I almost feel guilty about this post being on topic, but I feel it needs to be said.
Taking the statement of '2 major gold selling sites stop selling AOC gold' to be true (though after checking the more infamous ones, it would appear to be falsehood) the simple fact is the largest one IS still selling AoC gold. In fact this one largest site/company owns what must be approaching the majority of the smaller sites.
You know who the big one is - they pride themselves that they don't advertise in game (but their subsidiaries do).
Age of Conan has just become unproffitable, because there isn't many players left.
The vast majority of servers are empty and Funcom has a problem they cannot merge servers any time soon due to serious flaws in their core design.
That alone was appearently enough for those large sites to stop bothering with Age of Conan. (altho they still have some small beta sites who do).
Warhammer Online at the other hand comes to this:
1. Gold is so ridiculously easy to get, that it's completely pointless to buy gold through RMT anyway.
You buy a mount at rank20 and after that on what you going to spend it? Maybe a piece of gear perhaps or a dye pot. But that's basically it.
2. Mythic is banning spamming acounts like crazy and with no trial accounts it's becoming very costly venture for the RMT sites. Especially that the incentive to buy gold in WAR is extremely low.
WoW and EQ2 have a pleatoria of trial accounts and so you see the RMT still being very active there. Especially, because there is plenty of incentive to persuade people into buying gold or plat.
And why Matrix Online still appears on some sites? Well Matrix Online has only 2 servers left. So it's very easy for them to keep a stock of credits at bay in case someone bothers to order some. Or better yet, they still have stock left and wait and keep the site up till their out.
Look, most people agree to that gold sellers are a pain. Having played my share of MMO's I can reassure you that both Blizz and FC unroot these organisations as efficiently as Mythic. If I can say something seminasty about clever mister Mark Jacobs, he is applying a very old but extremely effective trick to bind his WAR community together. Open the history books and look to what hapens in any dissolving community with extreme polarization is exposed to war against a third party (Germany(Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (franco regime),etc). Regardless of if the thrid party is the agressor or if the community is agressing, it always bring people together. Mr Mark Jacobs is doing the same thing. He is diverting the MMO community's rage over to the chinese gold spammers. I don't know how well this actually will work, but being a professional I can see that this has tremendous marketing and community potential. Just to let you know Noggy, you are the proof of that Marks strategy works, by posting this message over here now. There is nothing noble in what he is doing, all the other guys are doing that as well but Mark know how to take advantage of this process.
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
Maybe, just maybe the community in this game is smart enough to just not buy gold. Maybe with the smaller community (assuming it is smaller) people just understand that. After all, the most effective way to get rid of gold sellers is for people to just say no.
Hahahaaa.. that was funny. Yeah, I'm sure that's the reason. AoC players are just smarter than average players .
Actually I wrote a post a few weeks ago, where I used different scientific methods to explain how people who like AoC have less than average intelligence. True story.
Maybe, just maybe the community in this game is smart enough to just not buy gold. Maybe with the smaller community (assuming it is smaller) people just understand that. After all, the most effective way to get rid of gold sellers is for people to just say no.
Hahahaaa.. that was funny. Yeah, I'm sure that's the reason. AoC players are just smarter than average players .
Actually I wrote a post a few weeks ago, where I used different scientific methods to explain how people who like AoC have less than average intelligence. True story.
Right......
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Funcom didn't develop a better way of preventing goldspam above other MMO's. LOL Just like they innovated so well with AOC right?
What they did do is make some very basic changes to the game which show they wanted to stop it and the failed to make some very major/critical changes to the rest of the game which show they cannot or will not work hard enough to bring AOC up to the quality level players expect.
Changes they made, they made it impossible for anybody to send mail without making it to level 5. They also put in place automatic methods to stop mass mail spam by limiting the number of messages you could send in a certain amount of time.
But what they did do compares very little with what they didn't do. They didn't give AOC the series of real, effective, and ideal patches which would have kept 800k subscribers around, or even half that number. They basically launched the game 8-12 months too soon, and they killed their playerbase by promising both before, during, and after launch things which they could not, would not, have not, and will not deliver on in a reasonable time.
DX10
PVP system
Guild Management Rights
Larger Bank
Guild Tax System
Functional Raids
Functional Siege
Better Itemization
Adaquate Performance on marginal systems
The list goes on and on...
