For so many people claiming having experience about how to deal with these verim of goldsellers.

I fail how anyone do not know that the ONLY reason goldsellers/bots are in any game, is because they got customers to sell to.

Without customers....sure, there would still be one or two, but barely a problem

Zenimax IS taking their part of it and both have stated that they have one of their prime points to deal with goldsellers, and they shown this by making it very easy to report them, and even sent GMs out to destroy the character. They even announce that during this X time, please message GM X about a bot, and the GM will appear and remove the bot.

Dont believe me? Ask people whos seen this. There are quite few of them.

But no, it is not Zenimax fault that criminals are able to buy an account just like anyone else and exploit it.

The BUYER is the real problem.....I thought this was crystal clear to anyone who been in any MMO with the plague of goldsellers.

babylon wrote: »

If things were more reasonably priced and people could make enough gold through playing the game (a subscription game where people should be able to get all they need or even want from regular gameplay), and there were no stupid rare items that relied on a good roll of the RNG, then people wouldn't be considering going outside of their regular gameplay for these things.

To not go off-topic with your made up story that ESO ever made a single promise that as long as you pay for their game, you will have gold for everything. I leave this for its own conclution.

By your reasoning that if things where not so expensive. And you do talk about everything, not just regular gameplay, it is alright to break the law and steal from the game.

So with that reasoning, if I dont have enough money for my new BMW yet, I am in my right to buy it from thieves, because the legal BMW are to expensive.

Are you serious?????

Cogo wrote: »

But no, it is not Zenimax fault that criminals are able to buy an account just like anyone else and exploit it.

To clarify, neither gold sellers nor gold buyers are committing any criminal acts. They are breaking Zenimax's Terms of Service, but that is not law.

AinGeal wrote: »

1. Just as the chests have the lock picking mini game, a cleverly designed mini game for gathering nodes would not only increase the time it takes to gather from a node but it could force a human element. Meaning a simple bot program won't be good enough.

2. Do away with guild stores and bring in auction/trading houses. This will open up competition. This will result in a more efficient economy that will be more beneficial to the social well being of the player base. This will, at the very least, ensure that the value of gatherables doesn't increase. It should bring the value down. The current system keeps prices higher than they should be.

Good to see people coming up with ideas. just to make a few pointers though:

1 - this is going down the same path that they already went down, and that is making the game harder for players to try and combat botters. The big issue with this lies in the simple fact that players don't have all day to farm, gather nodes, etc. botters don't care.

by the very definition of their function...they bot. so it really doesn't matter if they only get 10& or 20$ an hour from this game as long as they can just start their scripts, and check them every hour or so..and come back the next day and collect their stashes full of nodes. also, this idea, while it sounds interesting from a gaming point of view, would kill crafting in it's current design. They would have to completely rework crafting, as your capacity to craft and level it is based on the amount of time it takes to gather resources.


2 - Bringing in the AH would unfortunately only accelerate the issue. people don't buy money because they can't make it on the guild store...its actually pretty straightforward to do it in the store. it has nothing to do with the AH economy. putting a global AH would only give the botters a broader market to sell their farmed materials, increasing their money intake.

The real solution lies in eliminating the reasons people want to buy the gold in the first place. This game placed most of the QoL items in game behind gold thresholds, then limits your capacity to make it, thereby theoretically limiting how rapidly you gain these QoL items.

some examples include: storage (bank and personal), mounts, respec fees (many people find this important), repair costs (the steepest ive seen in any MMO to date)...and these don't even bring into play all the items that are full purchasable like gear (most world gear is sellable, meaning if you have a bunch of gold you can get whatever you want), materials for leveling crafting (far faster to buy it then farm it), etc.

All of these things are gated behind gold, yet they limit our personal gold intake. it takes time to make gold in this game, lots of time. and the more QoL things you want to do, the more gold it takes.

if the idea of goldselling didn't exist...it wouldn't be a bad approach to expansion in the game. because that's what it's really all about. player growth and expansion is usually gated in most games. Zenimax chose gold as the resource for this gating. unfortunately, gold is also a resource that can be traded...thus players can buy it from other players...or from goldsellers. take gold...make it responsible for most the QoL aspects of the game, and limit players intake of gold...and your creating an environment ripe for goldsellers.

