One of the greatest plagues of MMOs today are gold sellers.
It came to the point where some MMO companies decided to join them if they can't beat them... but that leaves a bad taste. It's like a government deciding that if they can't get rid of prostitution, they should be the main organizers of it and at least get the money.
Practical ideas:
1) Mercilessly perma-ban anyone who spams chat channels or email; ban every account paid by the same credit card as well.
This is easy since text chat can be logged on the server and thus it's trivial to prove if someone spammed with an offer.
In-game email text can be logged as well, so it's as easy to use as basis for banning.
2) Any test/free accounts should not be able to talk in any channels except to answer people who sent them a tell, and should not be able to email either.
In games that allowed trial accounts to talk in zone chats, sellers used them without fear, since if one is banned, they just switch to the next one, they were free anyway...
3) Limit how much money a character can hold, both on himself and in his bank, based on the level of the character.
This will force gold farmers/sellers to level their chars, which hurts when they are banned, since in a serious MMO it should take a lot of time and effort to get to max level, and it takes gear as well, which also takes time to get.
4) Limit what items can a low level character have in the bank or in the personal inventory. There's no reason for a level 5 character to have level 60 items in the inventory or in the bank.
For regular players, provide means to acquire more bank space if needed. I'm not saying it should be free or easy to get, but it should be possible, with time, effort and grind, so that there's no need for low level characters that are used as mules.
5) Alternatively, if mules are allowed, or if there are special characters as automated vendors for a player (which in itself is a bad idea, it decreases human interaction, it's better to have only trades in-person), make a condition that you need a level X character on account, in order to have 1 mule allowed to have up to level X items. In this way you keep the need to level at least one char, which hurts when banned.
6) Keep track of where the gold sellers come from, by their IP. Yes, identifying the geographic origin by IP is iffy... but it's still better than having them unchecked on a normal server.
If it turns out that from one specific area of this planet there is 50% or more accounts who are just gold sellers, either IP ban them all or move them all to a separate server. Create a server just for such cases, where you can't easily differentiate on an individual level, but where it's known that most people from a specific area are gold sellers, and then they can play among their own kind.
7) Sting ops - from time to time, Pantheon employees can create fake accounts, contact gold sellers, request to buy gold or items, then ban every account of the sellers that respond. Ban them, their friends, their families, and the entire genealogical ancestry back to cockroaches and centipedes.
Really as long as people are buying there is a limited amount that can be done to stop the selling, they will always find a work around IF its profitable for them. I would propose something like this (assuming we get the game we want with a death penalty with a sting, and slow leveling) For the buyer you lose all gold and 10 lvls of xp to the highest leveled toon on your account. I would also say BAN any accounts that are caught selling. If its pay to play, then the amount of farmers should be less I would think, but the only way to really stop them is to not make it worth their time and effort. If only a very small number of people are buying this would cut their profit margins and make it not worthwhile.
If we strictly only go after sellers they will get crafty like only selling from low level toons and just launder the money to them from the toons farming. If we trace IP addresses then they will probably just use public internet sites. They can always stay a step ahead, just a question of "is it worth it to them?"
I will give you a couple of examples of some crafty farmers I have seen that have used to skirt detection . They may send you an item, and then they purchase it from you from another toon for the agreed upon amount. Another I have seen is they may buy stacks of an item that sell to a vendor for a high amount, then trade that to the buyer and the buyer could then sell it to the vendor for the $. Things like that could be almost impossible to track. I am sure there are many other methods, so we have to make it unappealing to buy.
Side note as to #4 there may be a reason for that as I believe they said "twinking" will be allowed in Pantheon, meaning you can give your new low level alt some high level gear, gear for the most part wont have level restrictions aside from some raid drops I would assume. Not sure if that has changed but I do have to admit I did like that feature in EQ
Some people will always buy stuff, but at least we can clear the chat channels and email. If I don't see it, it's already sort of a win.
If they can spam me all day long, I don't want to play the game.