You can't tell me Funcom spent a lot of money figuring out a better way to quash Goldspammers, and if so why? When they so clearly have so many other more pressing development needs with regards to Age of Conan. No the gold spammers left, because the amount of effort they were putting into the spamming effort was not turning into sales for them. Why? Because population levels are so low, many players are quitting because of that. Even on their own forums, you see the pathetic attempt to psychologically change the debate on the general forum by posting about how it seems like populations are increasing, and they want players to think that, so they actually do turn around, and come play more. LOL.
Im not sure if they quit selling gold because of population or not, but as of a few months ago you could still buy swg credits from gold farmers. AoC hasn't gone that low in population "yet". My theory is the economy in AoC is set up to where there is not enough reasons for gold in AoC. Same goes for War. Im almost to level 40 and the only thing Ive spent my gold on is respecing my character a dozen times and that only costs about 4g each time. As of right now I have almost 600g and dont really have nothing to spend it on.
Look, most people agree to that gold sellers are a pain. Having played my share of MMO's I can reassure you that both Blizz and FC unroot these organisations as efficiently as Mythic. If I can say something seminasty about clever mister Mark Jacobs, he is applying a very old but extremely effective trick to bind his WAR community together. Open the history books and look to what hapens in any dissolving community with extreme polarization is exposed to war against a third party (Germany(Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (franco regime),etc). Regardless of if the thrid party is the agressor or if the community is agressing, it always bring people together. Mr Mark Jacobs is doing the same thing. He is diverting the MMO community's rage over to the chinese gold spammers. I don't know how well this actually will work, but being a professional I can see that this has tremendous marketing and community potential. Just to let you know Noggy, you are the proof of that Marks strategy works, by posting this message over here now. There is nothing noble in what he is doing, all the other guys are doing that as well but Mark know how to take advantage of this process.
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago. When did they implment this? I think it was a year ago last time I played and then you couldn't stand in ironforge without seeing pages and pages of gold spam going by each minute. Of course there were probably trial accounts useing say and so banning them was irrelevent to the companys which brings me to my next point.
It doesn't matter how many people they banned if they left each account in long enough for it to be profitable for them and I can assure you if you went to the place with the dragonkin in burning stepps and there was a place in the winterspring lake with the female ghost type mobs that you would see the same few people on hunter bots almost 24 hours a day and if you reported them it took them around a month to get rid of them. This was the case for the first couple of years.
Banning the gold sellers wasn't what was needed banning the gold farmers quickly makes it way way harder for the companies to make a profit and blizzard were extreamly slow at this and there was no need to be slow, it was easy to get this right and yet they banned anyone from speaking up. Of course if blizzard had dealt with them in the obvious places then gold farmers would have adapted but blizzard didn't even try, happily leaving them for many weeks at lvl 60 farming before getting rid of them, plenty of time to make a profit from each account.
I'm sorry but sueing a small sized gold seller but not the biggest ones doesn't show anything in fact if anything it opens up more questions. Why sue peons4hire a virtual nobody and not sue IGE?
I'm not accusing blizzard of taking money from them but their speed at dealing with gold farmers the ones paying them sub money was at least completly unacceptable, leave them long enough for them to make a profit then ban them and they get another box sale, clearly a massive income for any game company, easy to see why they are often so lethagic at sorting the problem.
Anyone who thinks gold selling has stopped because Funcom figured out a way of stopping it is absolutely, positively retarded. The game is dead. I thought the bleeding would stop by now but it has not...the game is literally a ghost town.
I agree, but it sure is funny to read those posts I just love it when some people always try to find positive things about disasters.
Instead of: "What? Game Director resigned?! Holy shit, game is doing worse than I thought. We are all fucked!!"
We get: "What? Game Director resigned?! Yay, new GD will save the game!!!"
and
Instead of: "What? Gold sellers left? Probably because of low population and decreasing profits."
We get: "What? Gold sellers left? Yay, FC did something to make them go away!!!"
