First of all we are talking about 50K characters as opposed as accounts. If every account banned has an average of 5 character, that means only 10K accounts banned.
Eq2 has around 250K active accounts, so 10K might seems quite a lot of their business flew out of the window. But.........(/open cynical corner) since the accounts banned belong to companies which need to make an income out of Eq2, that means that those companies will buy 10K more EQ2 boxes tomorrow to get back in business asap. Therefore SoE will gain for this action around $ 300K (/close cynical corner).
I am not complaining, I am very happy that SoE is taking action, just wanted to highlight to the people who were taking pity of SoE for its lost business, that things are not always as they look, and SoE isn't compromising its business at all.
Originally posted by Razorback Your thoughts are welcome as always Torak. I KNOW how much you care about this topic and how active you have been in this debate over a long period, I salute you. However I still blame the Devs as you know. Anyone capable of creating a world like L2 or WoW or EQ2 is capable of creating an economy that doesnt permit RMT's, the only thing missing is the desire to do so. That desire is always tempered by the greater desire to gain as many subscriptions as possible, even if some of those subscriptions are those of farmers, it is the world the devs have CHOSEN to hand us.
I totally agree. Except in the 1000's of hours i've played these games i've never had my fun ruined by a botter or secondary market.
Originally posted by Torak Originally posted by kaibigan34 Look at the situation a little more. Take L2 for example. There are asian servers. And there are american servers. If they IP banned all of asia from the american servers alot of farming would stop. But they dont. Why?
Take WoW. Its the samething there. They have asian servers and american servers. Why allow asians into the american servers when they have their own servers? Why not IP ban them?
Just my opinion though. I could be wrong.
Kai
One tiny little correction. Asian IP's are blocked from the L2 U.S./Euro servers. They are also blocked from WoW servers as well. The farmers use proxy servers which gives them a local IP's.
NCSoft also blocks credit card payments made with credit card outside of their country of origin. How do I know? They blocked mine. I am a U.S. civilian working for the U.S. government living outside of the U.S. My credit card was blocked for that reason along with many other service people. NCSoft did address the issue and corrected it for us.
I am a US citizen also and travel alot. I was able to access WoW from my hotel room in Hong Kong using the hotel's ISP and could play both games (including the L2 trial) using myDSL in the Philippines. They might have IP banned a few but not all.
As for credit cards. There are two stores in Cebu that I know of that sell game time cards for WoW, L2, EQ2, etc. All for the american servers.
There are quite a few farming cafes in the Philippines and some individual ones. The cafes are fun. You go in and Yyou get to play an MMO for free. You sign up and can play as long as you want. In the end you turn over a certain amnount of money on your character to one of the cafe owner's characters and he sells it. The three most popular games I saw in those were WoW, L2, and EQ2. All of the ones I saw used myDSL.
Originally posted by kaibigan34I am a US citizen also and travel alot. I was able to access WoW from my hotel room in Hong Kong using the hotel's ISP and could play both games (including the L2 trial) using myDSL in the Philippines. They might have IP banned a few but not all.
As for credit cards. There are two stores in Cebu that I know of that sell game time cards for WoW, L2, EQ2, etc. All for the american servers.
There are quite a few farming cafes in the Philippines and some individual ones. The cafes are fun. You go in and Yyou get to play an MMO for free. You sign up and can play as long as you want. In the end you turn over a certain amnount of money on your character to one of the cafe owner's characters and he sells it. The three most popular games I saw in those were WoW, L2, and EQ2. All of the ones I saw used myDSL.
Kai
Cool,
I think I need to clearify a bit though, I don't travel abroad...I live abroad. My IP is European. The problem arose from this. NCSoft switch to a new billing. The new system blocked any payment made with a credit card from an IP not of the same country. For example, all of my credit cards were issed from assorted U.S. finacial institutions. I now live in Europe, my credit cards AVS was in the states. Payment blocked because the IP address was German. U.S. credit card payment to U.S. account from a non - U.S. IP. -BLOCKED
Time cards are another issue, they always work, I used one while NCSoft corrected our billing issue.