As for twinking, it should be done only within a small level range. A character level 10 should be allowed to equip an item level 20, maybe... but not an item level 60 or it would be OP to the point of ruining the game for everyone else.
Maybe a system from EQ with required and recommended levels - at least the required level to equip, and if the character is lower than the recommended level, he can equip but all the stats get scaled down.
And raid gear must not be tradeable at all. Some things should remain holy.
Aethor said:
3) Limit how much money a character can hold, both on himself and in his bank, based on the level of the character.This will force gold farmers/sellers to level their chars, which hurts when they are banned, since in a serious MMO it should take a lot of time and effort to get to max level, and it takes gear as well, which also takes time to get.
This is not a bad idea at all. In other games it might not be as effective but in one like Pantheon that is group oriented and overall harder to solo I can see how this approach could be pretty effective. Who is gonna group with jjjjkkkeee who also doesn't speak? Just other sellers so they'd have to box. And if it is difficult to get high enough to carry a significant amount of money perhaps it would give the admins time to find and ban them. Whatever VR has planned, I hope they take a proactive stance against the gold sellers. Nothing worse than constant seller spam and harvesting bots running all over.
Aethor said:
One of the greatest plagues of MMOs today are gold sellers.
It came to the point where some MMO companies decided to join them if they can't beat them... but that leaves a bad taste. It's like a government deciding that if they can't get rid of prostitution, they should be the main organizers of it and at least get the money.
Practical ideas:
1) Mercilessly perma-ban anyone who spams chat channels or email; ban every account paid by the same credit card as well.
This is easy since text chat can be logged on the server and thus it's trivial to prove if someone spammed with an offer.
In-game email text can be logged as well, so it's as easy to use as basis for banning.
2) Any test/free accounts should not be able to talk in any channels except to answer people who sent them a tell, and should not be able to email either.
In games that allowed trial accounts to talk in zone chats, sellers used them without fear, since if one is banned, they just switch to the next one, they were free anyway...
3) Limit how much money a character can hold, both on himself and in his bank, based on the level of the character.
This will force gold farmers/sellers to level their chars, which hurts when they are banned, since in a serious MMO it should take a lot of time and effort to get to max level, and it takes gear as well, which also takes time to get.
4) Limit what items can a low level character have in the bank or in the personal inventory. There's no reason for a level 5 character to have level 60 items in the inventory or in the bank.
For regular players, provide means to acquire more bank space if needed. I'm not saying it should be free or easy to get, but it should be possible, with time, effort and grind, so that there's no need for low level characters that are used as mules.
5) Alternatively, if mules are allowed, or if there are special characters as automated vendors for a player (which in itself is a bad idea, it decreases human interaction, it's better to have only trades in-person), make a condition that you need a level X character on account, in order to have 1 mule allowed to have up to level X items. In this way you keep the need to level at least one char, which hurts when banned.
6) Keep track of where the gold sellers come from, by their IP. Yes, identifying the geographic origin by IP is iffy... but it's still better than having them unchecked on a normal server.
If it turns out that from one specific area of this planet there is 50% or more accounts who are just gold sellers, either IP ban them all or move them all to a separate server. Create a server just for such cases, where you can't easily differentiate on an individual level, but where it's known that most people from a specific area are gold sellers, and then they can play among their own kind.
7) Sting ops - from time to time, Pantheon employees can create fake accounts, contact gold sellers, request to buy gold or items, then ban every account of the sellers that respond. Ban them, their friends, their families, and the entire genealogical ancestry back to cockroaches and centipedes.
#3,&4) Mules
#5) why would mules not be allowed? its a time honored tradition dating back to Eq1 for us packrats, I for one dont sell any items in a new MMO unless like in some mmos where they have notes attached to Vendor trash items which label them as such but i dont think pantheon will go this route.
#1,2&7) love these ideas Entrapment FTW
You typically can't win a fight against the people selling the gold, you can ban thousands of accounts and they will still have thousands more. A lot of them seem to have unlimited accounts even in pay to play games. I've heard a lot of them use hacked accounts and stolen credit cards...whether or not this is true, who knows...but it sure seems to make sense.
