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Bots and Goldsellers: How bad will it be ?
SpottyGekko
Member EpicPosts: 6,916
After experiencing the opening weeks of FFXIV:ARR, I'm wondering whether ESO will also be heavily assaulted by an army of goldspammers at launch ?
ESO is ripe for it because it's not an F2P game, where players can buy game currency in the ingame Cash Shop for real money. Progression in ESO also seems a bit slower than most recent MMO's, which will frustrate many impatient players. There will also be a large number of players who'll be wanting to focus on PVP and will be less willing to "grind" PVE for currency.
Node bots will be a serious problem if they appear, because the nodes in ESO are contested. A "real" player won't stand a chance against a teleporting bot.
The resource nodes (and treasure chests) seem to be placed statically, so FFXIV's teleporting, invisible harvesting bots might work in ESO as well. How long before someone builds an auto-lockpicking 3rd-party app ?
Comments
I don't think it will be too much of an issue, but there probably will be Goldsellers
however, there is no Chat Bubble so you wont see a massive wall of texts about gold prices/websites. And the real question is, what would you use the gold for? Sure mounts are a bit pricy but you can easily make gold from questing. If you want the best gear you can just craft it, and the crafting in the game is pretty awesome as you get to choose its style, level, and bonus effect, etc...
There will be a strong demand for gold.
"If you want the best gear you can just craft it" is only a vaguely valid statement until you reach L10 or so. After that you will have to spend skillpoints in crafting to be able to work with higher level materials, etc.. Skillpoints that could have been used for your racial, weapon or world skills.
Many people won't bother with crafting, they'll just buy what they need from NPC's or players. Besides, if you're right and everyone wants to level a crafting profession to cap level, can you imagine how heavy the competition will be for nodes ? Resources will sell for thousands on the open market (if you can get them).
That's not even considering that to get the "best" gear takes rare Enchantment items which will no doubt sell for a huge heap of coin.
There's several other things that will require gold as well, that you can be sure of.
The real question, IMO, is how much demand for buying resources in the game will there be. You can't have combustion without fuel. Another good question, IMO, is how do they plan to combat it. This game (publically stated) will rely on a random loot tables similar to diablo type games. This can potentially create massive disparities between one player to another in regards to drops. It will also depend on their final item pricing in the game as well. If the costs are high with relatively low acquisition then they will make it perfect for third party RMT services.
Let us hope they have learned from all the prior mmo's over the past 22+ years that this can be a massive issue, and how to address it.
Btw, there were gold sellers in RIFT prior to coin lock (along with bots and account hacks).
Cheers!
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A lot will depend on how stringent their server-side checks are.
All client/server type games are going to have some issues there, there are always trade offs that have to be made, but FFXIV was particularly bad this way (though, granted, nowhere near as bad as, say, Defiance). Too much being done client-side with the server tending to believe the client without stringent checks in place.
Any even semi-popular MMO is going to have some issues with gold sellers, but if the TESO devs have half a clue, and I hope they do, many of the abuses that have been common in games like FFXIV can fairly easily -- albeit at a computational and bandwidth price -- be avoided.
What i'm worried over gold sellers, is their source of revenue, which'll be bots, exploits and hoarding the raw materials of the world.
You could really just say one or the other, they go hand in hand, without bots there are usually no gold sellers and vice versa.
Will not be as bad as a F2P, but there will be a good few for the first few months.
The problem is not the gold sellers, but the people who buy it. If no-one is willing to buy, all the sellers will leave.
There was already at leas gone gold seller in the last beta .. What eso needs is a fast simple report process, otherwise you'll get the usual response from some of 'just put em on ignore'
I know some mmo's allow you to just right click the name and report them and that then ignores that player, so solves both. They get reported fast and your chat is cleared up a bit
And there are always people willing to buy, it is inevitable, just as there are always willing to hack or cheat in some way, so developers have to expect this and make plans accordingly.
As a P2P game I am expecting a higher level of quality in this regard, let's hope they deliver on this title.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Im not exactly sure how the mega server will play into the ability to police the game for hacks, cheats and gold sellers but I hope they keep a handle on it. I just keep my expectations low so I will be pleased or not surprised.
Didn't SE get it right with FFXI by going after the people who bought gold? Did they change their policy for XIV?
Well, that's part of it. They also need to invest in the customer support staff to actively take care of reports in a timely manner, and go so far as to have moderators actively monitor chat channels and ban anyone immediately who spams gold selling in it.
Most players don't know (or recall this) but early MMO's such as Lineage 1 and DAOC had moderators who walked the realm, you would routinely see them slapping people down for getting out of hand in chat channels, Gold selling wasn't the big issue then, but just discussing another MMO could get you a quick day or two chat ban.
