LOTRO BETA Already Assaulted By Professional Gold Dealers!

Keogh · April 2007

By the way, LOTRO was already assaulted by a gold farming operation. This S.O.B. spammed the OOC chat Ch. in Bree nonstop ( it made the chat ch. unusable ) until he was silenced by a GM.

Note: Link and name of gold dealer removed to prevent viral advertising.

Sorrow · April 2007

Sigh biggest worry realized.

I sure hope they have a plan in place to deal with this.

tkobo · April 2007

There was one the other day, who was sending out "tells" advertising gold and powerleveling.

Guess he was using a "who" list, to find people.

virtuella · April 2007

The DEV's have allready banned several hundred account's from the US open beta.

DEVchat last night

Question

Sprite - *Banhammer* What plans are in place to deal with the "HAY BUY GOLD FROM US PLZ" spam that plagues so many MMOs these days?

Answer.

Mithril_Miser - We, as your name might imply, use the Banhammer. Also the Banspear, Banblade, the Maul of Banninating, and the Halberd of the Permaban. A wide variety of epic weaponry are available to our CS and community team!

LOTRO_Patience - Additionally, I wanted to let you guys know that we kicked over a nest of a few hundred gold-farming accounts this weekend. Those accounts will never see the light of Middle-earth. They were banned with extreme prejudice, as were the ones we found in the game.

LOTRO_Patience - Our GMs have been very diligent about getting farmers out of the game as quickly as they're reported.

seabass2003 · April 2007

Looks like this game is already a huge success!

Riho06 · April 2007

There really is no way to effectively stop these 'people' from spamming General chat or constantly sending you tells from a player named Hkjalkdfhsdaof. Just a sad reality nowadays since Gold farming/selling is such a profitable business.

docminus · April 2007

lol, did anyone notice the prices charged by that company? even if you wanted to buy, for that kind of money, you can just as well buy one or lifetime accounts!

i just hope that that epic GM weaponry will work - it's sort of the same type of answer any mmo developers give....

vingvega · April 2007

They really can't control this. Look at all the other MMO's out there. Yeah, they ban one farmer, another pops up. They are like a virus. They got these guys by the thousands working sweat shops earning money for school and food. All they do is grind and farm. Unless they are using third party programs to obtain the gold, there is no real way to regulate it unless the game is filled with GM's. Look at WoW, half the population is gold famers lol. They are around because people are too lazy to grind themselves they want the easy way to obtain gold. Basically the more people pay for the stuff, the more gold farmers will infest servers.

virtuella · April 2007

The estimated worldwide sale of ingame items/gold is several BILLION dollars EACH year.

Forbes had an article about it not so long ago.

The Chinese government is doing what they can to stop the chinese farmers because there is a risk they undermine their own currency.

That just shows how big it is.

It's sadly here to stay.

Torak · April 2007

yeah, sad to say but its really no surprise

Its big business now a days. People keep buying it in record sales numbers what does everyone expect?

There are only two real options:

Makes games with no currency, no trading, then all you have to worry about is the power leveler companies...you could remove levels also.
Everyone stop buying gold. If no one bought the sh*t, no one would farm it.

Highly unlikely any of those will happen. Until then we can keep blaiming the devs and the farmers, no point in saying its the over 1 billion dollars us Americans bought in "pretend gold" last year thats provoking it.

tkobo · April 2007

Was it darkspace who took the unusual step of banning a whole country from their game ?

That would be a great place to start imo.

Of course the better solution would be to simply make it so all trades were of equal value (with values determined by the game).

That way people couldnt just hand twinks equipment,or gold buyers gold.

Of course that would annoy the twinks, and they are an even larger group than the gold buyers, so it wont happen.BUT it would solve the issue.

Rosc · April 2007

Unfortunately this type of behavior is now the norm, since human labor is so cheap in other countries.

The answer is to combat it how you can without punishing your normal players. For examples of extremes in both directions, just go read the EQ and WOW forums.

virtuella · April 2007

Originally posted by Rosc

Unfortunately this type of behavior is now the norm, since human labor is so cheap in other countries.

The answer is to combat it how you can without punishing your normal players. For examples of extremes in both directions, just go read the EQ and WOW forums.

Ohh don't think it's only asians that are goldfarming.

It's everywhere.

As long as there is an option to make some money just by having a bot autoplay there will always be players abusing it.

It could be stopped but it would require certain things.

All gold earned in a game is bound to the same person and only that person can use the gold.

All loot would be bind on pickup.

All questitems would be bind on pickup.

The game would have no crafting or if it had it would be craft for your own character because of bind on pickup too.

Would people play a game like that if that could stop goldfarmers?

ChaulsinNL · April 2007

I'm pretty sure i wouldnt, part of the fun is in an economy and if everything is bind on pickup it would be hard to realize one. Now what most people noticed in WoW is that the gold sellers kept creating trial accounts to spam their shit. What i wonder is how hard would it be to not allow repetitive chatting/whispering for trail accounts. Spam x times = lock on your chat for an hour or so (would be a nice feature for some paying customers too

).

Now onto Lotro, isnt it still in beta or do american characters get transferred over too? Im guessing the latter since it would be foolish to buy gold in a beta

. I am hoping you can turn these area ooc chats off? Not much use for them if they turn into a spam fest anyways. But since Lotro doenst have any trail accounts it depends on how much money the gold sellers will make against turbine's efforts to permaban these assholes. So i think the best thing you can do is report the spammers/whisperers right away and have turbine ban them. If they keep the speed up i would guess it would cost the sellers more then they make, unless i underestimate the amount of people buying gold hehe. Guess im naive like that and think its a small % that does it.

thark · April 2007

There is only ONE thing that can STOP the farmers and gold selling..and that is

THE BUYERS...When they stop buying the farmers WILL stop..