I could send you the customer service log once I edit out any personal info but I will not post it and prefer not to send it. I have no idea who you are and I am not really inclined to share that with the public, sorry. And to be honest if you want to agrue about whether my billing issue actually happened or not thats up to you. Have at it.
Given the recent history of this site, whether anyone believes me or not is irrelevant anyway, its still gonna be questioned and trolled no matter what I say or do.
Originally posted by Torak Originally posted by kaibigan34I am a US citizen also and travel alot. I was able to access WoW from my hotel room in Hong Kong using the hotel's ISP and could play both games (including the L2 trial) using myDSL in the Philippines. They might have IP banned a few but not all.
As for credit cards. There are two stores in Cebu that I know of that sell game time cards for WoW, L2, EQ2, etc. All for the american servers.
There are quite a few farming cafes in the Philippines and some individual ones. The cafes are fun. You go in and Yyou get to play an MMO for free. You sign up and can play as long as you want. In the end you turn over a certain amnount of money on your character to one of the cafe owner's characters and he sells it. The three most popular games I saw in those were WoW, L2, and EQ2. All of the ones I saw used myDSL.
Kai
Cool,
I think I need to clearify a bit though, I don't travel abroad...I live abroad. My IP is European. The problem arose from this. NCSoft switch to a new billing. The new system blocked any payment made with a credit card from an IP not of the same country. For example, all of my credit cards were issed from assorted U.S. finacial institutions. I now live in Europe, my credit cards AVS was in the states. Payment blocked because the IP address was German. U.S. credit card payment to U.S. account from a non - U.S. IP. -BLOCKED
Time cards are another issue, they always work, I used one while NCSoft corrected our billing issue.
I could send you the customer service log once I edit out any personal info but I will not post it and prefer not to send it. I have no idea who you are and I am not really inclined to share that with the public, sorry. And to be honest if you want to agrue about whether my billing issue actually happened or not thats up to you. Have at it.
Given the recent history of this site, whether anyone believes me or not is irrelevant anyway, its still gonna be questioned and trolled no matter what I say or do.
We are experiancing a miscommunication here I think. I am not saying you didnt have an issue with your credit card. I was saying there are ways around using a credit card to access US versions of games.
We are experiancing a miscommunication here I think. I am not saying you didnt have an issue with your credit card. I was saying there are ways around using a credit card to access US versions of games.
Kai
Sorry again, I've been a bit defensive since I started posting here again. Yes, you are correct there are several ways around it. I also went back and took a look at the article about the IP blocks. WoW and NCSoft block Chinese IP's not all Asian. My mistake. So you could load up a U.S. version from another Asian country and if you had a timecard, play your heart out. The Chinese farmers use U.S. based proxy servers anyway so blocks don't stop them.
One thing you all need to keep in mind is the Currency Industry has so many more resources and so much more money and unlimited time to overcome anything that a game company can throw at them. What does the average Dev team have 2 maybe 4 people working on protecting the game on a limited budget? It would be impossible for a game company alone to stop them aside from selling the currency themselves or removing the economies. Its in the hands of the community....the players drive this not the devs or the farmers. The players are the ones who are forking over the cash and driving this on. All devs can really do is put in safeguards. WoW has about one of the most restricted economies out there, it didn't help them one tiny bit.
Originally posted by ste2000 But.........(/open cynical corner) since the accounts banned belong to companies which need to make an income out of Eq2, that means that those companies will buy 10K more EQ2 boxes tomorrow to get back in business asap. Therefore SoE will gain for this action around $ 300K (/close cynical corner).
I am not complaining, I am very happy that SoE is taking action, just wanted to highlight to the people who were taking pity of SoE for its lost business, that things are not always as they look, and SoE isn't compromising its business at all.
Tomorrow? They where back in game within 30 minutes. Hows that for cynical?
Originally posted by Cesain i am sorry if this makes people mad or anything but 50000 EQ2 CHARACTERS BANNED IS HILARIOUS I MEAN WOW THAT JUST GONNA MAKE PEOPLE HATE Everquest but who ever lost their characters im am sooo sorry
I would want those people hating EQ2. So they don't bring their sorry butts back into the game. To hell with them.
