Three strike rule for those buying gold.

Strike 1: Take the gold and warn them.
Strike 2: Take the gold and ban them for seven days.
Strike 3: Perma-ban.

This is pretty much how CCP/EVE Online handles it. The security team make a valid point that banning the buyers isn't nice because those are the customers of their product and quite often it's the newer players who want to get ahead and may not know better who do it.

Braumeisterlein wrote: »

Pele wrote: »

Agree. Ban the gold buyers as well.

As much as I agree, I'm skeptical that it's so easy.

How do you determine whether someone bought gold?

Very easy, Turbine did it in LOTRO and Square Enix do though not much.

The warning sign is that a player receives gold from an account proven to be RMT. The player may have been ignorant and unlike the criminal law ignorance is a good defense in this context so he gets a warning; second offense is a ban.

However, if the amount of gold was large and there was no trade involved, ie. the player was simply givcen a lot of gold from a proven RMT then there's no reason to think the player didn't know exactly what he was doing, so given him a multi-day suspension as a final warning.

It's easy to come up with convoluted situations where there's a doubt and I'm certainly prepared to accept benefit of the doubt is important, but someone receiving 10k gold from a proven RMT without any hint of a trade of an in-game item of corresponding value is NOT doubtful to anyone with common sense I would suggest.

Braumeisterlein wrote: »

. I mean I'm really no expert in IT, but wouldn't you need a gigantic datacenter to record (and analyse!) every single ingame Transaction over days and probably weeks

The numbers of accounts in an MMO is trivially small in data handling terms, and analysing transactional data like this is bread and butter, the hardware and software needed to do this is cheap and easily deployed.

True, if there are no 'leads' to follow then speculative fishing has to process a lot of data and mine it heavily, however patterns quickly emerge and a large number of RMT's banking accounts are going to be identified pretty early on, so other leads can be ignored till the big fish are gone.

I have no idea about ESO, but in WOW Blizzard do log every transaction and every pile of gold for example has a unique ID, and I'm pretty sure they're not unique in the level of detail they log: think of it a Bitcoin on steroids.

I bet if you will do that ESO will lose 50% of the playerbase, there are so many goldbuyers out there it is unbelievable.

AlexDougherty wrote: »

Harakh wrote: »

I bet if you will do that ESO will lose 50% of the playerbase, there are so many goldbuyers out there it is unbelievable.

Doubt it is as high as 50%, more like 30%.
But even losing that much would acceptable if it got rid of the spam and the bots.

I dont think its that much. But even a 30% drop in subscriptions due to bans would pretty much mean a death sentence for the game.

This thread is pure gold (no pun intended). Best comedy I've seen in a while.

Slantasiam wrote: »

gamebouncerb16_ESO wrote: »

One would think they could trace back items gold to account or player name? If it came from aaaghyt , then flags should be a waving .. big red ones

the thing is is the holder of all the gold will not have some random name like that the holders are valuable they will have thought up names and you wont be seeing those spam trade to buy gold

And it necessarily be mailed, it'll be traded face to face as well. And it might be in multiples of small random amounts. Or it might be through pre-arranged guild sales the seller will buy stuff from the player like being given a motif and told to sell it in chat for 10k to a named temp account. It'll look like a legitimate transaction. to identify gold seller deliveries you will have to in-depth check and trace gold and objects for a ton of legitimate looking transactions.

There will be literally hundreds of thousands of transactions to check and trace back through numerous use once and throw away accounts.

The 10k gold delivered to a customer will have come from a one-off account that is immediately deleted. That in turn will have received that 10k from 10 more accounts who in turn will have received that gold from other accounts who will have accumulated their gold each through legitimately vendoring raw materials that reach them from another chain of one-off deleted accounts.

This is how money laundering is done. It will be very hard to detect gold sellers and buyers and it will be very labour intensive. Computers are not magic boxes. This isn't Star Trek. You can't say:

'Computer. Auto-ban gold sellers and buyers'.

I read last night that some MMO's are used by the big drug cartels to launder money. This is an industry - one much bigger than Zenimax - that has been making huge amounts of money for over a decade.

Identifying either gold buyers or gold selling accounts isn't as simple as people make it out to be. I've lived long enough to know that if I see a simple obvious solution to a long-standing problem it means I don't understand something.

