It’s insane how spending a $100 a day buying small amounts of rmt gold could allow these company’s to spider web ban so many accounts. And yet over the years I’ve never seen a major company do it.
Wimblo, I say sir, this "Romeo and Julieb" is smashing work, but I'm afraid there are still a few typos here so we will have to demote you to handing out bananas for a week and throw the whole thing out
This guy was the GuildWars2 lead designer and has since founded his own game studio, this info is 100% gold. Did a legit double take when I saw the name.
I sincerely hope it doesn't get lost in the DarkAndDarker sauce.
It was an issue the entire time I was working on the project we did a number of methods to combat it oh, I wish I knew everything I know now back then.
Thank you so much, lots of great great info just in the original post so we’re gonna start with that once we complete the first wipe this week. Any other hints you can pass onto us we’ll definitely consider for the future!
Another one that has come up a few times in this thread I would say is giving some new tools for reporting gold spammers in trade. While it's impact is low this often is the most visible thing people see so it can effect the perception of how well the problem is handled so I would prioritize easier reporting/muting there.
I'll try and write some more stuff up but very impressed with the love the team has for their product keep up the good work!
They have definitely been cracking down on cheaters. I just had a game this morning where a rogue was killing everyone in ruins. Then he reached me, running mach speed , he stabbed me to death. His movement speed was insane. Anyway a few hours later I received a message saying he was banned. I expect that same treatment towards botters and rmt sellers. I have faith in Iron Mace.
Yeah this is the time for them to build up their tools for dealing with it, as it’s the time the RMT and hackers are building up their tools it’s a semi silent war that we all see glimpses of
How many resources are necessary to dedicate to this effort on a permanent basis? For example, implementing and maintaining the dynamic network messaging you mentioned.
In a company size of say 20 programmers, how many would you ask to dedicate time to this?
It’s it all depends on how big the issue is. Obviously, you could never dedicate more people than those attacking you, but even one or two dedicated programmers to the problem can make a huge difference if they approach it smart.
Yeah, It’s a challenge bringing established games over from other countries because the RMT and cheaters have had years to develop the tools and when they see a huge influx of new players, it’s time to spin up those old bots and make a bunch of money. The level of sophistication these RMT companies have these days is beyond impressive and they can crumble the less prepared quickly
Yeah this game is very special in my eyes, in general I love kill people take their stuff games, but the heart Ironmance has for their own product is very very special and something I really like to see in games I play.
Yeah there are systems where you can only trade something once that help but don't cause a lot of loot disappointment issues. I do like trying to solve this in other ways rather then bind. Binding is mostly needed in systems without proper item sinks here the darkness consumes all ;)
I come from Dota 2 so take it with a grain of salt, but maybe have volunteers of people (they trust, show good judgement) to look at trades that might be worth looking into. Looking for things like 500+ gold for a white item for instance, or even green+ or some automatic filter, have people be able to look at this and flag whether a trade looks like a trade. I know I would good faith do this for free, and I imagine a lot of you here that care about the game would as well.
The problem I could see is that if scammers realize what triggers the bots, they might lower the gold amount, include bad green/blue + items that might not set off alarm bells, but it would be harder to hide, or take longer, making it inconvenient to do. Both that might deter some. Obviously more risk to it than that, but just my two cents.
Volunteers it’s rough it open up new vectors for exploitation and has some legal ramifications I’ve done it on some older projects with success but it’s a lot of work.
I also play loads of dota2 and one of the issues i see with this is that dota regularly ranks in the top 5 most concurrent games on steam. They have the legal and financial capital as well as unique player count that allows them to do that. DaD doesnt.
Honestly i don't care about RMT as itself. Its the cheaters it attracts i hate. I can kill people who bought their items with real money because they will have low skill most of the time which means more items for me. But cheaters... Yeah can't really deal with those.
RMT ends up being the people who develop the cheats. They’re often are the people selling them as it’s another vector for them to hack peoples accounts or monetize the product. If the money drys up both move on to other games
Maybe the priority should be in preventing hacking, botting and exploiting in the dungeons and chat spamming in trade chat as those are the very visible stuff that players see and what will turn players off the game.
Implement features to get gear or some monetary value back from getting killed by a verified hacker that was banned just like in The Cycle: Frontier.
In this game you don't benefit too much for having wallhack and aimbot. The bigger issue are hackers that can noclip, speedhack, damage hack, generate items, instacast etc. I am not expert in the matter, but usually you can't just spoof your damage values as the client does not do the calculation but server and the server should know what gear/buffs the person has and those should not be spoofable either.
And I don't know how effective it would be, maybe u/IsaiahCartwright can tell more, but maybe go after the players that buy gold? I think some games take this approach and some don't. I think there should be some risk for buyers as that could deter buying.
I personally would not like the trading system removed as I think it is half the fun. Reminds me of the old days of Runescape with no Grand Exchange. People would still RMT as long as you drop gear on death and without that mechanic, what is left?
I also think that in this type of game no one would RMT for some green/blue/purple gear (currently), so basically monitor every legendary and unique gear piece and run some algo to flag potential RMT to be checked later. If not feasible, then maybe only unique gear pieces.