Originally posted by Torak Originally posted by kaibigan34
We are experiancing a miscommunication here I think. I am not saying you didnt have an issue with your credit card. I was saying there are ways around using a credit card to access US versions of games.
Kai
Sorry again, I've been a bit defensive since I started posting here again. Yes, you are correct there are several ways around it. I also went back and took a look at the article about the IP blocks. WoW and NCSoft block Chinese IP's not all Asian. My mistake. So you could load up a U.S. version from another Asian country and if you had a timecard, play your heart out. The Chinese farmers use U.S. based proxy servers anyway so blocks don't stop them.
One thing you all need to keep in mind is the Currency Industry has so many more resources and so much more money and unlimited time to overcome anything that a game company can throw at them. What does the average Dev team have 2 maybe 4 people working on protecting the game on a limited budget? It would be impossible for a game company alone to stop them aside from selling the currency themselves or removing the economies. Its in the hands of the community....the players drive this not the devs or the farmers. The players are the ones who are forking over the cash and driving this on. All devs can really do is put in safeguards. WoW has about one of the most restricted economies out there, it didn't help them one tiny bit.
There are a load of things that can be done to stop farmers and botters.
1) Dont allow immediate deletion of toons. Make the deletion take a week or two. Why? Because most of the time a person who sells this money will make a "mule" toon to deliver the gold/adena/plats to the consumer. They then delete the toon so if they looked for them they wont be found. However if they have the toon for two weeks there is a better chance they will get caught.
2) Dont allow trades with free trials. One of the ways these farmers move money is to use free trial toons. Dont allow any kind of trading with them. WoW is the only one that I have seen doing this.
3) Be more strict with people who have bought the "dirty" money. From what I have seen once money or items gets to the final user nothing is done. One article I had read a developer (no I cant remember who) said they could find the recipients of these transactions quite easily. Yet they do nothing to them. Take away the money, ban them for a week, or better yet ban them for good. After about the first 100 of those, people wont want to risk it.
I am beginning to think SOE's statement was yet another of their outright lies. When WoW had made a similiar announcement, gold prices on some of the sites shot up about $5. When L2 became more strict with farmers and botters, adena prices shot up about $4.
But when looked at those sites I saw that prices for EQ2 have stayed the same. Some actually went down. Makes me think its just another media spin thing for SOE.
The Plat sellers i see farming every named that isnt nailed to the wall are not gone, they've been in game for about 5 or 6 months and there still going strong, they wont let me get updates and when we actually steal a mob because we are so desperate for the update they run off and train us with mobs. Took me 4 months for 1 friggin update(there train backfired haha, and fusion dropped off him hehehe). I love eq2 but there attitude to making the game enjoyable is awful, beautiful content, graphics, e.t.c. but there customer service is awful, one thing that lets down this beautiful game. I play this game for fun, not to be hounded by plat sellers, plat spammers, plat XXXX.
Been playing battlefield 2142 and FEAR multiplayer because i am so sick of it
There are a load of things that can be done to stop farmers and botters.
1) Dont allow immediate deletion of toons. Make the deletion take a week or two. Why? Because most of the time a person who sells this money will make a "mule" toon to deliver the gold/adena/plats to the consumer. They then delete the toon so if they looked for them they wont be found. However if they have the toon for two weeks there is a better chance they will get caught.
2) Dont allow trades with free trials. One of the ways these farmers move money is to use free trial toons. Dont allow any kind of trading with them. WoW is the only one that I have seen doing this.
3) Be more strict with people who have bought the "dirty" money. From what I have seen once money or items gets to the final user nothing is done. One article I had read a developer (no I cant remember who) said they could find the recipients of these transactions quite easily. Yet they do nothing to them. Take away the money, ban them for a week, or better yet ban them for good. After about the first 100 of those, people wont want to risk it.
This is just three off the top of my head. Kai
Hey Kai,
I'm enjoying our tennis match
1) Lineage 2 does not allow immediate character delete. It takes 7 days to delete a toon. It doesn't faze botters/farmers. L2 actually has alot of anti-bot measures as I pointed out in my other post. Doesn't help a bit.