Look, most people agree to that gold sellers are a pain. Having played my share of MMO's I can reassure you that both Blizz and FC unroot these organisations as efficiently as Mythic. If I can say something seminasty about clever mister Mark Jacobs, he is applying a very old but extremely effective trick to bind his WAR community together. Open the history books and look to what hapens in any dissolving community with extreme polarization is exposed to war against a third party (Germany(Hitler), Italy (Mussolini), Spain (franco regime),etc). Regardless of if the thrid party is the agressor or if the community is agressing, it always bring people together. Mr Mark Jacobs is doing the same thing. He is diverting the MMO community's rage over to the chinese gold spammers. I don't know how well this actually will work, but being a professional I can see that this has tremendous marketing and community potential. Just to let you know Noggy, you are the proof of that Marks strategy works, by posting this message over here now. There is nothing noble in what he is doing, all the other guys are doing that as well but Mark know how to take advantage of this process.
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago. When did they implment this? I think it was a year ago last time I played and then you couldn't stand in ironforge without seeing pages and pages of gold spam going by each minute. Of course there were probably trial accounts useing say and so banning them was irrelevent to the companys which brings me to my next point.
It doesn't matter how many people they banned if they left each account in long enough for it to be profitable for them and I can assure you if you went to the place with the dragonkin in burning stepps and there was a place in the winterspring lake with the female ghost type mobs that you would see the same few people on hunter bots almost 24 hours a day and if you reported them it took them around a month to get rid of them. This was the case for the first couple of years.
Banning the gold sellers wasn't what was needed banning the gold farmers quickly makes it way way harder for the companies to make a profit and blizzard were extreamly slow at this and there was no need to be slow, it was easy to get this right and yet they banned anyone from speaking up. Of course if blizzard had dealt with them in the obvious places then gold farmers would have adapted but blizzard didn't even try, happily leaving them for many weeks at lvl 60 farming before getting rid of them, plenty of time to make a profit from each account.
I'm sorry but sueing a small sized gold seller but not the biggest ones doesn't show anything in fact if anything it opens up more questions. Why sue peons4hire a virtual nobody and not sue IGE?
I'm not accusing blizzard of taking money from them but their speed at dealing with gold farmers the ones paying them sub money was at least completly unacceptable, leave them long enough for them to make a profit then ban them and they get another box sale, clearly a massive income for any game company, easy to see why they are often so lethagic at sorting the problem.
Again, you are talking about things that were fixed 2 years ago. Trial accounts are not allowed to use the /1 channel (general chat).. they haven't been able to do that for almost 2 years. The new /report system has been in place for over a year. Trial accounts are not allowed to trade with players, and not allowed to use the AH. The only thing a trial account can do is create a character, spend 10 minutes running to Ogrimmar, spam in /say (very limited range) and then get banned in 5 seconds.
For over a year now, you just never see anyone spamming a website to buy gold. You also failed to mention the link where Blizzard banned 100,000 accounts. Or the fact that it's not even practical for a player to 'farm' gold anymore. Most money in the game is made by dailies and instances. A hunter grinding mobs is way to slow to be profitable... plus, you'd have to level him all the way to 70 to be able to do it and then risk getting banned for it.
Please don't talk about things from 2+ years ago and make it sound like now.
Again, you are talking about things that were fixed 2 years ago. Trial accounts are not allowed to use the /1 channel (general chat).. they haven't been able to do that for almost 2 years. The new /report system has been in place for over a year. Trial accounts are not allowed to trade with players, and not allowed to use the AH. The only thing a trial account can do is create a character, spend 10 minutes running to Ogrimmar, spam in /say (very limited range) and then get banned in 5 seconds. For over a year now, you just never see anyone spamming a website to buy gold. You also failed to mention the link where Blizzard banned 100,000 accounts. Or the fact that it's not even practical for a player to 'farm' gold anymore. Most money in the game is made by dailies and instances. A hunter grinding mobs is way to slow to be profitable... plus, you'd have to level him all the way to 70 to be able to do it and then risk getting banned for it. Please don't talk about things from 2+ years ago and make it sound like now.
now you are talking nonsence, I never tried to make it sound like now, I made it quite clear that the last time I played was around a year ago, and I also said well done to them if they have turned it around. my very first words on that post "I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago."
I commented on the 100,000 accounts by saying it's irrelevent how many you ban when they are a) trial accounts or b) left alone long enough to make a comftable profit before banning which was definatly the case on my server, I played for well over a year and blizzard consistantly took a month to ban people even if you reported them everyday (talking about the farmers not the pointless trial spammers).
