Permanent ban to account users, who buy from "Chinese gold sellers" .

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

So guys shout a little.. lets ban them all. No more buyers = no more sellers/botters etc. Done before can be done again.

Natjur

Sounds good, but how can you prove who was a buyer? Player X was give gold from player Y. Neither has any 'trace' of any botting.

How can you prove that Player X brought gold from player Y?

Humor

Hahahaha, If only it were that simple...

Simple to ban accounts, but, you can't do nothing more other than that. Meaning they can just create new accounts, use the scammed Credit Cards they stole, and remake another gold botter/seller.

No way to deal with bots, however, it'd be nice to see "something" actually done, hell, at this point in ESO's lifespan, anything would be better than the generic "We're looking into this issue" answer. My opinion of course.

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

It is this simple.. we report gold sellers.. "yagfjhadsgfhj" sended, 150k gold to "Anu Saukko" Ban to both.. they did it on lotr.. 50+thousand ppl what bought gold where banned for lifetime.

Natjur

killerintheline9 wrote: »

It is this simple.. we report gold sellers.. "yagfjhadsgfhj" sended, 150k gold to "Anu Saukko" Ban to both.. they did it on lotr.. 50+thousand ppl what bought gold where banned for lifetime.

But they use many many accounts to 'clean the trans'

Player yagfjhadsgfhj spammed the channels
Player A earned the gold
Player X sold the gold
Player Y brought the gold

Yes player yagfjhadsgfhj will be banned, but it was a junk account using a stolen credit card, it was designed to be banned

Player A may get banned, but it will take them a long time to work out if its a bot or a good farmer.

Player X account looks clean and only ever give one or two players gold (the buyers)
Player Y is the gold buyer and looks clean.

So tell me again how do you ban player Y?

Maybe you can just track large gold transfers, but with rare motifs now going to 50k+ and V10 players earning 10k per hour farming normal mobs.... That not going to work unless someone is transferring millions.

drschplatt

Chinese huh? Paint with a broad brush much?

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

Natjur wrote: »

killerintheline9 wrote: »

It is this simple.. we report gold sellers.. "yagfjhadsgfhj" sended, 150k gold to "Anu Saukko" Ban to both.. they did it on lotr.. 50+thousand ppl what bought gold where banned for lifetime.

But they use many many accounts to 'clean the trans'

Player yagfjhadsgfhj spammed the channels
Player A earned the gold
Player X sold the gold
Player Y brought the gold

Yes player yagfjhadsgfhj will be banned, but it was a junk account using a stolen credit card, it was designed to be banned

Player A may get banned, but it will take them a long time to work out if its a bot or a good farmer.

Player X account looks clean and only ever give one or two players gold (the buyers)
Player Y is the gold buyer and looks clean.

So tell me again how do you ban player Y?

yes i know what you mean, and im not fully aware how Zenimax tracks their servers.. But this i Know player Y can be traced back to main source of false gold. they did this on LOTR, i believe it can be done here also. I would love to hear what Zenimax would reply this, and what is their official reply to my question like. (main topic)

Chirru

Hard to catch...hard to prove and...don't want to loose subscriptions. Maybe start out with scratching the custom Add-On license and get only official Add-On's. As it is, the system is wide open to be abused from everyone with a 101 in computing. You even can buy the scripts online and off you go...

ozgod22_eso

killerintheline9 wrote: »

So guys shout a little.. lets ban them all. No more buyers = no more sellers/botters etc. Done before can be done again.

This was talked about in this thread:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/814378/#Comment_814378

How would you propose to identify these people engaging in external transactions outside the game? Will Zenimax now deploy resources to track people's bank accounts? Just because jgfhdghgdtgfj transferred 150k gold to Kyle The Magnificent doesn't necessarily mean that jgfhdghgdtgfj is a bot. And usually gold farmers are smarter than that. They use those bots to farm then they will create another character on the account called Killer Number 9 and use that account to transfer the gold, and then once it happens Killer Number 9 gets deleted never to be seen again. It's actually a lot more time consuming than people think to go through and trace all the myriad transactions happening in a game like this, let alone trying to find irregularities where you can't prove that a transaction was nefarious anyway.

There's a couple of approaches to this. One is the bandaid approach of banning them as they pop up, which needs Zenimax to spend money on GMs to sit in game waiting for reports. Along with this, they need to streamline the reporting process which is too cumbersome right now. Shouldn't need 5 steps and a minute out of playing the game to report bots, given how frequently we have to do it.

The second approach is to remove the demand for botting services. Sometimes you have to think outside the square. These solutions will not be palatable to most, myself included, but they work. One of the consequences of Blizzard's selling level 90 toons for real money is that it has removed the need for levelling bots to powerlevel toons for people. Why pay some third party company to powerlevel your toon when you can buy it from the Blizzard store? The only bots you really see in WoW now are PvP bots farming honor and dungeon bots farming justice points because that can't be purchased yet. Asian MMOs have long been free to play, pay to win. It sucks, and it goes against the notion of fair play, but it has gotten rid of botting to a large extent. Unfortunately it's much easier to get rid of botting than to get rid of the reasons why people engage in bot services.

Natjur

killerintheline9 wrote: »

yes i know what you mean, and im not fully aware how Zenimax tracks their servers.. But this i Know player Y can be traced back to main source of false gold. they did this on LOTR, i believe it can be done here also. I would love to hear what Zenimax would reply this, and what is their official reply to my question like. (main topic)

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

It takes a while to prove, and its better for a game to lets ten guilty get away with it then one innocent be banned that should not be. Also they have LOTS and LOTS of issues already for them to deal with (bugs, hacks, bot farmers)

Most MMO's do ban bots, gold seller and gold buyers, but normally its a few months before they get to banning the gold buyers as they are the hardest to prove.