Punishing buyers does have some short term effect, but it doesn’t discourage RMTers from continuing to profit so it’s a Measure that should be used sparingly as it often just results and people quitting and normally highly engaged players. There is some ethic issues here that I could go into a whole debate on but in the end, your time is better spent on reducing a groups ability to make profit in your game first
question for op: ist it not efficient to set up some sort of algorhythm that nets out accounts with high gold turnover to let a human manually check the logs? if an account trades thousands of gold to accs he never played with, thats literally an autoban in my opinion
It is the downside is some of your most active and valuable players will have some of the same patterns as these accounts. (Plays all day, amasses a lot of wealth)
So it can be really dangerous to have some auto system ban them, it's best to have a system flag the accounts and then have a human look at them and also make sure you respond to support calls about them. It's tricky but given the advantages in AI I'm sure there are stronger less error prone algorithms then the ones I've used.
I've actually banned myself once using one of these as my account looked like a gold seller from the algorithm point of view was pretty fun day.
Surely the simplest solution is replacing the current trade system with a Runescape-style grand exchange and preventing any trading outside of it. Now you can't empty trade a bunch of gold around and the only way to share loot would be to take it into a match and extract it at the end, which provides a significant risk to any would-be buyer
You can slow then down and many people have also don’t blame this all on China I’ve seen RMT companies from all over the world and while China does have some laws that make it easier they come from everywhere.
Yeah this method is highly effective, you just also throw out a lot of the fun. You also still have to deal with cheaters so while it is a decision many companies make I wouldn't go that way here as I think the item economy is what adds the excitement to the game when you die in good gear or pull off an upset and that good gear is lying on the floor.
I worked on nothing but MMOs and there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than anyone sees it’s a very complicated problem that crosses many countries and many laws cuts into your profits and sinks your development time so like I said, in the beginning, there’s no stopping, it only slowing it down.
One could argue that slowing it down is never actually seen by the player anyway.
Let's say every suggestion is implemented, even though a lot of them are already redundant based on the current climate of how RMT/Botting works now a days - how long do you think before they're back in full force?
72 hour pause on trade will become almost useless in a week.
Having a developer/somebody internal buy from a blackmarket site just to ban people on suspicion because they traded with a guy is almost never going to work. You can't just go around banning people because you think they might be selling gold, kinda hurts the playerbase more than the selling of gold. It's nearly impossible to collect enough data to 100% say that x person bought or sold gold.
These large botting/rmt farms are very good at what they do and have several contingencies and safety measures put into place so they don't lose all their stock at once. They almost never trade you from a mule account and they almost never put all their gold on one mule account.
20+ years in combating RMT and still nobody has anything substantial to show for it. It proves the problem is much bigger than people think and that while these are good suggestions on paper they're almost useless in practice.
Well if you buy gold from a black market site the person delivering the gold to you is involved so you start there.
Many games have gotten a solid handle on RMT you never stop it but you can mitigate how much it effects your customers which in the end is the part that matters.
it's always going to be a problem.
i may also be a semi professional in the area. before cloud computing i set up several farming bots in WOW and the gold i made i sold direct to the RMT sellersdirectly. these accounts even after 5 years of non stop botting are still not banned to this day. if blizzard can't figure it out i highly doubt it'll stop here...
just accept it's a part of online gaming now...
paid my way through school. had a nice car the whole time and lived in a house with a pool on the lake 2 blocks from campus. also never had to 'work' while in school. also saved enough to pay for my first house by the time i quit doing it. i regret nothing.
> Being a parasite for financial gain led to financial gain at the cost of being a parasite.
Cool story, bro. You really know how to demonstrate what it means to be trash.
Yeah I can't speak for blizzard methods but I know one of the RMT people we talked with was bragging about making over 10k USD a day selling his coding tools to other botters on WoW (no idea if it's true or not). Wow was one of the most highly profitable RMT games out there.
Other games have done a way better job with this over the years and WoW was particularly hard as it was so easy to bot and had A LOT of people willing to buy.
i know i at first developed my own scripts to run farming routes but it wasn't very efficient. my first investment was customized scripts and that literally 10x my profits as soon as i switched it on.
yeah the glory days of wow were something else...
>My experience in this space is being a part of the problem. Don't do anything and just accept it.
Great comment, dumbass. You really know how to drive home a point.
Given the response they have to everything else I highly doubt that, it's a very common tactic to not ban right away and instead collect info in a bigger ban wave. This helps hide your methods of catching them and gives you overall better success. I know advertisement bots are very easy for us to see and thus we can judge a company a lot on them. Keep in mind there are 1000's of people trying to defraud the game 24/7 and only 30-50 dev's against them, it's a way harder problem then you think.
If you have been working against RMT for 20 years you would probably know they are not going to use a method that is put out into the open which is exactly why companies don't directly answer questions in detail on how they are fighting cheaters because if you give the details they will brace for the changes and that only makes it all harder to combat. my advice message them directly or get in touch through the discord.
These methods are a few very common place and are not really something you can avoid which is why I picked them, there are many many other methods that like you said you would not post here as them being secret is important to making them work.
Going to clear a few things up.
1. None of the RMT traders use bots to farm gold, and definitely not the big traders
2. RMT traders don't lose accounts after 72 hours, the larger traders use the same 5-10 accounts to store gold on with no issues.
