Originally posted by Alders You can't keep them out. You have to deal with them on a full time basis by using actual in game GM's. No one wants to pay for them though and prefer to use auto banning software that does nothing.
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.
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.
Spammers will send about the same spam e-mails to you regardless of what e-mail provider you use. Thus, tools to block spam need to do about the same things no matter how you get your e-mail.
That's not at all the case for gold spammers. The characteristics that make gold spammers different from normal players will vary wildly from game to game. For the spam messages part of it, tactics will depend on how quickly they can get from a starting area to a densely populated area, how wide a distribution zone chat or shouting offers, how easily they can look up lots of names and send private messages, exactly what illicit services they're peddling, and what they need to do to evade countermeasures that the game company has already put into place. For the gold farming side of things, it will vary a lot more than that, even.
What sanctions can they do to keep Bots / Farmers / Sellers out of FTP games? They have destroyed the ArcheAge economy.
What would you do?
Gold farmers are as old as MMO's, free and sub. There are no silver bullet solutions. They are a parasite and they will require Development watching behavior and giving legitimate players the tools to ignore them. If the game is strong enough, it will out pace the tailgaters and move beyond them. Just do what you do in the game and keep trade isolated with people you know. It will work itself out.
Originally posted by Alders You can't keep them out. You have to deal with them on a full time basis by using actual in game GM's. No one wants to pay for them though and prefer to use auto banning software that does nothing.
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.
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.
Spammers will send about the same spam e-mails to you regardless of what e-mail provider you use. Thus, tools to block spam need to do about the same things no matter how you get your e-mail.
That's not at all the case for gold spammers. The characteristics that make gold spammers different from normal players will vary wildly from game to game. For the spam messages part of it, tactics will depend on how quickly they can get from a starting area to a densely populated area, how wide a distribution zone chat or shouting offers, how easily they can look up lots of names and send private messages, exactly what illicit services they're peddling, and what they need to do to evade countermeasures that the game company has already put into place. For the gold farming side of things, it will vary a lot more than that, even.
Yes but identifying spam from legitimate is an ongoing battle and the keywords, phrasing, blacklists, etc are always needed to be up to date as it changes quite regularly.
There are also more effective anti spam solutions then others. My point was if a game that doesn't have the resources to handle the spammers, bots, and gold sellers in-house, why is there not an emerging market for this to be outsourced to? Seems like there is a demand there since a lot of MMOs encounter this.
The best way to stop gold spammer and bots is to stop people from buying. You can't do that directly so you have to ban the people who buy. As enough of them get banned, they will tell their friends not to buy and the botters will eventually realize the game isn't worth investing their business' time into and they'll move on to another game.
Why doesn't this happen more often? I know it would be very upsetting if I lost $100 worth of in-game currency by being banned right after the delivery.
It's kind of hard to get gold scammers out of the game as long as they think they can make money at it.
There are some methods that pretty much eliminate them, but those aren't popular with players either.
Some things that would reduce them were reported to Trion during the beta, but obviously were never implemented.
One would be a better spam report ability. Being able to right click on a message (NOT the name) in the chat window to report a spammer, and without it spending labor points, would be a good start. Better if after a person receiving a certain number of those in a specified period of time, getting flagged and banned from chat until cleared or Banned by the GMs. (Obviously any report would result in the suspected message being forwarded to the file.) Also, this would be account based, not character based. It would be best if it also logged the offenders IP and other information to make it possible for pro-active enforcement if deemed necessary.
As to banning gold buyers, that also helps, but is a bit harder to verify and is after the fact. Doing both is preferable, but if you can only do one, target the sellers/spammers/bots.
And yes, there are plenty of other things that can be done, this is just one small example, and not even anything radical or new in the mmo world, but it does help.
