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Dealing with Gold -Buyers- in MMOs
Tisiphone
Member Posts: 486
With all the talk about how to deal with gold sellers in MMORPGs, and who does and does not buy gold and why, I'd like to take some time to start a (hopefully constructive) conversation about what developers can do to deal with gold buyers to make this a less desirable thing to do.
People have brought up the very sensible point that if you penalize people who receive gold, it becomes an easy way for players to attack the account of another player.
For instance, Mike the Ranger gets into a duel with Sue the Paladin, beats Sue fair and square - then throws insults at her for a few days. Sue is really angry about this and decides to get Mike in some real life trouble. Their game bans any account that receives money from a known gold seller. So Sue buys gold from Acmegoldstuff.cn, and sends it to Mike the Ranger, who promptly gets banned from the game. He has no recourse to prove he did not buy it.
So let me throw out some ideas that make the gold buying penalties more fair. Lets make the assumption that most any medium or larger developer has a pretty good idea of what transactions are buying and selling and a list of potential gold seller accounts they are monitoring.
Here are some ideas:
- Simply cancel the transaction with a note in the recipients mailbox that reads: "This transaction was canceled due to suspicion of RMT. If you believe you received this message in error, send a petition regarding ticket 235235."
- Give the player an option to accept or return the money with the message above, but have accepting it without a petition cause immediate A) Temporary, in-game play penalties, or 
A three-strikes probation period to begin. A probationary / warning period would be a way to deal with Adam Accountant who feels he has no time to farm this week and buys gold one time only.
- Deterrent by fear or embarrassment. Send the player a message from the GM system that says the transaction was monitored and their account will be monitored for x days. Or, post it in local chat for all to see!
These are some ideas. Obviously, sellers are the target of most measures, but it seems fair to try to decrease demand, which is the real root of the problem.
Ideas? Thoughts?
Comments
Or there's the obvious solution: Make it impossible to transfer that amount of gold to anyone for any reason, period. Make it impossible for a person to receive more than X gold per 24-hour period. Sure, someone can run back to the gold seller every single day for a month to get their gold, but who is going to do that? The same ought to be true of gear. You can only receive gear a certain % of level above you. People can still sell gear and weapons, it will cut down on the absurd prices that people charge and the ability to buy a ridiculous number of high-end weapons will be kept to a minimum.
I don't doubt that some will just wait and get a little gold day after day, I just think the few people who are that crazy won't be enough to keep the gold sellers in business.
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ok, so I'm a supporter of rmt, but I'll go with the flow here because I believe that there should be some pure mmos. However, I have more of a question than a suggestion. What is wrong with the method implemented by wow? Nothing you can buy with gold has much of an effect on the game, and anything worthwhile is bind on pickup. Unless you're specifically after twink gear, gold just doesn't help you enough to become imbalancing.
ban them from the game. if they can't be bothered to play that game then why let them. they're jsut ruining it for others. yea sure they can afford to buy gold, but why should they be allowed to just coz i can't afford to do the same.
its the same with MT's, except its items not gold
MMORPG companies typically don't ban gold buyers.
They however do take the suspicious money away from buyers. At least in wow.
I don't think gold buying is such a big deal. Just be glad you play on the western server. I was playing Aion on the Taiwan server and I would say 25% of people bot and 100% of people in Abyss have speed skill hack, allowing them to spam 8 skill in 1 second.
How about somthig like this? (not really so much gold selling but deffinitly help with items so you don't have to lock everything down and make it BOP)
Players who want to trade more then “5” items a day (or whatnot) have to register at the “trade center” where they can be monitored for price “flux*”, and as far as “combat” players who want to trade crafted items, they can sell up to 5 a day, and then the rest to NPCS, at the market rate.
The trade center would have its own quest line, where you had to creat a certain amount of items or something and when you got “Certified” you get a certificate or something.
------? (possibly have it so in main cities you can “rent”/Buy shops to host your business in. And even set up certain tools you need “Forge, anvil”
(Flux* AKA a 20k sword isn’t being sold for 1k)
And you can trade as many “raw” items you want (Such as 100 pelts, and 50 stone)
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This way you could keep people crafting and keep a player economy without locking everyone out.
I mean that was the problem I had with WOW, just about every item past lvl 40 is Bind on pickup or bind on equip...which is lame.