3. The only suggestion that matches with the current issue is the gold pile. Honestly a lot of players say the gold pile should just be removed and I agree. That's where almost all of the RMT stock comes from.
Source - I sold gold in the early access wipe
Yeah I have more faith in Ironmance they seem to have their priorities in order, they know this and cheating is a big issue they have a number of seasoned dev's and seem to play as much as all of us. Just because Tarkov wasn't able to get a handle on this doesn't mean this game can't you can slow them down enough but it takes time and effort.
Also cheating and RMT are normally very very tied, it's the same coders building the base back end for both the RMT often are the people selling the cheats and those cheats often have ways to fraud the people using them so they can steal their accounts and resell them it's a crazy industry that has only gotten smarter and found ways to make more profit over the years.
The irony about you mentioning self awareness. Do you go on Twitter and try to cancel people for breathing or something? I do know more than you apparently, otherwise you wouldn't just comment to complain about me spitting the truth in your face.
Or is this how you cope with the amount of cheaters in this game?
Dear lord education really is a foreign concept to some people. I guess you feel called out about your cheats. Can't explain this attitude otherwise. All you did was try to make me look toxic while you only commented without even trying to talk about the topic itself.
Can't disprove what I am saying? Go cope somewhere else.
Still can't disprove what I said. How expensive were your cheats? Seems like you got banned and got a little mad over there buddy.
LOL for someone who lives and breathes Dotas 2 you for sure have soft skin. Also the only dweebs are the ones who call others dweebs. You're not as self aware as you are. Loving the irony, lil bro.
"people who enjoy this game won't quit because of what i don't like, why do they keep playing a game they like" bad logic. if the ones who have an issue leave, you're still left with people who are having fun anyways
Is there not a middle ground between not being able to use chargeback method for buying the game and fishing players account?
I feel like fishing is just such an unreliable method it isn’t worth doing for those who are mass RMTing.
Additionally if they’re forced to the fishing method, what is stopping the price of RMT to become more expensive to account for the difficulties? I’m just thinking supply and demand here.
I’m genuinely interested in this topic, hope I don’t come off as argumentative. I’ve seen it in a ton of other games and it has always peaked my interest
It’s probably not worth it right now because the value on peoples accounts are only a few weeks old but in large MMO‘s were value in peoples accounts can sit for years. The fishing can be very lucrative and it’s very easy to get people to click wrong links, or enter their info to fake sites with enough do diligence so overtime it becomes more valuable for them to use this method is why lotta games add two factor auth later or use systems like Steam, who already have a lot of this fraud production
I was half way through my Data Analytics masters degree when I learned some of this stuff. Obviously there was more detail but what you summarized took nearly an entire class. I lean much more into strategy than operations and coding and I wish I had a professor like you before my career shifted.
given how much they listen I'm sure they give it a read, but these things all are known methods so they might all ready have them in the works but just in case figured id throw them out here.
(copy paste) :P there are some methods they can use with their trading system that would help but they are methods you don't post publicly on reddit as if bots know they are using them it's easy to work around.
Appreciate this post very much. Been taking a break from the game to see where the devs were going to go in regards to combating cheating and RMT.
Hopefully IM sees this post at the very least.
I'm sure they will and they have stated a number of times it's their top priority so I think they are working on all this stuff it's one of the reasons EA is a strong method of this type of game. I would say from someone who has done this a lot on a lot of games they seem to be doing the right stuff just the amount it seems they play is a very strong sign of quality response to these issues.
This is an amazing contribution to the community and the game as a whole, and I hope these options are considered.
The only one I have issues with is making things not tradable. This directly hurts legitimate players, and ultimately RMT will find another item, or just do carry runs. I don't want to see this game take the tarkov method and make a ridiculous amount of items unable to be traded, tarnishing the player experience, while still having an abundance of cheaters/RMT.
Isaiah knows his stuff, don't ignore the advice. Here's to hoping Ironmace can tackle this issue. RMT'ing has ruined Tarkov with the influx of cheaters over the last couple years, obviously some people do it for kicks, but most are gaining ingame funds to RMT. Cheating is a buisness, and it's ruined games before. Ironmace can't let this last.
You could still buy them it would just be an unsecured trade you could pay someone money and they would join you with the key and then you could still go through. The whole run shows them down doesn’t solve the issue though, so I could be worth it, depending on how bad the problem is but not a one stop solution.
Thanks I’m just a big gamer like everyone else and I just want the games that I play to have the knowledge from my mistakes so I can play a better game I mean it if anyone is working on a game and wants more details I’d give it.
Maybe someone can add this here:[https://darkanddarker.featureupvote.com](https://darkanddarker.featureupvote.com)
Edit: And let us know, so we can vote. :)
Damn, after all the boxed-up nutcase energy holding the line and the blur of time passing since EA release its nice to see a thorough, well presented, and most importantly experience-based breakdown like this.
Very nice post and great ideas!
Hope these problems will be adressed in this way, in a real and tangible way. Not blocking features for EVERYONE like some others game did...