Zen demonstrated earlier how easy it is to misidentify and ban the wrong people.

What Zen are now trying to do is close the stable door while hundreds of wild horses are stampeding through. What they should have done is defensively design the game to make gold harvesting difficult and have systems in place, having learned from history.

They didn't and now they are playing catch up.

I'm sure they'll get things under some sort of control eventually but it'll take a multi-pronged effort and it'll take time.

The big question is - can they do it before too much damage is done to their ambition to be a premium sub game?

I hope so because despite everything this is a great game and if I'm asked to give up the right to create a thousand characters a day or forego some quest rewards in the meantime I'm fine with that.

Harakh wrote: »

I bet if you will do that ESO will lose 50% of the playerbase, there are so many goldbuyers out there it is unbelievable.

I doubt the figure it 50% but wouldn't argue their numbers aren't large.

That said, some would leave since they can't but their way to end-game but most I would say are likely to stop cheating and carry on.

In any case, a game riven with bots like this that make it hard or impossible for normal players to harvest their stuff has no right to exist IMO and is better off closing down.

kasain wrote: »

These threads are stupid. Really it doesn't matter if 1% of the game buys gil, or if a gold seller sells one item a day. Or better yet, they trade items for cash. Oh and its not just botters. Many gold sellers are westerners. I know many who power lvl characters, toons and get paypal cash from people or companies.

Even in old games that are free to play now LOTR, AION, gold sellers are still there. They won't go away, period!

Yes, those of us who are MMO vets know this, genius.

We are simply gobsmacked that Zenimax left the door wide open for them and apparently extended the welcome mat, even though the MMO genre is ancient now, and it should be a no-brainer how to put some basic security in place. No one expects a bot-free game, but ots have overrun this game to an incredible extent.

The game developer has to make it so either you can quest most items you want, or have a cash store where you can buy. Personally, I said it many times ESO should make horses, modif books quest able, and have a repair skill learnable. In addition they could have some npc sell basic craft able items, lvl 1-2. After that you go out and farm. This is to encourage people to craft.

But no,ESO rather bots take over there game and make player life hard. The botters get far more resources and zero nerfs vs the players who get all nerfs and very little support from the developer.

Beat Molag ball, get a 17k non sellable hore.

Get a craft to 50, receive a book from a quest. Maybe do extra.

You heard it straight from the horse's mouth, folks. I believe we have one of the gold sellers in our midst.

Yep, yep, we know all this. Supply and demand -- basic economics. It's what drives all this. And yes, Zenimax could have and should have done any or all of these things to minimize the odds of this happening to their fledgling game. But they decided to attempt to throw out the lessons learned from MMOs that came before, and make everything an overinflated, overpriced, grindfest that ensured a market for lazy people to want to buy gold and items instead of work for them.

steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »

I don't know how you can read what kasian says and pain him as a gold-seller when his suggestions would hurt gold-selling a lot.

Because I think he knows that at this point, there's little Zenimax can do. It's after the fact and the game is a sinking ship. He's laughing all the way to the bank.

I hate to say that, because in every other way, it's gorgeous. But they really, truly, and horribly dropped the ball on this. It's inexcusable, really.

steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »

I think, especially considering your other posts, that you are doing him a disservice.

There's plenty Z can do and he reiterated some of them. And he is right - make changes to the reward and pricing structures to reduce the demand for gold. That has to be one weapon in the armoury.

I want to be wrong.

Believe me.

All he is saying is that you cannot eradicate gold selling and he is right. What you can do is limit the usefulness of it. Again, he is right. ESO makes gold hard to come by and gates key features like transport and respecs behind a giant pile of the stuff. Not to mention the escalating costs of repairs.

LOTRO has gold sellers but you can play for years and not see a bot. There's not a whole lot you can do with gold. You can get anything worthwhile as part of the dtory. There are not insanely rare things that both drop by chance and are tradeable and you aren't charged gold for game features. (They are often monetised in their store but that's a different topic).

LOTRO is an example of a game defensively designed to limit the impact of gold-selling.

ESO unfortunately is an object lesson of the opposite kind.

Do bot ban buyers. Ask them why.

