Most people probably know the US have a huge problem with drugs. To combat this Richard Nixion declared that the US is officially declaring a war on drugs.
Fast forward to today about 50 years later, Drugs won. GG NO RE. Big Pharma and drug traffickers making bank at the cost of US lives.
The US government had very strict punishment set up for both those that supply and those that consume illegal drugs. Yet the drug epidemic only gotten worse and not better.
If we were to look at the RMT problem in a similar lens, where the botters are the drug traffickers’ and the RMTers are the drug users. It should be easy to see that banning bots will only allow other bots to take it’s place, and banning players won’t stop others from buying. Hence the O’ Famous “A Kingdom ruled in fear is not a kingdom worth ruling” for those that remember that post.
Obviously this parallel does not mirror the situation exactly, as the war on drugs was heavily impacted by the US racism. But regardless the way to resolve the issue is to make people let reliant on RMT, maybe make royal crystal to gold ratio better. Or reduce the power of gold in game. I’m not here to say I have a solution to the problem, I’m just here to provide the context that shutting down bots and banning RMTers won’t stop the problem.
The difference between real life and Lost Ark is SmileGate is an omnipotent god in Lost Ark and can track anything and everything they want to and stop the bots if they really wanted to. The reality is it isn’t profitable for them to spend the resources needed to actually stop the bots while not making significant changes to the game. If they made significant changes to the game it would make it literally impossible to be profitable as a bot but then the game would not be what made it popular in the first place.
We need game companies and gamers to agree to make some sacrifice to ensure it is impossible to cheat in video games in the first place. Whether that is registering our Social numbers with some central anti-cheating global center to be able to play video games or something else that is the only way to stop it and have a F2P video game with free trading of all items.
Why would anyone willingly give that info out? With the amount of breaches that happen it would only be a matter of time before players had their identities stolen. I’m not going to risk that just to play a game.
They do in Korea and everyone there doesn’t have their crap stolen.
It is the only proven way to effectively prevent cheating in video games. Many very smart people have spent god knows how many hours trying to stop cheaters for decades now. Nothing works. This is currently the only known way.
If you think breaches don’t happen in South Korea then I have ocean front property in Arizona to sell you. How the heck do you think people outside of SK play online games on Korean servers? They buy KSSN from shady people.
A system like Korean SSN would not work in other regions, due to how privacy and other applicable laws work from country to country. Sad reality, it will never happen here.
It’s always going to an uphill battle, unless they do severe punishment against the whales that RMT (which I also doubt will ever happen)
lol. At least Nixon, he made a statement and he did something about it, but you look at AGS, they made a statement, but they didn’t do anything about it, so they just pretended to make a statement
Should have seen the amount of people who disagrees with people simply because it is just a video game or you are entitled. EX: if you didnt pay for it, you dont get to complain about it like are you serious bro.
The reason it failed is the people on the inside were fighting on the side of drugs. It was corrupt at the top, but you get sold this story about how prohibition doesn’t work by the people who defeated prohibition in order to harm you. a Lost Ark analogy would be to suggest that AGS is compromised and cooperating with the botters to profit off of selling Smilegate’s currency that their deal was to remit.
Somewhat simple solution to this. AGS works with the RMTers and tax them. They sell the gold, AGS gets to control their access. Allow bot use only during off hours. Limit the amount of gold they can sell. That keeps inflation in check, we don’t have to see bots all day, and some poor people in third world countries can make some money. Win, win, win.