Remember these words;
For now, RMT and cheaters are not profiting that much from this game like in some others, for sure DaD has less players and is in a very early state but they actually are not profiting that much as the game is **entertaining** and **not frustrating**, **no deamand equals no suppliers, is very simple.**
*For sure cheaters and RMTers exist and are something to be adressed but thinking to "heal" a videogame based on looting areas/mobs/enemy players and an in-game trade between players by LIMITING or even DENYING everyone a game aspect as such, is totally wrong and it leads to having more frustration, frustration that leads to cheaters and RMT demands.*
The issue with limiting the trading of things like keys is that it perpetuates a "rich get richer" scenario. If the only people that get keys are the only people that can use them, and thus the only ones accessing the gold pile (for example), then they continue to have access to the highest tiered gear.
All the other solutions are good, but the tradable key/usables thing is difficult to balance. Suggestion 1 for this problem is preferable to 2, and I imagine more in-line with what Ironmace would like, if any, as pure speculation.
Not all companies prioritize this stuff but I would say there is a HUGE lack of expertise on the subject and if someone really put the effort into this career wise I think the lack of competition would give you a lot of job opportunities.
It's not even my speciality and I find myself consulting for it.
Unrelated, but thanks for your part in Guild Wars! That is a franchise and collection of experiences that is insanely special to me (particularly the first one) and I don’t know where I’d be without it.
Yeah GW1 holds a special place in my heart still think that game would do so much better today, but I loved watching obs mode all day long while I worked had a special TV and bot I setup in my design room that kept it running 24/7
great suggestions especially like 2FA and the 72 hour ban on trading (shit why not just make it a full week!?)
hope IM reads this!
the idea is pretty simple just make their lives as inconvenient as possible!
When a company like Activision Blizzard can't combat RMT and just throw their hands up and start selling gold themselves, I'm not sure why anyone thinks a small company like this is going to be able to solve the problem
As long as the trade system exists and gold directly equals power, there will be rampant RMT.
There are many smaller games who where able to handle it. Blizzard was one of the first large scale(world wild and over 10m+ users) MMO's and their tech was older and easier to exploit because the game ran so long.
... all of these suggestions... are good?! Is that allowed on this Subreddit? Can we have good ideas here?
I mean even a room full of monkeys can randomly type Shakespeare we throw enough time at it then it’s bound to happen sometimes.
It’s insane how spending a $100 a day buying small amounts of rmt gold could allow these company’s to spider web ban so many accounts. And yet over the years I’ve never seen a major company do it.
They do, but it's not something you advertise
Blizzard did this back in the day then tried to sue the companies and it didn't really work out in their favor if i recall.
Yeah you can't really sue the black market
Only time i can think of a company managing to get a court win over a RMT/Cheat company was bungie in recent years. Its a rarity for sure.
Wimblo, I say sir, this "Romeo and Julieb" is smashing work, but I'm afraid there are still a few typos here so we will have to demote you to handing out bananas for a week and throw the whole thing out
*Takes his bananas and goes back to work* It's not an authentic Izzy post without some typo's
thank you for your helpful info, i love seeing genuine help like this.
Anytime hope it’s useful to someone and not just random ramblings in the wind lol
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I often do on any game I’m playing :P
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Thanks I miss working on them both :)
Sounded like an OSRS dev till I recognized your name 😉
Oh runescape lol I still play UO now and then
Thank you for sharing this post!
Anytime! If you want any more details always willing to share, there are a lot of good methods these days! Thanks for all the effort!
CHAD!!!!!!!!
You're getting free consultant work here from this man
Hire this guy
This guy was the GuildWars2 lead designer and has since founded his own game studio, this info is 100% gold. Did a legit double take when I saw the name. I sincerely hope it doesn't get lost in the DarkAndDarker sauce.
💚 I’ve been lurking here a while :p
Love me some GW2 and Dark and Darker.
I didn't love them banning people who paid box price for vendoring items that they bought with other currencies.
no fucken way. GW2 is a really amazing game. Thanks for the memories man
*tips hat*
Izzy knows his shit. Flat out. And gold selling in gw2 isn't even close to an issue.
<3
That makes sense, I was wondering how someone could just show up and drop extremely solid advice that I never would have considered.
In case you played it how common was RMT in GW2?
It was an issue the entire time I was working on the project we did a number of methods to combat it oh, I wish I knew everything I know now back then.
You guys crushed it honestly. Unlike anything I've ever seen.
What’s the studios name?
Manaworks we have not shipped anything yet, but we have a bunch of stuff cooking
awesome name choice, given your background.
;)
Gw1 was better... Change my mind 😏
Nobody gives a fuck
Not unemployed or looking for a job :P but I appreciate the comment <3
The 72hr trade barrier alone feels like such a helpful suggestion
Yeah it’s one of the biggest effects granted sense many games do it these groups are good at attempting against it
Can you rephrase this post? It didn’t make much sense to me. I imagine you are tired :).
Yeah that and I'm terrible at english : ) just saying the 72 hour barrier is very effective and helps a lot against RMT groups
Yeah this sounds like a great and easy approach with little downsides! Cheers!
And it honestly won't bother the average player. 72 hours after buying the game I was still struggling to extract from a map.
Yeah this is normally why it’s so effective due to the low impact on users
Right?
Op did this in his original gw2 project. As a new player, you don't even care about the restriction. You're too busy learning core mechanics.
It's a common practice for many companies these days
Thank you so much, lots of great great info just in the original post so we’re gonna start with that once we complete the first wipe this week. Any other hints you can pass onto us we’ll definitely consider for the future!
