Simple solution: Pay someone hourly to remain logged into the game with the authority to ban gold spamming inside of the game! How freakin hard is it?! We all see, it only takes 1 person to fix it. Put me in, I'll do this job.
This would heavily curb gold farmers/spammers and force them to rethink their time. They'll find a new loop hole, but it'll take a few years or more.
when i read this article. I thought of ONE game. Silkroad Online. You can't tell me that they're nto getting some sort fo kickback there. AS every sever is full of bots, and they just keep opening up more servers. Now you can't tell me they're nto getting some sort of kickback from this. B/c every server's full of goldbots. Almost all of them have less than 1% of the player population in them. So there's NO WAY they're making enough money to keep all of those servers up considering almost no real players are on any of the servers. Most of the games out there that have bots have them being "rapant" i've yet to see any of them. When i tried PW-MS which is by far one of the biggest failures of all time yet still somehow is still going, i saw 3 bots in game. In WoW during my 45days that i played it, i saw NO bots at all. I saw no one cheating, and everything was nice.
Now of course i've never played any NCSoft game, and that's simply b/c most of their games have never interested me. I'm probably going to try out GW2 since it looks really interesting. Now about aion, i looked at some gameplay videos of the game, and well the animations poorly done, and the graphics just dont' seem to be that high. Tack on this talk about rampant bots and cheaters, i don't think i'll be trying it till it's under control.
1.) No trading between characters/accounts at all. You sell or give your item (acquired by crafting or looting) to an NPC or an NPC auction house and they resell it to another player at a fixed rate(or variable based on in game availablity of the item at the time of sale) - and then send you back the money. 2.) Force antivirus on the client - same as business VPN solutions - if your not running AV or it is not up to date, then you fail the logon. 3.) Run your own scan after the AV check - looking for keyloggers or IP/MAC spoofing software on the client. - Do this in the open - not hiding it from the client. 4.) Ban people caught in RMT based on IP/MAC/credit card information. 5.) Enforce password complexity.
For starters...
No flaming from me. I've actually thought about #1 for quite some time. Sure, players who enjoy being in game moguls will get upset but there is no reason that every game has to be about every aspect of the mmo experience.
I've often thought that not allowing any direct transfers between characters is the way to go.
It won't work for more then a few hours. Many of the RMT transactions now are provided through in game auction services and similar. Dummy transactions used to mask the actual purpose.
I disagree that "it won't work." The auction houses ARE a type of "direct transfer" between characters. And yes, you are correct in that often gold sellers NOW are using the auction houses to set up dummy transactions. How many times have we all seen that grey item on the broker or auction house selling for 2000g and there are oh, say, 5 of them listed at the exact same price?
Sadly these online criminals have gotten pretty crafty at their crime.
Do I want to give up trading with guild mates and shopping the AH? No. But I do think that could work.
Originally posted by reowens3It's a hard core solution and takes a lot of guts - but the only REAL answer is to ban the buyers. As some one who works with computers all day everyday, I KNOW it is possible to track and monitor EVERY account. So, one strike a warning, two strikes, reset [as in back to zero], the account, three strikes permaban the account. And MAKE SURE EVERYONE IN GAME KNOWS IT. 90% of the players I know in Aion [at least Elyos, I've not played as Asmo] play the game straight up. That said, it is demoralizing to have to race bots to quest mobs - repeatedly [see Heiron]. To put up with "hey hey hey" from xcvfgcg a gold selling bot set up in the Hall of Prosperity in Sanctum... advertising where to get the cheapest ki. And watch as the price of critical mat slowly climbs as the bots reduce availability and watch as the price of gear made from those mats climbs and watch as the general price increase + gold buyers results in a fractured economy and watch as players - real players, not the casual player, leave in 1000s. You mentioned that you work for NCSoft. Rightly or wrongly, they have the worst reputation in the botting, rmt and gold selling. [L2 anyone?] After waiting 2 years for Aion, I am less than three months from cancelling my account. The gold buyers are enabling the bots, the bots are ruining the game and NCSoft seemingly has no way of getting a handle on things. I would suggest they ban the buyers, create insta-ban for botters [if you abuse or misuse, then YOU get insta-banned]. And - gasp... sell ki in game themselves. Think... they are in the roll of the central bank and these bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking algae eating bots are pirates and parasites. It takes industrial sized cojones and a willingness to engage in some outside thinking. It's a certainty that if they don't, great game or not, Aion will fail. And speaking for one, I will NEVER play another NCSoft game again. I am paying premium price for this service, to find an apparent reluctance [no offense, you are one person, there are multiple servers] on the part of the company to address this in a meaningful, substantive way only reinforces the opinion that you mention, that the company *somehow* is profiting from the situation. I know that in my Legion, I am starting to see my senior officers logging in less frequently - and these are hard core players.... but when you have played fair and hard, and get in a fight with someone 15 levels under you but who has solid gold gear, armor and weps - someone who's character SCREAMS "I cheat" - meh.....
