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GoldSellers and GoldBuyers Banned
Badem
Member Posts: 830
As senn on SilkyVenom
http://www.silkyvenom.com/forums/showthread.php?t=15184
Haha i heard some guy whispering to everyone in 3 Rivers on Infinuim server last week 'hey Psst you wanna buy some gold? nice and cheap check my website iamadic.com'
Outrage among the players spam on teh thestran chat channel and dozens of petitions to GM and hey presto one hour later he was gone including another individual we can only assume he was trading gold to at the time ROFL 
Comments
banning gold farmers & buyers is just one of those thing's that'll always be ongoing -- although I'm sure it will become less prominent as time goes on..
there is no black and white 'formula' for finding and banning a gold seller. obviously you cannot have somebody manually reading every single message sent on a server. the trick is to have some sort of automation in place that can catch a gold farmer's message. however, it's not that simple..
you cannot simply flag their message because they mention a website. lots of people mention websites - whether it's a guild site, or something else. i think that messages mentioning a website should be queued for some kind of review, however. or, reviewing messages that mention a website and are from a low level character might work better. but, there's still a lot of false alarms and grey area there -- so much that it would still be more than one person could handle in a game like WoW to monitor all these messages manually.
you can't ban people for giving eachother large amounts of gold, for obvious reasons. friends could be giving you money, guildies could be giving you money, or even your other account might be giving yourself money. heck, some random person might be quitting and giving you money. or maybe you are trading with somebody and they give you the money first, or after the item is traded. who knows. the point is, just giving somebody a large sum of gold is not reason or proof they are a gold seller.
then of course you have the free trial accounts which can be disabled or banned, but do nothing to stop a gold seller who can just start another free trial account. WoW at least prevents whispers from trial accounts, which I'm sure helps a lot to stop gold sellers from using them that way -- altough they still stand around people and use /say.
right now developers really have to rely on the players to report gold sellers, along with whatever other systems they have in place to find them. i'm not saying that i am 100% right about all of this -- I'm just trying to point out some of the glaring obstacles regarding finding abd banning gold sellers for people that don't understand why it can't just be done overnight.
I think from what i have seen in teh game so far is that teh majority of players dislike goldsellers, so soon as they find them tehy report them
the GM/Sigil/SOE can tehn pull the chat logs and transaction logs from that player and examine it for mentions of gold selling/Exploits/etc and also who they have traded gold to
We have in work a system that red flags certain catchphrases against a database which are tehn reviewed later and since we store everythign that passses over the system it not too difficult to see what happens
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png
They say never say never. Well, I'm saying it. They will never completely remove RMT (real money trade) from online games. There's always some bored, rich dumbass out there that's willing to cut corners and pay someone else for online currency.
That being said, the Vanguard staff actively combats this in their game and do it quite well.
Unlike other companies that claim to do it and really don't, or do combat it but only 1/2 assed, Sigil really tries. They try very hard. They publicly "execute" accounts of both sellers and buyers.
Not only is it hilarious, but it is effective. When a company is as hard-core as Sigil is about keeping this crap out of their game, and are so vocal about it, you tend to think twice about buying that currency... which is exactly what should be done.
Kudos Sigil. Keep up the good work. (Now, just fix your game
)
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Simple. If there is a market for something, and profit is easily achieved, there will always be someone there to provide that service.
Don't assume the people buying gold are the same ones who prefer low exp and 5 days to level. Most people who buy golds are the people who have money to waste/little time to play or grind/ or just prefer not working for something.
Your always going to have someone that wants to cheat in any form they can. Nature of some people I guess...
As others have mentioned I think there will be less of gold farming as the buddy passes get used up... Right now Gold Farmers are on all the online forums asking for peoples buddy passes so they can use them to advertise there Gold Farming in game. Once those passes are gone they will have to buy a new copy of Vanguard everytime they get busted.
Gold farming will never go away tho, because someone could just google "Vangaurd" and "Gold" and come across these services. But I think the majority of players in Vanguard hate Gold Farming... I know one guy I was in a group with started bragging about all the money he had (something like 40 gold) it was obvious he bought it, and everyone started raggin on him lol... Was rather funny.. I know I won't be playing with him any longer... Buying gold has a stigma attached to it in Vanguard, if you do it, I wouldnt suggest telling anyone or you might find yourself without a guild and friends...
Your always going to have someone that wants to cheat in any form they can. Nature of some people I guess...
As others have mentioned I think there will be less of gold farming as the buddy passes get used up... Right now Gold Farmers are on all the online forums asking for peoples buddy passes so they can use them to advertise there Gold Farming in game. Once those passes are gone they will have to buy a new copy of Vanguard everytime they get busted.
Gold farming will never go away tho, because someone could just google "Vangaurd" and "Gold" and come across these services. But I think the majority of players in Vanguard hate Gold Farming... I know one guy I was in a group with started bragging about all the money he had (something like 40 gold) it was obvious he bought it, and everyone started raggin on him lol... Was rather funny.. I know I won't be playing with him any longer... Buying gold has a stigma attached to it in Vanguard, if you do it, I wouldnt suggest telling anyone or you might find yourself without a guild and friends...
Bragging about that is pretty lame but if he didnt come right out and tell you he bought it you have no right to assume he did . Am level 14 also am a level 36 weaponsmith and i have 64 gold and i earned every copper of it . but am a myser i dont spend it on anything i dont have to and even than am more likly to just do without , strange to cause am the first person that will give you 5 gold if you need it lolRegal
Take a game like WoW, which the Van players would call a carebear game for casuals. I would expect a thriving gold farming business there because 1) WoW players are viewed as the type of players who WOULD buy gold, and 2) WoW has millions of subscribers, thus there's a huge pool of players.
In other words, I would expect a much lower percentage of the total Vanguard subscriber base to buy gold than I would WoW, and Vanguard's subscription base is currently only a fraction of WoW's.
I guess I just wonder how gold farmers can "make a living" with Vanguard. If I was a cynic, I might suggest the announcements of banned gold farmers is just a ruse.
I think we see a lot of gold farmer bannings simply because the player base is reporting them. I also think that maybe SOE is tracking IP's. There was a recent post on another board where a guy had hired a powerleveling company to powerlevel his character. He is now banned from VG.
So it could be a combination of the playrs and some built in system that allows Sigil to track IP's.
If that was the case there would be a lot more people banned, you now how many people play their friends account.
Hell The guild I was in WoW people played other peoples accounts, and never got banned, and Blizzard is way more strict about Power leveling.
Now if your playing on an American account, and you travel or have a friend in a country which doesn't allow playing on American servers they will ban it, even if it is you playing in some country they don't allow.
I'm pretty sure one of his guild mates told on him, so they looked in to it. He even said it was probably what happened.