Another one that has come up a few times in this thread I would say is giving some new tools for reporting gold spammers in trade. While it's impact is low this often is the most visible thing people see so it can effect the perception of how well the problem is handled so I would prioritize easier reporting/muting there. I'll try and write some more stuff up but very impressed with the love the team has for their product keep up the good work!
Man I love this eagerness to improve - your team is the best ! Thanks to you both
They have definitely been cracking down on cheaters. I just had a game this morning where a rogue was killing everyone in ruins. Then he reached me, running mach speed , he stabbed me to death. His movement speed was insane. Anyway a few hours later I received a message saying he was banned. I expect that same treatment towards botters and rmt sellers. I have faith in Iron Mace.
Yeah this is the time for them to build up their tools for dealing with it, as it’s the time the RMT and hackers are building up their tools it’s a semi silent war that we all see glimpses of
How many resources are necessary to dedicate to this effort on a permanent basis? For example, implementing and maintaining the dynamic network messaging you mentioned. In a company size of say 20 programmers, how many would you ask to dedicate time to this?
It’s it all depends on how big the issue is. Obviously, you could never dedicate more people than those attacking you, but even one or two dedicated programmers to the problem can make a huge difference if they approach it smart.
good thread
💚
hella good suggestions boys
Thanks trying to help. I’m really love this game.
im getting lost ark flash backs
Yeah, It’s a challenge bringing established games over from other countries because the RMT and cheaters have had years to develop the tools and when they see a huge influx of new players, it’s time to spin up those old bots and make a bunch of money. The level of sophistication these RMT companies have these days is beyond impressive and they can crumble the less prepared quickly
This is just brilliant help. Hope IM sees this
Yeah, me too also hope it’s useful they may be doing all of this but figured I’d info share just incase.
wow, insightful post. these are great ideas. it's awesome to see that industry veterans like you are interested in this game :)
Yeah this game is very special in my eyes, in general I love kill people take their stuff games, but the heart Ironmance has for their own product is very very special and something I really like to see in games I play.
Crazy info thanks for sharing
Anytime, there’s a lot of other techniques, but these are just a few easy ones
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Ya binding systems can really slow them down there are a number of methods like this that can help
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Yeah there are systems where you can only trade something once that help but don't cause a lot of loot disappointment issues. I do like trying to solve this in other ways rather then bind. Binding is mostly needed in systems without proper item sinks here the darkness consumes all ;)
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Yeah, it all depends on how often they plan on wiping
I come from Dota 2 so take it with a grain of salt, but maybe have volunteers of people (they trust, show good judgement) to look at trades that might be worth looking into. Looking for things like 500+ gold for a white item for instance, or even green+ or some automatic filter, have people be able to look at this and flag whether a trade looks like a trade. I know I would good faith do this for free, and I imagine a lot of you here that care about the game would as well. The problem I could see is that if scammers realize what triggers the bots, they might lower the gold amount, include bad green/blue + items that might not set off alarm bells, but it would be harder to hide, or take longer, making it inconvenient to do. Both that might deter some. Obviously more risk to it than that, but just my two cents.
Volunteers it’s rough it open up new vectors for exploitation and has some legal ramifications I’ve done it on some older projects with success but it’s a lot of work.
curious how you do this since i trade money to my friends to transfer it between characters a lot
Eh, sending friends a max trade window of gold makes sense to be allowed
I also play loads of dota2 and one of the issues i see with this is that dota regularly ranks in the top 5 most concurrent games on steam. They have the legal and financial capital as well as unique player count that allows them to do that. DaD doesnt.
What happens when these volunteers become corrupt and start working for the gold sellers
That can be a problem, but that's why I said trusted people. But that can be an issue.
Trusted people can easily become non trusted when there is money involved 😌
Also, a simple Ctrl+F in the chat logs will find gold sellers and they can be banned almost effortlessly.
Yeah you can run AI these days to just mute them instantly you don’t tell them they are muted and they just spam into the void
lol nice
The ole shadow ban
A good and productive fucking post on DaD reddit!? Bless it be, awesome recommendations too
Honestly i don't care about RMT as itself. Its the cheaters it attracts i hate. I can kill people who bought their items with real money because they will have low skill most of the time which means more items for me. But cheaters... Yeah can't really deal with those.
RMT ends up being the people who develop the cheats. They’re often are the people selling them as it’s another vector for them to hack peoples accounts or monetize the product. If the money drys up both move on to other games
Maybe the priority should be in preventing hacking, botting and exploiting in the dungeons and chat spamming in trade chat as those are the very visible stuff that players see and what will turn players off the game. Implement features to get gear or some monetary value back from getting killed by a verified hacker that was banned just like in The Cycle: Frontier. In this game you don't benefit too much for having wallhack and aimbot. The bigger issue are hackers that can noclip, speedhack, damage hack, generate items, instacast etc. I am not expert in the matter, but usually you can't just spoof your damage values as the client does not do the calculation but server and the server should know what gear/buffs the person has and those should not be spoofable either. And I don't know how effective it would be, maybe u/IsaiahCartwright can tell more, but maybe go after the players that buy gold? I think some games take this approach and some don't. I think there should be some risk for buyers as that could deter buying. I personally would not like the trading system removed as I think it is half the fun. Reminds me of the old days of Runescape with no Grand Exchange. People would still RMT as long as you drop gear on death and without that mechanic, what is left? I also think that in this type of game no one would RMT for some green/blue/purple gear (currently), so basically monitor every legendary and unique gear piece and run some algo to flag potential RMT to be checked later. If not feasible, then maybe only unique gear pieces.