2) Good idea but its a very short term fix. Trial accounts are to short. Another example. L2 very very rarely has a free trial and they are very limited when they do have them. If you recall they had one here last month which only lasted 2 weeks, no more free trial. Thats it. Now there is a 7 day trial which you must be a paying member of fileplanet to get, so its a free trial you gotta pay for. It doesn't even break the botters stride. There was NO free trial of L2 in NA for over 2 years. Didn't help.
3) Again, good idea but that takes monitoring and that takes people/time and resources. Lets grab a random number out of the air and say 25% of the aprox 2 million U.S. players of WoW buy gold. Thats alot of people to track down and confirm they actually made a purchased. Can they track whether it was purchased or maybe a friend gave it to them? All of this takes time. How large are the teams that do this sort of thing right now? Would you be willing to pay more then 14.99 a month to fund a special "team" to monitor player transactions to ensure no money trading was going on? Technologically it might be easy to whip up the info but who's going to tackle the phone book sized results??? How many new results will you pull daily? Realistically can it be done and NOT effect sub prices. The people required to do this cost money in salaries and benefits equipment (they need gear to do the job) and facilities (they need somewhere to do it from).
Edit - oh and once you have their names what are you going to do with them? 25% of 2 million people? Lets call it 10% for arguments sake. 200,000 customers. You gonna ban them all? Imagine the PR fallout from that. It might sound good to you as a player but as a company you just shot yourself in the foot,
You kicked 200,000 paying subs and lost the money. You used a whole bunch of time and resourses that could have been better spent on other dev projects so that cost you money. The potential PR fallout could be a problem and what if there was legal action? Whether they win or loose doesn't matter....it cost money no matter what. So.....where is the benefit for the company?
Not allowing to delete toons will really hurt newbie the most. When you start playing you need to try several class before finding one you like. Not being able to delete toons you don't like will cause a real problem since the maximum characters we can have is only 6.
I'm enjoying our tennis match Me too. 1) Lineage 2 does not allow immediate character delete. It takes 7 days to delete a toon. It doesn't faze botters/farmers. L2 actually has alot of anti-bot measures as I pointed out in my other post. Doesn't help a bit. 2) Good idea but its a very short term fix. Trial accounts are to short. Another example. L2 very very rarely has a free trial and they are very limited when they do have them. If you recall they had one here last month which only lasted 2 weeks, no more free trial. Thats it. Now there is a 7 day trial which you must be a paying member of fileplanet to get, so its a free trial you gotta pay for. It doesn't even break the botters stride. There was NO free trial of L2 in NA for over 2 years. Didn't help. 3) Again, good idea but that takes monitoring and that takes people/time and resources. Lets grab a random number out of the air and say 25% of the aprox 2 million U.S. players of WoW buy gold. Thats alot of people to track down and confirm they actually made a purchased. Can they track whether it was purchased or maybe a friend gave it to them? All of this takes time. How large are the teams that do this sort of thing right now? Would you be willing to pay more then 14.99 a month to fund a special "team" to monitor player transactions to ensure no money trading was going on? Technologically it might be easy to whip up the info but who's going to tackle the phone book sized results??? How many new results will you pull daily? Realistically can it be done and NOT effect sub prices. The people required to do this cost money in salaries and benefits equipment (they need gear to do the job) and facilities (they need somewhere to do it from). Edit - oh and once you have their names what are you going to do with them? 25% of 2 million people? Lets call it 10% for arguments sake. 200,000 customers. You gonna ban them all? Imagine the PR fallout from that. It might sound good to you as a player but as a company you just shot yourself in the foot, You kicked 200,000 paying subs and lost the money. You used a whole bunch of time and resourses that could have been better spent on other dev projects so that cost you money. The potential PR fallout could be a problem and what if there was legal action? Whether they win or loose doesn't matter....it cost money no matter what. So.....where is the benefit for the company? Fallout from PR? Lets take a game and use it an example. Lets say a game like WoW started using more hardcore tactics to stamp out botters and farmers. Lets assume they banned 200k players for various botting and farming infractions. Now they publically announce this and tell everyone the reason is violations for botting and farming. Do you really think anyone is going to get upset? They will most likely be applauded. Plus banning is just one possible solution. My favorite idea I ever heard was if you got caught buying ingame money/items/toons with real money you had to wear a new tag telling everyone what you did. Imagine it. Some yahoo just spent $600 on ebay for a level 60 undead warlock. Blizzard finds out. Instead of banning the sod they force a tag over their head to show everyone what they did. A hell of a stigma to have to live down. Yes it would cost alot of money to fight it. But that is on them not us. We pay them for a service. If they cant provide said service then they need to get out of the game business. I am sorry but I have had it with all this namby pamby feeling sorry for game companies. If a game comes out literally full of bugs the excuse is "You know how hard it is to make a game?". I dont care how hard it is. That is what we are paying them for. Just like being able to play in a game without botters and farmers ruining our gameplay.
