I don't want to give a thread like this more attention by posting (or reading all the comments), because its absurd, but I better post (emphatically) "NO" to make sure its not only people who are into rmt responding. I want to play a game. I want to pay a sub to get content updates focused on content, not on making micro transaction money, and I want people who buy gold to get banned for trying to ruin the game. If you don't like playing the game, then you don't need game gold. If you play the game, then you make game gold while playing it. People feel a lot more pressure to pay more to keep up with everyone else if stupid things like RMT are added.

What we need is for Zeni to hire some good economists, if they haven't already, and let them come up with a phased plan to correct the mess in stages from the dup'ing and so on. I'm confident almost none of us posting in this thread know how to fix it (in a feasible, realistic way, cost effective for Zeni, and not to the detriment of early players), so don't respond with "it's too late and already beyond hope." That's why I said they need to hire experts and make a plan to fix it over the next few months.

And before any free-market capitalist complain, we absolutely don't want to "let the market take care of itself" since the "market" is "these people are rich from duping, these other people bought things dup'd without knowing so they are victims but still using stuff that is hurting the economy, and these people are poor and can't make money because the prices for things they have are diluted from bots and the prices for things they want are ballooned from people with too much money."

It can all be fixed, if its being planned at a meta level for the long term picture and then carefully manipulated in stages to get us there with carefully monitored metrics. Then using that data to keep making adjustments and re-analyzing the plans as needed, not just rubber stamping a plan, setting it in motion, and calling it good. And of course it requires keeping any more insanely disastrous bugs like the dup'ing from the live server.

RMT would just throw all that out and have Zeni say "throw money to us so you can be cool in game, because you ain't gettin' anything in this game economy any other way." I don't think that's the game they meant to make, and I hope its not what they'll do to fix this problem. I have to say, that $15 palomino horse in the store has me worried though. We'll have to see where they go with the cash store. That seems like the kind of thing they'd know better than to be doing after the Oblivion horse armor crisis...

Back on point, I do worry they might not be hiring the needed experts and instead relying on developers to think of ways to fix it. I haven't seen them say anything about who they have working on it. They really need a team of experts on economics, not programmers to solve it. That's not to say anything negative about programmers, because I studied CS myself. And I know I'm not qualified to develop a solution to this game economy dilemma.

If this game every starts seriously doing RMT they will lose a lot of players (rightly so). This is a subs game and ALL content should be included/available for NO additional money !

Yeah the bag space thing is stupidly high. That definitely need lowering, not drastically, but lowering !
Making in-game items such as bags easier to obtain would remove some of the need for people to purchase gold. You'd think a company the size of Zeni would have realised this !

How is this thread not locked?

To remove enormous gold sinks like the skill resets are would be a huge step to get rid of the gold sellers and RMTs. Mounts should be cheaper too, only reason for this is to make it less interesting to buy gold for real money.

Make the gold sinks cost something else, a quest, a time limit etc, there are many ways to make skills for example cheaper, but still limited by other means. Same with mounts, introduce other ways to pay than tens of thousands of gold.

This is organised botting, which uses solen credit card details to fund accounts. It should and is being taking seriously by Zenimax.

As we have no auction house, the gold sellers are having a limited impact on the game fortunately.

ebuntsb14_ESO wrote: »

Since most botters use 3rd party programs that can be easily obtained, why cant ZOS obtain these same bot programs and then simply make it so these programs stop working? Of course the ones that design the botting programs will create new programs, and again ZOS can obtain these on day one and block them.

Most botter use sites such as Viper or other sites to get their bot programs. These can be stopped. The ones that each person creates and use, use a general script which can be stopped. The ones that can write their own elaborate bot might be harder.

Developers observe how bots exploit weaknesses all the time. That's how they're able to break the stupid things.

I've unplugged my scriptable keypad just to avoid becoming collateral damage when the bot accounts are banned wholesale.

My antipathy toward botters is that with three or more characters acting on the echoed keypresses of the one live character controlling them they slaughter bosses I have to make several runs at to overcome. The consequence is that the numbers the developers crunch to evaluate the average difficulty of that boss is skewed by the exploitation of scripting.

The ability to make useful add-ons Zen afforded to the playerbase is endangered by the abuse of that ability.

Empassioned pleas to the botters to restrain themselves are pointless. Theirs are business decisions. Businesses have different values from players. In their eyes fairness and sportsmanship are myths. Like religion, they are no more than cultural opiates.