I never said they were using general chat, the gold spammers when I last played which I belive was around a year ago (sunwell was being talked about hitting test) at that point there was masses and masses of gold spam done in says at the auction house with the message being spammed every few seconds.
The game hasn't changed much since I last played so I think you are talking nonsence about it not being possible to farm gold. Dailys are good money of course but you could make better money still farming primals or harvesting etc particually offpeak. bots are completly capable of running a route and harvesting for you these days.
Up until just last week I was getting messages from gold sellers. Some still make their way in the mail system. Its not completly gone, but I'm know, from previous statements from FC, that they have been mass banning accounts. They just don't feel like they need to state that they are doing because all MMOs do it.
Would you happen to have any links to those statements, I do not recall reading anything about FC mass banning gold seller accounts.
Thousands of people died in my house today. What do you mean you want proof? Nobody needs proof! This is The Internet, where everything you read can be believed.
Not that I really care, but we need to see an article on it or something. I realize you can't give out names for obvious reasons, but you *can* link to news articles, if they exist.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
Up until just last week I was getting messages from gold sellers. Some still make their way in the mail system. Its not completly gone, but I'm know, from previous statements from FC, that they have been mass banning accounts. They just don't feel like they need to state that they are doing because all MMOs do it.
Would you happen to have any links to those statements, I do not recall reading anything about FC mass banning gold seller accounts.
Thanks in advance.
I'm pretty sure it was video interview, but I can try to look it up again if you'd like.
Edit: I didn't find an offical post doing a simple search; however, I did find that the chat system in AoC was altered with the Aug 28th patch which corrisponds to a steep drop off in guild sellers. Apparently, there as a program that allowed you to log into the AoC chat system only and not be logged into the game allowing people to have a single account logged in on multiable servers. When this was patched, the gold sellers had to actually log into the game to sell gold making the /petition option and the anti selling script that most MMOs have (its not hard to use a chat system to track "selling in game gold cheap" and ban the IP) work more effectively
Originally posted by Ryti
Originally posted by Libertasplz
Anyone who thinks gold selling has stopped because Funcom figured out a way of stopping it is absolutely, positively retarded.
The game is dead. I thought the bleeding would stop by now but it has not...the game is literally a ghost town.
I agree, but it sure is funny to read those posts I just love it when some people always try to find positive things about disasters.
Instead of: "What? Game Director resigned?! Holy shit, game is doing worse than I thought. We are all fucked!!"
We get: "What? Game Director resigned?! Yay, new GD will save the game!!!"
and
Instead of: "What? Gold sellers left? Probably because of low population and decreasing profits."
We get: "What? Gold sellers left? Yay, FC did something to make them go away!!!"
This forum is funny
GD was fired. If you knew how the biz world worked you'd know that most of the time when a high up in the company resigns its not a choice.
On topic: Gold farming has stopped for a couple of reason
1: sever mergers haven't happened yet which makes the dip in population more drastic than it actually is
2: gold has been pretty much pointless since the game's release. All armor worth anything is BoP, matts are easy to get, and gems (the only thing over priced) were nerfed
3: Account banning of gold farms. Once an account is banned and the population drops the farmers won't buy another account until pop picks back up. That and the only way to test the game is a buddy key unlike other games.
Make of that what you will. Perhaps Funcom has found a reliable way of preventing or banning gold sellers?
FC did some things that makes gold farming a lot of work, first they put mobs in the farming places and they also made so a lot of the better gear is bind on equip. Epic FOD farming gives about 1,2 gold an hour for an 80 and some sellable gear for maybe a gold. You really need an 80 for that also which takes some time to get and is a big bother if you get banned. Also you need a lvl 70 to farm T3 resources, the only ones worth money in the game.
Together with some banning it is just not worth the cash, youll get 3-4 times as much $ for farming in Wow for the same time. Also, you really just need the gold for mount, guildcity and possibly some nice purple item, money isn't really that important in the game so few players really need to buy it.
Wow still have most players who needs gold, that gold is easiest to farm also, why bother to try to sell to WAR or AoC players then? You wan't to make most cash in shortest time. Ergo, almost all farmers farm Wow.
I agree, but it sure is funny to read those posts I just love it when some people always try to find positive things about disasters.
Instead of: "What? Game Director resigned?! Holy shit, game is doing worse than I thought. We are all fucked!!"