With each new game we as a community lower our expectations again and again. We even go so far as to provide them with excuses. Its disgusting. We accept every lame excuse and swallow every lie. Its something we wouldnt allow in normal life. But in game communities its par for the course. If you ate a major fastfood joint and got food poisoning, would you accept them saying "Well its too hard to make sure every piece of meat comes out untainted."??? How about if you were robbed and the cops could have stopped it but said "Its too costly to stop a robber."??? They could do it. They could stop botters. Or at least make it more costly for them to stay in business. It would be costly to the game company too. But that is their problem. We dont pay them to think of answers ourselves. We pay them to think of the ways and implement them. Kai
EQ2 has a mediocre population at best, then it spreads at across 25 servers and they put a sign saying "Welcome to Ghost Town! Drive Safely"
-- Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
Amen to that. I couldnt play the game for a week and posted numerous times highlighting this, you know what SOE did? Ignored me whilst everyone else spammed me with moronic idiosyncracies like "Have you checker your router settings?" Turns out a node was down between me and SOE that affected tens of thousands of accounts - they refused to confirm this.
-- Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
Amen to that. I couldnt play the game for a week and posted numerous times highlighting this, you know what SOE did? Ignored me whilst everyone else spammed me with moronic idiosyncracies like "Have you checker your router settings?" Turns out a node was down between me and SOE that affected tens of thousands of accounts - they refused to confirm this. Aye, they dont care if we're having a problem, as long as there making money they dont care. The whole of CS needs the sack/boot/firing. whatever. Current CS is terrible and they need a completely new dep. there so awful they cannot be bothered to say when servers are coming down. there a disgrace to everyone else who works hard for the game(developers, artists, producers e.t.c.) and there an embarresment. They need a review as there definiteky not up to scratch.
Comments
First of all we are talking about 50K characters as opposed as accounts.
If every account banned has an average of 5 character, that means only 10K accounts banned.
Eq2 has around 250K active accounts, so 10K might seems quite a lot of their business flew out of the window.
But.........(/open cynical corner) since the accounts banned belong to companies which need to make an income out of Eq2, that means that those companies will buy 10K more EQ2 boxes tomorrow to get back in business asap. Therefore SoE will gain for this action around $ 300K (/close cynical corner).
I am not complaining, I am very happy that SoE is taking action, just wanted to highlight to the people who were taking pity of SoE for its lost business, that things are not always as they look, and SoE isn't compromising its business at all.
I totally agree. Except in the 1000's of hours i've played these games i've never had my fun ruined by a botter or secondary market.
Make a difference!
One tiny little correction. Asian IP's are blocked from the L2 U.S./Euro servers. They are also blocked from WoW servers as well. The farmers use proxy servers which gives them a local IP's.
NCSoft also blocks credit card payments made with credit card outside of their country of origin. How do I know? They blocked mine. I am a U.S. civilian working for the U.S. government living outside of the U.S. My credit card was blocked for that reason along with many other service people. NCSoft did address the issue and corrected it for us.
I am a US citizen also and travel alot. I was able to access WoW from my hotel room in Hong Kong using the hotel's ISP and could play both games (including the L2 trial) using myDSL in the Philippines. They might have IP banned a few but not all.
As for credit cards. There are two stores in Cebu that I know of that sell game time cards for WoW, L2, EQ2, etc. All for the american servers.
There are quite a few farming cafes in the Philippines and some individual ones. The cafes are fun. You go in and Yyou get to play an MMO for free. You sign up and can play as long as you want. In the end you turn over a certain amnount of money on your character to one of the cafe owner's characters and he sells it. The three most popular games I saw in those were WoW, L2, and EQ2. All of the ones I saw used myDSL.