So the key is to find a way of gating the players growth and expansion (which is a normal process in most MMO's), that doesn't provide them with the option of getting that gating resource from a 3rd part vendor. Or, at least, it reduces their desire to.

solution to this is simple: eliminate gold as the gating resource. use other methods. examples would be: gate mount acquisition via level. make them as cheap as a piece of gear, but make the basic ones lvl 20, the upgraded ones lvl 40 or 50, etc. then as they put out higher grades of mounts, they can simply give them a higher level cap, and even possible adjust the lower caps as the higher ones come out. the need for players to spend money to buy a horse is now gone. they still have to produce something in game to get the horse, but its levels instead of gold.

another example is respec fees. again, highly priced, many think they are punitive and punishing. so instead of using gold (again), they could instill Cooldowns of large magnitudes. 3 days, or a week...so its available, and cheap, but you can't abuse it.

In addition to this, many other MMO's have realized that players like having MORE options (instead of less), and they have opened their OWN stores up, so players can opt to buy from them instead. many of these MMO's make the items purchased on the stores BoE so the players can turn around and sell them themselves. so instead of the money going to a gold seller, it goes to the company, who turns around and invests it in...guess what....the game.

Many MMO's have figured this stuff out, and done these things. many MMO's have realized that in order to eliminate the goldsellers, they need to eliminate the reasons players buy their gold in the first place. And it's FAR cheaper then hiring an entire team of GM's to constantly patrol the servers. and Its far less impacting on the players then constantly making the game harder for THEM to play it, all for the sake of trying to nerf bots....who really don't care how hard it is, as long as they can start their scripts and walk away from the game.

Wow, so this happened.

tanthil wrote: »

AIDs is an illness, i bet the people with it wish they could stop having AIDs just by choosing to stop having it.
CANCER is an illness, i bet the people with it wish they could stop having CANCER just by choosing to stop having it.

Please tell me addiction is an illness again... please

Such ignorance, please dont compare something people choose as a lifestyle and can leave behind them to something that that strikes without warning and kills you.

This is a tired topic.

The buyer is not the problem. The buyer is just a fraction of the problem. Penalizing the buyer does nothing for Zenimax other than alienate their revenue source further from their game.

The RMT site is not even the whole issue. The poor design and implementation of the games economy lies solely on the shoulders of the game designers. In today's game making environment companies hire economic specialist to gauge what will impact the MMO market.

Zenimax, by design, created gold sinks. These few things (horses, repairs, travel) are not on par with a player driven economy. It is as if they did not hire anyone to even consult them, provide them with scenarios of what would impact the economy both for good and ill.

Poor design of the guild stores is another area that has caused the economy to be horrible in ESO. Most guild stores are not a viable source for crafters to sell when the open market in zone chat has the potential for bigger profits. This leads to another poor implentation of the higher tier motifs and their style stones.

I could go on and on and on about the poor design around the economy but I won't. Turn your energy elsewhere. No one has an advantage over anyone else whether they buy gold or not. Gold in this game does not allow for advantages of any sort.

temjiu wrote: »

Good to see people coming up with ideas. just to make a few pointers though:

1 - this is going down the same path that they already went down, and that is making the game harder for players to try and combat botters. The big issue with this lies in the simple fact that players don't have all day to farm, gather nodes, etc. botters don't care.

by the very definition of their function...they bot. so it really doesn't matter if they only get 10& or 20$ an hour from this game as long as they can just start their scripts, and check them every hour or so..and come back the next day and collect their stashes full of nodes. also, this idea, while it sounds interesting from a gaming point of view, would kill crafting in it's current design. They would have to completely rework crafting, as your capacity to craft and level it is based on the amount of time it takes to gather resources.

There is two things to address here. First, it does matter. You have to think of this from a business point of view. Let's refer to a gold seller as a company. Capital is something a company can have. Capital in this case are the computers used to run the game and bot programs on them. A fine example of how capital is put to work to earn more capital (cash is also capital). I'll reiterate that time is money. If they can make twice as much money running WoW for an hour instead of ESO, then that's what they'll do.

2 - Bringing in the AH would unfortunately only accelerate the issue. people don't buy money because they can't make it on the guild store...its actually pretty straightforward to do it in the store. it has nothing to do with the AH economy. putting a global AH would only give the botters a broader market to sell their farmed materials, increasing their money intake.

