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Bots / Farmers / Sellers are destroying FTP.
Dauzqul
Member RarePosts: 1,982
What sanctions can they do to keep Bots / Farmers / Sellers out of FTP games? They have destroyed the ArcheAge economy.
What would you do?
Comments
nothing can be done as long as there's money to be made on it
it can be made less attractive if the ingame currency is stupidly easy to aquire though(see swtor)
I had fun once, it was terrible.
One way to kill off gold farmers is to make it so that there isn't any loot worth getting. That means there won't me any market for their services. Another way to kill off gold farmers is to make it impossible to transfer goods from one player to another. Wizard 101 did this, for example. But these are both radical solutions and don't fit within the game mechanics of most MMORPGs.
Another solution is to make gold farming harder. One approach here would be to make it really hard to make a bot that can fight. If a bot can't find information about what is going on in the game world, then the bot can't function. Programs can try to inspect packets that inform the client of what is going on, or scrape information that the client has stored on the state of the game world from system memory.
So what if a game encrypted all network traffic, and also encrypted the sort of information in system memory that would be useful to bots? Such encryption doesn't really need to be strong; it just has to be a pain for someone creating a bot to figure out what it is so that he can decrypt it. And then you could change the encryption every single patch just to make a would-be bot-writer start over.
That doesn't do anything to hamper humans actively playing the game from farming gold that way--though hiring humans to play a game is much more expensive than merely letting bots run. For that, you'd probably want some big data analytics. It's highly probable that the playing style of gold farmers is very different from that of "normal" players. Accumulate enough data on what people do and there's a good chance that you could devise some machine learning algorithm that would make the gold farmers really jump out--and exclude normal players who happen to farm gold sometimes.
Gold farmers would, of course, be able to adapt their strategies to look more like "normal" players. But that would probably mean losing quite a bit of efficiency in gold farming. Losing a lot of gold from having accounts banned would also be painful. If you can make it so that they only farm gold 2/3 as fast as before and lose half of that to bans, that's big progress--and would likely convince a lot to leave your game alone.
How about this:
"I’m happy to announce we’ve booted out over six figures worth of bad actors from the game, and have started up new processes that are aimed at keeping their reentry as difficult as possible. (Yes, that two million number up there does have these folks subtracted from it already.)"
Source
Or are you going to say that over a million bans had no effect on the economy?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Six figures means over 100K, not over 1 million. And depending on how easy it is to bot, even 100k bans in a free to play game can amount to trying to bail all of the water out of an ocean.
Why say over six figures? Isn't 999,999 the end of the six figures?
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Well I took it to mean 1 million, since 6 figures is 100,000 to 999,999 and they said over six figures.
Edit: But I guess it could be over 100k and just worded poorly.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Havent heard of any. They are either p2w crap, failed p2p attempts or both (ArcheAge).
There is no item decay so Archeage economy is irrelevant.
So what makes his "opinion" subjective and yours a fact? This is just the same pattern you constantly apply to every poster who raises a point against any of your precious Trion games. According to you, their "don't like this or that about it" is always just opinion while your "best game ever" is always a fact.
As to high quality: The day WoW goes F2P you will have a high quality F2P game -but since it is a high quality game, Blizzard won't likely go full F2P anytime soon. And until then, you have a F2P market full of failed sub games that couldn't carry this business model or went the asiangrinder+cash shop route right away.
Bots, farmers, sellers are only destroying F2P because of clueless companies that don't have any idea that their game will become a gold-seller target in beta already -despite this has been happening to EVERY game since the dawn of time.
You can even give the janitor an account and tell him to roam the servers for 1 hour every evenning, scoping the chat for ads and ban the respective accounts, but obviously this is still rocket science to most companies or financially not manageable.
If a multibillion dollar company let's their own game taken over by asian farmers, they probably deserve it.
Open World PvP
While this isn't the best solution to ending Gold farming it allows the players to take action opposed to just watching them as they farm away or waiting for the GM's to do something.