I am sure before we hit the 90 day 'live' mark, we will see our first wave of gold buyers banned, in the mean time, they think they are safe.

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

ozgod22_eso wrote: »

killerintheline9 wrote: »

So guys shout a little.. lets ban them all. No more buyers = no more sellers/botters etc. Done before can be done again.

This was talked about in this thread:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/814378/#Comment_814378

How would you propose to identify these people engaging in external transactions outside the game? Will Zenimax now deploy resources to track people's bank accounts? Just because jgfhdghgdtgfj transferred 150k gold to Kyle The Magnificent doesn't necessarily mean that jgfhdghgdtgfj is a bot. And usually gold farmers are smarter than that. They use those bots to farm then they will create another character on the account called Killer Number 9 and use that account to transfer the gold, and then once it happens Killer Number 9 gets deleted never to be seen again. It's actually a lot more time consuming than people think to go through and trace all the myriad transactions happening in a game like this, let alone trying to find irregularities where you can't prove that a transaction was nefarious anyway.

There's a couple of approaches to this. One is the bandaid approach of banning them as they pop up, which needs Zenimax to spend money on GMs to sit in game waiting for reports. Along with this, they need to streamline the reporting process which is too cumbersome right now. Shouldn't need 5 steps and a minute out of playing the game to report bots, given how frequently we have to do it.

The second approach is to remove the demand for botting services. Sometimes you have to think outside the square. These solutions will not be palatable to most, myself included, but they work. One of the consequences of Blizzard's selling level 90 toons for real money is that it has removed the need for levelling bots to powerlevel toons for people. Why pay some third party company to powerlevel your toon when you can buy it from the Blizzard store? The only bots you really see in WoW now are PvP bots farming honor and dungeon bots farming justice points because that can't be purchased yet. Asian MMOs have long been free to play, pay to win. It sucks, and it goes against the notion of fair play, but it has gotten rid of botting to a large extent. Unfortunately it's much easier to get rid of botting than to get rid of the reasons why people engage in bot services.

yes they are every where, at least some of the gold buyers can be banned, it works also an fear factor to buyer, not to buy from them. Did you know that, there were beta testers over 5 million, i believe actual player data base must be somewhere 8-15 million, maybe. who has bought the game and paid at least the first 30 days. so they make great income, they have plenty enough money to transfer it to just solving this matter. And i am very much sure that they can track A to B what is going on their servers, if they have money and time, which they have.
After all its just 1000111000011110011 and they can make ghost software what can read this correct info and auto ban.

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

The ghost software could be like this
it uses commands to calculate possible botters and associates and buyers like this
1. time spend on one spot
1.1. player total deaths and deaths on one spot
1.2. total loot gained, loot gained on same spot
1.2.2 player level, unused skill points, armor lvl, general skills based on player lvl
1.3. player route,same or not
1.4 player online time
1.5 guests done
1.6 player name
1.7 player ip
1.8 calculates total % chance him to be bot,
1.8 continues to phase 2
2. gained loot goes whom, what happen to it, where it were transferred.
2.1 what transfer method was used
3. actual gold buyer has been found
4. software greats data base what can be used identify byer/seller
5. Or makes auto-ban based on total %, what it has calculated of happenings.
and player/players will be send auto mail of happenings and chance to prove Zenimax wrong.

zaria

killerintheline9 wrote: »

Natjur wrote: »

killerintheline9 wrote: »

It is this simple.. we report gold sellers.. "yagfjhadsgfhj" sended, 150k gold to "Anu Saukko" Ban to both.. they did it on lotr.. 50+thousand ppl what bought gold where banned for lifetime.

But they use many many accounts to 'clean the trans'

Player yagfjhadsgfhj spammed the channels
Player A earned the gold
Player X sold the gold
Player Y brought the gold

Yes player yagfjhadsgfhj will be banned, but it was a junk account using a stolen credit card, it was designed to be banned

Player A may get banned, but it will take them a long time to work out if its a bot or a good farmer.

Player X account looks clean and only ever give one or two players gold (the buyers)
Player Y is the gold buyer and looks clean.

So tell me again how do you ban player Y?

yes i know what you mean, and im not fully aware how Zenimax tracks their servers.. But this i Know player Y can be traced back to main source of false gold. they did this on LOTR, i believe it can be done here also. I would love to hear what Zenimax would reply this, and what is their official reply to my question like. (main topic)

Lots of the bots like the level 3 in coldharbor is very easy to spot.
Now you log who they interact with, they have one bot who they travel too, another who receive the 250 gold from each of them, he moves the gold to yet another account who give it to player.

Yes its ways to launder gold but its hard to do in large scale without an AH.

You can also go the other way, search for players who gave away 100k gold or more, check if player does this regularly, if so check if he get gold from other accounts, verify that player is not an legitime trader playing the marked.

You also have other sources, accounts who was closed because of credit card fraud, ip addressees assosiated with banned accounts are prime suspects and could be looked into for transactions.

The only type of bot who is hard to catch is the players who use bots while afk, they don't follow an common pattern, typically find an isolated spot to harvest or grind, character has an real life in game. Best tool here is to search for standard bot clients on his computer.

Anu_Saukko_Tutkija

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warden_(software)

ZOS_MichelleA

Hello! We do have an existing thread for discussion of this topic. Please direct your thoughts to the following thread: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/95846/how-to-end-gold-farming-in-a-mmo.

This will help keep the conversation consolidated. Thanks for your understanding!