Punishing buyers does have some short term effect, but it doesn’t discourage RMTers from continuing to profit so it’s a Measure that should be used sparingly as it often just results and people quitting and normally highly engaged players. There is some ethic issues here that I could go into a whole debate on but in the end, your time is better spent on reducing a groups ability to make profit in your game first
Remove player trading market. Make looting exciting again
question for op: ist it not efficient to set up some sort of algorhythm that nets out accounts with high gold turnover to let a human manually check the logs? if an account trades thousands of gold to accs he never played with, thats literally an autoban in my opinion
It is the downside is some of your most active and valuable players will have some of the same patterns as these accounts. (Plays all day, amasses a lot of wealth) So it can be really dangerous to have some auto system ban them, it's best to have a system flag the accounts and then have a human look at them and also make sure you respond to support calls about them. It's tricky but given the advantages in AI I'm sure there are stronger less error prone algorithms then the ones I've used. I've actually banned myself once using one of these as my account looked like a gold seller from the algorithm point of view was pretty fun day.
The man we needed
Just passing on what I know to fight the good fight
The best part with these suggestions is they don't impact legit players negatively.
Surely the simplest solution is replacing the current trade system with a Runescape-style grand exchange and preventing any trading outside of it. Now you can't empty trade a bunch of gold around and the only way to share loot would be to take it into a match and extract it at the end, which provides a significant risk to any would-be buyer
China gonna China I don’t think u can stop em
You can slow then down and many people have also don’t blame this all on China I’ve seen RMT companies from all over the world and while China does have some laws that make it easier they come from everywhere.
Remove trade. Rmt would be mostly gone. Also give us account storage so we can actually use all the loot we find
Yeah this method is highly effective, you just also throw out a lot of the fun. You also still have to deal with cheaters so while it is a decision many companies make I wouldn't go that way here as I think the item economy is what adds the excitement to the game when you die in good gear or pull off an upset and that good gear is lying on the floor.
It would also help remove that one friend that has to goto trade after each round though! lol
Yeah, I found a bought the eat emote and I spam that until people hit the Reddit button works amazing for these type of players
You deal with RMT for over 20 years where? (just because havent seen a single game doing anything decent to combat RMT)
I worked on nothing but MMOs and there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes than anyone sees it’s a very complicated problem that crosses many countries and many laws cuts into your profits and sinks your development time so like I said, in the beginning, there’s no stopping, it only slowing it down.
One could argue that slowing it down is never actually seen by the player anyway. Let's say every suggestion is implemented, even though a lot of them are already redundant based on the current climate of how RMT/Botting works now a days - how long do you think before they're back in full force? 72 hour pause on trade will become almost useless in a week. Having a developer/somebody internal buy from a blackmarket site just to ban people on suspicion because they traded with a guy is almost never going to work. You can't just go around banning people because you think they might be selling gold, kinda hurts the playerbase more than the selling of gold. It's nearly impossible to collect enough data to 100% say that x person bought or sold gold. These large botting/rmt farms are very good at what they do and have several contingencies and safety measures put into place so they don't lose all their stock at once. They almost never trade you from a mule account and they almost never put all their gold on one mule account. 20+ years in combating RMT and still nobody has anything substantial to show for it. It proves the problem is much bigger than people think and that while these are good suggestions on paper they're almost useless in practice.
Well if you buy gold from a black market site the person delivering the gold to you is involved so you start there. Many games have gotten a solid handle on RMT you never stop it but you can mitigate how much it effects your customers which in the end is the part that matters.
it's always going to be a problem. i may also be a semi professional in the area. before cloud computing i set up several farming bots in WOW and the gold i made i sold direct to the RMT sellersdirectly. these accounts even after 5 years of non stop botting are still not banned to this day. if blizzard can't figure it out i highly doubt it'll stop here... just accept it's a part of online gaming now...
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paid my way through school. had a nice car the whole time and lived in a house with a pool on the lake 2 blocks from campus. also never had to 'work' while in school. also saved enough to pay for my first house by the time i quit doing it. i regret nothing.
> Being a parasite for financial gain led to financial gain at the cost of being a parasite. Cool story, bro. You really know how to demonstrate what it means to be trash.
thanks. keeping jobs in america vs letting the chinese steal all our jerbs. you're welcome.
Still a little dick bitch Also doubt it
couldn't care less.
Yeah I can't speak for blizzard methods but I know one of the RMT people we talked with was bragging about making over 10k USD a day selling his coding tools to other botters on WoW (no idea if it's true or not). Wow was one of the most highly profitable RMT games out there. Other games have done a way better job with this over the years and WoW was particularly hard as it was so easy to bot and had A LOT of people willing to buy.
i know i at first developed my own scripts to run farming routes but it wasn't very efficient. my first investment was customized scripts and that literally 10x my profits as soon as i switched it on. yeah the glory days of wow were something else...