I think that the problem and the solution lies with people who buy the gold, not the ones who sell it. Buying the gold should be punishable just as severely as selling it. If the devs make it known that if you get caught you will get perma banned, people will be less likely to buy it. They could make it well known that devs will pose as gold sellers in order to catch people buying and then ban them. This should be sufficient to scare people out of buying. If you take away the people who want to buy gold, there will be no market for the sellers and they will go away.
Keiiek said:I have a more practical idea. If 10 or more people report a person for gold spamming, that person becomes attackable by other players and is visually displayed above their heads unless they make the case that they aren't gold spammers. Let the community handle things.
Keiiek said:Then, perhaps, allow time for a GM or guide to determine that person is, in fact, a gold spammer, then make him attackable.
I personally don't care about gold sellers. What I care about is the automation of the process which effects the economy, introducing an unnatural amount of currency, spam, and the monopolization of content from normal players. As long as things of value are obtained in the open world and fairly, I couldn't care less who they go to or what they paid out of game.
In a group-centric MMO I worry about this sort of thing even less. Every game that is challenging and where competition is present will always have RMT.
Aethor said:
Some people will always buy stuff, but at least we can clear the chat channels and email. If I don't see it, it's already sort of a win.
If they can spam me all day long, I don't want to play the game.
As for twinking, it should be done only within a small level range. A character level 10 should be allowed to equip an item level 20, maybe... but not an item level 60 or it would be OP to the point of ruining the game for everyone else.
Maybe a system from EQ with required and recommended levels - at least the required level to equip, and if the character is lower than the recommended level, he can equip but all the stats get scaled down.
And raid gear must not be tradeable at all. Some things should remain holy.
That is not necessarily true. If the effect of stats and damage capabilities increase with levels (as they did in EQ1), higher level equipment only has so much benefit for a lower level player. In EQ for instance, how much hp you got from STA went up throughout your levels, hence the reason you'd use pure +hp gear when twinking a new char rather than stamina gear. It was the same way with str/atk and mana from wis/int. There was also hard caps on how much damage you could do prior to lvl 20 and 40.
Voila, no further restrictions necessary.
I'm certainly in favour of harsh penalties for anyone participating in RMT activities, but I'd say equally harsh penalties for anyone who is purchasing as well as selling. Let the ban hammer fall on first offenders, period. Dry up the demand and the suppliers will move to other games.
I do like the suggestion of limiting the amount of gold a character can carry based on level, but I think it should be the highest level in the account, not per character. The idea is to make it hurt the gold farmer when their account is banned, not to prevent legitimate players from buying and selling from a mule or perhaps a low level character that they're doing crafting with.
Gold spammers change characters and accounts with far too much frequency for any sort of system where the player community is expected to ostracize or beat their scrawny butt into the ground in game.
I'm not in favour of any system which restricts new players from using zone or community channels in game. This punishes the vast majority of legitimate players and discourages interaction. We want to encourage player cooperation, not train new players to go it alone from the outset.
Where the player community can have direct policing involvement is through a /report mechanism. Set a threshold where after a certain number of /reports issued from different player accounts against a specific account, that account and all characters gets muted until they can be investigated. Muting would include blocking that account from trading coin or items from any character. If certain characters or guilds abuse the /report mechanism, they themselves would be open to discipline.
I think it's important for the back end systems to track the IP addresses used by each account, but only by host, not by subnet. In other words, no person should be banned because they live in a bad IP neighbourhood. IP addresses should be flagged when accounts are reported for spam activity and any trade associated with a flagged IP should also be flagged as suspicious. The assumption here is obviously that if I'm trading with someone who is spamming, I'm probably involved with RMT - I'm either moving items/coin to another mule or I'm a customer.
If the devs play hard ball with RMT from the outset we'll have a much healthier player community and a more viable in game economy.
