access cause they dont care if an acct gets banned or not if their not paying for it.
Ok, now im just starting to not just babble, but state the obvious to some of you. I dont pretend to know much about protocols, or software related issues. So, i'll leave it up to the people that do, and hopefully they can get some solutions.