Urantia - BG - Valkyies, Israphel
Wall of text batman. But anyway, here is food for thought for both you and Lum if he is reading.
I know that NCWest might have a different attitude toward RMT and gold farming BUT what can you do (what can you could possibly do) if the main corporate in Korea keep having a neutral stance and even leaning toward approving this kind of behavior in the first place?
This might be a cultural different but RMT (meaning buying in-game items, golds with real money) is pretty normal and even standard act in Korea. A lot of people do this and they don't really care much about gold farmer really. They might be annoyed by the bots but farmers in general are approved. It goes so far to even become a bragging right for many players. This is particular true for NCSoft games (Lineage, Lineage 2 and AION). Yes, they pay a lot of money for in-game items and they will made it know publicly.
You see, rich people in America show it off by having shiny expensive cars, rich people in Korea show it off by shiny cars too and a dagger in AION they bought for 2000 USD (you read it right, 2000 us dollar, even more). Yeah, own a ultimate weapon of doom in one of the most popular game in Korea is a bragging right and even the godly amount of real money they pay for it too.
You see, in Korean servers, when you get in a fight with someone 15 levels under you but has solid gold gear, armor and weps - it does not SCREAMS "I cheat", it only screem "I am richer than you, I have more money than I know what to do with you poor bastard".
Why do you think the amount of botting and spamming went off the chart for AION US? Because they were using the Chinese version and the Korean version as development test bed for almost a year. Ever heard of professional made hardware botting devices? Heheh. And you wonder why the botting and spamming in AION US went out of control.
You can say all MMO have bots and farmers but you cannot deny this kind of behavior is particular worse in NCSoft games. It's because the root of the issue is left unchecked and frankly I don't think the effort of just NCWest is enough to resolve anything here.
Okay people here's a simple solution to stop gold farmers and advertising spammers. STOP buying gold and power leveling. You (mainly players in American and Europe players) keep on complaining of how they lag you and it's unfair and end up making racist crap about the Chinese. If you didn't buy their gold and power leveling systems they would run out of business. If you haven't notice America is known to be the laziest country and Europe are very racist. So since most of you are lazy you buy their gold or power leveling package, and later end up complaining. And most of them aren't Chinese, some players sell gold to obtain the money to pay for their account (average of $15 a month) for a mmorpg game. And if you play European server they make racist joke constantly about CHINESE GOLD FARMERS. I saw a EU Lotro movie on youtube title as "Noob Chinese gold farmers" and on the video a was a group of noob french players attempting to so a quest, and the one filming is assuming they are failed gold farmers. Even check the comments and they all agreed with the player. More than 60% of players on a MMORPG game all brought gold and power levling before so don't go dissing the gold farmers if you brought their gold and power leveling before. SO IF YOU WANT THIS TO STOP, STOP BUYING THEIR GOLD AND POWER LEVELING PACKAGE AND THEY WILL RUN OUT OF BUSINESS. COMPLAINING, MAKING RACIST COMMENTS AND BLAMING THE GM FOR BEING LAZY IS NOT GOING TO STOP THESE GOLD FARMERS.
Unfortunately the people who ARE buying gold....are not reading your dissertation. They're not likely hanging out on a game forum reading about gold buying and selling.
I think it's mildly comical that no MMO company has ever taken a proactive approach at directly prohibiting and fighting RTM. The flaw lies within the industry who cannot capitalize on a 1 billion/yr market they create. Point the fingers all you want, but here we are again... 3months after a major game release... and the game is almost crippled by RTM. Who's fault is it really? The people who buy gold? Time to shore up some responsibility.
but you have to read his whole solution. And yes, this will not work for people whose main purpose is to buy and sell. His solution is that you sell to npc's. Npc's sell to the players and at a controlled price point or price range.
That's not going to be at all popular - for this solution to work I can't give an item or a pile of gold to a friend or a guildie (or a random newbie) that I want to help out. You've just cracked down on RMT by banning generosity and altruism from your game. I can't think of anything quite as likely to screw up the social dynamic of your MMO - and in the long run, it's the social side that keeps your subscribers subscribing.
Yes, I realize that. But I would most definitely play a game (that I was interested in) that did this because to me, in the end, it's a game.
It does takeaway the "real world" aspect and makes it so that anything earned in the game is done through the efforts of the player. To get rid of rmt and farmers I would do it in a heart beat. And this is coming from a player who has given away millions of game currency to friends and new players.
It's sort of like monopoly. Yo umight be playing with friends and family but you aren't funnelling money to them.