It makes crafting for money totaly useless...
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I dont' understand what you trying to do. But locking people from trading won't make people happy.
I know back in the days when I play wow, I spend 3 hours per day just doing crafting, and selling things in the auction house. Letting me only sell 5 things a day won't make me happy.
I dont' understand what you trying to do. But locking people from trading won't make people happy.
I know back in the days when I play wow, I spend 3 hours per day just doing crafting, and selling things in the auction house. Letting me only sell 5 things a day won't make me happy.
I'll edicate you.. First off a good 60% of the time when you buy gold you'll meet some one in game that will have you post say and apple on the auction house for 1000gold, and then they will buy it and there you have your gold trading. Its really hard for Devs to detect. but if you had it so you could only trade so many items. and they could watch for price fluxs more carfully it'd be easier to see the trades going on. Thats how gold buy (most of the time) works
Second. way is people sell in game items for real money say I get sword of a million deaths or somthing and its a really rare item well normaly I could sell it to another player for X amount of REAL dollers.
Well to combat this most Devs/games makes rare items BOP or Bind On Pickup. So once you have it you can sell it unless its to a NPC. With what I explained above that would stop gold farmers from getting a "ton" of rare items and selling them, because you can only sell 5 a day on this "auction house" trade place.
So how do you keep a player run economy (which is the most fun economy) running if you are going to have BOP items....well you can, so make it so you can craft items and sell a certain amount a day (5) OR you can sell an unlimited amount in like a shop or somthing that you rent ingame. I think it would be lotsa fun and serve a purpose at the same time.
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In the large thread I started I explained how the gold sellers get around it making it seem legit.
I don't see how blizzard could prove other then speculation you bought gold.
The company had me place 5 individual bandages on the auction each listed at 200g. The next day I log in and someone purchased them all and I had my 1000g. They never sent anything through the mail, although one company did just send me 1000g through the mail. I expected to get caught on that one but nothing ever happened.
After doing the bandage thing I was curious and would search the AH once in awhile and sure enough I found various people with bandages listed. I guess you could really just search for any worthless item thats overpriced. Other then that most of its done through in game email.
In my opinion the best way to combat gold farming/selling is by either;
A) All items have a designated min/max amount and when trying to sell it at the auction you cannot go over/below the listed amounts. You know when you see some crappy epic item listed at 2000g that its not worth, the Epic Sword of Purpleness would have a min 50g max 100g in the item details.
C) Items have signatures that you can view. I suggested this back in EQ as a novelty. When you buy say, Ghoulbane, when you inspect the sword it lists the stats and then another window shows who first obtained it and how many owners it had with how much it had been sold for in the past each time.
I think all this talk doesn't really take into account the amount of money it would cost to hire GMs to monitor the problems.
You take small indie company that has one server. You add a GM or ...3 to monitor this, you significantly raise their bottom line.
Then you take another game, say WoW. They have hundreds of servers with thousands of transactions going on all the time. Again the people to monitor that raises their bottom line.
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You make the money of no value, they will trade items. You make many items untradeable you piss off the player base. Can't even really approach power leveling.
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You can stigmatize it like they attempt to do with illegal music downloading and drug use. Make it uncool to do it. Peer pressure does fabulous things.
Apparently from WoW and other forums, gold sellers now dont send gold by mail anymore ever since blizz make any gold send by mail to have about an hour? delay so they can check on it. I dont know whether there's an amount cap before they do that.
Now seller just meet up with buyers and using the trade mthod, transfer gold to them.
I think the best way to reduce any gold sellers and buyers is to remove the huge money sink in game.
Eg. Whats the purpose of selling the epic flying training in WoW for 5k gold?
This kind of money sink will only make more players buy gold. Instead of using money to make players ultimately stay longer with the game, it should be done using quest, like daily quests, to achieve it. Thus even if you have large amount of money its of no use...
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I think this is a very good subject of discussion as you have considered the issue of being effective vs being fair. The potential of griefers abusing the system is the main deterrent to players enforcing RMT prevention. The problem is further compounded by privacy issues as this has mostly prevented the comunity from auditing the success rate of measures enforced by GMs. Allowing a person to reject mail is a good idea, however it is not fool proof as one may still claim to be an unexperienced user as a form of legitimate defense, which still leaves the door open to abuse.
