How about if you got a 3 day ban and only the gold you had on you was removed? So if you spent it all and only had 2k left, they just put you at zero.
This is what currently happens if they even touch the gold at all.
Now If I get hit with a negative gold amount like they do in RU, I would probably agree with your statement and it would deter people from ever buying RMT again.
But there will always be stories of people buying RMT gold that avoid the ban or keep the gold and people will continually take the risk.
If the devs could actually detect the majority of RMT transactions and put them at negative or perma ban them and it was widely published on social media, it would have a real impact on RMT. Unfortunately this doesn’t look like it’s happening since most of us personally know people that have RMT’ed hundreds of thousands of gold and received no punishment at all. To be clear I would support harsher punishments for RMT’ers.
I still think a larger impact could be had if better detection methods and 2FA for creating new accounts prevented bots from auto farming hundreds of thousands gold every day across hundreds of characters.
Yes and I suggested they do this somewhere above. I think this is definitely necessary. There should also be increasing ban times leading to perma ban with repeat offenses.
This is all I’m saying. We don’t know why they can’t. Either they aren’t prioritizing it, or there is some other limitation. Would be nice to get some communication to clear that up.
Some guilds share info on where they buy gold. Some even have section in their discord where they can buy gold, gold bot script, chaos bot script, etc. A lot of things happen in guild scale where most of guildies do it.
The thing is: this isn’t the same situation, bots are not like drug lords, they are more numerous than their buyers, so fighting them is harder than fighting the buyer
Think of it like this: there is a store owner that sells phones, they buy from lots of thiefs and resell them. The owner is the person that RMT, the thiefs are the bots. Your should try to put both in jail for sure, but taking down the owner is faster and more efficient to reduce crime than the other, so priority should be to take down the store owner
IMO they would lose a significant amount of the real players still playing the game. I would guess that atleast 30% of the current playerbase has engaged in some third party RMT and these players are probably ones that started off spending real money in game before realizing it’s a better deal to get it from bots.
It seems like the dev team for our version is significantly understaffed or something since it takes months for simple changes (cursor bug still in game and is the clock fixed after the DST change).
My whole point of posting was that If they need to prioritize targeting RMT buyers or detecting bots/implementing effective 2FA, they should focus on the detection/2FA since it would have a greater impact on the RMT situation, IMO.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. My opinion differs here though. I think targeting buyers would be easier to sustain because they ultimately care more about their account. Punishing them is easier and leads to the same result. Trying to punish sellers is signing up for a constant battle as long as there is demand for gold from buyers.
Ideally they would do both but you’re probably right about this:
So maybe they don’t have the resources to target buyers in a way that wouldn’t be too ham-fisted and cause people to quit. It would have also probably been simpler if they established that much earlier in the lifespan of the game so people would try RMT, get punished and then stop. It didn’t start at 30% of the player base or whatever it is now. It’s so widespread at this point that they do risk losing a substantial amount of players with severe penalties. I do think it would ultimately lead to a healthier game but they may disagree.
when drug dealers get caught, they post bail and are back on the corner selling again the next day. Then they show up to court, get probation, and back to the corner again.
OSRS is a really good example of RMT off the rails getting curtailed a bit by banning the gold buyers instead of trying to ban the millions of gold sellers reestablishing themselves. U have to stop the practice by removing the clients so there is no more demand for cheating gold prices.
I am actually kind of concerned with how AGS/SG are handling this bot situation. Similar to how we wash our hands with soap and not antibacteria. If you start killing bacteria, the ones that survive become extremely resilient and reproduce. AGS/SG are trying to ban bots and eliminate them directly but the bots keep evolving and adapting. All these countermeasures they put in place also further discourage legitimate players from logging into the game. They should have implemented harsher sanctions against RMT players in the first place but I don’t think they will listen. Don’t see a bright future for this game in NA/EU at this point…
You’re supporting my argument for prioritizing resources toward preventing bots from making new accounts with no barriers.
The fact that they can just make a new account is the entire point I was trying to make and point out that this needs to be the number one priority over making sure every RMT buyer is banned.
The purpose of the drug dealer analogy was to point out which the govt prioritizes, going after buyers or dealers.
Punish buyers so they’ll never buy again and drive down demand so dealers won’t have customers anymore? This seems to be the most popular position on the forums.
Or punish sellers driving down supply and making it where customers can’t find cheap drugs (cheap gold) to buy. IMO this is the best route to go.
And I’ve been keep saying they will find ways to go around restrictions…
People want RMTers banned because it seems like every 1 out of 100 of them get punished.
So they shouldn’t try to put in any restrictions then? Just keep letting bots automatically create thousands of accounts every minute since the fixes probably won’t be 100% effective?
The fact that the bots can currently use programs to automatically create thousands of new accounts every minute without a single barrier is the biggest driving factor for the amount of rampant RMT in the game.
I agree with you here. The entire point of my post is to ask:
Given that the dev team obviously has limited resources (cursor bug still in game, clock still broken, patch delays, etc.), should they prioritize new methods to prevent bots from creating new accounts and detection methods for ones already in game?
Or should they prioritize finding any and all RMT’ers and perma banning them or setting them to negative gold?
Both would be great but the forum constantly says “focus on banning RMT’ers over the sellers” is the best way forward and I disagree.