There are ways to deal with all the bots and gold spammers, however most companies indirectly condone it.. Oh publicly they dismiss it because that is the politically correct response, but behind closed doors, they don't care and sometimes even support it.. Every so often some will go so far in breaking the rules, that gaming companies are forced to deal with it, but normally only when it EFFECTS their bottom line..
As in anything in life, if you take away their food supply, the sharks will move on to different games or die off.. And yes, drying up the sharks food supply is just that easy.. It really is..
The best way to stop gold spammer and bots is to stop people from buying. You can't do that directly so you have to ban the people who buy. As enough of them get banned, they will tell their friends not to buy and the botters will eventually realize the game isn't worth investing their business' time into and they'll move on to another game.
Why doesn't this happen more often? I know it would be very upsetting if I lost $100 worth of in-game currency by being banned right after the delivery.
The problem is that someone who buys $100 in in-game currency from a gold spammer is, by definition, someone willing to drop $100 on an online game for frivolous reasons. In other words, a whale. Those are the people that games, especially of the free to play variety, are desperate to keep around. You can ban the gold farmer. Maybe you can even take away the gold. But you don't ban whales unless they're doing something much, much worse than buying illicit gold.
Do you know how many stolen accounts gold farming companies have?
Do you know how many stolen CCs they use to buy accounts?
Putting a subscription on a game does NOTHING to keep them out.
Just to be fair the video you posted of ESO is from April. It is nothing like that now.
Because there's minimal money to be made in ESO today so bots moved on.
The point was not the state of ESO today - the point was that my response was to "I'd make it subscription only" - which does nothing to prevent bots.
Gold selling companies always target games with biggest money making potential, payment model is irrelevant to them.
Which also explains why AA is infested. Everyone knows competitive pvp games generate tons of money because it capitalizes on peoples competitive nature. Im betting Trion is so focused on the fat stacks of cash, its probably why they had to push the Nightmare Tide expansion back.
The best way to stop gold spammer and bots is to stop people from buying. You can't do that directly so you have to ban the people who buy. As enough of them get banned, they will tell their friends not to buy and the botters will eventually realize the game isn't worth investing their business' time into and they'll move on to another game.
Why doesn't this happen more often? I know it would be very upsetting if I lost $100 worth of in-game currency by being banned right after the delivery.
The problem is that someone who buys $100 in in-game currency from a gold spammer is, by definition, someone willing to drop $100 on an online game for frivolous reasons. In other words, a whale. Those are the people that games, especially of the free to play variety, are desperate to keep around. You can ban the gold farmer. Maybe you can even take away the gold. But you don't ban whales unless they're doing something much, much worse than buying illicit gold.
I agree that game companies should see the buyers as people who have extra cash to spend and should find a way to get those people to give them that extra money instead of giving it to gold sellers.
The issue of buying in-game currencies isn't that the person bought illegitimate currency. The issue is they are supporting a lot more illegitimacy that surrounds the activity. Spam would go away if they couldn't support the purchase of those extra accounts. I know ESO was about $50 per license and spam in that game was non-stop for the first couple months before I quit. Players shouldn't have to deal with that, nor should they be put at a disadvantage by botters and farmers who disrupt the economies without participating in the economies.
Bots are not in AA because its F2P, if it was P2P they were there anyway.
They do the same in P2P games.
The "problem" like someone allready mentioned is the value of in-game currency, every game like this allways call the interest of bots, they know alot of lazy ppl will buy it to become rich afaster.
Allready see games be ruined for me to avoid bots, devs dont need to change game rules to fight bots, they need 24h mods to fight them in real time.
I dont mind neither care about some bot here and there, but army of bots in places where everyone can see it except Devs is something i will never understand...
Ah, this new new problem of goldfarming ! Only around since forever. Only discussed since always. Brand-new, just like homo sapiens !
Also, goldfarming doesnt kill f2p specifically. It kills all MMOs in general, no matter if they are f2p or not.
If at all, f2p have LESS of a problem. Because the company can just agree to sell gold themselves. Thus the goldfarmer sees too low a profit margin for their work.
