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Yet Another Solution To Gold Sellers
TheLizardbones
Member CommonPosts: 10,910
Gold sellers sell gold and items because it's profitable. If it wasn't, they wouldn't do it.
Why not let everyone in the game sell everything, for real money eBay style? For every transaction, the developer takes a transaction fee, based on the amount that an item or items sold for.
In theory, competition would drive prices down enough that it would not be profitable to be a gold seller as a business. As an individual, it could be very profitable, since the individual would have a low overhead.
Buyers would be less likely to go outside the system, even to get a better deal since the in game system would be convenient and the buyer would be guaranteed to get their items.
There are, of course, issues with this, mostly revolving around credit card security, but I'm sure you could get a company like Google Checkout in on it to make things secure enough.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Comments
I seem to remember EQ2 having a couple servers that did almost exactly what you describe.
Dunno what they gleaned from that experiement.
"I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- John Galt
Im interested in knowing how it has turned out. I went to the site last night because i am thinking of sploring that world. But i saw some kind of shop not sure it its what you are talking about and it put me off some.
This idea would seem to work at first glance, but you have to take a look at the whole picture. I see where you are coming from though. Take the term "gold" and relate it to the real world using the word "drugs". If all "drugs" were regulated and sold by the government, there wouldnt be a black market to sell them in, which makes the business non-profitable. But you have to take a look at the mmo playerbase, especially the age range. MMO's. especially now, are targeted toward a large audience. Kids as young as 8 years old are hopping on to world of warcraft or other similar MMO's. That's why these games have been dumbed down so much over the years. It's all about money when it comes to these big companies.
Now, If you take your idea and implement it into an MMO, it would without a doubt stop gold farmers. But your idea also gives a huge disadvantage to the younger crowd of gamers. This would turn the younger crowd away from these games because it gives a huge advantage to the adults who have a credit card at hand.
Great idea, yes. But you have to take a look at the big picture. These companies could care less about you as an individual. It's all about expanding there playerbase. Playerbase=Revenue
Gold sellers work for pennies a day so anything over the cost to play is profit. Wouldn't stop them unless you sold things for almost free yourself.
Make games you want to play.
http://www.youtube.com/user/RavikAztar
edited cause i see your point now.
"I swear -- by my life and my love for it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
- John Galt
Haha ok thanks. I really didn't know how to respond to your origional post
Or those young gamers could make money off of playing the game they like to play (if they liked playing the game). Don't discount a young person's ability to play a game without buying advantages, and don't discount their ability to spend their parent's money. :-)
I think a bigger issue would be every player joining the game with the idea of making money rather than playing the game. The game play would have to compete with the money making aspects of the game. Issues with subscribers would likely come down to the issue that all games face...not really being all that fun to play.
** edit **
Advantages based on credit cards would depend more on the type of game and what's available that can be sold. 'Bind on Pickup' items could not be sold. So your raid purples couldn't be sold. It would just depend on the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Gold sellers don't technically work. They have people working for them. There is the odd case of prison labor and people who would otherwise be so poor that they are nearly what we would consider slave labor, but most of those operations have employees, and they are paid to play. There is an investment of time, if nothing else.
You are technically doing two things by making RMT an integral part of the game. Decreasing the profit margin for individual gold sellers and decreasing the guarantee that a gold seller with sell what they've spent time accumulating. The customer base would have a choice of who they buy from, and it might not be the gold seller...it might be the individual entrepreneur. In essence, it would no longer be a monopoly.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Is this a joke?
All it means is that they don't have to advertise and don't have to worry about getting their characters booted. You will never drive prices low enough to make it not profitable, since if you did then gear would be pointless in the first place. They would then concentrate their efforts on other areas ( powerleveling, etc.).
There are no in-game solutions for RMT. At best it would force them to advertise outside of the game. The only way to limit RMT is to actively ban characters, and to make it relatively difficult for them to obtain accounts. Making it difficult to obtain an account would also inconvience your users.
It is a case of pick your poison.