In Darkfall one could get rich running into a gold farmer if you know what I mean
First off I suggest we stop with the harum-scarum bullshit that gold selling "ruins" a games economy. It can certainly cause inflation, but since digital resources are infinite it makes the numbers involved rather meaningless whether gold sellers are involved or not.
That said, the fact of the matter is that these gold selling networks have grown so large and so powerful they can afford to throw tons of money to infest even pay to play games. This is not simply a free to play issue. While a game company can put in features to attempt to at least stem the tide of of these bots/farmers/sellers/scammers there really is no way to stop them completely. These networks are wealthy clever and persistent. As long as there are players willing to pay for their services, they will continue to exist. A company or a group of companies trying to combat the gold selling industry through legal means or with technology are really just throwing good money after bad. Ergo a war on gold sellers by gaming companies themselves would quite likely go as well as the US "War on drugs".
One method I suppose may work is for the gaming community to police themselves. We could give anyone we personally know who buys gold or other services a severe and fatal beating, but of course that would be extreme vigilante justice which is not only immoral but quite illegal.
So with those two options ruled out what can be done to stop gold selling by a game company or game community? Not very much. However there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Government intervention. For you see almost all of this gold selling revenue is being made under the table. Its not taxed and therefore not tracked. Governments DO NOT LIKE THIS. Especially so in a post 9/11 world. Large sums of untraceable money tends make Governments very nervous. Right now this industry is being investigated and the debate about jurisdiction and legality are in full swing. Once these decisions are made you can expect the tax man or law enforcement is going to start taking large bites out of these gold sellers asses. That still won't stop them, but at least it may cut down their numbers.
you know what the prob with sellers is?
buyers.
if no one would buy, whom would they sell to?
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
Have no trading like D3. Problem solved.
There isn't any possible solution for botting/rmt in microtransaction games. The only viable solution is to get rid of the economy aspect, and that pretty much pushes the game out of the MMORPG genre. The more I look at microtransactions in MMORPGs, the more evident it becomes the business model cannot be incorporated, without having detrimental effects on the rest of it's systems.
Monetizing any game system always seems to take away from another because of the interdependency inherited from the game's economy.
OP is just mad that he can't monopolize the market...
Some people don't give a rats ass about the AH or the economy... it doesn't affect them if they don't use the AH.
You economy peeps are just as bad as the P2W peeps... oh the doom and gloom of it all...
Check out the server pops... they've been dropping... I'd be more concerned about there being a player base instead of an economy... peeps are moving on already.
That, like the things in my first paragraph you quoted, is incompatible with the desired mechanics of most MMORPGs. But if you want free for all PVP, then that will help with gold farming a little.
Sure they are. Games that are contests of whoever pays the most wins tend to be very low quality. Most "free to play" doesn't go that far, though.
Hiring humans to manually counter what your adversary can just buy more computers to do is a losing cause. It's a band-aid that might make you feel good for five seconds, but if the gold spammer is back with a new account in 60 seconds, what did you accomplish/ Software to catch the gold farmer and spammers is the only viable option.
But you can't just license auto-banning software, set it up, and ignore it. You have to have a custom solution for your particular game and constantly change it as the gold farmers change tactics. It won't be flawless, but you can mostly win eventually if you stay with it. See, for example, the success that e-mail spam filters have had, in spite of having to block a vastly more diverse set of malicious e-mails.
And if you don't have anyone on staff who can design software to catch gold farmers in your game, then making an MMORPG was a really stupid idea in the first place. Trying to make an MMORPG without any programmers with much of a math or statistics background on staff is going to cause much worse problems than merely having your game overrun by gold spammers.
I'd make it subscription only
Maybe there is a market to be had there. Many email hosts use third party services to manage their spam. If MMOs are really being hindered by this, why can't there be market for individual companies to offer this sort of service? Of course, there would need to be some sort of standard framework in which the anti-bot software can be easily integrated.