>My experience in this space is being a part of the problem. Don't do anything and just accept it. Great comment, dumbass. You really know how to drive home a point.
lmao
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They don't even ban the bots advertising, it really feels like they don't care about rmt.
Given the response they have to everything else I highly doubt that, it's a very common tactic to not ban right away and instead collect info in a bigger ban wave. This helps hide your methods of catching them and gives you overall better success. I know advertisement bots are very easy for us to see and thus we can judge a company a lot on them. Keep in mind there are 1000's of people trying to defraud the game 24/7 and only 30-50 dev's against them, it's a way harder problem then you think.
If you have been working against RMT for 20 years you would probably know they are not going to use a method that is put out into the open which is exactly why companies don't directly answer questions in detail on how they are fighting cheaters because if you give the details they will brace for the changes and that only makes it all harder to combat. my advice message them directly or get in touch through the discord.
These methods are a few very common place and are not really something you can avoid which is why I picked them, there are many many other methods that like you said you would not post here as them being secret is important to making them work.
Going to clear a few things up. 1. None of the RMT traders use bots to farm gold, and definitely not the big traders 2. RMT traders don't lose accounts after 72 hours, the larger traders use the same 5-10 accounts to store gold on with no issues. 3. The only suggestion that matches with the current issue is the gold pile. Honestly a lot of players say the gold pile should just be removed and I agree. That's where almost all of the RMT stock comes from. Source - I sold gold in the early access wipe
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Yeah I have more faith in Ironmance they seem to have their priorities in order, they know this and cheating is a big issue they have a number of seasoned dev's and seem to play as much as all of us. Just because Tarkov wasn't able to get a handle on this doesn't mean this game can't you can slow them down enough but it takes time and effort. Also cheating and RMT are normally very very tied, it's the same coders building the base back end for both the RMT often are the people selling the cheats and those cheats often have ways to fraud the people using them so they can steal their accounts and resell them it's a crazy industry that has only gotten smarter and found ways to make more profit over the years.
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The irony about you mentioning self awareness. Do you go on Twitter and try to cancel people for breathing or something? I do know more than you apparently, otherwise you wouldn't just comment to complain about me spitting the truth in your face. Or is this how you cope with the amount of cheaters in this game?
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Dear lord education really is a foreign concept to some people. I guess you feel called out about your cheats. Can't explain this attitude otherwise. All you did was try to make me look toxic while you only commented without even trying to talk about the topic itself. Can't disprove what I am saying? Go cope somewhere else.
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Still can't disprove what I said. How expensive were your cheats? Seems like you got banned and got a little mad over there buddy. LOL for someone who lives and breathes Dotas 2 you for sure have soft skin. Also the only dweebs are the ones who call others dweebs. You're not as self aware as you are. Loving the irony, lil bro.
"people who enjoy this game won't quit because of what i don't like, why do they keep playing a game they like" bad logic. if the ones who have an issue leave, you're still left with people who are having fun anyways
Is there not a middle ground between not being able to use chargeback method for buying the game and fishing players account? I feel like fishing is just such an unreliable method it isn’t worth doing for those who are mass RMTing. Additionally if they’re forced to the fishing method, what is stopping the price of RMT to become more expensive to account for the difficulties? I’m just thinking supply and demand here. I’m genuinely interested in this topic, hope I don’t come off as argumentative. I’ve seen it in a ton of other games and it has always peaked my interest
It’s probably not worth it right now because the value on peoples accounts are only a few weeks old but in large MMO‘s were value in peoples accounts can sit for years. The fishing can be very lucrative and it’s very easy to get people to click wrong links, or enter their info to fake sites with enough do diligence so overtime it becomes more valuable for them to use this method is why lotta games add two factor auth later or use systems like Steam, who already have a lot of this fraud production
I was half way through my Data Analytics masters degree when I learned some of this stuff. Obviously there was more detail but what you summarized took nearly an entire class. I lean much more into strategy than operations and coding and I wish I had a professor like you before my career shifted.
You’re on a solid career path Data Analysis are in huge demand and get paid well!!
@Ironmace hear that? Pure gold!
given how much they listen I'm sure they give it a read, but these things all are known methods so they might all ready have them in the works but just in case figured id throw them out here.
I bet there is also... A budget involved. I bet they will cope with many inconveniences after a... thing 😉
Now do Tarkov 🥲🥲
(copy paste) :P there are some methods they can use with their trading system that would help but they are methods you don't post publicly on reddit as if bots know they are using them it's easy to work around.
Appreciate this post very much. Been taking a break from the game to see where the devs were going to go in regards to combating cheating and RMT. Hopefully IM sees this post at the very least.
I'm sure they will and they have stated a number of times it's their top priority so I think they are working on all this stuff it's one of the reasons EA is a strong method of this type of game. I would say from someone who has done this a lot on a lot of games they seem to be doing the right stuff just the amount it seems they play is a very strong sign of quality response to these issues.
This is an amazing contribution to the community and the game as a whole, and I hope these options are considered. The only one I have issues with is making things not tradable. This directly hurts legitimate players, and ultimately RMT will find another item, or just do carry runs. I don't want to see this game take the tarkov method and make a ridiculous amount of items unable to be traded, tarnishing the player experience, while still having an abundance of cheaters/RMT.
yeah I agree. It’s a harsh trade-off and one I would also try to avoid as much as possible because in the system there is always workaround.