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Admittedly, I haven't wread all of the other comments, I just don't have time, but here's my two cents that I ranted on my guild's forum:
For AION, at least:
"I really don't understand how the farming bots get so out of control though; why not do one of two simple options:
1) If somebody gets a certain number of /autohuntingreports (10? 20? whatever, pick a number): Have the game AUTOMATICALLY ban the account. Normal players don't accumulate autohunting reports, and itd be a really easy way to get rid of players named khjkdsfh. For real players banned by this process, allow them to quickly log in to their account at ncsoft's site and dispute the ban, reinstating the account to normal status until the dispute can be investigated. Bots aren't going to dispute their accounts, and even if the chinese kid running the bot disputes, an admin can look at it and go "Hmm, your character name is fgfd, he has never spoken a word, and has never done a quest. Riiiiighhht..."
or
2) Have us type in a random word once an hour/every other hour, like they are going to do to aether farmers. This method is a little more intrusive to the players, but I sure as hell wouldn't mind typing a word in every hour if it stopped the rampant devaluation of our currency.
Those solutions seem really practical and really easy to implement. Am I a genius or have these been tried before?"
From experience if a game company wants to limit the illegal gold buying and selling they should create an in game store of their own where you can purchase items for money.
An example would be DDO's Store. You can purchase weapons, armor, potions, adventure packs by getting DDO store points that you buy with real money.
This pretty much cuts out any third party gold selling since you can do it legitimately.
In a game like WOW as long as the opportunity is there to buy gold from a third party source people will continue to do so. If WOW were to implement its own store they would probably cut off the illegal third parties entirely. The only reason they haven't in some cases is because I suspect some of the larger gold farmers are probably giving blizzard a percentage. They could've solved this years ago and they haven't and from other peoples opinions are slow to react to obvious examples of gold farmers and sellers. They claim having to deal with illegal gold farmers taxes their resources, BULLSHIT. They claim to have over 11 million subscribers each of them paying 15 bucks a month. Thats an enormous amount of resources so wheres all the money go ?
The only logical reason behind it is that they get paid off to ignore gold farmers.
One person said make it so gold isn't everything. Gold isn't everything but rare/unique items are and in game those are obtained by gold.
Even making gold easy to get doesn't help because it just causes inflation. The only way for that solution to work is for there to not be a single rare/unique item in game and all items are fairly easy to get. But then part of what makes the game fun is lost.
And for the person who said that them buying gold was none of my business, guess what it is. It ends up effecting the game for me and other players that follow the rules. Limitations are put on characters in game to combat something we don't participate in. We have to read spam on gold selling even though we don't buy. We end up fighting against characters who have every top item in the game because they bought it and now the fight will never be fair again.
Your lazy self having to buy gold to feel special affects everyone who plays by the rules, so it is everyone's business.
Well I wish you luck Lum. Seems a bit late for NCSoft to look at this matter. All their games have been plagued by this problem for some time. All of us have been posting about this since Aion was announced, yet they launched the game with very little thought to this problem.
Hopefully you can bring some sort of resolution to this that NCSoft has been unable to fix up to now.
I believe that the PLEX system used in Eve Online its a good alternative, already proven it has discouraged a lot the farming for "gold", where if someone wants to buy "gold" can cash it through the proper channels, some of this was mentioned in this article, basically i would call it "if you cant defeat them, join them", the eve-economy continues as normal, the PLEX system havent affected or trashed the market, it just became an additional option for those that wants money now!
"People who buy gold are no different from people who buy bowling trophies and get their names etched on them, or people who get mail-order diplomas from non-existent schools. They're people who want to claim achievements that they have not earned, and, at the heart of it, the root of all evil is the desire for the unearned."
How is farming gold an achievement to strive for? I guess that's where one of the lines are drawn on people's opinion's of games. To me, the achievement is beating a boss or owning some guy of the opposing faction. You do these things with skill/knowledge of game mechanics. The gold to pay for the gear to do those things is a means to that end and its laughable to claim that it is, in fact, the end unto itself. Every word that came out of your keyboard perfectly sums up my belief that you are jealous. Do you think a man that owns a business and uses his money to get other people to do the work for him thus increasing his profits is cheating? I guess when I pay the neighbor's 12 yo to mow my lawn, I'm also cheating.
Your analogy is flawed in every way. Buying gold to get gear to be competitive would be like paying a guy for better bowling gear, driving me to the lanes in a limo and filling out my score card leaving me more time to concentrate on owning my opponent. You are the guy who rents his two dollar shoes, uses the dinged up house ball and cries no fair when I roll a 276 and make off with the real trophy. If it helps you to sleep better thinking I cheat then so be it.