In general I would go for some sort of sensible compromise. Ideas that spring to mind:
- Of course every gold farmer and spammer gets banned, pronto.
- You have to solve a lengthy series of introduction quests before entering the gameworld itself. I prefer this from a roleplaying perspective as well. It could be done like the Origin stories of "Dragon Age: Origins", or like the introduction quest at the start of every Elder Scrolls (well ok - Morrowind had none as such). They should be much longer though; specifically there shouldnt be big shortcuts. This way a goldfarmer cant just create a level one character for spamming. They would have to invest time into the character.
- There is no general chat. There is only a short-range "say" and a middle range "shout", the later with a useage limit (you'll get coarse if you use it too often). You can gain a group tool that allows you to communicate with your group, and you can gain a guild tool that allows you to communicate with your guild, and as a psion you can get a class tool that allows you to communicate with everyone of your class. All these special tools require lengthy questlines and arent tradeable.
- Money is scarce and has surprisingly little uses, mostly for consumeables or crafting materials. The best items come from quests and are not tradeable. Or, alternatively, Boss Monster items can only be used by people who actually killed that boss at least once. Or even only by people in the same group when the Boss Monster was killed and this item dropped.
- Money has weight. Too much money will make you go encumbered. You can store money on banks, but that will cost you 1% of the money every month.
- Quests provide you with items, but you never need money to do them.
- Certain classes (Paladin, Monk) cannot hold much money in the first place. Items for these classes do not require any money to make, just quests to solve.
Originally posted by Quizzical
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? [...]
All network traffic should of course be encrypted, thats not worth any discussion.
Encrypting the LOCAL MEMORY though is a stupid idea. If the local memory is encrypted, the program itself cannot read it, either. It would have to decrypt it - and guess what, after this the REAL DATA would be in the memory of the program. So the program would have gone massively SLOWER and massively MORE COMPLICATED - for no actual benefit whatsoever.
Originally posted by Volgore
So what makes his "opinion" subjective and yours a fact? [...]
As to high quality: The day WoW goes F2P you will have a high quality F2P game [...]
First and second sentence are really funny to read. Why is an extremely old game like WoW "high quality" ? And it wasnt even high quality when it was released ... ! Thats, after all, part of its success: everyone could run it.
Originally posted by General-Zod
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
Open World PvP is nothing short ideal for goldfarmers. They'll bring a large group, farm the best spots and kill everyone else who gets too close.
Originally posted by Pepeq
OP is just mad that he can't monopolize the market...
Yeah, after that intro I was totally interested what else you have to write.
Originally posted by Grunty
I'd make it subscription only
Have you NEVER played a subscription only game ?!? Where do you get the idea that would result in less goldfarmers ?!?
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? [...]
All network traffic should of course be encrypted, thats not worth any discussion.
Encrypting the LOCAL MEMORY though is a stupid idea. If the local memory is encrypted, the program itself cannot read it, either. It would have to decrypt it - and guess what, after this the REAL DATA would be in the memory of the program. So the program would have gone massively SLOWER and massively MORE COMPLICATED - for no actual benefit whatsoever.
If you decrypt it, use it, and then overwrite the decrypted value in under a microsecond, that's going to be an awful lot harder for a bot program to find and use than if the value is sitting there in memory all the time, don't you think? Even if you have to do it all over again the next frame, it's a lot harder to find a value that isn't even there 99.99% of the time, and jumps around in all sorts of different places even when it is somewhere in memory.
It doesn't need to be a strong encryption algorithm; indeed, that doesn't offer much benefit, as all you can get here is security by obscurity. But it's not hard to write a weak encryption algorithm that runs very, very fast while still making it a lot harder for a would-be bot-writer to find what he's looking for.
