Well, it’s late, yes. But I’m missing the theory in your post?
AGS is not selling “gold for money”. As such they can’t really “remove it”. What is really happening is:
every gold has to be made by players from the content
gold is only spent for honing/ugrades/taxes, not skins, not accesories, not pheons
“the exchange” is the official place where people with money can buy a skin, pheons, una completion tickets and trade it with other players for their grind-time (in form of gold and resources; gold and resources are interchangeable right now)
RMT’s doing the same, they trade their (bots) grind-time for real money (out of game)
As such… disabling let’s say exchange (if that’s the part of “the theory” of yours) changes nothing. RMT will still trade their time for real money in whatever currency.
If you remove let’s say gold trades altogether (market, sending gold) it again changes nothing. The core remains… RMT have grind-time to offer (in form of resources for example) and they will trade that for real money.
In non-realistic fantasies of some… if they shift value of crystals for example (lowering shop prices/adjusting the fixed ratio) it again changes nothing. The core issue… that real players can’t compete with bots in value of time. Same effect happing in real economy when you import cheap labor force doing mindless job for a price not worth for “normals”.
To remove RMT you need either:
target the means of trades (if there is not an easy way to trade bots time for anything of value, bots go away)
target the trades (like real financial bureau… by tracking “trades” that have not equal value counterpart. AKA “what did you get this money for?”)
target the sellers (kinda hard since they are anonymous and you can’t target them personally, also they are clever, this is their job)
target the buyers (would require some kind of real ID, or pseudo id, like a phone. This is Steam’s job they are not doing at all despite having all means required.)
offer the legal alternative (like allow bots for mindless content for everyone, or make things like infinite chaos “being farmed” automatically while being offline/online) - wouldn’t work for LA as its base gameplay is based on mindless grind and bots can do that always better
And each of these is problematic for its own reasons.
I welcome the bots i wanna see if LA can hit 1mill concurrent again just from bots alone would be kinda cool award. The game with the highest bot count babee lets embrace it.
Bots will never go out, do you know why? because progressing is slow, tedious and expensive in this game. Even the devs know that, otherwise they wouldn’t sell overpriced mats at the store.
The things is, they don’t care enough to actually change it and from the looks of it, they are having a nice profit, so no reason to spend resources cutting bots from the game, that way they can inflate the numbers so the game doesn’t seem in a bad state as it really is.
At this point if you pretend to be competitive in the game just buy gold from bots, otherwise you are gimping yourself.
You will also probably save hundreds of dollars while doing so.
No but I only use gold merchants once a week and in puika. But for inflation to happen at this rate the only explanation is bots using una token. There’s no other major raw gold generations that they could have.
I had a whisper today, “Hey m8, its this game dead?”
I asked why they thought that and they explained that they had just started playing and so far all he’d seen while leveling up to Vern Castle were all area’s full of bots and hardly any players.
Go look at any botting forum or discord. Lost Ark is so easy to bot and has so little done about it that people who never botted before are now doing it too, I mean why go to sleep doing nothing when you can run chaos dungeons all night and get more honing materials?
Yes, bots are a big deal and the dev’s should be ashamed of the state its gotten to. The say they have all this “data” to help them make informed decisions? Well… wheres the data on accounts running 24 hour infinite chaos dungeons? hmm?
This is a better shot actually, looks like they all just finished a run. This is the scene on every server all day, players see it constantly and devs are clearly choosing to ignore it.
inflation is generally not a bad thing for F2P players IF they can supply the goods the RMTers want
relics
honing materials
now the problem is that to “abuse” that market as F2P player you have to be extremely efficient or dedicated, as you can’t sell and progress fast at the same time.
Those F2P who put lot of time into game and sit on many 1370+ alts and/or several 1415 chars already are having a great time with inflation.
Everyone else is fucked, because if can’t take a bite of the whale/rmt gold, you have to rely just on the “standard” gold making, and that means you barely afford honing raw gold costs and can’t use market or even Mari for progression
I’ll hang around still, but this game has shown why I avoided F2P games like the plague in the first place. I just got bought in by the hype and friends coming over.
The game showed a lot of promise in the first week, when they locked all the “founder” servers in anticipation for queue times, just to remove it for the bots to swarm in and make it unplayable for everyone in the EU region.
AGS do sell “money to gold”, you can buy royal trade to blue and then trade to gold.
While the last trade is controlled by player the end result is still Money to gold (just with extra step).
This part is where bot are bad since bot offer the gold ‘directly’ and therefore steal money.
But if the player use that rmt gold to buy any cash shop item (via blue cristal or Ah) then AGS win since someone had to pay for those. The rmtter may have paid less for it but the middle man (that bought the skin/blue cristal to sell) had to pay the normal price.
The theory is that maybe the loss is worth the godly player chart.
but that is not how it works. It’s like saying that every company is causing inflation because they pay their employees with money.
AGS doesn’t sell gold. It’s only player trading. Just like market. Market also isn’t causing inflation. The only difference there the exchange is selling shop items (most of them). Market only sells ingame items (mostly).
Devs don’t have money from the gold conversion (aside from tax obviously). They take money only from shop and items that are sold there. RMT can’t sell shop items (that would steal money from devs).
RMT really only sell cheap time to players. They don’t “steal” devs money, they are not competition on this field really as they can’t sell shop items devs have income from. In big picture it “only” causes secondary damage. Reputation is one of them. People leaving because of bots. Because of queues they cause.
But the number of pheons used (that’s what devs get money from) remain very similar with or without RMT really. It’s economy within a economy.
the economy they are messing up, is the in game economy, they are also taking away tons of money earned from the tax on trade.
Basically lost ark sells gold to p2p players, farmed by f2p players. They take a cut of every sale. 5% at least from the crystal side. But since they pay f2p players with in game benefits, they are effectively losing the whole sale. The bot farms are setting up an alternative market with cheaper gold, and Lost ark loses their commission. They also effectively lower the earning power of f2p, and increase inflation and the wealth gap. Which makes the game less appealing to f2p players, which is part of the product LA is selling to whales.
pheons was probably created to create revenue stream that can’t be avoided. You are right they get their cut on any pheon trade regardless
bots cause players who will keep the game alive to quit.
the dead game does not attract whales.
the business side of aspect?
short term thinking is the problem of the day.
like, let’s say any sane person(and we are hoping this person to be a potential whale) looked at charts, saw a high player count and downloaded the game, picked a server (wich overloaded with bots had to pick a low pop one), created character yada-yada person is in the game.
saves Armen whatever and person in the first zone where interaction possible with other players Rethramis. “Oh boy I knew long sword guy was the right choice look at all the other long sword guy players” “Wait, why are there way too many of them” “They are walking in patterns I wonder why”
I think you see where I’m getting at.
The game is not going to gain much of a new player from steam charts anymore. most new players will come from friends telling them to “play with me this game” etc.
And bot problem already laid on almost every single platform people looking charts thinking oh that’s Russian election kind of numbers.
with your logic Amazon could have pulled an NFT rug pull scheme and made a lot of money would it still be a good decision for their business?
Why do you think there are so many threads like this? Because we are sitting in fucking queues every time we want to play the game and it pisses us off enormously!
