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Are Real-Money-Transactions the status-quo?
If RMT's in the MMO Genre are the status-quo, why do developers continue to deny their approval behind a thin cloak of "random bannings".
My theory: They make way more money off the Subs and new games the gold sellers buy then they ever could by just offering an official RMT service. Also... RMT games don't sell nearly aswell as P2P. Whats ironic about that fact is we're all playing a P2P game for the larger scale and seamless environment, but also to avoid F2P games that survive soley on their RMT system.
If Aion developers really wanted to rid their game of RMT's why don't they start by banning every single character advertising currency RMT's in-game.
Well... thats exactly how they would start. If they wanted to.
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You know, I kinda feel the same way as the OP does, that the reason gold sellers aren't banned is because they buy accounts.
However, in Aion, the actual numbers of spammers is per server is pretty low. I have a block list of 35 of them since release, and it seems I must block 3 to 7 names each day.
That sounds like a lot, but you figure each account can have 8 toons, as well as old toons being deleted within 6 minutes of the command, it isn't that many accounts.
Currently, I would wager that NCsoft is losing more customers than they are getting via the spammers and sellers.
The other problem is, that the ads in the spam fly by so fast in the chat that you can't read them, so I am not sure how they are even getting customers to their sites.
But yes, it would be very easy to ban them... just let GM's have a "Ban" option next to "Block" or "Whisper" and it would be all done.
I started an alt today, and I found 8 spammers standing in the starting zone of Poeta. I even challenged several to a duel (They just stand there and get pummeled... only one repeatedly declined). If I can find them, you know darn well the admins could.
Either way, NCsoft needs to deal with this, for if they don't it will show that they do not care about their playerbase, and that will spell disaster for NCsoft in the service oriented NA/Euro market.
The short answer is no.
Also from Ayase's tweet (community manager):
"@aion_ayase One of the issues we'll be looking to address is gold spam."
It's a little harder than that sadly, banning character's does not solve the problem because the person will just make a new char.
The only true way is to ban the account....Make the person have to buy a new account / game box and start over....The cost would be too great for him / her to be effective if they did that.
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You're not taking into account a couple of things. Accounts can be made with stolen or bogus credit cards. Even if the CC are valid, people can just chargeback the cards and pay nothing. The cost to dispute those charge backs is too big for the most part, so generally the only two parties that lose from this whole story are the legit players and the MMO companies.
Correct. If they wanted to.
At the moment it's a win situation. Don't expect measures except to clean up the image.
it really doesn't matter how hard it is...
At the end of the day a company will do what is best for its cash flow.
And for MMO's thats enabling players to sell currency/services in a RMT.
RMT's have been around so long that players simply have accepted it, therefore developers don't really lose that many customers from it. Atleast not enough to change the developers minds about RMT's.
Thieves have been around for a long long time. Just because I acknowledge their existence, doesn't mean that I accept it as well. It's just not the same thing. The same applies for RMT and games. I refuse to play games where RMT is provided by the developers and I leave games where RMT is left unchecked and rampant.
Perhaps it's just ignorance on my side on how bans work, but I'm also starting to question why it has to take so long for mmorpgs to get rid of gold selling spammers.
They are pretty easy to spot.
I'm not saying its the easiest thing to do to rid a game of RMT's, but if Developers truly cared they would have prevented the problem through intelligent design before the game was even released.
There are people who have already put up phishing sites for passes so they can steal accounts. I see spam from them on occasion as well as gold spam now. I am guessing the hacked accounts will be stripped of anything of value and the gold will be transferred to the gold farmer who will then sell it to some person that wants to buy gold.
If it were just a case of banning an account the situation with gold farmers in MMOs would be easy to solve. However, this is not the case. Especially when a person's account is hacked and they try to call an get the toon restored from backup. Then they have to track down who transferred what to whom and see if the account is still active and whether or not that too was a hacked account.
These people are quite savvy and many of them have been doing this sort of thing for sometime. It is not very easy to keep gold spam to a dull roar, and almost impossible to stop entirely.
EVE online did a good job figuring out who their RMT players were, but the economy is set up very well to view suspicious transactions. Most games such as this one have a simpler economy and do not have the same mechanisms for recognizing suspicious activity.
In short, I would be surprised if something happens soon because it requires a team of people to really curb this sort of behavior an it is a full time job. Considering that they have server issues and queues to deal with, as well as some patchwork that was done for gameplay issues, I doubt they are going to dedicate the time needed to monitor this sort of behavior until other issues that take priority are ironed out.
All that said my community rating for this game is going to remain a 6 until these people are ejected from it as much as can be reasonably expected.
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Correct. If they wanted to.
At the moment it's a win situation. Don't expect measures except to clean up the image.
thats the point. its like in lineage 2 (the first and last game i tried fron ncsoft):
they have proven to not beeing able (or willing) to come to terms with botters and gold sellers regardless wether they use gameguard or not!