I feel the need to have to post this due to traction that the following thread is generating and the abundance of people agreeing with this bot prevention method and seeing @Shadow_Fox mentioning that they will bring it up to the team. - Just kill gold mailing
There are multiple issues with this idea and in the end it just prevents more social interactions between players whilst not combating bots in the slightest and here’s why;
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By removing gold in mail you’re preventing people from being able to make deals outside of the Auction House (I know Personal Trading is a thing and I will come round to that in point 2). Here’s an example, T1 mats are currently selling at 1g per 10 and there’s hundreds of thousands of these trades up in the auction house. If I have 1,000 star fragments that are un-bound and a guildmate starts levelling an alt, we could come to an agreement that he would pay 0.7g per 10, so I mail him the stones and he mails me back the gold, no personal trading cause we’re both busy that day as an example.
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As I mentioned previously, Personal Trading is in the game, so even if they remove gold being sent via mail, they don’t prevent trading between players and just create friction for the active player base. Using the example in my first point, me and that guildmate now have to meet each other somewhere in the game at a specific time to trade now rather than the ease of mail.
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This also prevents/creates friction for Bussing/Carrying services which is a staple in all other regions as far as I know. Now people may mention that you can’t mail gold cross servers or whatever, so how do they do it? Most likely buy an item for way more than it’s worth on the Auction House to bypass this. Issue with that of course is that Bots will and are doing the same already?
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Removing gold from mail also doesn’t actually solve anything. What people keep doing is trying to ‘attack’ the methods in which Bots transfer their gold, this will only be at a detriment to the player base. If you can’t see the issue with that statement I just said then allow me to explain;
Bots are an issue because people RMT, we all know this, so there’s 2 issues, Bots and RMTers. You will not be able to prevent all RMTers from trying to purchase, you could even threaten Account bans, Hardware ID bans, add in VPN preventions and people will still try to RMT so that’s out of the question. So we move onto the bots, Bots generate gold through various methods and sell them to players who pay via something of ‘real world substance’. What AGS/SG need to do is prevent the bots from generating the gold that they sell, not prevent how they send the gold they’ve already generated…
They have tried this clearly with the steam trusted status, almost worked. Now they’ve added VPN preventions which has already been bypassed by botters and hurts actual players, now I know it’s against ToS but that’s a different debate. So lets breakdown methods in which bots can make gold easily and replicable.
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Rapport rewards, these have already been nerfed and for people saying it hurts the playerbase, technically it reduced overall inflation so gold from other methods is more valuable.
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They gain gold via quests that give gold as a reward, as far as I know GS have removed most if not all by now but I’m not willing to re-run the story to check.
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They sell mats from Chaos dungeons, we’ve all seen them in Vern running from chaos dungeon to repair vendor and back.
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They sell life skill items, you can see them in Port Krona easily.
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They sell Adventure Tome items, this isn’t as obvious to see but it no doubt happens, even if it’s only from quests that reward you said item.
Assuming these are the only methods (Let me know if you can think of other ways that bot generate their gold income feel free to reply), and we assume point 1 and 2 are pretty much fixed the only other ways they generate their gold is via selling through the Auction House. When they announced that you had to be trusted to do things like send mail I was excited, finally something that prevents bots, but yet they allowed non-trusted accounts to use the Auction House ? That makes little to no sense to me, if i’m wrong please enlighten me.
Finally, my theory for a fix that would actually tackle the issue of how bots generate their gold is to prevent selling on the Auction House through some sort of check that needs to be made on that account. You can still buy on it though, which allows newer players access to items if they want to buy mats for example. This check can be made in or out of the game as far as I know. Feel free to provide feed back on how I’m completely wrong, would love to have a discussion about a prevention method that doesn’t ruin many staples of Lost Ark in other regions.