Another way to handle bots / RMT

General Discussion General Discussion
1

Hello guys,

I want to discuss another way to handle the situation with bots:
Currently, the strategy looks more like: Throwing as many rocks in the way of a bot as possible.
But in my opinion, that’s doesn’t fix the bot problem.

I can only talk about EUC, maybe it does look different in NA / EUW.
Instead of focusing only on bots, focus more on players who use RMT.
You currently banning them (which is good) but I think you should start to ask yourself: Why are they doing this?
Why do they take the risk of getting their chars, their progress, their used time taken away from them for a bit of gold?
The answer is pretty simple:
Because they can’t get on gold in another way. Many people do have a lot of work, or real life, Family, Children, Relationships etc.
Yet they do want to progress and to play this game, and they want to reach 1445+ and enjoy … they just don’t have that much time. But people who work have (sometimes) money, which they can spend. And some of them want to do that.

Now we have the problem: Your shop is underwhelming.
You can transfer 100 blue crystals (BC) for around 500g so 1 BC = 5g.
1BC = 2.35 RC (Royal Crystals). So 2,35 RC = 5g.
For 50€ you get 5750 RC.
5750 RC : 2,35 =2445 BC *5 = 12225 gold.
In the current state of the market

So lets say 50€ = 12k Gold. That could sound much, but it actually isn’t. The current gold seller price (I just checked few websites) are around 2,4€ =1k.
Your shop offers: 12.000 : 50 = 240g each euro, while Gold seller offers:
1000: 2,4 = 416g each euro. So you get around 73% more value from RMT.

That means, for now, you get nearly double the amount from RMT (with the risk of getting banned).
So … to finally kill the Goldseller, I suggest that you start to build up your Shop.
Add some TRADABLE stuff f. E.:

make dye items tradable and let people sell it in AH
add way more skins, or make a skin rotation (1 week a special skin, another week another skin and in 4 weeks you start the rotation again),
add pets
Just push Items that people would love to buy with gold. Give customer the option to spend in your shop and get a good value of gold out of it.
You could - f. E. make the Super Special Lost Ark Pass tradable, so people can sell them in AH and you activate it with a click. That would also give f2p players the option, to buy “shop exclusive” items.

But don’t add items, that shift that game too much to P2W (f. E. Up materials.)
Also, be careful if you add too many Resource boxes (like grenades, Potions etc.) since the estates for now is practically useless, the crafting section is pretty much a waste (except a certain item) and all grenades, potions etc. will get crafted with heavily loss. This needs to get balanced, so the f2p players does have a passive income.

So TL;DR: Buff your Shop, be a threat for the black market.

That is my point of few, I really would like to hear your guy’s opinion.

2

be more strict with player who buy
i know too much ppl who rmted so much gold and get a 3 days ban
this is still worth for them, who does 200k gold in 3 days

4 Likes
3

I think the stance should be taken against the RMT player themselves. There needs to be a hard crackdown on detecting RMT. RMT will always be at an advantage against the actual in game shop the game provides. If you block out the buyers, then there lacks purpose for bots to be in the game besides providing items to the players that use the bots themselves, which is much easier to strike down.

1 Like
4

I suggested something similar to this in another thread and yeah, going after the buyers should be a much easier way to deal with the RMT problem.

The current 3 strike policy is too easy to circumvent. You can buy as much gold as you want as long as you only buy gold two times. Amazon needs to make the penalty way worse. Anyone who buys gold should be banned for at least a month AND hit with a gold debt equal to 2x the amount they bought.

Launching the game with such a toothless penalty was a mistake. The only penalty for buying gold should have been a permanent ban from day one.

1 Like
5

If the strategy you have mentioned worked and people started to buy from AGS with equal price then the market will adjust to the prices where they were.

Many players benchmark our markets to the KR markets where KR markets reach phase of maturity and our markets still new. The learning curve is still there and it will need sometime till we reach KR markets level and the prices will be low and acceptable.

AGS they dont want anyone to share the cake with, and if I own a company I would like that too since it will be profitable for me and my staff.

Bots will always be there, unless AGS creates something innovative and new to game industry. For example, requesting passport copy or driving license to play this game or use any verification methods which alot of apps using today. Taking the extra mile will help since the game is 18+ anyway

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6

The conversion rate is insanely bad tbh. I did it once to hone as I constantly lack gold (just got main T3, ilvl1346, no alts) and it’s certainly just a pain running sub-500gold for the whole week, meaning I can only tap 2-3 times a week.

Conversion is totally not worth it, too expensive per hone-try. But issue is is that it’s their main source of income. Many people use Royal Crystals to get gold if they can afford it and/or are just hardcore.

Other way is to use alts but cba, ain’t got enough time with work/life and Im quite sure it’s going to burn me out of the game quite fast doing everything more than once every single day per alt just to get 2-3 taps a week more. /rant

I have respect for the people who can run alts next running their main with all the daily stuff…

TL;DR: they won’t move or provide an alternative way to get gold as the conversion is their main source of income from the whales. However when gold inflation happens, rates should get better (900 dollars gets you about 250-300k gold on NA/EU while in KR it gets you 1 MIL gold)

7

lost ark at the highest level for some people is all about selling buses so the people who bus for example list gems every week that sell for 10-20k im not saying its the wrong idea but it just doesn’t work. you could maybe find people that are selling single items for 100-200k but anything like 10-30k is a no go you would ban legit players selling carrys and before you go saying its against ToS its not Roxx and other devs have confirmed selling carrys in game for in game gold is completely fine.

1 Like
8

They need to permaban gold buyers, not 3 days ban and that kind of weak ass bs. That will impact the profits of gold botters.

The reason we have such a bad bot situation is without a doubt a lot of people are buying 3rd party gold. Sharks are only attracted to wherever there’s blood (not sure if that’s the right saying but you get the gist).

9

throw in negative balance as well.