Ban Gold Buyers

Starnes

Can we please start banning the gold buyers?

You can trace their transactions, you can see they received large sums of gold from an account that was banned for gold selling. Follow the path of the gold direct to the buyer and ban them along with the seller.

deathly809_ESO

They probably already do.

deathly809_ESO

And to add on, it would probably be better if they didn't and just monitored their accounts to ban gold sellers.

Endolith

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

And to add on, it would probably be better if they didn't and just monitored their accounts to ban gold sellers.

I think actively banning buyers would be a more effective way of addressing the problem. Gold sellers pop up with new accounts all the times. People spending money to buy gold for the game are much more likely to care about a banned account.

deathly809_ESO

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

And to add on, it would probably be better if they didn't and just monitored their accounts to ban gold sellers.

I think actively banning buyers would be a more effective way of addressing the problem. Gold sellers pop up with new accounts all the times. People spending money to buy gold for the game are much more likely to care about a banned account.

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

Endolith

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

It shouldn't be hard for them to flag large transfers of gold. Once they do that, it would take some review to make sure they aren't banning people who are sending their guild mate or girlfriend money for a horse or something.

Starnes

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

It shouldn't be hard for them to flag large transfers of gold. Once they do that, it would take some review to make sure they aren't banning people who are sending their guild mate or girlfriend money for a horse or something.

Exactly, they can easily come up with a good list of suspects based on gold transactions or any gold transactions from banned gold selling accounts and work from there.

Absolutely everything you do in this game leaves a data trail that can and should be followed.

Natjur

Account A spams selling gold
Account Z want to buy gold
Account C,D and E each sent account Z 10,000 gold

Account A is banned for spamming 'gold for sale'

How do you ban account Z (the buyer) and C, D and E (the sellers)?
What limit do you 'monitor'?
How do you make sure you don't ban normal players moving their own gold around?

The last lot of 'auto ban' for moving large amount of gold around banned lots of guild leaders.

"It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer"

Saerydoth

They actually already do ban gold buyers. There just aren't a huge number of them, and it's not something that's really publicized. It just turns into a blip on the radar compared to the spammers and bots.

deathly809_ESO

Starnes wrote: »

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

It shouldn't be hard for them to flag large transfers of gold. Once they do that, it would take some review to make sure they aren't banning people who are sending their guild mate or girlfriend money for a horse or something.

Exactly, they can easily come up with a good list of suspects based on gold transactions or any gold transactions from banned gold selling accounts and work from there.

Absolutely everything you do in this game leaves a data trail that can and should be followed.

Like others are saying what is the limit on transfer size? What about people who buy and sell a lot? What if you have multiple accounts send a person (or each one of his alts) a smaller amount of money?

Starnes

Saerydoth wrote: »

They actually already do ban gold buyers. There just aren't a huge number of them, and it's not something that's really publicized. It just turns into a blip on the radar compared to the spammers and bots.

I hope they do, they should at least confirm that they are banning these players if that is the case. If we hear that ZOS is taking action against these individuals it would allay a lot of concerns.

Corvidia

Saerydoth wrote: »

They actually already do ban gold buyers. There just aren't a huge number of them, and it's not something that's really publicized. It just turns into a blip on the radar compared to the spammers and bots.

That doesn't make sense. If no one (or very few) people are buying gold then the number of gold sellers would decrease. Instead the number appears to ahve gone up.

Natjur

Starnes wrote: »

Absolutely everything you do in this game leaves a data trail that can and should be followed.

But with millions of transactions per second, no one can monitor them all without a lot of 'auto checking' and its easy for them to get under the radar.

An account getting 100k is easy to spot.
An account getting 10k ten times over a week, not so easy and is could be the same 10k going back and forward between someone owning two accounts.

With people selling motifs for 20k and vamp bites for 10k. (even tho both those are way overcharged) The gold transfer has to be around 60K+ before it becomes clear its a gold seller/buyer

Endolith

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

Like others are saying what is the limit on transfer size? What about people who buy and sell a lot? What if you have multiple accounts send a person (or each one of his alts) a smaller amount of money?

That's why the size limit is just a flag, not an auto-ban. Then someone at ZOS has to take a look at things and figure out whether it is gold selling. If they can't tell the difference, then don't ban that person. But I suspect in a number of cases it wouldn't be hard to figure out.