Someone was griefing people by blocking a bridge? Moderator would show up and kill them on the spot, causing experience loss and sending them back to their bind point.
Now this wasn't easy, I actually ended up with a moderator in my clan back in Lineage 1, which had a low population, and when he eventually got moved over to L2 support the used to say how challenging it was to deal with literally thousands of reports at a time which eventually resulted in the end of his active moderation role in the world, all of his time was spent investigating claims.
One thing we can be sure of, left unchecked and the situation will be a real problem, so hopefully they've planned accordingly.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I dont see a botting problem in the future of ESO.... The ecconomy with the 5 guilds that allow internal trading will not fit the goldsellers well.... I am a strong believer ESO will be more of a trading economy instead of a monetary economy..
next to that, i dont think its a game where grinding will work, ...
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
the more popular the game the more gold sellers there will be.
To truly combat gold selling, you will need...
1. A near instantaneous reporting system that logs said offender's most recent /says, /shouts, /tells.
2. 24/7 live in-game monitoring of said reports. With a game as massive as ESO will be, think cubical army!
3. Some sort of penalty system that also monitors / disables a reporters ability to abuse the system against legit players that said reporter has a non gold selling beef with.
It can be done, but not at a minimal cost.
At the end of the day, the bean counters rule!
TLDR;
Yes, there will be a lot of gold sellers spamming in game!
I got your Deliverance!
Where's my banjo?!!
Goldsellers and bots cannot exist in an environment where grinding mobs is impossible. If ESO keeps its current in-game economic model (which I hope it does,) it will be impossible for goldsellers and, likewise, inflation to crop up. Selling items to the shop gave very, very little gold in comparison to the items actual value, and this return did not scale with level. If you want a decent return on your items, you really have to scrap them and sell them to other players as materials (or craft something from them yourself), find someone who actually wants to use that particular item, or the item has to have the ornate trait so it sells for double + to vendors.
Bots and gold sellers can't function in an environment that requires a lot of player interaction. Also, if they want to set up some kind of marketplace to sell their crap to players, they'd have to set up a large guild, which makes it extremely easy for ESO to pick out the botters/gold sellers and wipe the entire guild off the face of Tamriel in one fell swoop.
The current system is actually quite brilliant, so I hope beyond hope that this is the final economic model, and not just a lucky side effect of them trying to force people to craft in the beta in order to have those features more heavily tested. A lot of people were whining for more money for selling to vendors, but they don't realize that keeping vendor interaction low and undesirable is the best way to completely eliminate gold farming.
Two parts to the gold seller equation: supply and demand.
Supply comes from how easily the game is exploited through hacks, warping duping etc.
More importantly, hacked accounts supply easy currency, and the spam bots we all love. This will be especially bad for the first month after launch when the hackers try their list of logins and passwords from other games. Gold farmers are not going to spend $60 dollars on a spam bot when they can get hundreds of accounts from people with poor account security.
I think the demand side will be strong from what I have experienced with beta. Some gold sinks in the form of mounts, and all of the gear looks tradeable. Currency can buy you a stronger character gearwise, so the demand will most likely be there.
My apologies, when I created this thread, I didn't actually have a clue how ESO's economy was designed. I assumed (wrongly) that it had a "standard design" with a global AH.
Then I found this article:
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/10/18/tamriel-infinium-selling-your-wares-in-the-elder-scrolls-online/
That was quite a shock !
I'm quite surprised that there hasn't been a lot more crying on this forum about the economy design. The only place that players can buy and sell (other than person-to-person) is in the shop of whichever guild "occupies" one of the 6 keeps in Cyrodil !
That effectively means that global chat is going to be 24/7 trade spam. The chatbox will be scrolling so fast it will be unusable, lol
It's an interesting design, but it's most likely going to cause a MAJOR amount of complaining right after launch...
Got to agree with this...
+1 I really hate that kind of trading. So, trading is now monopolized by guilds? That's just....
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I love this type of trade system. You actually have to work to accomplish trading. Auctions and traders are easy mode, we have to much easy mode in games today. They store idea makes having a keep worth something.
I'm not sure why you say ESO is "ripe for it" since it's not a F2P game...F2P games are the worst for third party leaches like gold sellers, due to the fact you can't stop them from coming back after you ban their accounts....they just make another free email address. Since there is no cost to entering the game their cost of doing business is zero, again this leads to massive amounts of macro'ers, gold farmers, gold spammers etc. Only in a pay to play subscription game can you at least ban the credit card associated with the account and insure that each time they get banned that they had to have spent some money to get the game itself.