I think I made an incorrect assumption. What exactly is the current situation? The bots gather. We know that much but what happens next? I think I made the incorrect assumption that the gatherables were being passed onto another account (one with characters with actual names) and being sold to players. I don't think this is the case. It would take too much time to sell the stacks. Again, time is money. Let's say they have two accounts. One to gather through botting and one to sell the stacks. If it takes 1 hour to fill a 60 slot inventory with iron but it takes 2 hours to sell a 60 slot inventory worth of iron, then that is 1 hour where the bot is full and not doing anything. Unless those stacks are selling for twice their vendor value, the gold seller would be better off putting both accounts to work as bots gathering and just vendoring.

However, if the value of a stack is high enough, it does become more profitable to take the time and sell them to other players instead of vendoring. Also, if those stacks can sell in a short enough time, again it becomes worth taking the time to sell them to other players. A trading house is a great way of ensuring this does not happen. The value would come down closer to vendor value (depending on supply and demand) and with an increase of undercutting competition, the time would not become short enough to make selling to other players (even through the trading house) worth it. They'll simply vendor, which is what I think they do now. After all, it would (should) be too easy for ZoS to see the stacks being mailed from the bot account to the selling account and ban the selling account too.

The real solution lies in eliminating the reasons people want to buy the gold in the first place. This game placed most of the QoL items in game behind gold thresholds, then limits your capacity to make it, thereby theoretically limiting how rapidly you gain these QoL items.

The biggest one I can think of here is the horse. They should at the very least stagger the pricing better but I agree that the price should come down. Another one is the fast travel. You do it but then you have to wait for the price to drop to do it again. It's either that or pay way more than you should. Fast travel is not a big deal other than QoL. Putting it at and leaving it at the base rate (which is lvl dependent) would make the game more enjoyable for the players and would actually be a better gold sink. It's a principal of economics. Rational people think at the margin. I'll fast travel to a town, and do all I possibly need to while there until the price drops back down before fast traveling back to where I was questing. I'll even go get a drink, take a bio break, or simply do a little farming around the city edges until that price comes down. If the price simply stayed down, people would fast travel more frequently because they no longer wait for the price to come down. Hell, sometimes I'll judge it to see if I can ride back to where I was leveling before the price drops down and not pay that second fast travel fee at all. If they keep it at the flat rate it should be, it will become a more effective gold sink and make game playing more enjoyable and convenient.

some examples include: storage (bank and personal), mounts, respec fees (many people find this important), repair costs (the steepest ive seen in any MMO to date)...and these don't even bring into play all the items that are full purchasable like gear (most world gear is sellable, meaning if you have a bunch of gold you can get whatever you want), materials for leveling crafting (far faster to buy it then farm it), etc.

All of these things are gated behind gold, yet they limit our personal gold intake. it takes time to make gold in this game, lots of time. and the more QoL things you want to do, the more gold it takes.

if the idea of goldselling didn't exist...it wouldn't be a bad approach to expansion in the game. because that's what it's really all about. player growth and expansion is usually gated in most games. Zenimax chose gold as the resource for this gating. unfortunately, gold is also a resource that can be traded...thus players can buy it from other players...or from goldsellers. take gold...make it responsible for most the QoL aspects of the game, and limit players intake of gold...and your creating an environment ripe for goldsellers.

So the key is to find a way of gating the players growth and expansion (which is a normal process in most MMO's), that doesn't provide them with the option of getting that gating resource from a 3rd part vendor. Or, at least, it reduces their desire to.

Definitely some good points there. Like completing certain quests should reward a player with a 5 or 10 slot increase to their inventory. If they introduce the Dark Brotherhood, then Shadowmere can be a reward somewhere involving them. A black, fast moving horse that can't be bought with gold.

another example is respec fees. again, highly priced, many think they are punitive and punishing. so instead of using gold (again), they could instill Cooldowns of large magnitudes. 3 days, or a week...so its available, and cheap, but you can't abuse it.

Really good idea there. This is actually one area where the mechanism used for fast travel could work. It's cheap(er) but after using it, it jumps up to a very expensive amount. Then, after a few days or one week, it finally gets back down to that cheap(er) level again. This way, it's like you say but you also don't get locked out. Then again, maybe being locked out is precisely what is needed.