As for the performance hit, it shouldn't be much. You don't need to decrypt all that many things. A bot doesn't get any benefit from knowing what color your armor is, for example. And better yet, this would go in a part of a game engine that is trivial to scale to arbitrarily many CPU cores, so the only real performance hit is that you're using an extra CPU core occasionally. Your frame rate wouldn't budge.
Originally posted by Robokapp anyone else thinking the destruction of FTP isn't necessarily a bad thing?we need a return to quality not to affordability. We have too much of that. Enough so that non-humans have access to it as seen in this thread.
Good point!
As some F2P players have said, these bots are "content!" Banning means nothing when the game is free. E-Mail accounts are free. It costs bots exactly $0 to make another account and continue on.
Players wanted F2P. There you go
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Originally posted by DMKano PoE, LoL, PS2.... there are a ton of quality f2p games on the market.
May I ask what *your* criteria is for "quality?" Quality is not a set standard, by any means.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Originally posted by DMKano The point was not the state of ESO today - the point was that my response was to "I'd make it subscription only" - which does nothing to prevent bots.
This I agree with. Subs do NOT keep gold farmers out, either. However, a sub may be able to hinder them a little more.
Bans cost them more, though that costs both the farmers AND the game companies.
GMs and Customer Service would be more feasible.
Gold farmers have always been and will always be around. Where there is money to be made, they will appear.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse. - FARGIN_WAR
Both of these expectations are unrealistic, so simply have one employee with a mighty banhammer and actually enforce it without just simple reversals as an option.
Play what you Like. I like SWOTR, Have a referral to get you going! --> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <-- Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
Gold sellers are most annoying to me because of the spam chat. In most games who cares if people buy gold or power leveling. So you make it to 50 (or whatever). So you have more gold than me, I don't really care if you can buy more stuff. It can have some affect in some games depending on the game mechanic. All it really means to me is that you miss a bunch of content. Eventually I will reach level cap, eventually I will get good gear.
In PvP games it is more problematic because you may not be as competitive because of gear at the same level for some period of time until you get yours.
So many mentions of F2P, yet zero mentions of Firefall. Odd. I play Firefall 10+ hours a week right now, and I never see a gold seller. Ever. In fact, in all of my years playing Firefall, I haven't. So, here's how Firefall manages this.
In order to send items to another player, you must friend that player and remain friends for 3 days (72 hours). This means that minimum time frame for delivery is 3 days, and that's assuming the friend request is seen and accepted immediately. It also means that if the goldseller is banned during that time frame, a different account would have to friend that person for 3 more days. All of this means direct delivery would take an unacceptably long time or might be outright impossible.
The other way I've seen goldsellers work is to have the buyer list some trash item on the global auction house for an absurd amount of money, then the seller buys it (or bids for it), thereby effectively transferring that money to the user. In Firefall, this is nearly impossible. For any item sold on the market, a prospective buyer only has access to the lowest price offer. So, a potential goldseller would have to buy up all of the same item until the goldseller gets to the desired order. This can take a lot of credits. The other option is to list a buy order for something the goldbuyer has and list it at an absurd amount of credits. Problem is, everyone can see this buy-order, in which case, the credits could go to the wrong person.
The other thing that helps, I think, is that Firefall is essentially itself a goldseller, kind of. You can buy premium currency from the publisher for real money. There is an in-game currency exchange where players can exchange premium currency for standard currency and vice versa with other players. It's anonymous just like the item market - there's no way to see who is buying/selling, only the amounts available/offered at what prices. There is also a minimum ratio, and what is sold tends to stay close to it.
Originally posted by Tiller It will never stop unless people stop buying...and for whatever reasons hacked accounts and perma bans for those who purchase game gold aren't good enough reasons to deter people from buying from them. It's annoying but it is what is. I mean even a game like GW2 where you can pretty much buy game gold from anet in the form of gems to gold conversion has the same issues.
One thing is "shit happen", completely another is INCOMPETENCE which was demonstrated with AA. Never seen something like here since Aion.