All it means is that they don't have to advertise and don't have to worry about getting their characters booted. You will never drive prices low enough to make it not profitable, since if you did then gear would be pointless in the first place. They would then concentrate their efforts on other areas ( powerleveling, etc.).
There are no in-game solutions for RMT. At best it would force them to advertise outside of the game. The only way to limit RMT is to actively ban characters, and to make it relatively difficult for them to obtain accounts. Making it difficult to obtain an account would also inconvience your users.
It is a case of pick your poison.
There's a solution to every problem. Until you try them all, you can't definitely say which ones will definitely work, and which ones won't.
(a) You could drive real world prices of in game items low enough that it's not profitable to sell those items using RMT (even if the method used isn't allowing everyone to use RMT to buy and sell the stuff in their bags)and (b) if there are many sources for items instead of just the gold sellers, then that means the gold sellers will lose their captive customers. Right now, to buy anything using RMT, you must buy from a gold seller. If RMT were allowed in game between players, then you could buy from anyone who happened to loot whatever it is you wanted from a random mob.
You did highlight an actual issue though - advertising. With real money on the line, people would go nuts selling their stuff.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
So how to say it. NO!
Really just another idea that push rl into game. I am playing a game to distance myself from rl for a while same thing like reading a book or watching a movie. This idea ruin it so well NO.
If selling gold enables you to take money out of the game and thus profit from it, then all you've done is legitimize the activity. The prices will drop from having to deal with casual gold sellers and the obligatory cut that the dev studio would take, but the mass gold farming and /tell spamming will remain.
What you have to remember is, people buy gold because they don't have the time to farm it themselves. That has not changed. People who mass farm get paid on the order of a few dollars an hour. That has not changed. The people who organize this sort of activity will still be able to profit from this and will not go away. Not as long as they're able to get money out of it and it remains profitable.
I've posted my thoughts on the matter here, and from what I can tell, they would solve the problem so long as the method discussed (alternate currency) remained relevant / had enough interest to keep the system alive.
umm you will never remove the ability to RMT 3rd party sites. unless you make a game completely single player without any DLC or item shop.
for as long as people are lazy and have too much money, RMT will exist. gold sellers make money from the lazy retards who HAVE to have the money ingame to buy everything instead of earning it. or the people too lazy to level. you wont beable to stop it or game companies would have done so years ago.
the deleting/banning on spamming accounts doesnt actually effect gold spammers, as they do not use the spamming accounts for their dealing or grinding. most of the insane high levels you see in game could be a gold spammer's farmer. the rest are just storage or bots for spamming.
banning 1million spammers wont stop them having 1million gold to trade, just means THAT spammer is deleted.. you have to back track and locate the main toons and ban them to totally kill a gold spammer. other wise you only have regional ip blocking or isolating the game to extreme levels crippling the income for the company.
no there is no real way to remove RMT companies. someone is always ready to take their place.
About the only thing I can think of to remotely work is to incorporate not only a typical Gold seller name security feature to auto-boot them (Names like Ahgfjhgyfg)....but also for key words they typically use to advertise...including website links. That or carpet bomb Chinese Warehouses. ;P
No customers, no sellers. Simple.
Ban anyone that buys their services. Once the customer base is gone, they cease to bother your game.
I've seen this work. I've yet to see ANYONE successfully remove the sellers with buyers left in the game. Those sellers come back. Where there is a demand a supply will surface so kill the demand - ban the buyers.
Yeah...but greedy companies won't permaband people who pay to play the game. Sadly, it would be a large chunk of customers for them to do that on a permanent basis....I'd imagine anyways.
problem is you cant accurately 100% prove who is a buyer and who is not. i can buy 100000000 gold with 10usd from a seller, turn around and buy all your trade goods off an AH. getting you banned because you have the money. or i can be a gold seller and put money for trade ingame for cheap amounts so you buy it up thinking its legit.
many gold sellers like to use store house bots as leveling cheats for their bots a good example of that is look at uncharted waters online. there are multiple companies of just gold spammer storage bots that are selling millions of trade goods for cheap.
not to actually make money with but when their spam bot is deleted they take the goodsand instantly level it up.
some dopes actually buy that junk too. which makes it hard to prove who is an idiot buyer and who actually buys from RMT sellers. just banning buyers can ruin the reputation of the company/game if they ban innocent people or people who are guilty but cant actually be proven.. who turn around and rise a stink about being banned unfairly (even though they are guilty) besides no one will play a game with ban happy mods every so often some dope will get banned and rise a stick
You can ban the buyers and it has been done.