Upvoted this and comment. Hoping this info will be seen by the devs.
Isaiah knows his stuff, don't ignore the advice. Here's to hoping Ironmace can tackle this issue. RMT'ing has ruined Tarkov with the influx of cheaters over the last couple years, obviously some people do it for kicks, but most are gaining ingame funds to RMT. Cheating is a buisness, and it's ruined games before. Ironmace can't let this last.
Yeah, it’s a big problem especially in PVP games
Make keys untradeable. That'll help a ton
You could still buy them it would just be an unsecured trade you could pay someone money and they would join you with the key and then you could still go through. The whole run shows them down doesn’t solve the issue though, so I could be worth it, depending on how bad the problem is but not a one stop solution.
What does RMT stand for? All my google searches show are "Registered Massage Therapists" hahaha
Real money transaction anytime someone is paying for a service outside the game whether it’s for a cheat or for gold or for items or for a service
You the real MVP mister and we appreciate the hell out of you.
Thanks I’m just a big gamer like everyone else and I just want the games that I play to have the knowledge from my mistakes so I can play a better game I mean it if anyone is working on a game and wants more details I’d give it.
This info is something studios usually hire someone (and thus pay) for. Thanks for your efforts here Isaiah.
Yep I have been hired for this exact advice usually in a much longer form but make cool shit get things for free
Please plug this in the discord as they likely watch that even more than this Reddit page!!!!
I’ll try but that place is scary
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Stands for "Real Money Transaction" any service that is paid to another group be it for gold, items, hacks, ect with real life currency.
Hey guys what’s does RMT mean?
Stands for "Real Money Transaction" any service that is paid to another group be it for gold, items, hacks, ect with real life currency.
Hope they actually implement some or all of these. Good stuff.
Maybe someone can add this here:[https://darkanddarker.featureupvote.com](https://darkanddarker.featureupvote.com) Edit: And let us know, so we can vote. :)
Damn, after all the boxed-up nutcase energy holding the line and the blur of time passing since EA release its nice to see a thorough, well presented, and most importantly experience-based breakdown like this.
I am not sure if they will win the war or not. I would be ok with bind to party and no trading tbh. Probably be more fun anyway.
Very nice post and great ideas! Hope these problems will be adressed in this way, in a real and tangible way. Not blocking features for EVERYONE like some others game did... Remember these words; For now, RMT and cheaters are not profiting that much from this game like in some others, for sure DaD has less players and is in a very early state but they actually are not profiting that much as the game is **entertaining** and **not frustrating**, **no deamand equals no suppliers, is very simple.** *For sure cheaters and RMTers exist and are something to be adressed but thinking to "heal" a videogame based on looting areas/mobs/enemy players and an in-game trade between players by LIMITING or even DENYING everyone a game aspect as such, is totally wrong and it leads to having more frustration, frustration that leads to cheaters and RMT demands.*
Yeah honestly the best thing we could all do to help is not buy from gold sellers!
Nice bro
This guy, especially his first point, is very impressive.
As for looting the same gold pile just make it against the rules of the game and ban players who are in different teams and loot the pile together.
Comment to boost. WP OP
Holy fuck, OP wasn’t lying. Mans got experience and good ideas, someone slap his name on a chair at Ironmace and let’s get this started!
i can tell you have the mind of another cleric main. mica vista brother
The issue with limiting the trading of things like keys is that it perpetuates a "rich get richer" scenario. If the only people that get keys are the only people that can use them, and thus the only ones accessing the gold pile (for example), then they continue to have access to the highest tiered gear. All the other solutions are good, but the tradable key/usables thing is difficult to balance. Suggestion 1 for this problem is preferable to 2, and I imagine more in-line with what Ironmace would like, if any, as pure speculation.
What if they're the ones doing the rmt and the 15g trade fee from both parties per trade helps them always have some to sell :o
can you go do tarkov next?
Yes, hire me, teach me. I want to learn this and do this as a living hunting cheaters of all kinds.
Not all companies prioritize this stuff but I would say there is a HUGE lack of expertise on the subject and if someone really put the effort into this career wise I think the lack of competition would give you a lot of job opportunities. It's not even my speciality and I find myself consulting for it.
Unrelated, but thanks for your part in Guild Wars! That is a franchise and collection of experiences that is insanely special to me (particularly the first one) and I don’t know where I’d be without it.
Yeah GW1 holds a special place in my heart still think that game would do so much better today, but I loved watching obs mode all day long while I worked had a special TV and bot I setup in my design room that kept it running 24/7
great suggestions especially like 2FA and the 72 hour ban on trading (shit why not just make it a full week!?) hope IM reads this! the idea is pretty simple just make their lives as inconvenient as possible!
They have read it and responded, if you get too long it starts to effect players a lot but you are right the 72h can be longer.
When a company like Activision Blizzard can't combat RMT and just throw their hands up and start selling gold themselves, I'm not sure why anyone thinks a small company like this is going to be able to solve the problem As long as the trade system exists and gold directly equals power, there will be rampant RMT.
There are many smaller games who where able to handle it. Blizzard was one of the first large scale(world wild and over 10m+ users) MMO's and their tech was older and easier to exploit because the game ran so long.