The answer is pretty simple, make it absurdly easy to get gold legally in 1370+ content. Before any haters jump in here and say there’s enough gold in the game already, I agree, but I’m not talking about not having enough gold. I’m talking about making gold so abundant through legal means, the risk of looking elsewhere for gold becomes less appealing. By taking away sources of gold income all that means is that gold sellers make more accounts to counter act the loss of previous income. This creates strain on the servers and long queue times for heavily affected areas. By increasing how much gold is available in the end game content, a place that a bit cannot enter and succeed, you decrease the feeling of the average player to look at RMT as a viable, about risky, way to get to where they want to go.
If you really want to Amber Heard in the gold seller’s beds, you could also decrease the necessity for gold in general. Such as a 5% decrease in the gold cost per honing attempt. By increasing the availability of gold and decreasing the necessity for having that much gold, you essentially limit any demand from the gold seller market.
Leave honing material drop rates the same. Or keep them at the pace you choose. Don’t inject more honing materials into the game to combat bots, I promise you it won’t work. What does work is taking a product, in this case illegally bought and sold gold, and make it essentially worthless. Just another arbitrary material.
Sure, the price of materials in the auction house will increase, that’s a given. But limiting the gold injection into content that bots can not realistically complete will offset that. Bots won’t be able to afford the materials to resell for profit.
Just as an aside, I have no problems making and keeping gold to do everything I want to do in this game. This is simply a proposed solution to an increasing problem.
I mean … you are proposing to fight bots by purposely inducing inflation. It might work on paper but it’s too dependent on assumptions. What if you are wrong? What if you do all that and they just make more bots and sell even more dirt cheap gold to compete with the increased gold source? This will also render T1 and T2 content worthless since nothing you get during those phases will amount to any value. This will of course make certain T3 items absurdly expensive.
T1 and T2 are supposed to be worthless as stated by the director of the game. I’ll admit it’s not a perfect solution as there are risks, but doing what they’ve been doing to fight the bots hasn’t worked and the assumption that bots will flood the servers even more is unlikely. That’s why I suggested gating the gold behind certain content that bots cannot access and/or complete
Well Amazon/Smilegate, VPN Bans were not THE answer. I use a VPN router 99% of the time and you guys ruined my ability to easily play. I did log in yesterday and 100+ bots in Vern were running chaos over and over…they were the only ones playing there. I guess I’ll finally quit now.
It doesn’t really matter if T1 and T2 are suppose to be worthless, it’s still an experience that players have to go through, and using T1 & T2 as pretty much tutorials for T3 isn’t going to create a fun experience for new players.
I do think think bots are going to flood the market even more though because it’s such an easy solution. Less people are buying gold? Well let’s make our farmed gold cheap enough so more people are buying, then let’s make more bots to increase profits.