"People who buy gold are no different from people who buy bowling trophies and get their names etched on them, or people who get mail-order diplomas from non-existent schools. They're people who want to claim achievements that they have not earned, and, at the heart of it, the root of all evil is the desire for the unearned." How is farming gold an achievement to strive for? I guess that's where one of the lines are drawn on people's opinion's of games. To me, the achievement is beating a boss or owning some guy of the opposing faction. You do these things with skill/knowledge of game mechanics. The gold to pay for the gear to do those things is a means to that end and its laughable to claim that it is, in fact, the end unto itself. Every word that came out of your keyboard perfectly sums up my belief that you are jealous. Do you think a man that owns a business and uses his money to get other people to do the work for him thus increasing his profits is cheating? I guess when I pay the neighbor's 12 yo to mow my lawn, I'm also cheating. Your analogy is flawed in every way. Buying gold to get gear to be competitive would be like paying a guy for better bowling gear, driving me to the lanes in a limo and filling out my score card leaving me more time to concentrate on owning my opponent. You are the guy who rents his two dollar shoes, uses the dinged up house ball and cries no fair when I roll a 276 and make off with the real trophy. If it helps you to sleep better thinking I cheat then so be it.
I think you are the one who is logically flawed.
All of your examples are legal options. Buying gold is against the rules of the game that you agreed to. So all of your examples are wrong.
Great article Scott. So very true about all aspects. As an active Aion player, I hope you are able to make leaps and bounds against all the counterfeit. One thing I'll ask you to look at is the ease of macro creation for certain tasks. From what people call 'macro grinding' or 'afk grinding' is allowing even everyday gamers to implement these methods.
I also made a suggestion on Aionsource.com but it seems that the over anxious moderators deleted my thread. What about taking away kinah from these accounts, as you catch these accounts... storing it legitimately and distributing the kinah to the player base via veteran award system. If NCSoft is giving away their work/product for free you take away their market. The harder they work to keep their stocks open, the bigger chance you will find them, and people won't be as inclined to buy if its coming via 'veteran awards' every month. I"m sure the amount of kinah will decrease over time. I know this is a stretch, but just an idea I had while brainstorming 'what would I do'. It awards the legit player base.
Another thing that is upsetting in Aion is the frequency and population of 'private store' sales for these websites selling kinah and powerleveling. People really feel that there are no GMs on a realm. In Panda alone on this past sunday there were 7 sales ads right outside the broker/bank area... there is usually 2-5 ads in Morheim. They are constantly the same websites. I know the IPs used are not from those websites, but just frustrating.
Good luck to you, I'd love to chat sometime for you to hear more of my thoughts and others I talk to about it.
Reading this thread has brought a scenario to my attention:
Lets say you have one million players in a given game paying a $15/month fee and you were the CEO that had the ability to make any decisions happen. Lets also say 100,000 players were paying accounts to be gold farmers/botters/RMTers. Would you ban 100,000 accounts and lose the dollars?
By banning 100,00 accounts, you would gaurantee yourself a loss of 1.5 million dollars for the month. Do you think as a CEO the positives would outweigh the negatives? Sure, we will have 900,000 players who play fair and normally happy, but the company itself would loses 1.5 million dollars.
Originally posted by jeffxsee Reading this thread has brought a scenario to my attention:Lets say you have one million players in a given game paying a $15/month fee and you were the CEO that had the ability to make any decisions happen. Lets also say 100,000 players were paying accounts to be gold farmers/botters/RMTers. Would you ban 100,000 accounts and lose the dollars? By banning 100,00 accounts, you would gaurantee yourself a loss of 1.5 million dollars for the month. Do you think as a CEO the positives would outweigh the negatives? Sure, we will have 900,000 players who play fair and normally happy, but the company itself would loses 1.5 million dollars. What do you all think?
What they do is ban them, and then the farmers buy another account. Thats hows the devs get money out of gold selling. They ban the account after a certain amount of time, letting the farmer guy know before hand. He buys another acount as a fee to farm more. If your not on their list of perfered farmers your just banned outright. This is how a former dev at guild wars said it worked anyway, and is why they made an online store to buy the game. So when the farmers rebought accounts they bought from the game company online not at bestbuy. Im sure other mmo's just sell gold outright, just enough not to braek the game and ban any other farmers because they take away from their gold selling profits. Why wouldnt they?
Reading this thread has brought a scenario to my attention:
Lets say you have one million players in a given game paying a $15/month fee and you were the CEO that had the ability to make any decisions happen. Lets also say 100,000 players were paying accounts to be gold farmers/botters/RMTers. Would you ban 100,000 accounts and lose the dollars? By banning 100,00 accounts, you would gaurantee yourself a loss of 1.5 million dollars for the month. Do you think as a CEO the positives would outweigh the negatives? Sure, we will have 900,000 players who play fair and normally happy, but the company itself would loses 1.5 million dollars. What do you all think?