Forget about excuses "unless people stop buying" and alike. This is total BS.
Comments
Spammers will send about the same spam e-mails to you regardless of what e-mail provider you use. Thus, tools to block spam need to do about the same things no matter how you get your e-mail.
That's not at all the case for gold spammers. The characteristics that make gold spammers different from normal players will vary wildly from game to game. For the spam messages part of it, tactics will depend on how quickly they can get from a starting area to a densely populated area, how wide a distribution zone chat or shouting offers, how easily they can look up lots of names and send private messages, exactly what illicit services they're peddling, and what they need to do to evade countermeasures that the game company has already put into place. For the gold farming side of things, it will vary a lot more than that, even.
Gold farmers are as old as MMO's, free and sub. There are no silver bullet solutions. They are a parasite and they will require Development watching behavior and giving legitimate players the tools to ignore them. If the game is strong enough, it will out pace the tailgaters and move beyond them. Just do what you do in the game and keep trade isolated with people you know. It will work itself out.Yes but identifying spam from legitimate is an ongoing battle and the keywords, phrasing, blacklists, etc are always needed to be up to date as it changes quite regularly.
There are also more effective anti spam solutions then others. My point was if a game that doesn't have the resources to handle the spammers, bots, and gold sellers in-house, why is there not an emerging market for this to be outsourced to? Seems like there is a demand there since a lot of MMOs encounter this.
The best way to stop gold spammer and bots is to stop people from buying. You can't do that directly so you have to ban the people who buy. As enough of them get banned, they will tell their friends not to buy and the botters will eventually realize the game isn't worth investing their business' time into and they'll move on to another game.
Why doesn't this happen more often? I know it would be very upsetting if I lost $100 worth of in-game currency by being banned right after the delivery.
+1
It's kind of hard to get gold scammers out of the game as long as they think they can make money at it.
There are some methods that pretty much eliminate them, but those aren't popular with players either.
Some things that would reduce them were reported to Trion during the beta, but obviously were never implemented.
One would be a better spam report ability. Being able to right click on a message (NOT the name) in the chat window to report a spammer, and without it spending labor points, would be a good start. Better if after a person receiving a certain number of those in a specified period of time, getting flagged and banned from chat until cleared or Banned by the GMs. (Obviously any report would result in the suspected message being forwarded to the file.) Also, this would be account based, not character based. It would be best if it also logged the offenders IP and other information to make it possible for pro-active enforcement if deemed necessary.
As to banning gold buyers, that also helps, but is a bit harder to verify and is after the fact. Doing both is preferable, but if you can only do one, target the sellers/spammers/bots.
And yes, there are plenty of other things that can be done, this is just one small example, and not even anything radical or new in the mmo world, but it does help.
Lost my mind, now trying to lose yours...
There are ways to deal with all the bots and gold spammers, however most companies indirectly condone it.. Oh publicly they dismiss it because that is the politically correct response, but behind closed doors, they don't care and sometimes even support it.. Every so often some will go so far in breaking the rules, that gaming companies are forced to deal with it, but normally only when it EFFECTS their bottom line..
As in anything in life, if you take away their food supply, the sharks will move on to different games or die off.. And yes, drying up the sharks food supply is just that easy.. It really is..
The problem is that someone who buys $100 in in-game currency from a gold spammer is, by definition, someone willing to drop $100 on an online game for frivolous reasons. In other words, a whale. Those are the people that games, especially of the free to play variety, are desperate to keep around. You can ban the gold farmer. Maybe you can even take away the gold. But you don't ban whales unless they're doing something much, much worse than buying illicit gold.
Just to be fair the video you posted of ESO is from April. It is nothing like that now.
Which also explains why AA is infested. Everyone knows competitive pvp games generate tons of money because it capitalizes on peoples competitive nature. Im betting Trion is so focused on the fat stacks of cash, its probably why they had to push the Nightmare Tide expansion back.