In addition to this, many other MMO's have realized that players like having MORE options (instead of less), and they have opened their OWN stores up, so players can opt to buy from them instead. many of these MMO's make the items purchased on the stores BoE so the players can turn around and sell them themselves. so instead of the money going to a gold seller, it goes to the company, who turns around and invests it in...guess what....the game.

I remember reading an interview where they said they would have a shop. People got pissed off because not only was the game P2P and you had to buy the game, but they were also going with a cash shop. This is where they can go the way GW2 did. No P2W items, just vanity stuff. The game uses "gold" as currency but TES currency is actually the Imperial Septim. They could have a cash shop like GW2. Players spend RL money on Septims which are then used to buy cash shop items. Septims can also be purchased via in-game gold but Semptims can also be converted into in-game gold. This allows players to basically buy gold from ZoS by buying Septims and converting. ZoS basically becomes a gold seller for their own game. Gold buyers will gladly pay a little extra to ZoS over a gold seller if it means their account isn't at risk of being banned. The bots lose the player business and have to go elsewhere.

Many MMO's have figured this stuff out, and done these things. many MMO's have realized that in order to eliminate the goldsellers, they need to eliminate the reasons players buy their gold in the first place. And it's FAR cheaper then hiring an entire team of GM's to constantly patrol the servers. and Its far less impacting on the players then constantly making the game harder for THEM to play it, all for the sake of trying to nerf bots....who really don't care how hard it is, as long as they can start their scripts and walk away from the game.

Definitely a good point.

Thulsola wrote: »

McDoogs wrote: »

Drug dealers wouldn't exist if there weren't addicts. Kill the addicts!

Addiction is an illness. Cheating is a choice. See the difference?

There's is no such thing as free will. See: Determinism. See the difference? But to be back on point that's like blaming people for a "black market" existing, while there is no governmental effort to crush it. Not to mention the fact that Black markets and Gold buyers serve a function. If the function were obsolete that would be the only other way for it to go away.

It doesn't work that way. The first rule about everything in life is "If people can abuse it, they will abuse it". You have to design everything thinking that people will want to abuse it, you have to design everything abuse-proof, and this applies to everything, from a game to everything else. ZOS simply failed to do that.

That's just how real life works. If you could take all the money you want from an ATM cash machine because of a flaw in its system, the developers of that system would be either sent to prison or fired in the best case scenario, and rightfully so. In games they don't get fired because consecuencies of people abusing it aren't so terrible, but it's still their fault for poorly designing a game that is open to abuse -in pretty obvious ways-.

I think that many are suffering from a case of "post hoc ergo proptor hoc" here: After, therefor, because of it.

I don't like X thing in the game.
X thing can be solved by buying gold.
Therefore X thing is responsible for the cheating.
Fix X thing, the cheating will go away.

I agree with @dr_zed, if the ability to cheat exists, it is going to happen no matter what. So while everyone may have a legitimate point about X being broken or poorly designed in the game, it isn't really directly relevant to how to deal with cheaters. I do think though, @dr_zed‌, that all you can really do is make it harder for cheaters to cheat. There is little you can do to stop it all together.

In fact, playing the blame game - despite how I titled my initial post - probably isn't all that productive either. At this point if we want to see the game improved it is in our best interests to make positive suggestions and support Zenimax in their efforts to fix the game.

For the addiction/choice enthusiasts check out Yalachkov, Kaiser, and Naumer's article in the April 2009 Journal of Neuroscience: "Brain Regions Related to Tool Use and Action Knowledge Reflect Nicotine Dependence" (Google the title)

Valar Botghulis

Here's a very simple suggestion to thin out the bots. Put scripted killzones (scripted to make godmode useless) under all the nodes and in the sky -- basically, everywhere the player shouldn't be able to go. You wouldn't need complete coverage; a proportion would be enough. Then flying bots and under the map bots would automatically commit suicide.

Someone had better think of something fast. Today I was out by Dreugh Waters and a crowd of fifteen or so bots dashed past me. They were going from node to node as usual, but because there were so many of them, they didn't have to fear attacks from the dreugh or wolves. Anything that went after them was mobbed and taken down very quickly -- they could smash up a dreugh in about fifteen seconds. This is getting a bit out of hand.

BRP1970 wrote: »

Make almost everything bound to player, then people would play for them selves and bots would cease.

Or more people would bot for themselves...

Seriously, how'd we miss this?

Gold buyers dont affect me at all.