What they do is ban them, and then the farmers buy another account. Thats hows the devs get money out of gold selling. They ban the account after a certain amount of time, letting the farmer guy know before hand. He buys another acount as a fee to farm more. If your not on their list of perfered farmers your just banned outright. This is how a former dev at guild wars said it worked anyway, and is why they made an online store to buy the game. So when the farmers rebought accounts they bought from the game company online not at bestbuy. Im sure other mmo's just sell gold outright, just enough not to braek the game and ban any other farmers because they take away from their gold selling profits. Why wouldnt they?
Sounds like double dipping...not bad for a company I suppose.
One person said make it so gold isn't everything. Gold isn't everything but rare/unique items are and in game those are obtained by gold. ...
I suggest you play DDO and learn a bit about how the 'Favor' system works in that game for example.
There are things that you can only get through having the right amount of favor with certain factions. These things are unique (bound) to your character and cannot be traded. Favor is not something you can brought, sold or traded. It must be earned. It must be earned by playing the game which in many cases involves grouping and being social.
There are other things you can / could do too. You could have bonuses only availale to people based on time in game, time in a guild, explorations made, friends made etc.
To simply think of MMO gaming as simply a series of tasks to earn 'items' is a bit sad.
If what defines your MMO is simply the rare items then the design team have done a poor job.
One person said make it so gold isn't everything. Gold isn't everything but rare/unique items are and in game those are obtained by gold. ...
I suggest you play DDO and learn a bit about how the 'Favor' system works in that game for example.
There are things that you can only get through having the right amount of favor with certain factions. These things are unique (bound) to your character and cannot be traded. Favor is not something you can brought, sold or traded. It must be earned. It must be earned by playing the game which in many cases involves grouping and being social.
There are other things you can / could do too. You could have bonuses only availale to people based on time in game, time in a guild, explorations made, friends made etc.
To simply think of MMO gaming as simply a series of tasks to earn 'items' is a bit sad.
If what defines your MMO is simply the rare items then the design team have done a poor job.
Out of curiousity and since I haven't played DDO, would it ever be possible to catch up to a veteran player who has high favor? I'm assuming the veteran player has time on his side since he started earlier. I'm guessing the new player through this particular system will never be able to catch up in terms of favor if both the veteran and new beginner is playing the same amount of time?
Originally posted by jeffxsee Out of curiousity and since I haven't played DDO, would it ever be possible to catch up to a veteran player who has high favor? I'm assuming the veteran player has time on his side since he started earlier. I'm guessing the new player through this particular system will never be able to catch up in terms of favor if both the veteran and new beginner is playing the same amount of time?
Yes. Favour is capped. You earn so much favor per quest. The people you can't keep up with are the players who pay for content you haven't payed for. But that's fair because that is their revenue model.
ok so instead of doing something about the gold seller try doing something about the buyer. the gold buyer are the fuel the gold seller needs to keep on running. so instead of banning gold seller who will always come back try banning gold buyer. they buy gold because they want to have the good game equipment to be leet so they will make a big deal if they get ban. once they do they'll learn their lesson
I thik the first step to combating this problem is simple: Transaction regulations on box sales. My point is that someone is buying all these accts, and you bet the company can track down certain sales and where they originate, and if they cant that seems pretty silly to me.
At the rate they go through subs, I highly doubt any of the farmers are buying boxes. They can purchase 50 digital download keys with the CC info they just got from the idiot that bought gold from them in the time it takes to run down the block and buy the three copies (if that many) of the game sitting on a brick and mortar's shelf.
-- Whammy - a 64x64 miniRPG - RPG Quiz - can you get all 25 right? - FPS Quiz - how well do you know your shooters?
Comments
Simple solution: Pay someone hourly to remain logged into the game with the authority to ban gold spamming inside of the game! How freakin hard is it?! We all see, it only takes 1 person to fix it. Put me in, I'll do this job.
This would heavily curb gold farmers/spammers and force them to rethink their time. They'll find a new loop hole, but it'll take a few years or more.
when i read this article. I thought of ONE game. Silkroad Online. You can't tell me that they're nto getting some sort fo kickback there. AS every sever is full of bots, and they just keep opening up more servers. Now you can't tell me they're nto getting some sort of kickback from this. B/c every server's full of goldbots. Almost all of them have less than 1% of the player population in them. So there's NO WAY they're making enough money to keep all of those servers up considering almost no real players are on any of the servers. Most of the games out there that have bots have them being "rapant" i've yet to see any of them. When i tried PW-MS which is by far one of the biggest failures of all time yet still somehow is still going, i saw 3 bots in game. In WoW during my 45days that i played it, i saw NO bots at all. I saw no one cheating, and everything was nice.