I agree that game companies should see the buyers as people who have extra cash to spend and should find a way to get those people to give them that extra money instead of giving it to gold sellers.
The issue of buying in-game currencies isn't that the person bought illegitimate currency. The issue is they are supporting a lot more illegitimacy that surrounds the activity. Spam would go away if they couldn't support the purchase of those extra accounts. I know ESO was about $50 per license and spam in that game was non-stop for the first couple months before I quit. Players shouldn't have to deal with that, nor should they be put at a disadvantage by botters and farmers who disrupt the economies without participating in the economies.
Bots are not in AA because its F2P, if it was P2P they were there anyway.
They do the same in P2P games.
The "problem" like someone allready mentioned is the value of in-game currency, every game like this allways call the interest of bots, they know alot of lazy ppl will buy it to become rich afaster.
Allready see games be ruined for me to avoid bots, devs dont need to change game rules to fight bots, they need 24h mods to fight them in real time.
I dont mind neither care about some bot here and there, but army of bots in places where everyone can see it except Devs is something i will never understand...
Ah, this new new problem of goldfarming ! Only around since forever. Only discussed since always. Brand-new, just like homo sapiens !
Also, goldfarming doesnt kill f2p specifically. It kills all MMOs in general, no matter if they are f2p or not.
If at all, f2p have LESS of a problem. Because the company can just agree to sell gold themselves. Thus the goldfarmer sees too low a profit margin for their work.
In general I would go for some sort of sensible compromise. Ideas that spring to mind:
- Of course every gold farmer and spammer gets banned, pronto.
- You have to solve a lengthy series of introduction quests before entering the gameworld itself. I prefer this from a roleplaying perspective as well. It could be done like the Origin stories of "Dragon Age: Origins", or like the introduction quest at the start of every Elder Scrolls (well ok - Morrowind had none as such). They should be much longer though; specifically there shouldnt be big shortcuts. This way a goldfarmer cant just create a level one character for spamming. They would have to invest time into the character.
- There is no general chat. There is only a short-range "say" and a middle range "shout", the later with a useage limit (you'll get coarse if you use it too often). You can gain a group tool that allows you to communicate with your group, and you can gain a guild tool that allows you to communicate with your guild, and as a psion you can get a class tool that allows you to communicate with everyone of your class. All these special tools require lengthy questlines and arent tradeable.
- Money is scarce and has surprisingly little uses, mostly for consumeables or crafting materials. The best items come from quests and are not tradeable. Or, alternatively, Boss Monster items can only be used by people who actually killed that boss at least once. Or even only by people in the same group when the Boss Monster was killed and this item dropped.
- Money has weight. Too much money will make you go encumbered. You can store money on banks, but that will cost you 1% of the money every month.
- Quests provide you with items, but you never need money to do them.
- Certain classes (Paladin, Monk) cannot hold much money in the first place. Items for these classes do not require any money to make, just quests to solve.
All network traffic should of course be encrypted, thats not worth any discussion.
Encrypting the LOCAL MEMORY though is a stupid idea. If the local memory is encrypted, the program itself cannot read it, either. It would have to decrypt it - and guess what, after this the REAL DATA would be in the memory of the program. So the program would have gone massively SLOWER and massively MORE COMPLICATED - for no actual benefit whatsoever.
First and second sentence are really funny to read. Why is an extremely old game like WoW "high quality" ? And it wasnt even high quality when it was released ... ! Thats, after all, part of its success: everyone could run it.
Open World PvP is nothing short ideal for goldfarmers. They'll bring a large group, farm the best spots and kill everyone else who gets too close.
Yeah, after that intro I was totally interested what else you have to write.
Have you NEVER played a subscription only game ?!? Where do you get the idea that would result in less goldfarmers ?!?
Mission in life: Vanquish all MMORPG.com trolls - especially TESO, WOW and GW2 trolls.