Gelston

I haven't been in the 1st zone of my alliance for a couple weeks. There were gold spammed then, but it was maybe an ad every 5 minutes or so. I went back yesterday and it seemed like almost constant spam in zone. I'd say either they are in their death throes and spamming it a lot more to get buyers, or there are plenty of buyers.

Starnes

Natjur wrote: »

Starnes wrote: »

Absolutely everything you do in this game leaves a data trail that can and should be followed.

But with millions of transactions per second, no one can monitor them all without a lot of 'auto checking' and its easy for them to get under the radar.

An account getting 100k is easy to spot.
An account getting 10k ten times over a week, not so easy and is could be the same 10k going back and forward between someone owning two accounts.

With people selling motifs for 20k and vamp bites for 10k. (even tho both those are way overcharged) The gold transfer has to be around 60K+ before it becomes clear its a gold seller/buyer

I am no forensic IT specialist, but I have no doubt that gold sellers probably often distribute the gold amounts in smaller lump sums hoping to evade the radar, gold totals would probably be easier to work with, find the outliers and work from there.

Again I'm no specialist, but I am sure there are specialists out there that can produce a pretty darn near absolutely accurate list of gold buyers which can then be gone over by a human to verify they are in fact gold buyers.

Endolith

Starnes wrote: »

Again I'm no specialist, but I am sure there are specialists out there that can produce a pretty darn near absolutely accurate list of gold buyers which can then be gone over by a human to verify they are in fact gold buyers.

No doubt. There's no sense in some people pretending it is an insurmountable problem. It isn't, even if you want to take a more technical approach instead of putting in GMs. It's just a matter of whether ZOS wants to commit the resources to do it right and not auto-ban a bunch of people who aren't doing anything wrong.

deathly809_ESO

They probably just have a bunch of "gold laundering" schemes. I have a feeling it is not as easy as people think. (look at other MMOs)

RedTalon

They most likely ban both with any luck once they find out who to ban, given both the sellers and buyers are breaking the TOS.

Banning all parties involved is the only option to deal with the problem really.

HandofBane

Good idea, though it doesn't go far enough to guarantee it will be effective. Ban the buyers (as well as any sellers/bots caught) after a thorough manual investigation, then once a week publish a list of account names banned for buying on the main website as an example that gold sales are not tolerated on either end of the deal. Buyers will learn fast they cannot get by supporting the sellers, sellers will run out of buyers, and folks ingame will get the message fast that such behavior is not tolerated for its disruptive effect on the game.

Dunhilda

How fun would it be to sell an item for more gold than it's normally worth to a known gold seller ( Known by ZoS) and then be banned when you didn't know

Let me tell you the business models I know off
1/
Bots spam ads
Some bots farm gold
a real person sell said gold
That's one way

2/
no ads ( Maybe depends)
A real player farm golds (Subject)
A real player sell gold
that's the other way.


So you can see with option two the instance above where I sell an item could lead you to trouble, in option two the players are real players that play the game and work as part of a agency to off load some unwanted gold for spare money IRL ( some do so as a full time job)


Oh anyone hear about when someone sent their husband 37k on ESO and they got banned?
I have the link if anyone wants to read it up ( I be off to bed soon)


Spoilers
ZOS_GinaBruno Unbanned them ( Him?)

Ojustaboo

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

And to add on, it would probably be better if they didn't and just monitored their accounts to ban gold sellers.

I think actively banning buyers would be a more effective way of addressing the problem. Gold sellers pop up with new accounts all the times. People spending money to buy gold for the game are much more likely to care about a banned account.

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

Zenimax could spend a few hundred dollars on a load of preloaded 10 or 20 dollar visa cards, create a few characters, a few gmail accounts and pretend they are genuine buyers.

Might take a bit of time, might cost a few hundred (presuming you can't cancel such transactions) but then they would have some of the actual account names used to transfer the gold, then they can ban players receiving gold from those accounts. Hopefully word would soon get around that buyers accounts have been banned, and people might stop buying it.

However that seems too simple and it would also mean giving the gold sellers money which I wouldn't want zenimax to do, just thinking out loud on possible solutions.

deathly809_ESO

Ojustaboo wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

And to add on, it would probably be better if they didn't and just monitored their accounts to ban gold sellers.