Now of course i've never played any NCSoft game, and that's simply b/c most of their games have never interested me. I'm probably going to try out GW2 since it looks really interesting. Now about aion, i looked at some gameplay videos of the game, and well the animations poorly done, and the graphics just dont' seem to be that high. Tack on this talk about rampant bots and cheaters, i don't think i'll be trying it till it's under control.
No flaming from me. I've actually thought about #1 for quite some time. Sure, players who enjoy being in game moguls will get upset but there is no reason that every game has to be about every aspect of the mmo experience.
I've often thought that not allowing any direct transfers between characters is the way to go.
It won't work for more then a few hours. Many of the RMT transactions now are provided through in game auction services and similar. Dummy transactions used to mask the actual purpose.
I disagree that "it won't work." The auction houses ARE a type of "direct transfer" between characters. And yes, you are correct in that often gold sellers NOW are using the auction houses to set up dummy transactions. How many times have we all seen that grey item on the broker or auction house selling for 2000g and there are oh, say, 5 of them listed at the exact same price?
Sadly these online criminals have gotten pretty crafty at their crime.
Do I want to give up trading with guild mates and shopping the AH? No. But I do think that could work.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
Wall of text batman. But anyway, here is food for thought for both you and Lum if he is reading.
I know that NCWest might have a different attitude toward RMT and gold farming BUT what can you do (what can you could possibly do) if the main corporate in Korea keep having a neutral stance and even leaning toward approving this kind of behavior in the first place?
This might be a cultural different but RMT (meaning buying in-game items, golds with real money) is pretty normal and even standard act in Korea. A lot of people do this and they don't really care much about gold farmer really. They might be annoyed by the bots but farmers in general are approved. It goes so far to even become a bragging right for many players. This is particular true for NCSoft games (Lineage, Lineage 2 and AION). Yes, they pay a lot of money for in-game items and they will made it know publicly.
You see, rich people in America show it off by having shiny expensive cars, rich people in Korea show it off by shiny cars too and a dagger in AION they bought for 2000 USD (you read it right, 2000 us dollar, even more). Yeah, own a ultimate weapon of doom in one of the most popular game in Korea is a bragging right and even the godly amount of real money they pay for it too.
You see, in Korean servers, when you get in a fight with someone 15 levels under you but has solid gold gear, armor and weps - it does not SCREAMS "I cheat", it only screem "I am richer than you, I have more money than I know what to do with you poor bastard".
Why do you think the amount of botting and spamming went off the chart for AION US? Because they were using the Chinese version and the Korean version as development test bed for almost a year. Ever heard of professional made hardware botting devices? Heheh. And you wonder why the botting and spamming in AION US went out of control.
You can say all MMO have bots and farmers but you cannot deny this kind of behavior is particular worse in NCSoft games. It's because the root of the issue is left unchecked and frankly I don't think the effort of just NCWest is enough to resolve anything here.
Unfortunately the people who ARE buying gold....are not reading your dissertation. They're not likely hanging out on a game forum reading about gold buying and selling.
President of The Marvelously Meowhead Fan Club
I think it's mildly comical that no MMO company has ever taken a proactive approach at directly prohibiting and fighting RTM. The flaw lies within the industry who cannot capitalize on a 1 billion/yr market they create. Point the fingers all you want, but here we are again... 3months after a major game release... and the game is almost crippled by RTM. Who's fault is it really? The people who buy gold? Time to shore up some responsibility.
That's not going to be at all popular - for this solution to work I can't give an item or a pile of gold to a friend or a guildie (or a random newbie) that I want to help out. You've just cracked down on RMT by banning generosity and altruism from your game. I can't think of anything quite as likely to screw up the social dynamic of your MMO - and in the long run, it's the social side that keeps your subscribers subscribing.
Yes, I realize that. But I would most definitely play a game (that I was interested in) that did this because to me, in the end, it's a game.
It does takeaway the "real world" aspect and makes it so that anything earned in the game is done through the efforts of the player. To get rid of rmt and farmers I would do it in a heart beat. And this is coming from a player who has given away millions of game currency to friends and new players.
It's sort of like monopoly. Yo umight be playing with friends and family but you aren't funnelling money to them.
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Admittedly, I haven't wread all of the other comments, I just don't have time, but here's my two cents that I ranted on my guild's forum:
For AION, at least:
"I really don't understand how the farming bots get so out of control though; why not do one of two simple options:
1) If somebody gets a certain number of /autohuntingreports (10? 20? whatever, pick a number): Have the game AUTOMATICALLY ban the account. Normal players don't accumulate autohunting reports, and itd be a really easy way to get rid of players named khjkdsfh. For real players banned by this process, allow them to quickly log in to their account at ncsoft's site and dispute the ban, reinstating the account to normal status until the dispute can be investigated. Bots aren't going to dispute their accounts, and even if the chinese kid running the bot disputes, an admin can look at it and go "Hmm, your character name is fgfd, he has never spoken a word, and has never done a quest. Riiiiighhht..."
or
2) Have us type in a random word once an hour/every other hour, like they are going to do to aether farmers. This method is a little more intrusive to the players, but I sure as hell wouldn't mind typing a word in every hour if it stopped the rampant devaluation of our currency.
