How to combat gold sellers - the smart way.

clocksstoppe · April 2014

Firstly i would like to say i do not take credit for creating this system, but i have seen it in other mmos and it worked very well.

Secondly, it is important to understand that gold farmers exist because of demand - there will always be someone out there who wants to buy gold with their irl money.

Now to the system. Implement a special token in the cash shop that people buy for money. This token would have a price carefully set by Zenimax and it would be delivered to the player by mail. The token can be traded ONLY ONCE, after that it becomes bound.

Now the most important part, what it does. The token can be redeemed, giving either game subscription time, or cash shop credit. The gold value of the tokens would be decided by the community itself.

What are the advantages? You can buy imperial edition upgrade/cash shop items/game time with your gold you earned in-game. It allows more people to play the game, should they choose to buy their game time exclusively with gold.

The disadvantages: gold buying will still exist, but it will be done using Zenimax and the game itself as a middleman, and due to this it will destroy gold sellers.

Even if the gold sellers undercut the tokens, would you risk your account getting banned while buying from them, would you risk getting scammed? Would you risk getting your paypal/credit card stolen?

KerinKor · April 2014

/shakehead

You clearly don't understand RMT and the way they operate, they're rampant even in F2P games like Rift, GW2 and SW:TOR as well.

As for buyers being banned in your scheme that's PRECISELY what ZOS should be doing here right now and the lack of any statement by ZOS that buyers will be banned is the simply allowing RMT to prosper because the large numbers of buyers aren't risking their accounts.

ESO doesn't need to become a Store-based, MT-infested game in order to deal with the root cause of RMT: the gold BUYERS!

Blackwidow · April 2014

OP, no. Just no.

clocksstoppe · April 2014

Blackwidow wrote: »

OP, no. Just no.

why

Valethar · April 2014

That might work in an F2P environment with a fully fleshed out MT store. It's not going to work here. The only thing ZOS has to offer at present are upgrades to the IE, a single horse, and subscriptions. There's simply not enough digital merchandise to support selling tokens.

Wreaken · April 2014

How to combat gold sellers, the smart way, don't buy gold in the first place.

Pretty simple logic I thought.

zaria · April 2014

Eve uses something like this, ESO has the horse who save you 17k gold in the beginning.

Two problems, one is that the gold sellers can underbid the official stores prices.
Second it that the criminals in not after the 10$ you buy gold for but your credit card number.

Ygge · April 2014

It works well in EVE, does it not? Why would it not work here?

Also, I don't see how it would work in a free-to-play environment. What I and, I believe, many other EVE-players placed value on was the possibility of buying game time with in-game currency. It would possibly work on cash shop credits too, as long as cash shop items aren't pay to win. (edit: It would work too but I don't like the concept of unfair advantages by paying.)

As for the gold sellers underbidding official store prices, people whom stand to choose between a legitimate but more expensive shop versus a illegitimate and cheap shop where credit card scamming may occur may not as often choose the cheap version as one would think. Especially if Zenimax performed some sort of informative campaign on risks.

Since such a method does not confer in-game benefits other than the possibility of obtaining gold earned by other players by paying for another persons game time or cash currency, i.e not gold obtained by bots nor items that grant more experience, research speed or gold gain etc.

It's a good system I think. Could someone please elaborate why it would be bad? I see negative reactions but not many explanations as to why it would not work.

Noth · April 2014

Ygge wrote: »

It works well in EVE, does it not? Why would it not work here?

Also, I don't see how it would work in a free-to-play environment. What I and, I believe, many other EVE-players placed value on was the possibility of buying game time with in-game currency. It would possibly work on cash shop credits too, as long as cash shop items aren't pay to win. (edit: It would work too but I don't like the concept of unfair advantages by paying.)

As for the gold sellers underbidding official store prices, people whom stand to choose between a legitimate but more expensive shop versus a illegitimate and cheap shop where credit card scamming may occur may not as often choose the cheap version as one would think. Especially if Zenimax performed some sort of informative campaign on risks.

Since such a method does not confer in-game benefits other than the possibility of obtaining gold earned by other players by paying for another persons game time or cash currency, i.e not gold obtained by bots nor items that grant more experience, research speed or gold gain etc.

It's a good system I think. Could someone please elaborate why it would be bad? I see negative reactions but not many explanations as to why it would not work.

EvE still has just as bad of an issue of gold sellers and bots as any other game.

clocksstoppe · April 2014

Noth wrote: »

Ygge wrote: »

It works well in EVE, does it not? Why would it not work here?

Also, I don't see how it would work in a free-to-play environment. What I and, I believe, many other EVE-players placed value on was the possibility of buying game time with in-game currency. It would possibly work on cash shop credits too, as long as cash shop items aren't pay to win. (edit: It would work too but I don't like the concept of unfair advantages by paying.)

As for the gold sellers underbidding official store prices, people whom stand to choose between a legitimate but more expensive shop versus a illegitimate and cheap shop where credit card scamming may occur may not as often choose the cheap version as one would think. Especially if Zenimax performed some sort of informative campaign on risks.

Since such a method does not confer in-game benefits other than the possibility of obtaining gold earned by other players by paying for another persons game time or cash currency, i.e not gold obtained by bots nor items that grant more experience, research speed or gold gain etc.

It's a good system I think. Could someone please elaborate why it would be bad? I see negative reactions but not many explanations as to why it would not work.

EvE still has just as bad of an issue of gold sellers and bots as any other game.

source? proof?

Ygge · April 2014

Of course EVE has goldsellers and bots. As I understand the issue the concept of goldsellers can't be removed by any reasonable action of the publisher.

Therefore one must look to ways to combat the violation in order to lessen the profits of the gold selling groups.

This discussion, as I understand it, revolves around the possibility of implementing and possible success of such a method as the one described above. Indeed, EVE has a bad case of goldsellers, but I can't see it as being as bad as the one in the Elder Scrolls Online. Thus, is this a viable method?