We get: "What? Game Director resigned?! Yay, new GD will save the game!!!"
and
Instead of: "What? Gold sellers left? Probably because of low population and decreasing profits."
We get: "What? Gold sellers left? Yay, FC did something to make them go away!!!" This forum is funny
GD was fired. If you knew how the biz world worked you'd know that most of the time when a high up in the company resigns its not a choice.
The point is: When a GD leaves a company, willing or otherwise, it's because shit has really hit the fan. Gaute was a founder in FC and they wouldn't have kicked him out unless they were in huge HUGE trouble. Yet most people see only the positive side of it. Get it?
I too do believe removing Gaute was the best thing do, I just hope they would have done it 6 months ago. I fear now it's too late.
But hey, thanks for educating us on how the "biz world" works. I really appreciate it.
FC did a really good job getting rid of these gold sellers. However their method was quite different. Instead of doing like WAR and banning gold seller accounts, they decided to get rid of PLAYERS so that gold sellers would lose all their customers. It's quite ingenious really.
LOL! Somebody hit the nail on the head.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
Comments
I almost feel guilty about this post being on topic, but I feel it needs to be said.
Taking the statement of '2 major gold selling sites stop selling AOC gold' to be true (though after checking the more infamous ones, it would appear to be falsehood) the simple fact is the largest one IS still selling AoC gold. In fact this one largest site/company owns what must be approaching the majority of the smaller sites.
You know who the big one is - they pride themselves that they don't advertise in game (but their subsidiaries do).
Age of Conan has just become unproffitable, because there isn't many players left.
The vast majority of servers are empty and Funcom has a problem they cannot merge servers any time soon due to serious flaws in their core design.
That alone was appearently enough for those large sites to stop bothering with Age of Conan. (altho they still have some small beta sites who do).
Warhammer Online at the other hand comes to this:
1. Gold is so ridiculously easy to get, that it's completely pointless to buy gold through RMT anyway.
You buy a mount at rank20 and after that on what you going to spend it? Maybe a piece of gear perhaps or a dye pot. But that's basically it.
2. Mythic is banning spamming acounts like crazy and with no trial accounts it's becoming very costly venture for the RMT sites. Especially that the incentive to buy gold in WAR is extremely low.
WoW and EQ2 have a pleatoria of trial accounts and so you see the RMT still being very active there. Especially, because there is plenty of incentive to persuade people into buying gold or plat.
And why Matrix Online still appears on some sites? Well Matrix Online has only 2 servers left. So it's very easy for them to keep a stock of credits at bay in case someone bothers to order some. Or better yet, they still have stock left and wait and keep the site up till their out.
Cheers
Ouch.
Any more posts off topic will be removed lets keep this topic related to AOC.
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
http://mmorpgeconomy.blogspot.com/2006/12/blizzard-bans-wow-accounts-12-million.html
Hahahaaa.. that was funny. Yeah, I'm sure that's the reason. AoC players are just smarter than average players
.
Actually I wrote a post a few weeks ago, where I used different scientific methods to explain how people who like AoC have less than average intelligence. True story.
Hahahaaa.. that was funny. Yeah, I'm sure that's the reason. AoC players are just smarter than average players
.
Actually I wrote a post a few weeks ago, where I used different scientific methods to explain how people who like AoC have less than average intelligence. True story.
Right......
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Funcom didn't develop a better way of preventing goldspam above other MMO's. LOL Just like they innovated so well with AOC right?
What they did do is make some very basic changes to the game which show they wanted to stop it and the failed to make some very major/critical changes to the rest of the game which show they cannot or will not work hard enough to bring AOC up to the quality level players expect.
Changes they made, they made it impossible for anybody to send mail without making it to level 5. They also put in place automatic methods to stop mass mail spam by limiting the number of messages you could send in a certain amount of time.
But what they did do compares very little with what they didn't do. They didn't give AOC the series of real, effective, and ideal patches which would have kept 800k subscribers around, or even half that number. They basically launched the game 8-12 months too soon, and they killed their playerbase by promising both before, during, and after launch things which they could not, would not, have not, and will not deliver on in a reasonable time.
DX10
PVP system
Guild Management Rights
Larger Bank
Guild Tax System
Functional Raids
Functional Siege
Better Itemization
Adaquate Performance on marginal systems
The list goes on and on...