Those solutions seem really practical and really easy to implement. Am I a genius or have these been tried before?"
Joey Sands
South of Heaven (Aion; Lumiel)
From experience if a game company wants to limit the illegal gold buying and selling they should create an in game store of their own where you can purchase items for money.
An example would be DDO's Store. You can purchase weapons, armor, potions, adventure packs by getting DDO store points that you buy with real money.
This pretty much cuts out any third party gold selling since you can do it legitimately.
In a game like WOW as long as the opportunity is there to buy gold from a third party source people will continue to do so. If WOW were to implement its own store they would probably cut off the illegal third parties entirely. The only reason they haven't in some cases is because I suspect some of the larger gold farmers are probably giving blizzard a percentage. They could've solved this years ago and they haven't and from other peoples opinions are slow to react to obvious examples of gold farmers and sellers. They claim having to deal with illegal gold farmers taxes their resources, BULLSHIT. They claim to have over 11 million subscribers each of them paying 15 bucks a month. Thats an enormous amount of resources so wheres all the money go ?
The only logical reason behind it is that they get paid off to ignore gold farmers.
One person said make it so gold isn't everything. Gold isn't everything but rare/unique items are and in game those are obtained by gold.
Even making gold easy to get doesn't help because it just causes inflation. The only way for that solution to work is for there to not be a single rare/unique item in game and all items are fairly easy to get. But then part of what makes the game fun is lost.
And for the person who said that them buying gold was none of my business, guess what it is. It ends up effecting the game for me and other players that follow the rules. Limitations are put on characters in game to combat something we don't participate in. We have to read spam on gold selling even though we don't buy. We end up fighting against characters who have every top item in the game because they bought it and now the fight will never be fair again.
Your lazy self having to buy gold to feel special affects everyone who plays by the rules, so it is everyone's business.
Well I wish you luck Lum. Seems a bit late for NCSoft to look at this matter. All their games have been plagued by this problem for some time. All of us have been posting about this since Aion was announced, yet they launched the game with very little thought to this problem.
Hopefully you can bring some sort of resolution to this that NCSoft has been unable to fix up to now.
I believe that the PLEX system used in Eve Online its a good alternative, already proven it has discouraged a lot the farming for "gold", where if someone wants to buy "gold" can cash it through the proper channels, some of this was mentioned in this article, basically i would call it "if you cant defeat them, join them", the eve-economy continues as normal, the PLEX system havent affected or trashed the market, it just became an additional option for those that wants money now!
"People who buy gold are no different from people who buy bowling trophies and get their names etched on them, or people who get mail-order diplomas from non-existent schools. They're people who want to claim achievements that they have not earned, and, at the heart of it, the root of all evil is the desire for the unearned."
How is farming gold an achievement to strive for? I guess that's where one of the lines are drawn on people's opinion's of games. To me, the achievement is beating a boss or owning some guy of the opposing faction. You do these things with skill/knowledge of game mechanics. The gold to pay for the gear to do those things is a means to that end and its laughable to claim that it is, in fact, the end unto itself. Every word that came out of your keyboard perfectly sums up my belief that you are jealous. Do you think a man that owns a business and uses his money to get other people to do the work for him thus increasing his profits is cheating? I guess when I pay the neighbor's 12 yo to mow my lawn, I'm also cheating.
Your analogy is flawed in every way. Buying gold to get gear to be competitive would be like paying a guy for better bowling gear, driving me to the lanes in a limo and filling out my score card leaving me more time to concentrate on owning my opponent. You are the guy who rents his two dollar shoes, uses the dinged up house ball and cries no fair when I roll a 276 and make off with the real trophy. If it helps you to sleep better thinking I cheat then so be it.
I think you are the one who is logically flawed.
All of your examples are legal options. Buying gold is against the rules of the game that you agreed to. So all of your examples are wrong.
Great article Scott. So very true about all aspects. As an active Aion player, I hope you are able to make leaps and bounds against all the counterfeit. One thing I'll ask you to look at is the ease of macro creation for certain tasks. From what people call 'macro grinding' or 'afk grinding' is allowing even everyday gamers to implement these methods.
I also made a suggestion on Aionsource.com but it seems that the over anxious moderators deleted my thread. What about taking away kinah from these accounts, as you catch these accounts... storing it legitimately and distributing the kinah to the player base via veteran award system. If NCSoft is giving away their work/product for free you take away their market. The harder they work to keep their stocks open, the bigger chance you will find them, and people won't be as inclined to buy if its coming via 'veteran awards' every month. I"m sure the amount of kinah will decrease over time. I know this is a stretch, but just an idea I had while brainstorming 'what would I do'. It awards the legit player base.