Celandor said:
I'm certainly in favour of harsh penalties for anyone participating in RMT activities, but I'd say equally harsh penalties for anyone who is purchasing as well as selling. Let the ban hammer fall on first offenders, period. Dry up the demand and the suppliers will move to other games.
...
It will never happen, especially in a game that is hard, involves time sinks, and where items are rare. Even if you ban the majority of the people doing it, people will adjust and find new ways.
RMT is the sign of a booming game economy. While I can appreciate trying to prevent such pay to win advancement, the best stuff (raid gear) will seldom be available through RMT outside of character sales; and the best way to prevent that is to continually expand and improve the game so people don't want to sell their characters to begin with. Besides, in a game that is PvE focused, it hardly effects you and just knowing your character is 100% legit makes you appreciate it all the more.
Wow, I must be an idiot. This is my third attempt to post a reply and the editor keeps eating my response.
I don't think RMT is the sign of a thriving economy, but rather a consequence of having a large number of people collected together who are willing to flex their credit card rather than take the time to play their character. The only thing thriving is the bank account of the RMT farmer.
RMT does have a negative impact in PVE games in two regard. First it accelerates inflation in the game economy. Second, the RMT farmers tend to monopolize key camps, sometimes for days at a time. I don't mind competing with players who are doing level appropriate content, but I lose patience when dealing with farmers. There needs to be a balance between competition for content and being shut out to the point where I lose interest in the game.
We have very different opinions on this, but what fun would it be playing games and discussing them on forums if everyone played and thought identically?
It is up to both the players and us as a team to control RMT in our game, we can only do so much on our end with monitoring, admin, banning etc. but if you guys don't buy it, then they don't have a market to sell too and they will not bother farming something that they can't make money from.
One side can't control it alone, but together we can wipe most if not all of it out in Pantheon. ;)
Celandor said:
Wow, I must be an idiot. This is my third attempt to post a reply and the editor keeps eating my response.
I don't think RMT is the sign of a thriving economy, but rather a consequence of having a large number of people collected together who are willing to flex their credit card rather than take the time to play their character. The only thing thriving is the bank account of the RMT farmer.
RMT does have a negative impact in PVE games in two regard. First it accelerates inflation in the game economy. Second, the RMT farmers tend to monopolize key camps, sometimes for days at a time. I don't mind competing with players who are doing level appropriate content, but I lose patience when dealing with farmers. There needs to be a balance between competition for content and being shut out to the point where I lose interest in the game.
We have very different opinions on this, but what fun would it be playing games and discussing them on forums if everyone played and thought identically?
We both agree that RMT can have a negative effect on the game economy and that it shouldn't be left entirely unchecked. I just know from experience that it will not be stopped, and that the greatest negative impact RMT has had on games was due to botting, not just people selling items legitimately obtained.
Kilsin said:It is up to both the players and us as a team to control RMT in our game, we can only do so much on our end with monitoring, admin, banning etc. but if you guys don't buy it, then they don't have a market to sell too and they will not bother farming something that they can't make money from.
One side can't control it alone, but together we can wipe most if not all of it out in Pantheon. ;)
YES! It takes two, or should I say both the cooperation of the gamers and developers.
I would say that it is much more effective to perma ban BUYERS than the sellers, as I have noticed in the past sellers seem to re-buy the game and level up all over again and they make so much money doing so that buying the game again is nothing to them.. Just a mere setback. Also, when you start to ban the buyers you're drying up the demand for ill gotten gains which will drive away gold sellers. Afterall, they are there to make money.
Gold sellers these days have gotten really savvy... I've heard from friends I play with on FFXIV that they will actually have potential buyers put something on the marketboard for a set amount of GIL and then the gil seller will buy it for the amount paid by the gil buyer... So you see, it is laundered at that point.
Developers have the responsibility think and carry out inventive ways to combat the cunning players, and players have a responsibility to play fair. If most everyone can do this we can have an easier time. But realisitically it is a problem that is here to stay and the best we can do is do our part.