So...

If you have friends that you know buys gold or any such service..convince them to STOP..

Make this go round everywhere,,Viral marketing..

PLS tell them to stop buying..

These people live because someone obviously buys their stuff/service..

All other solutions to this problem WILL never work, actually banning farmers is an actual profit for the company banning, because they know they will earn some more box sales when said person buys a new account..This is a fact, banning someone WILL not end this.

There must be like a couple of million players that buys gold service , and yet you get frustrated when you get a spam and yet YOU are the one part of this(as a buyer)..DO NOT BUY GOLD PEOPLE..Pls

/Thark

Gameloading · April 2007

Originally posted by seabass2003

Looks like this game is already a huge success!

Just because there are gold farmers in the game doesn't mean the game is a huge success. 9 Dragons is still in beta and there are powerleveling and gold sellers everywhere, and the game has only 3 servers, of which 2 are usually half full and one of them is almost completely empty.

Cyeber · April 2007

Banning a country from playing does not work as most of these farmers now have companies set up in Canada and America which re-direct their asian connections via American and Canada Servers while also hiding their IP Address. Its big business, and they have lots of money to invest in solutions to by-pass anything the game dev's throw at them. The only way to stop them (as mentioned above) is to bind everything to each character. Maybe thats not such a bad idea. It would take part of the fun out the game as it would kill the economy side of the game, but maybe its worth it in the long run. At least then anything a character was wearing or had stored in their housing would be have been earned the hard way. (You have to wonder why the Devs have not done this, maybe they get kick-backs from some of the farmers, anything to make more money from the poor MMO Player).

haltea · April 2007

Ban gold buyers and problem will stop. Of course the wont do this cause it will make them lose money

Antipathy · April 2007

Originally posted by Torak

yeah, sad to say but its really no surprise
Its big business now a days. People keep buying it in record sales numbers what does everyone expect?
There are only two real options:

Makes games with no currency, no trading, then all you have to worry about is the power leveler companies...you could remove levels also.
Everyone stop buying gold. If no one bought the sh*t, no one would farm it.

Highly unlikely any of those will happen. Until then we can keep blaiming the devs and the farmers, no point in saying its the over 1 billion dollars us Americans bought in "pretend gold" last year thats provoking it.

Given your signature I'm surprised you didn't mention the Ryzom economy. Whilst I don't like every aspect of the game, I was impressed by how resistant to gold farming the economy appeared. Knowing a few good crafters seemed far more important than having large amounts of ingame cash.

whitedelight · April 2007

Just wanted to point something out for you all. If gold farmers can make enough money to sell to you all while capping out at level 15, then that shows money is not hard to come buy, so there is no need to buy it.

HensenLiros · April 2007

Aye, when I was playing yesterday on my burglar I noticed some guys saying at OCC "Professional leveling from 1 to 15 for only 50$. 15 hours needed only!" or something like that. I would have taken it as a joke if they didn't kept saying that for 4 straight hours.

Darwa · April 2007

Originally posted by Keogh

By the way, LOTRO was already assaulted by a gold farming operation. This S.O.B. spammed the OOC chat Ch. in Bree nonstop ( it made the chat ch. unusable ) until he was silenced by a GM.
Note: Link and name of gold dealer removed to prevent viral advertising.

Thank the gods for that!

SirShadow · April 2007

Question for you all,

I found a small wording bug in a beginning quest area, but I do not see any

built-in bug reporting system under the options, is there one somewhere ???

How do you report bugs?? in VG there was a handy bug report window in the

options that worked great, if you could quickliy take a screenshot and report

things while staying in-game would go along ways.

Herodes · April 2007

Noooo! The EVIL Goldfarmers.
They earn 5000$ weekly for grinding the same mob 24/7 in their luxurious mansion in their wealthy countries, such as China. While we poor guys sit on a tree or in a cave with a glass of water and dry bread, must not do anything else than playing MMORPGs.

Ok, their bosses take most of the money, but where are your fukkin´ Nike-boots from?

Sorry

Cerion · April 2007

Originally posted by haltea

Ban gold buyers and problem will stop. Of course the wont do this cause it will make them lose money

Yep..I was going to post the same thing.

You have to ban the people buying the gold (as well as those selling it). It is far more effective to put the fear of loosing an account into those already willing to spend real cash for gold. These people have something to loose. Gold farmers do not have much to loose, and everything to gain.

If you punish the recipients, the market begins to dry up. Fewer people willing to buy gold means the price falls, and soon its not worth the gold farmers time to even be present in the game.

Einherjar_LC · April 2007

Coming from the original Asheron's Call, I will be quite interested to see how Turbine handles cheaters(alternative playstyles for those of you that don't like being called what you are) after seeing what a mess they made of that game when left unpunished.

My tolerance was high in that game as I held out hope Turbine would do the right thing, but by time they did, it was too late and the damage was done by the cheaters. My tolerance will not be so lengthy this time around.

I realize you can't get all of the cheaters, but as long as Turbine continually tries to keep a level playing field for all players, they will get my money. That goes for any MMO though.

As for the topic at hand specifically. I'm all for banning the farmers AND buyers at the credit card level. That still leaves the game card abuse for which I'm not sure of a solution. Putting the buyers at risk of CC bans I think would dry the demand up a bit as true players aren't so willing to lose an entire account, or risk not being able to play again due to CC black-listing over a little gold.

Howdy, Stranger!

LOTRO BETA Already Assaulted By Professional Gold Dealers!

Comments

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

LOTRO BETA Already Assaulted By Professional Gold Dealers!

Comments