Kai
Cool,
I think I need to clearify a bit though, I don't travel abroad...I live abroad. My IP is European. The problem arose from this. NCSoft switch to a new billing. The new system blocked any payment made with a credit card from an IP not of the same country. For example, all of my credit cards were issed from assorted U.S. finacial institutions. I now live in Europe, my credit cards AVS was in the states. Payment blocked because the IP address was German. U.S. credit card payment to U.S. account from a non - U.S. IP. -BLOCKED
Time cards are another issue, they always work, I used one while NCSoft corrected our billing issue.
I could send you the customer service log once I edit out any personal info but I will not post it and prefer not to send it. I have no idea who you are and I am not really inclined to share that with the public, sorry. And to be honest if you want to agrue about whether my billing issue actually happened or not thats up to you. Have at it.
Given the recent history of this site, whether anyone believes me or not is irrelevant anyway, its still gonna be questioned and trolled no matter what I say or do.
Cool,
I think I need to clearify a bit though, I don't travel abroad...I live abroad. My IP is European. The problem arose from this. NCSoft switch to a new billing. The new system blocked any payment made with a credit card from an IP not of the same country. For example, all of my credit cards were issed from assorted U.S. finacial institutions. I now live in Europe, my credit cards AVS was in the states. Payment blocked because the IP address was German. U.S. credit card payment to U.S. account from a non - U.S. IP. -BLOCKED
Time cards are another issue, they always work, I used one while NCSoft corrected our billing issue.
I could send you the customer service log once I edit out any personal info but I will not post it and prefer not to send it. I have no idea who you are and I am not really inclined to share that with the public, sorry. And to be honest if you want to agrue about whether my billing issue actually happened or not thats up to you. Have at it.
Given the recent history of this site, whether anyone believes me or not is irrelevant anyway, its still gonna be questioned and trolled no matter what I say or do.
We are experiancing a miscommunication here I think. I am not saying you didnt have an issue with your credit card. I was saying there are ways around using a credit card to access US versions of games.
Kai
I dont really know what to say besides... woot?
On the moon, nerds have their pants pulled down and they are spanked with moon rocks!
Kai
Sorry again, I've been a bit defensive since I started posting here again.
One thing you all need to keep in mind is the Currency Industry has so many more resources and so much more money and unlimited time to overcome anything that a game company can throw at them. What does the average Dev team have 2 maybe 4 people working on protecting the game on a limited budget? It would be impossible for a game company alone to stop them aside from selling the currency themselves or removing the economies. Its in the hands of the community....the players drive this not the devs or the farmers. The players are the ones who are forking over the cash and driving this on. All devs can really do is put in safeguards. WoW has about one of the most restricted economies out there, it didn't help them one tiny bit.
Could you please post a llink to your source of the above statement please.
======================
It's just me, so open the door.
Could you please post a llink to your source of the above statement please.
There you go http://www.mmorpgchart.com/
The report is 6 months old, but you ll get the idea.
Kai
Sorry again, I've been a bit defensive since I started posting here again.
One thing you all need to keep in mind is the Currency Industry has so many more resources and so much more money and unlimited time to overcome anything that a game company can throw at them. What does the average Dev team have 2 maybe 4 people working on protecting the game on a limited budget? It would be impossible for a game company alone to stop them aside from selling the currency themselves or removing the economies. Its in the hands of the community....the players drive this not the devs or the farmers. The players are the ones who are forking over the cash and driving this on. All devs can really do is put in safeguards. WoW has about one of the most restricted economies out there, it didn't help them one tiny bit.
There are a load of things that can be done to stop farmers and botters.
1) Dont allow immediate deletion of toons. Make the deletion take a week or two. Why? Because most of the time a person who sells this money will make a "mule" toon to deliver the gold/adena/plats to the consumer. They then delete the toon so if they looked for them they wont be found. However if they have the toon for two weeks there is a better chance they will get caught.
2) Dont allow trades with free trials. One of the ways these farmers move money is to use free trial toons. Dont allow any kind of trading with them. WoW is the only one that I have seen doing this.