RMT will never go away, it has been here since the days of MUD's It is how people work, they trade services and goods. Learn to Civilisation, people.

The problem with this game is the cash sinks are too high and get in the way of FUN.

After much posting on the whys and wherefores of tax systems, we were listened to and the Guild store tax has been lowered to a significant, yet acceptable level, No need to evade apart form on very high ticket items.

Next two targets for the rational players who know MMO economies and how they work are as follows -

a) Repair cost. This is a game killer. Horrible attrition for very little action. Go and look at how WoW did it and stopped the rot of punitive nonsense and gained MILLIONS of players as part of the 3rd gen revolution. There are similar methods but WoW's stands out as a simple one that was painful but not a terrible toll on all players : attrition at death.

b) Respec. OMG. OMG again. Ridiculous cost for such a basic service. Learn from the past and sort this out fast.

Acceptable would be something like

Skill Reset ... start at 2k and then increment by 2k each time up to 10k tops. Free respec any time a skill is changed for anyone with POINTS in that line.

Stats Reset ... start at 500g and go to 5000g in stages and stays at 5k tops.

This makes them significant but of use. At present not many can afford their fiorst skill set which they would decide on at very high level.


These gold sinks fuel RMT. Make no mistake.

I agree. The buyers are as guilty as the sellers.

steveb16_ESO46 wrote: »

All he is saying is that you cannot eradicate gold selling and he is right. What you can do is limit the usefulness of it. Again, he is right.

I am aware of all this, and I have been saying it myself, repeatedly. It is the way he said it, and the other things that he said, for instance the way he laughs at us. He clearly has intimate knowledge of the gold-selling trade. Let's leave it at that, K?

ESO makes gold hard to come by and gates key features like transport and respecs behind a giant pile of the stuff. Not to mention the escalating costs of repairs.

Again, agreed 100%.

LOTRO has gold sellers but you can play for years and not see a bot. There's not a whole lot you can do with gold. You can get anything worthwhile as part of the dtory. There are not insanely rare things that both drop by chance and are tradeable and you aren't charged gold for game features. (They are often monetised in their store but that's a different topic).

LOTRO is an example of a game defensively designed to limit the impact of gold-selling.

LOTRO is an absolutely terrible game to compare with, though, simply because it is f2p and because of the very reason that you mentioned -- in their nasty money-grubbing attempts to monetize every single thing about that once-great game, Turbine has made gold all but worthless there.

The better comparison is World of Warcraft, because unlike LOTRO, it has endured for nearly a decade as a subscription-based game maintained high numbers. It started out way back in 2004 with the same plan as ESO -- mounts were very expensive and hard to get, crafting could be grindy and dependent on odd recipes, gold was hard to accumulate. As a result, gold selling and botting thrived. There's a long history to go over here, but the long and short of it is that while botting is still a problem, it's nothing - NOTHING - like we're seeing here now; and WoW's gold trade has dwindled. Gold spammers in-game are exceedingly rare.

Basically, Blizzard slowly over the years devalued their gold -- not completely, but wisely. They'd provide one or two big gold sinks (instead of making everything a gold sink, when no one has any money to begin with, as is the case now in this game), and drop prices on everything else to reasonable amounts. Gear repair is kept to reasonable amounts. Raw materials vendor for very little, which frees up trade on the open market. It took a while for them to get to this point, and there are still stupid, lazy people who buy gold rather than do a few daily quests and earn a grand. There will always be stupid, lazy people.

ESO unfortunately is an object lesson of the opposite kind.

More and more I am getting the impression that the ESO design team made all their decisions based on the following two ideas:

"Hey, won't it be great to finally have an MMO that does everything the old-school way, before all the nerfs that capitulated to the casuals?"
and
"Make sure you keep prices on those horse high, guys. Need to sell more Imperial Editions and Palominos from the cash shop."

Kl3mzyy wrote: »

They should just ban boters and wipe mats/gold which was send to other accounts, that way they would lose customers and they would stop boting.
I do not agree with baning gold buyers tho, it's something common these days and if they have money for it, well why shouldn't they buy it ( they do not get any advantage with gold ).

Actually, since gold buying often leads to hacked accounts, it poses a security risk.

So you people arguing against banning buyers are way off-base.