There was a point in time when i actually used a gold service to buy something. This was at a time when i was so frustrated with the game (eq1) and wanted an item to complete a quest and it was perma-camped that i caved and bought it. That being said... its impossible to get rid of them. The best we can do is make it a blackmarket so that it is not so visible. I hate seeing the emails and the messages on screen. If we can drive them underground and let them know its not tolerated in public - then i think that is a win. Make people search out the gold and not have it freely available. Have a dedicated fuction to report spam and let guides punish those that spam stuff like this.. even if its a timeout for a week.
What i do not want to see is people offering AFK leveling either. I understand offering legit grouping services through the mentor system and even asking or getting a fair price for that service (system built-in), but i dont want PL AFK 1-60 1-110 spam in my chats!
Keiiek said:make gold spammers worth quadruple xp.
Bwahaha. I love this.
Take it further. Make gold spammers AND the people who buy from gold spammers killable by other players, and lootable. Put a serverwide announcement out there.
"TRALYAN HAS BEEN ACCUSED OF THE MOST HEINOUS OF CRIMES, AND THE WRATH OF THE GODS HAS FALLEN UPON HIS PERSON. YOU ARE CHARGED WITH HUNTING DOWN THE INFIDEL, AND WILL BE REWARDED FOR YOUR SERVICES TO THE PANTHEON."
And then /popcorn.
Flag gold spammers as attackable, remove their ability to chat, reduce their level to 1, snare them and make them worth an insane amount of XP. You're welcome.
http://www.fantheonmmo.com/topic/92-anti-rmt-sheriff/
Please read the 10 golden rules before checking out the PDF. Feel free to respond with any feedback. There are other aspects of the idea that are not delved into, particularly with how the Sheriff (and his vigilantes) would operate. If anybody is genuinely interested in learning more, feel free to PM me on Discord @ 1AD7#7153
Trial accounts cannot /shout, /tell, /ooc whatever other than /say more than 1 time every 5 minutes until level 5 (or whatever level requires at least a full 10 hours of play) unless there is a paid box behind them.
Ban any account or character that is RMT with a ban of their IP permanently.
Paid accounts that RMT get no refund of anything.
Trial accounts can only carry something like 5 platinum on them and 5 more in bank (something equal to what a level 20 would have earned or so...something no legitimate free account should have, need or legitimately have acquired).
Kilsin said:It is up to both the players and us as a team to control RMT in our game, we can only do so much on our end with monitoring, admin, banning etc. but if you guys don't buy it, then they don't have a market to sell too and they will not bother farming something that they can't make money from.
One side can't control it alone, but together we can wipe most if not all of it out in Pantheon. ;)
Absolutely the wrong answer.
Players are not designing and coding this MMO. If good quality hires and planning are not taken in this phase and beyond, you will have major security issues and gold farming will be the least of it.
I as a subscribing player do not expect to be paying for the burden of managing cheaters, spammers, hackers, exploiting and lastly gold farmers.
Pushing the responsibility of dealing with these issues to players is unacceptable, and additionally opens more paths for player abuse thus compounding any existing issues.
Case in point, creating tools allowing players to make reports and complaints that bring scrutiny(on possible actions) on other players is just handing a gift to all the trolls, cheaters and griefers. This underbelly of players that have zero interest in following rules, standards and procedures will simply exploit any such tools to direct grief against otherwise innocent players as well as bogging down game moderation with excessive spam.
With FTP MMO's these kinds of low life activities are what is expected. Falling under the title of "you get what you pay for".
But with an MMO where players are paying a monthly premium, being subjected to exploits, cheating, hackers, spammers and gold farming is not business as usual. And telling players they need to step up and manage it is even more improper.
Paying players with only a few precious hours to play are not going to be happy having to deal with chat spammers blowing up immersion, gold farming camp exploiters, teleporting hackers and more.
This is not the first rodeo for many at VR, so if they are not hiring, planning and designing to deal with these issues, all bets are off for any sustained critical and economical success.