You can't tell me Funcom spent a lot of money figuring out a better way to quash Goldspammers, and if so why? When they so clearly have so many other more pressing development needs with regards to Age of Conan. No the gold spammers left, because the amount of effort they were putting into the spamming effort was not turning into sales for them. Why? Because population levels are so low, many players are quitting because of that. Even on their own forums, you see the pathetic attempt to psychologically change the debate on the general forum by posting about how it seems like populations are increasing, and they want players to think that, so they actually do turn around, and come play more. LOL.
Fix the game, if you build it they will come!
Im not sure if they quit selling gold because of population or not, but as of a few months ago you could still buy swg credits from gold farmers.
AoC hasn't gone that low in population "yet".
My theory is the economy in AoC is set up to where there is not enough reasons for gold in AoC. Same goes for War. Im almost to level 40 and the only thing Ive spent my gold on is respecing my character a dozen times and that only costs about 4g each time. As of right now I have almost 600g and dont really have nothing to spend it on.
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
http://mmorpgeconomy.blogspot.com/2006/12/blizzard-bans-wow-accounts-12-million.html
I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago. When did they implment this? I think it was a year ago last time I played and then you couldn't stand in ironforge without seeing pages and pages of gold spam going by each minute. Of course there were probably trial accounts useing say and so banning them was irrelevent to the companys which brings me to my next point.
It doesn't matter how many people they banned if they left each account in long enough for it to be profitable for them and I can assure you if you went to the place with the dragonkin in burning stepps and there was a place in the winterspring lake with the female ghost type mobs that you would see the same few people on hunter bots almost 24 hours a day and if you reported them it took them around a month to get rid of them. This was the case for the first couple of years.
Banning the gold sellers wasn't what was needed banning the gold farmers quickly makes it way way harder for the companies to make a profit and blizzard were extreamly slow at this and there was no need to be slow, it was easy to get this right and yet they banned anyone from speaking up. Of course if blizzard had dealt with them in the obvious places then gold farmers would have adapted but blizzard didn't even try, happily leaving them for many weeks at lvl 60 farming before getting rid of them, plenty of time to make a profit from each account.
I'm sorry but sueing a small sized gold seller but not the biggest ones doesn't show anything in fact if anything it opens up more questions. Why sue peons4hire a virtual nobody and not sue IGE?
I'm not accusing blizzard of taking money from them but their speed at dealing with gold farmers the ones paying them sub money was at least completly unacceptable, leave them long enough for them to make a profit then ban them and they get another box sale, clearly a massive income for any game company, easy to see why they are often so lethagic at sorting the problem.
perhaps not enough players in AoC to make gold selling profitable.
The tank that is born to tank!
Anyone who thinks gold selling has stopped because Funcom figured out a way of stopping it is absolutely, positively retarded.
The game is dead. I thought the bleeding would stop by now but it has not...the game is literally a ghost town.
I agree, but it sure is funny to read those posts
I just love it when some people always try to find positive things about disasters.
Instead of: "What? Game Director resigned?! Holy shit, game is doing worse than I thought. We are all fucked!!"
We get: "What? Game Director resigned?! Yay, new GD will save the game!!!"
and
Instead of: "What? Gold sellers left? Probably because of low population and decreasing profits."
We get: "What? Gold sellers left? Yay, FC did something to make them go away!!!"
This forum is funny
I'm sorry it's simply not true, I'm not in anyway a WoW hater, I think it's a fantastic MMO but blizzard put very little if any effort into stoping gold selling or at least they didn't I've not played for quite some time. There were certain places in WoW that always had multiple gold farming botted hunters, when blizzard released the armory you could see these people had never gained any faction further confirming them to be bots, You could report these guys every day and yet they would last on average at least a month before they got banned. I posted a polite post on the blizzard forms detailing where the bots where, how you could intentify them and half jokingly said that if blizzard employeed me I'd get rid of the majority of them in a week. They banned my account. It's clear that companys make alot of money from the gold farmers and in many games I've been suspious that they actually quite like the money they get from them.
Yes I do think good communication works and makes the community like them more and be more sympathic to them and hopefully other developers will learn that great communication is the way to go. Currently I plan to play WAR till the WOW expansion, then play that till christmas time and then hopefully Darkfall will be out, I have no loyalty to WAR I'm just impressd with the way they have acted.
