Remove gold from MMOs once and for all!

Chryos

So how do botters deal with posts that hurt their business? They do stuff like post tinfoil baseball caps or call people paranoid idiots in an attempt to discredit or embarrass them so they stop etc etc. Take a "good" college level cyber forensics and learn all about how criminals try to fight back against those who stand up to them. Anyway, just like the guy who said he was reporting me for trolling and spamming when I spoke out before against them by trying to spread awareness. If ZOE reads my post history they would obviously know I am no troll or spammer. This is what the botter criminals do tho..

Eris

To be honest, I doubt that anyone is going to come up with a solution in this forum that the MMO devs have not thought of in the last 20 years. This has been going on long before there were graphical MMOs. People used to sell coin and virtual items back in the Gemstone days and probably before that.

A bad solution, but a solution is that nobody be allowed to trade, chat, comment, join a guild, game mail, etc., for 1 month. By that time there is a pretty good chance that the account will already be closed either through discovery or through someone reporting invalid use of their credit card. Like I said, a bad solution, and definitely fallible, but it would cut out most of the problem. Without a supply, they cannot sell, if they cannot trade they have no supply, if they cannot chat or game mail they cannot spam. If they get banned before they can trade or spam all their effort is wasted. The more their effort is wasted the more they will focus elsewhere.

Sadly, it also has a negative effect on community and makes it a single player game for a month, so that is a negative which is probably to negative.

knaveofengland

in the uk they have banned 2500 internet sites , you can guess what ones they was , just support eso in time they will deal with the issues

SeñorCinco

kcolasaccob14_ESO wrote: »

My best suggestion is finding out who they are in real life and beating the f*** out of them.

I think this kind of dialog is inappropriate.


I love it!

Chryos

My favorite tactic botters use to discredit is when they try and break down my post using debate tactics or nitpicking using the "scientific method" stuff they learned about in college. Anyone with a bit of wisdom in dealing with people from all cultures can pick out intent or "read between the lines", this is very evident from "english as a second language" speakers when they type in english. So if I make a post against gold spamming and am doing nothing but "trying to do the right thing" and then I have someone telling me by using a "scare tactic" that they are reporting me for trolling and spamming, what does that really say about the other person?

deathly809_ESO

Witblitz wrote: »

How hard can it be? Attack the root of the problem, remove gold from the game. Come up with a better idea, speaking of which, what would you recommend?

You are out of your mind. How would you trade? What would you "sell" your potions, or small valued item for? What happens when you have a really valuable piece of armor and you want to sell, how would you find something you think it is worth?

There is a reason no modern country works on the barter system anymore.

Genomic

Chryos wrote: »

My favorite tactic botters use to discredit is when they try and break down my post using debate tactics or nitpicking using the "scientific method" stuff they learned about in college.

Scientific method? Observation, hypothesis, experimentation, analysis? Damn those botters and their book-learnin'!

Dante_Marquis

This will not fix the problem with the gold sellers..I am now getting in game mail from gold sellers that are now selling Iron ore, Wood, Leather, and every Motif books. The only way to stop this is ESO need to sell all of this and gold in there Online store...Now before you all say only the rich will be able to buy this not really..sell it cheep..I am not rich but if I love the game I will always buy something every month to support it.

AlexDougherty

Witblitz wrote: »

How hard can it be? Attack the root of the problem, remove gold from the game. Come up with a better idea, speaking of which, what would you recommend?

And how would we buy items and pay for repairs, and if they actually did remove the money and make it trade 25 Iron Ores to repair 30 points of damage (my example), wouldn't they just change from selling gold to selling materials.

Witblitz wrote: »

Don't make gold a sell-able commodity then. Every penny your earn belongs to you alone. Place all gear and equipment in value brackets allowing for trade. Get these damn bots out of the game already.

Yes, but then they'll just say they'll just trade 1000G for one iron bar when you tell them the secret password via whispers.

And the bots are only one symptom, they also steal gold from people who's password&username they guess/steal. Banning the sellers is the only really viable method.

Witblitz wrote: »

How did Blizzard manage to remove botters and spammers from Diablo III. Go look there for answers.

Different Game, Different type of game too, different engine, etc.

epoling

Putting all the crafting materials in a RMT store isn't a very good solution either. People will leave the game stating that it has become "Pay to Win" (whether it is or not). It also unfairly disadvantages those who have smaller discretionary budgets and don't have money to spend on game store items. It's a game and the playing field should be level for all, not who has the most out-of-game spendable cash. It would be nice if there were a perfect solution, but I don't think us players are really going to come up with one.

Arizona_Willie

When we sign up we give them permission to access our computers and gather information about them. Each computer has an identifying number. Why can't they use that to bar gold sellers? If they catch someone selling gold, all they need to do is get their computer number and bar that machine. They can't change the number without changing components which would make it ridiculously expensive to do for the gold sellers.