I think actively banning buyers would be a more effective way of addressing the problem. Gold sellers pop up with new accounts all the times. People spending money to buy gold for the game are much more likely to care about a banned account.

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

Zenimax could spend a few hundred dollars on a load of preloaded 10 or 20 dollar visa cards, create a few characters, a few gmail accounts and pretend they are genuine buyers.

Might take a bit of time, might cost a few hundred (presuming you can't cancel such transactions) but then they would have some of the actual account names used to transfer the gold, then they can ban players receiving gold from those accounts. Hopefully word would soon get around that buyers accounts have been banned, and people might stop buying it.

However that seems too simple and it would also mean giving the gold sellers money which I wouldn't want zenimax to do, just thinking out loud on possible solutions.

The gold sellers are not here to help people but make money. What you are saying is that they can make money from Zenimax directly.

Ojustaboo

Endolith wrote: »

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

But then they would have to find the actual accounts that sell the gold. The people screaming in chat are not the ones who trade the gold. Some other account is that doesn't give off any hints that they are a gold seller.

It shouldn't be hard for them to flag large transfers of gold. Once they do that, it would take some review to make sure they aren't banning people who are sending their guild mate or girlfriend money for a horse or something.

That should work.

Doesn't have to be large amounts as I daresay the seller's would find a way around this by sending smaller amounts from various accounts, just simply look for someone sending gold to more than X number of different user ids and investigate further.

Guildmates could be a problem with the 5 guild system as the seller could make the buyer join their guild to get the money, but that's a simple enough thing to work out, has the guild member just joined, did they leave soon after getting sent money, how many other members of the guild joined up just before receiving money,

It should be fairly easy to spot people using a guild for cover.

Where it can go wrong is if gold isn't transfered, but instead the seller gets the buyer to sell the seller an item to complete the transaction in a way that looks like it's a normal sale.

Of course you can still look for transactions where low level characters are selling low value items for a lot of gold and see if the person buying it is often buying low value items for a lot.

But it can get very very messy at this point.

The seller could use 2 accounts, one to send the buyer a high value item and another to buy the item back

The buyer could take 10 stacks of ore out of the guild bank that's owned by another account of the seller, and sell for what is an average amount, getting him 10 to 20k but not being high enough to raise concerns.

And there's hundreds of other scenarios that could be used,

However I don't believe the average buyer has the intelligence to do most of the above. And I doubt the seller's can be trusted once they have your money to play out any over time transfer of small amounts.

I do think it should still be possible to write something that is fairly a accurate at spotting the sellers or buyers, but I also think it's a very complex thing to get right.

SuicideDonkey

A smart gold seller not wanting to get caught will never get caught, I see it on EVE all the time, as they got tougher on isk sellers, the isk sellers just changed tactics, they just invited someone to a corp(guild), gave them a delivery contract for XX billion isk and they just hopped over to another station, bam, transaction complete and totally legit.

It's just as easy to do here, gold seller invites buyer to his guild, gold buyer post something at a ridiculous price in guild store, gold seller buys it, bam, transaction complete and totally legit.

I understand it's a touchy subject, but to be honest, I don't care about people buying gold in ESO, without a central AH the economy is so fractured that people buying gold have practically no influence over the market, and without the ability to inflate the market the only advantage they get is ,what, earlier access to bag and bank space and some mounts. As I see it the only real drawback to people buying gold is that it encourages that obnoxious gold seller spam, but even that goes away once you're out of the starter zones.

ESO is sub based at the moment, so a permaban for gold buyers they do catch may not be a good idea, in my opinion they should just confiscate the purchased gold and let the player know that they just wasted some of their RL money and call it good, maybe give repeat offenders a week or two ban to cool their heels but don't go bigger than that.

Ojustaboo

SuicideDonkey wrote: »

It's just as easy to do here, gold seller invites buyer to his guild, gold buyer post something at a ridiculous price in guild store, gold seller buys it, bam, transaction complete and totally legit.

While I don't disagree with any of your post, regarding the above, it still should be possible for someone to write something that flags up suspect transactions.

Obviously people try to sell things at stupidly high prices all the time and sometimes people legitimately buy them, either because they don't know their value, or because they have a lot of gold and don't care about paying over the odds.

But it should still be possible to write something that spots thing that are being bought way over value time and time again from the same account.