3) Be more strict with people who have bought the "dirty" money. From what I have seen once money or items gets to the final user nothing is done. One article I had read a developer (no I cant remember who) said they could find the recipients of these transactions quite easily. Yet they do nothing to them. Take away the money, ban them for a week, or better yet ban them for good. After about the first 100 of those, people wont want to risk it.
This is just three off the top of my head.
Kai
But when looked at those sites I saw that prices for EQ2 have stayed the same. Some actually went down. Makes me think its just another media spin thing for SOE.
Kai
The Plat sellers i see farming every named that isnt nailed to the wall are not gone, they've been in game for about 5 or 6 months and there still going strong, they wont let me get updates and when we actually steal a mob because we are so desperate for the update they run off and train us with mobs. Took me 4 months for 1 friggin update(there train backfired haha, and fusion dropped off him hehehe). I love eq2 but there attitude to making the game enjoyable is awful, beautiful content, graphics, e.t.c. but there customer service is awful, one thing that lets down this beautiful game. I play this game for fun, not to be hounded by plat sellers, plat spammers, plat XXXX.
Been playing battlefield 2142 and FEAR multiplayer because i am so sick of it
1) Dont allow immediate deletion of toons. Make the deletion take a week or two. Why? Because most of the time a person who sells this money will make a "mule" toon to deliver the gold/adena/plats to the consumer. They then delete the toon so if they looked for them they wont be found. However if they have the toon for two weeks there is a better chance they will get caught.
2) Dont allow trades with free trials. One of the ways these farmers move money is to use free trial toons. Dont allow any kind of trading with them. WoW is the only one that I have seen doing this.
3) Be more strict with people who have bought the "dirty" money. From what I have seen once money or items gets to the final user nothing is done. One article I had read a developer (no I cant remember who) said they could find the recipients of these transactions quite easily. Yet they do nothing to them. Take away the money, ban them for a week, or better yet ban them for good. After about the first 100 of those, people wont want to risk it.
This is just three off the top of my head.
Kai
Hey Kai,
I'm enjoying our tennis match
1) Lineage 2 does not allow immediate character delete. It takes 7 days to delete a toon. It doesn't faze botters/farmers. L2 actually has alot of anti-bot measures as I pointed out in my other post. Doesn't help a bit.
2) Good idea but its a very short term fix. Trial accounts are to short. Another example. L2 very very rarely has a free trial and they are very limited when they do have them. If you recall they had one here last month which only lasted 2 weeks, no more free trial. Thats it. Now there is a 7 day trial which you must be a paying member of fileplanet to get, so its a free trial you gotta pay for. It doesn't even break the botters stride. There was NO free trial of L2 in NA for over 2 years. Didn't help.
3) Again, good idea but that takes monitoring and that takes people/time and resources. Lets grab a random number out of the air and say 25% of the aprox 2 million U.S. players of WoW buy gold. Thats alot of people to track down and confirm they actually made a purchased. Can they track whether it was purchased or maybe a friend gave it to them? All of this takes time. How large are the teams that do this sort of thing right now? Would you be willing to pay more then 14.99 a month to fund a special "team" to monitor player transactions to ensure no money trading was going on? Technologically it might be easy to whip up the info but who's going to tackle the phone book sized results??? How many new results will you pull daily? Realistically can it be done and NOT effect sub prices. The people required to do this cost money in salaries and benefits equipment (they need gear to do the job) and facilities (they need somewhere to do it from).
Edit - oh and once you have their names what are you going to do with them? 25% of 2 million people? Lets call it 10% for arguments sake. 200,000 customers. You gonna ban them all? Imagine the PR fallout from that. It might sound good to you as a player but as a company you just shot yourself in the foot,
You kicked 200,000 paying subs and lost the money. You used a whole bunch of time and resourses that could have been better spent on other dev projects so that cost you money. The potential PR fallout could be a problem and what if there was legal action? Whether they win or loose doesn't matter....it cost money no matter what. So.....where is the benefit for the company?
--
Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL
--
Note: PlayNC will refuse to allow you access to your account if you forget your password and can't provide a scanned image of the product key for the first product you purchased..... LOL