Once a game starts to struggle with population they get very aprensive about banning people, you can see that happened in Vanguard where the biggest cheaters mostly got temp bans if they did anything at all and the same is true in AoC. Early on when they had 800k people playing they were agressive with the cheaters, a few months later with populations wanning dramatically then didn't ban anyone guilty of the gem dupe and they took a month after it became common knowlege to fix it.
I'm generally cynical when it comes to marketing and I'm not easily mislead but you can easily see that mythic are doing the things they talk about in game and they have made it very easy and quick now to report gold sellers.
By the way those comments from him come from his blog and are not posted on the offical WAR site.
Are you kidding me? Blizzard was banning like 100,000 accounts every three months. But then they got smart and added a 'report' tool for the client.
If someone spams, you have to only click ONE time and that person gets put on your ignore list, gets reported as a gold spammer AND if 4 other people also report them, they get instant banned. This features was added to the general chat and to the ingame mail system. You used to see how fast it worked ingame.. someone lvl 1 character would run up to the ogrimmar bank, spam the website, and in 4 seconds that character would be gone.
There is literally NO gold-spamming going on ingame any more. A player would have to use a website to research to even find a company.
Blizzard is making billions of dollars on WOW, they have spent a lot of tme adding features to block goldsellers (like the one mentioned above) and they have even taken some of them to court. It's absurd to suggest they are taking a 'blackmail' from these companies so that they are allowed ingame.
Here is a link to an article that talks about it 115,000 accounts banned
http://mmorpgeconomy.blogspot.com/2006/12/blizzard-bans-wow-accounts-12-million.html
I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago. When did they implment this? I think it was a year ago last time I played and then you couldn't stand in ironforge without seeing pages and pages of gold spam going by each minute. Of course there were probably trial accounts useing say and so banning them was irrelevent to the companys which brings me to my next point.
It doesn't matter how many people they banned if they left each account in long enough for it to be profitable for them and I can assure you if you went to the place with the dragonkin in burning stepps and there was a place in the winterspring lake with the female ghost type mobs that you would see the same few people on hunter bots almost 24 hours a day and if you reported them it took them around a month to get rid of them. This was the case for the first couple of years.
Banning the gold sellers wasn't what was needed banning the gold farmers quickly makes it way way harder for the companies to make a profit and blizzard were extreamly slow at this and there was no need to be slow, it was easy to get this right and yet they banned anyone from speaking up. Of course if blizzard had dealt with them in the obvious places then gold farmers would have adapted but blizzard didn't even try, happily leaving them for many weeks at lvl 60 farming before getting rid of them, plenty of time to make a profit from each account.
I'm sorry but sueing a small sized gold seller but not the biggest ones doesn't show anything in fact if anything it opens up more questions. Why sue peons4hire a virtual nobody and not sue IGE?
I'm not accusing blizzard of taking money from them but their speed at dealing with gold farmers the ones paying them sub money was at least completly unacceptable, leave them long enough for them to make a profit then ban them and they get another box sale, clearly a massive income for any game company, easy to see why they are often so lethagic at sorting the problem.
Again, you are talking about things that were fixed 2 years ago. Trial accounts are not allowed to use the /1 channel (general chat).. they haven't been able to do that for almost 2 years. The new /report system has been in place for over a year. Trial accounts are not allowed to trade with players, and not allowed to use the AH. The only thing a trial account can do is create a character, spend 10 minutes running to Ogrimmar, spam in /say (very limited range) and then get banned in 5 seconds.
For over a year now, you just never see anyone spamming a website to buy gold. You also failed to mention the link where Blizzard banned 100,000 accounts. Or the fact that it's not even practical for a player to 'farm' gold anymore. Most money in the game is made by dailies and instances. A hunter grinding mobs is way to slow to be profitable... plus, you'd have to level him all the way to 70 to be able to do it and then risk getting banned for it.
Please don't talk about things from 2+ years ago and make it sound like now.
now you are talking nonsence, I never tried to make it sound like now, I made it quite clear that the last time I played was around a year ago, and I also said well done to them if they have turned it around. my very first words on that post "I don't know how it is now and well done to them if they have turned it around but that isn't how it was a year or so ago."
I commented on the 100,000 accounts by saying it's irrelevent how many you ban when they are a) trial accounts or b) left alone long enough to make a comftable profit before banning which was definatly the case on my server, I played for well over a year and blizzard consistantly took a month to ban people even if you reported them everyday (talking about the farmers not the pointless trial spammers).