Another thing that is upsetting in Aion is the frequency and population of 'private store' sales for these websites selling kinah and powerleveling. People really feel that there are no GMs on a realm. In Panda alone on this past sunday there were 7 sales ads right outside the broker/bank area... there is usually 2-5 ads in Morheim. They are constantly the same websites. I know the IPs used are not from those websites, but just frustrating.
Good luck to you, I'd love to chat sometime for you to hear more of my thoughts and others I talk to about it.
Reading this thread has brought a scenario to my attention:
Lets say you have one million players in a given game paying a $15/month fee and you were the CEO that had the ability to make any decisions happen. Lets also say 100,000 players were paying accounts to be gold farmers/botters/RMTers. Would you ban 100,000 accounts and lose the dollars?
By banning 100,00 accounts, you would gaurantee yourself a loss of 1.5 million dollars for the month. Do you think as a CEO the positives would outweigh the negatives? Sure, we will have 900,000 players who play fair and normally happy, but the company itself would loses 1.5 million dollars.
What do you all think?
CCP got a nice solution to this
wiki.eveonline.com/wiki/30_days_Concord_Pilot_License_Extension
BestSigEver :P
He's wrong. Game comapnies are in on it, and theres devs that will tell you this. He's just not in the loop so the company line is they're against it.
What they do is ban them, and then the farmers buy another account. Thats hows the devs get money out of gold selling. They ban the account after a certain amount of time, letting the farmer guy know before hand. He buys another acount as a fee to farm more. If your not on their list of perfered farmers your just banned outright. This is how a former dev at guild wars said it worked anyway, and is why they made an online store to buy the game. So when the farmers rebought accounts they bought from the game company online not at bestbuy. Im sure other mmo's just sell gold outright, just enough not to braek the game and ban any other farmers because they take away from their gold selling profits. Why wouldnt they?
What they do is ban them, and then the farmers buy another account. Thats hows the devs get money out of gold selling. They ban the account after a certain amount of time, letting the farmer guy know before hand. He buys another acount as a fee to farm more. If your not on their list of perfered farmers your just banned outright. This is how a former dev at guild wars said it worked anyway, and is why they made an online store to buy the game. So when the farmers rebought accounts they bought from the game company online not at bestbuy. Im sure other mmo's just sell gold outright, just enough not to braek the game and ban any other farmers because they take away from their gold selling profits. Why wouldnt they?
Sounds like double dipping...not bad for a company I suppose.
I suggest you play DDO and learn a bit about how the 'Favor' system works in that game for example.
There are things that you can only get through having the right amount of favor with certain factions. These things are unique (bound) to your character and cannot be traded. Favor is not something you can brought, sold or traded. It must be earned. It must be earned by playing the game which in many cases involves grouping and being social.
There are other things you can / could do too. You could have bonuses only availale to people based on time in game, time in a guild, explorations made, friends made etc.
To simply think of MMO gaming as simply a series of tasks to earn 'items' is a bit sad.
If what defines your MMO is simply the rare items then the design team have done a poor job.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
I suggest you play DDO and learn a bit about how the 'Favor' system works in that game for example.
There are things that you can only get through having the right amount of favor with certain factions. These things are unique (bound) to your character and cannot be traded. Favor is not something you can brought, sold or traded. It must be earned. It must be earned by playing the game which in many cases involves grouping and being social.
There are other things you can / could do too. You could have bonuses only availale to people based on time in game, time in a guild, explorations made, friends made etc.
To simply think of MMO gaming as simply a series of tasks to earn 'items' is a bit sad.
If what defines your MMO is simply the rare items then the design team have done a poor job.
Out of curiousity and since I haven't played DDO, would it ever be possible to catch up to a veteran player who has high favor? I'm assuming the veteran player has time on his side since he started earlier. I'm guessing the new player through this particular system will never be able to catch up in terms of favor if both the veteran and new beginner is playing the same amount of time?
Yes. Favour is capped. You earn so much favor per quest. The people you can't keep up with are the players who pay for content you haven't payed for. But that's fair because that is their revenue model.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
ok so instead of doing something about the gold seller try doing something about the buyer. the gold buyer are the fuel the gold seller needs to keep on running. so instead of banning gold seller who will always come back try banning gold buyer. they buy gold because they want to have the good game equipment to be leet so they will make a big deal if they get ban. once they do they'll learn their lesson
At the rate they go through subs, I highly doubt any of the farmers are buying boxes. They can purchase 50 digital download keys with the CC info they just got from the idiot that bought gold from them in the time it takes to run down the block and buy the three copies (if that many) of the game sitting on a brick and mortar's shelf.
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