If you decrypt it, use it, and then overwrite the decrypted value in under a microsecond, that's going to be an awful lot harder for a bot program to find and use than if the value is sitting there in memory all the time, don't you think? Even if you have to do it all over again the next frame, it's a lot harder to find a value that isn't even there 99.99% of the time, and jumps around in all sorts of different places even when it is somewhere in memory.
It doesn't need to be a strong encryption algorithm; indeed, that doesn't offer much benefit, as all you can get here is security by obscurity. But it's not hard to write a weak encryption algorithm that runs very, very fast while still making it a lot harder for a would-be bot-writer to find what he's looking for.
As for the performance hit, it shouldn't be much. You don't need to decrypt all that many things. A bot doesn't get any benefit from knowing what color your armor is, for example. And better yet, this would go in a part of a game engine that is trivial to scale to arbitrarily many CPU cores, so the only real performance hit is that you're using an extra CPU core occasionally. Your frame rate wouldn't budge.
P2P doesn't prevent them, but it does add a buffer.
As some F2P players have said, these bots are "content!" Banning means nothing when the game is free. E-Mail accounts are free. It costs bots exactly $0 to make another account and continue on.
Players wanted F2P. There you go
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
Bans cost them more, though that costs both the farmers AND the game companies.
GMs and Customer Service would be more feasible.
Gold farmers have always been and will always be around. Where there is money to be made, they will appear.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
You know what stops bots and gold sellers?
People not buying gold,
Not having tedious grind for gear.
Both of these expectations are unrealistic, so simply have one employee with a mighty banhammer and actually enforce it without just simple reversals as an option.
--> http://www.swtor.com/r/nBndbs <--
Several Unlocks and a few days game time to make the F2P considerably easier
Gold sellers are most annoying to me because of the spam chat. In most games who cares if people buy gold or power leveling. So you make it to 50 (or whatever). So you have more gold than me, I don't really care if you can buy more stuff. It can have some affect in some games depending on the game mechanic. All it really means to me is that you miss a bunch of content. Eventually I will reach level cap, eventually I will get good gear.
In PvP games it is more problematic because you may not be as competitive because of gear at the same level for some period of time until you get yours.
I self identify as a monkey.
So many mentions of F2P, yet zero mentions of Firefall. Odd. I play Firefall 10+ hours a week right now, and I never see a gold seller. Ever. In fact, in all of my years playing Firefall, I haven't. So, here's how Firefall manages this.
In order to send items to another player, you must friend that player and remain friends for 3 days (72 hours). This means that minimum time frame for delivery is 3 days, and that's assuming the friend request is seen and accepted immediately. It also means that if the goldseller is banned during that time frame, a different account would have to friend that person for 3 more days. All of this means direct delivery would take an unacceptably long time or might be outright impossible.
The other way I've seen goldsellers work is to have the buyer list some trash item on the global auction house for an absurd amount of money, then the seller buys it (or bids for it), thereby effectively transferring that money to the user. In Firefall, this is nearly impossible. For any item sold on the market, a prospective buyer only has access to the lowest price offer. So, a potential goldseller would have to buy up all of the same item until the goldseller gets to the desired order. This can take a lot of credits. The other option is to list a buy order for something the goldbuyer has and list it at an absurd amount of credits. Problem is, everyone can see this buy-order, in which case, the credits could go to the wrong person.
The other thing that helps, I think, is that Firefall is essentially itself a goldseller, kind of. You can buy premium currency from the publisher for real money. There is an in-game currency exchange where players can exchange premium currency for standard currency and vice versa with other players. It's anonymous just like the item market - there's no way to see who is buying/selling, only the amounts available/offered at what prices. There is also a minimum ratio, and what is sold tends to stay close to it.
One thing is "shit happen", completely another is INCOMPETENCE which was demonstrated with AA. Never seen something like here since Aion.
Forget about excuses "unless people stop buying" and alike. This is total BS.