Trouble is, it gets to the point where you would need a team of experts writing non stop just to keep ahead of the sellers and such experts probably could name their salary in various anti fraud companies rather than working for a games company.

It is possible, but no where near as easy as most people imagine.

djwolfnrb19_ESO

deathly809_ESO wrote: »

They probably just have a bunch of "gold laundering" schemes. I have a feeling it is not as easy as people think. (look at other MMOs)

Other MMOs that I play don't have any gold sellers. But then, if I encounter some bug in a quest or somehow lose an item through no fault of my own I petition and within minutes I get an in-game GM standing beside me knowing what quests I'd completed, what point I was at in a quest, what I'd killed, and exactly what I'd earned and how. They have a very advanced database that knows everything about the millions of characters in the game.

What concerns me is the financial side of this problem. I go into a dungeon and at times 2/3rds of the "players" are bots. That's a lot of monthly accounts. Would cleaning up the gold sellers give ZOS more money or less?

Cleaning up gold sellers is easy. You heavily promote the fact that gold buyers are cheats and that buying gold or joining a "gold guild" will be grounds for termination. You only have to ban enough players for the message to get through that "Cheaters will be caught" for the gold market to dry up.

So let's see which path ZOS chooses: quick profits from thousands of bot accounts or a long sustained game.

SuicideDonkey

Ojustaboo wrote: »

Trouble is, it gets to the point where you would need a team of experts writing non stop just to keep ahead of the sellers and such experts probably could name their salary in various anti fraud companies rather than working for a games company.

It is possible, but no where near as easy as most people imagine.

You've just hit upon the real reason why you can't ever really stamp it out, it quickly gets to a point where it's just not cost effective for the company to do anymore to stop gold buying/selling.

As a for profit company they make the decision about cost effectiveness, some companies like work really hard and spend a lot of money combating RMT. Look at EVE the economy is an integral part of EVE and CCP cares enough about that to spend a great deal of time, money and effort to to fight the RMTs, they can't stop it, but they try fairly hard. Then you get companies that couldn't give a damn like PWI.
Where Zenimax stands on this, I don't know, but will gold being fairly useless in ESO, I'd be inclined to think that they won't go overboard.

GambitJ79b14_ESO

Saerydoth wrote: »

They actually already do ban gold buyers. There just aren't a huge number of them, and it's not something that's really publicized. It just turns into a blip on the radar compared to the spammers and bots.

Well IMO it should be publicized, campaigned, warned, declaimed directly that buying gold is against the TOS. At least the announcement that buyers are also targeted should be quite a deterrent. If there are no buyers then the bots will have no impact on the market, they will fill their coffers with no turnover.

Natjur wrote: »

Account A spams selling gold
Account Z want to buy gold
Account C,D and E each sent account Z 10,000 gold

Account A is banned for spamming 'gold for sale'

How do you ban account Z (the buyer) and C, D and E (the sellers)?
What limit do you 'monitor'?
How do you make sure you don't ban normal players moving their own gold around?

One of the major keys is in the people reporting the bots, once identified as a bot it doesn't matter how much or how little is transferred. Whom/Whatever it sends it's gold to is also illegitimate and should be banned. The harder part in that is just how far down the trail does the ban-hammer go? I would imagine a gold buyer isn't going to just hold on to that gold, it's going to circulate and at some point a legitimate trade will happen - How does one determine how far it goes.

I would think the amount of gold generated (looted/item venders) over a period of time and place would be a greater identifier than the amount transferred.

gunplummer

I think banning or even catching a gold buyer could be difficult. Lets say you order 100k gold from one of the sites spammed in chat and you give them an item any value say 10 aged meat and they give you 100k gold in return.

Given the current prices of things how could you justify banning them for buying gold or even prove they bought from a gold selling site? What if the gold selling site doesn't spam the chat and only advertises through internet searches?

Just because its a large transaction does not make it illegal. I have given friends gold for all kinds of things such as helping craft/collect something or help in a tough dungeon which with help includes no tangible item in exchange for gold.

I think the only real way for Zos to do anything is to continue banning bots rather then make the mistake of banning an honest player.

ijRoberts

gunplummer wrote: »

I have given friends gold for all kinds of things such as helping craft/collect something or help in a tough dungeon which with help includes no tangible item in exchange for gold.

I might be misunderstanding, but how is giving your friend gold helping them with a tough dungeon?