IMO, i think the best solution would be a player elected review board. The board would have access to monitoring a companys action in fighting RMT and would be able to review the handling of individual cases as well as providing feedback and overseeing general player welfare. It needs not always get involved however. In the case you just mentioned, for instance, none of the solutions that you provide acount for presumption of inocence (i know this isnt a legal system, but most players in the west would consider it basic fairness) so an email from the ads/GMs asking Mike for an explanation would be the right thing to do. An experienced player would have very likely sent a comunication or ticket the second he realized he received the gold, so if Mike had done so, he would be able to allege in his defense he had seen receiving the gold as iregular and had no intentions of keeping it. The system as is (in most MMOs) would work best in this scenario.
Ofc, Sue gets away with it, Mikes griefing goes unpunished, and an unexperienced user would have been banned. The system broke down with Sue not taking screenshots and reporting Mikes harrasment. The GMs, if theyre smart, couldve given Mike a day or two to do the right thing. Even Newbies are likely to tell their friends or guildies they received the gold.
Player supervision by respected members of the comunity is what i would advocate instead of automated suspension or banning which, all players being paying customers, fails in providing recourse. Banning should only be handled by GMs and it is a company responsability to fill said posts with concerned, ethical people.
Finally, i think i read somewhere that SWG gave some players the ability to mute spammers and flag them for investigation. I dont know how the system works but i imagine this players would be trusted people and that they would use screenies as proof. If true, this would be a very good solution imo.
edit; made idea more clear
Just to make things clear...
I speak for myself and no one else, unless i state otherwise mine is just an opinion. A fact is something that can be independently verified, you may challenge such but with proof. You have every right to disagree with me through sound argument, i believe in constructive debate, but baseless aggression will warrant an unkind response.
I've often thought too that the best way to handle the gold farmer/spammer issue is to hammer the gold buyers, but after a while of never seeing an MMO take real action against buyers, though it made sense to do so, I concluded that MMO's aren't really interested in banning playing players unless they're caught publicly doing something.
The money spent policing compounded by the money in lost subs doesn't really add up from the dev/pub perspective does it?
Ok I understand now. But the main problem is while it's a good way to combat gold selling, it make some of the players unhappy. So one problem creat another.
Interesting point. That's what I was trying to do with say, posting a message for everybody in the city to see. I think peer pressure really is remarkable.
As to added staffing requirements, like I said in my OP, I am making an assumption that most medium to large game developers have some way of auditing transactions for suspicious ones, and keep some sort of list of suspected gold sellers. I don't work for an MMO company, but I do work in network security, and there is always a means to automate detection for 1) Abnormal activity and 2) Specific events in a specific order. This doesn't necessarily need to be a GM / human job.
I think that a lot of game companies do some audits of accounts that regularly send a common amount of gold to multiple people. Of course, auction house trades are a way to avoid this, but you still have on person buying many items for much more than the average cost.
I like the idea of frequent traders having to register for a system that looks for abnormalities in their trade (100g in profits every day for a week, then 10k out of the blue the next day.
I'd like to add that I'm a firm advocate of legitimate RMT; I play Second Life regularly.
I have spend over $3,000 usd on lotro and wow gold alone past 3 years total. You cant stop it really. I spend about nearly $1,000 usd gold in ffxi mmorpg as well.
It's people like you who force developers to restrict players. A thousand a year? That's pathetic.
It's people like you who force developers to restrict players. A thousand a year? That's pathetic.
I could do a lot of things with that much money... But why people buy gold is another thread:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/253849/Have-You-Bought-Gold-.html
hey crafting is EXPENSIVE
and we got to feed the farmers you know people got to eat.
Gosh i remember back in everquest 1.... i spend $5,000 usd in gold in everquest 1....good old days.
And there you have it. The people most likely to buy gold are the ones with too much money on their hands.
That won't work unless you are banning players to buy & sell expensive items. If you look at wow, there are items that will cost people to grind gold for a week or more. If you set a limit higher, it is meaningless, if you set it too low, no one will buy/sell these items.
Secondly you scheme is easy to defeat. The gold seller will just automatically transfer gold in smaller chunks for long periods of time.