Why can't they trace the credit card transactions? We have a world wide system of financial transactions and they SHOULD be able to trace the transactions.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

If the financial transactions work and the seller gets his money there HAS to be a way to find out where the money went and how he got it. There are records of every transaction.

kmorganlfcb16_ESO

Demeos wrote: »

...Or they could go with the alternative that certain other MMO's went with and provide a legitimate way of buying gold within the game and essentially make it not worth the time and effort that gold selling sites would need to put in to compete.

I played EveOnline for a few years which had its own legal means of purchasing ingame currency, yet you could still find third party sites selling it. These sites would also sell ingame items such as ships, equipment and skillbooks etc, so the problem broadens as opposed to being fixed.

Omniphonic

Taid wrote: »

A well written but misappropriated view of Path of Exile's barter system.

Yet despite these things, due to a few design decisions and lack of effort to police it's player-base, Path of Exile still became a haven for RMT buyers and sellers. You write a glowing review of it's economy system, but since your information is incomplete is it also inaccurate.

Path of Exile wouldn't be a dead game with ~8,000 active players a year after it's release if the ideal system you described was actually in place there. I had actually never experienced a game that plagued by RMT before PoE, and I had the expectations that because ESO was a p2p game, none of that kind of nonsense would exist.

I also don't believe for a second that it would be that hard to permanently stop, if developers really wanted to. I think they think it's a sign of a healthy game for their paying customers to be harassed by bots on a daily basis. ZOS practically paved the way for them with the account-bound names and 'you've got mail' annoying notice that there's no way to block or ignore. I don't have a very good opinion of game developers because I always believe I could have done it better, maybe that's skewing my biased opinion.

AlexDougherty

Arizona_Willie wrote: »

When we sign up we give them permission to access our computers and gather information about them. Each computer has an identifying number. Why can't they use that to bar gold sellers?

Actually you can alter that identifier, without changing components, it's taught in most computer installation courses (course for becoming a network engineer and setting up networks), for the purpose of setting up networks.

Why can't they trace the credit card transactions? We have a world wide system of financial transactions and they SHOULD be able to trace the transactions.

FOLLOW THE MONEY.

If the financial transactions work and the seller gets his money there HAS to be a way to find out where the money went and how he got it. There are records of every transaction.

Those financial records are confidential, and you need a court order just to see the parts that take place in your country, to see international transactions you would need the cooperation of all police forces, several court orders (at least one for each country) and probably the involvement of interpol and banking organisations (who are going to notice you poking around in bank affairs).

To get all this you would need the proof you are trying to track, which at this point you wouldn't have. Catch 22 anyone.

Vunter

...Are you taking this guy seriously?
I see too many tl;dr replies to this topic

Nazon_Katts

Lessen the felt need of having to buy gold by providing easy means to players to acquire it, rather than making it harder by inaccessible, inconvient trading systems would be a step in the right direction. Accepting the fact that there's no way drying out the grey market, unless you run it yourself or scrap player trading entirely could help with redesigning the game's economy.

Currently, all that gold sinks and limited item supply does, is playing into the gold sellers hands, as it is just increasing demand for their goods. Opening up the market is very much needed to bring the average player on par with professional farmers. I'm going to make the bold claim that even a global AH would be better than what we have now, though it is not my preferred options and most certainly not the only option for a thriving and player friendly economy.

But considering the rather simplistic implementation of a generic MMO economy, a simplistic and generic solution like multiple, public AHs probably would be the easiest route. Otherwise, how crafting works and how resources enter the game would need an extensive overhaul, so you'd have true localized markets.

South_of_Heaven

Remove MMOs from MMOs! Solves every problem!

SaibotLiu

What you need is proven and loyal members of the fanbase who are willing to volunteer to act as an anti RMT police force and be empowered to do so by ZOS. It will never happen, because a sane developer would never give its player base the authority to ban other players on their own discretion, as the fear would be it would lead to abuse of said authority.

Clearly ZOS is not going to pay the staff required to rid the game of this problem, they'd rather swat a few flies here and there and tolerate the rest. That's up to them, but the solution is clear.

I for one would rather take the natural risks to give certain trustworthy players GM powers to act against these gold farmers, than to allow them to be the ones to destroy the in game economy. ZOS has shown dedication to keeping their in game economy regulated, but are falling short of the mark where it counts. (Bugs and exploits, and this problem obviously.) So all their other efforts are for not, unless they act.

Vordar

Every MMO has this problem, a lot of it depends on how the economy settles after a few months, I agree with getting rid of the biggest gold sinks that causes lazy people to buy gold. Yeah yeah we've all heard the excuses: I have a RL with Work so I don't have time to farm (I have never understood why people want the best things in game if they don't have time to play it anyway), but as soon as the gold sinks go away the gold selling should go down to a minimum.

Cleofis

Here's a novel idea. Why don't people stop buying gold? If no one bought it they wouldn't sell it.

seaef

This problem is not solvable until people stop buying items from sellers. You can try and mess with items and currency all you want, but seller will always find a way around imposed limits. The fault lies with the players.

michaelpatrickjonesnub18_ESO

Witblitz wrote: »

How hard can it be? Attack the root of the problem, remove gold from the game. Come up with a better idea, speaking of which, what would you recommend?