As you say - you really don't need to get rid of the bots, etc... Simply put - you track them. Once you track the network, you ban the customers. Every last one of them as you find them. No "warnings" about it via suspensions, etc. - pop: your account is dead with how to petition and what proof YOU need to provide to get it fixed - *IF* it isn't proven sufficiently with their records.
Better to lose 1000 'good customers' than leave 100 bad ones that are trashing your game by buying from gold spammers and the like.
Again - once those buyers are gotten rid of, keeping it clean is easy. Those spam bots and the like are a joke and won't be fired up if they aren't making money. That game or, in the cases I know of - the specific servers, become "dead spots" that they won't try because they aren't selling there.
So you have lost little to nothing. The gold spammers either pay for their accounts to try selling occasionally or they stop. Your customer base gets cleaned up and the bad apples removed... So on and so forth. Getting rid of suppiers doesn't work but buyers? Entirely different story.
Tracking the network silently is all well and good, except you have to pay a few guys (& gals) to do all this.
Unfortunately devs are gonna weigh up the pros and cons and may undervalue the benefit of getting rid of this activity.
However, my thought has always been, not to ban or delete spammers / bots, but to covertly make them useless.
I.e. spammers comments dont appear in the chat channels to anyone except confirmed bot / spammer accounts. May take a while for them to realise they cant be heard.
bots slowly get lower returns for their efforts. their chance of getting rare / valuable drops dissapears.. could also take some time before they realise theyve been rumbled. all their loot is marked secretly as 'pirate goods' to legit players..
(Sure theyll probably make a new account and see their spammers not talking and see their goods marked 'pirate goods'.. but its causing them extra effort to check... perhaps newly made accounts arent considered 'legit' until they do the tutorials etc.. )
But all this takes effort and companies have to realise that these are important issues to the playerbase. For that to happen we have to complain and/or leave games which dont deal with their spammers / bots in an effective way.
its realy simple....(*wannabe) gamers have to stop buying the gold and it will stop all just like that....if there is no market for it it wont be sold anymore.
* yes i say WANNABE gamers.......people that buy gold can't realy be called a gamer now can they?
Everybody is bitching about those sellers but the fact many of you are still buying gold keeps these guys in bussiness.
i think the guys from trion have a good system there......1 click for report + ignore (FTW)
I almost fell out of the chair reading this line..
You got it wrong though, because it is the exact opposite of Cicero's quote.
You do not condemn 1000 innocents just to be sure 100 guilty won't get away unpunished.
That is considering you do not live in China or Korea. Not to say how absurd such statement it is business wise...
Also just out of curiosity, where have you seen it work as you claim?
The only logical reaction is to open your own cash shop, which is, surprisingly, what most companies are doing by now
Any company that cannot or will not effectively monitor RMT transactions and cannot or will not then ban both buyers and sellers in order to put an end to RMT should do what Blizzard is doing and let everyone buy and sell items for real world currency.
The problem is, a company that can't or won't effectively monitor botters and farmers and sellers and buyers might be unable or unwilling to monitor and stop hacks and exploits that will flood the market from sources other than players playing the game as intended. But that will be Blizzard's problem. I'm interested to see how this will work out.
(Edit: I also think this will make Diablo III less appealing to those sweatshop gold farms someone mentioned in another thread, because there will be too much competition from actual players. Part of the reason you can end up paying a silly amount of money so someone can play your game for you or farm your shinies for you is because the entire process is illicit, therefore, the number of suppliers who can and will engage regularly in it without being caught is limited. Not so in this case.)
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
remove grinfd from game so there will be no bot farmers and gold sellers.