They probably already do.

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 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.

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"

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?

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.