Interesting idea. But a game still needs some form of currency.

So the best solution is to do what Turbine did to combat it in Lord of the Rings. They jumped on it like white on rice.

Later, they went free-to-play and that completely destroyed the market for it.

Also, you have to put bigger cool down timers on bosses, loot and XP. It's a free-for-all in this game because everything spawns fast, and everything is instantly repeatable.

I'm talking nodes, too. Nodes don't respawn this quickly in Lotro. Not even close. But with all the servers and dynamic layers they have, it works fine, because the population is dispersed much better.

They don't need to eliminate gold. They need to fix their game mechanics. It's just poorly designed. No structure. No security blanket. Nothing.

stefaan.de.wasch1b16_ESO

Witblitz wrote: »

Come up with a better idea, speaking of which, what would you recommend?

What I would recommend ? That people actualy play the game called ESO and not the Spot The Bot Game...

I have yet to see botters, but then I don't actively go out looking for them to get frustrated over and have a reason the rant and rave... Hell, I kill a dungeon boss and move on the the next dungeon... you know... to like.... level ?

If you go out looking for stuff, you "will" find it... everytime... Damn, they even found the God Particle... It's like drugs... if you don't go out looking for them, you'll never be confronted by them... but if you actualy "do" look for them... you'll see them everywhere.

Play ESO... that's what I would recommend

crush83

It's simple. Just turn off the servers.

starkerealm

qwertyburnsb16_ESO wrote: »

Apart from that, technically isn't this like criminal damage, fraud and theft? Couldn't this be taken up by the authorities via Interpol?

Slightly off topic, but, you know Interpol is only an advisory agency, right? As in, the only thing it does is shuffle paperwork between the police in different countries?

starkerealm

Mightylink wrote: »

No matter what there is always currency, if there is no gold people will find something else to trade for, its unavoidable.

You could do a loadout tree that unlocks with non-transferable XP options. Basically, you spend the treasure you get to unlock new armor pieces or weapon equipment. You unlock modifiers on those items using the same XP type. You can get access to new nodes to purchase via quest rewards or achievements.

No actual items, no money, nothing to trade or vendor. You just unlock bits as you go along, and put the points where you want.

It's better suited for narrower games than a full on RPG, but the basic idea is sound enough. I don't think it'd be a good fit for ESO, though.

jkbennettb14a_ESO

Nazon_Katts wrote: »

Lessen the felt need of having to buy gold by providing easy means to players to acquire it, rather than making it harder by inaccessible, inconvient trading systems would be a step in the right direction. Accepting the fact that there's no way drying out the grey market, unless you run it yourself or scrap player trading entirely could help with redesigning the game's economy.

Currently, all that gold sinks and limited item supply does, is playing into the gold sellers hands, as it is just increasing demand for their goods. Opening up the market is very much needed to bring the average player on par with professional farmers. I'm going to make the bold claim that even a global AH would be better than what we have now, though it is not my preferred options and most certainly not the only option for a thriving and player friendly economy.

But considering the rather simplistic implementation of a generic MMO economy, a simplistic and generic solution like multiple, public AHs probably would be the easiest route. Otherwise, how crafting works and how resources enter the game would need an extensive overhaul, so you'd have true localized markets.

Eliminating gold sinks would only cause inflation and lessen the value of gold.

Items have an intrinsic value given the same supply and same demand. More gold, easier to obtain gold only lessens golds value. It does nothing to the intrinsic value of items. The exception would be items bought from NPCs which remain static. But that's not really what we're discussing here.

jkbennettb14a_ESO

cfurlin wrote: »

This problem is not solvable until people stop buying items from sellers. You can try and mess with items and currency all you want, but seller will always find a way around imposed limits. The fault lies with the players.

This...Ban the buyers. The sellers are not the roots of the tree, the buyers are.

Ithug

What about Ultima Online economy ? When selling items to vendors, the price for this item was going down after a certain amount, because the vendors have "too many" of these items...

If the sales for an item drop, it is the opposite, the price for this come back to a normal value.

There is also bulk order, which is a nice way to encourage crafting. You get quest from vendor. They ask you.. idk.. maybe 50 cotton helmet level 24 with divine trait.. And reward you with a nice some Elegant lining.. *** like that...

It will also be great to have "mini auction house", maybe just allow access to GStore via a Guild NPC that the guild will have to buy with gold.

Just some ideas...

Xaegoth

jkbennettb14a_ESO wrote: »

cfurlin wrote: »

This problem is not solvable until people stop buying items from sellers. You can try and mess with items and currency all you want, but seller will always find a way around imposed limits. The fault lies with the players.

This...Ban the buyers. The sellers are not the roots of the tree, the buyers are.

I agree with this.

You come down hard on the buyers (permanent ban) and the gold sellers will have no one to sell to....and move on to another game.

I would think this would be easier too...ban a buyer and they won't pop back up 3 minutes later like the gold farmer/bots do.