I never said they were using general chat, the gold spammers when I last played which I belive was around a year ago (sunwell was being talked about hitting test) at that point there was masses and masses of gold spam done in says at the auction house with the message being spammed every few seconds.
The game hasn't changed much since I last played so I think you are talking nonsence about it not being possible to farm gold. Dailys are good money of course but you could make better money still farming primals or harvesting etc particually offpeak. bots are completly capable of running a route and harvesting for you these days.
One of the things I have read several times relating to WoW is that Blizzard want the gold farmers, after all... its more money for them...
Wow Aside, AoC ? There is just no market for gold at this point is there?
-Lum
Would you happen to have any links to those statements, I do not recall reading anything about FC mass banning gold seller accounts.
Thanks in advance.
Players left. No buyers. Gold sellers left. It's as simple as that.
Ever heard about supply and demand? Some people here have no idea how things in the real life work.
Not that I really care, but we need to see an article on it or something. I realize you can't give out names for obvious reasons, but you *can* link to news articles, if they exist.
Error: 37. Signature not found. Please connect to my server for signature access.
I'm pretty sure it was video interview, but I can try to look it up again if you'd like.
Edit: I didn't find an offical post doing a simple search; however, I did find that the chat system in AoC was altered with the Aug 28th patch which corrisponds to a steep drop off in guild sellers. Apparently, there as a program that allowed you to log into the AoC chat system only and not be logged into the game allowing people to have a single account logged in on multiable servers. When this was patched, the gold sellers had to actually log into the game to sell gold making the /petition option and the anti selling script that most MMOs have (its not hard to use a chat system to track "selling in game gold cheap" and ban the IP) work more effectively
GD was fired. If you knew how the biz world worked you'd know that most of the time when a high up in the company resigns its not a choice.
On topic: Gold farming has stopped for a couple of reason
1: sever mergers haven't happened yet which makes the dip in population more drastic than it actually is
2: gold has been pretty much pointless since the game's release. All armor worth anything is BoP, matts are easy to get, and gems (the only thing over priced) were nerfed
3: Account banning of gold farms. Once an account is banned and the population drops the farmers won't buy another account until pop picks back up. That and the only way to test the game is a buddy key unlike other games.
Games:
Currently playing:Nothing
Will play: Darkfall: Unholy Wars
Past games:
Guild Wars 2 - Xpiher Duminous
Xpiher's GW2
GW 1 - Xpiher Duminous
Darkfall - Xpiher Duminous (NA) retired
AoC - Xpiher (Tyranny) retired
Warhammer - Xpiher
FC did some things that makes gold farming a lot of work, first they put mobs in the farming places and they also made so a lot of the better gear is bind on equip. Epic FOD farming gives about 1,2 gold an hour for an 80 and some sellable gear for maybe a gold. You really need an 80 for that also which takes some time to get and is a big bother if you get banned. Also you need a lvl 70 to farm T3 resources, the only ones worth money in the game.
Together with some banning it is just not worth the cash, youll get 3-4 times as much $ for farming in Wow for the same time. Also, you really just need the gold for mount, guildcity and possibly some nice purple item, money isn't really that important in the game so few players really need to buy it.
Wow still have most players who needs gold, that gold is easiest to farm also, why bother to try to sell to WAR or AoC players then? You wan't to make most cash in shortest time. Ergo, almost all farmers farm Wow.
GD was fired. If you knew how the biz world worked you'd know that most of the time when a high up in the company resigns its not a choice.
The point is: When a GD leaves a company, willing or otherwise, it's because shit has really hit the fan. Gaute was a founder in FC and they wouldn't have kicked him out unless they were in huge HUGE trouble. Yet most people see only the positive side of it. Get it?
I too do believe removing Gaute was the best thing do, I just hope they would have done it 6 months ago. I fear now it's too late.
But hey, thanks for educating us on how the "biz world" works. I really appreciate it.
LOL! Somebody hit the nail on the head.
This is a sequence of characters intended to produce some profound mental effect, but it has failed.
My post was on topic yet you felt the need to delete it......
Like I said, good way to stop goldsellers bothering players, just create a crap game.
Be paid for Beta Testing, don't pay to Beta Test.