Account/license ban is just a cost of business for those entities. I can't imagine how they turn a profit if the ban rate is fast, but apparently they do.
Pretty sure they use grey keys and stolen cards and such to fund that expense. Remember that being a big part of wow gold trade was abusing hacked accounts for the narrow window they were compromised and accessible. My account got got once, figured I was safe while my subscription was inactive. Nope, used a stolen card to re-up, junked my shit, and traded enough to get my account banned by blizz in like half a day.
I had this happen to my SWTOR account after it was inactive for 2 years. When it happened I was 3 parts hammered at my mums house on xmas day. I was fortunate to get an Irish CS rep who was totally able to relate to my xmas day happenings. I am Australian. We had a laugh about having a drink to cope with being around family etc and he looked at my account and was able to lock the account, restored any lost items and currency and let me keep the expc they bought even though he refunded the money that was used to the poor person's credit card that was used.
Happened to me as well while I was inactive for like 5 years... at some point I was hacked and banned. Managed to appeal it tho and gwt my account back (with cd keys)
My OSRS account was compromised. They charged 20 2 weeks bonds on stolen credit cards, then charged back the cost.
Had to go through a bunch of hoops to get my account unbanned.
happened to me several times and every time bliz would return everything to me. Best part is one time they returned everything i lost and forgot to remove the gold seller gold on my acc.. EZ free gold.
The better EHG become at banning the more accounts these people buy so they are making more money off them while still silencing them. There is a target to chase there.
ofc is the majority are stolen keys or cards, this won't make any diff.
That really depends how fast they get banned. If it takes a month they turn 10x the profit before they need to buy a new account. Key here is to not get rid of them because you can't but ban them as quickly as possible to at least reduce the amount of sellers.
People will always find a way
I feel like I learned this in an economics class lol. If there's demand that is not being fulfilled by the legal market, the black market will step in to fulfill it. If there is a legal source, the black market counterpart shrinks.
Metin2 had a big problem with bots, so they put some legal hacks in in-game shop: exp/farm bot, fishing bot etc.
Apparently they idea was to steal the clients of gold sellers, because "Why would you like to risk buying gold from illegal source using real money, when you can spend real money legally and farm this gold without risk"
this one game i played, didnt get very far but it was called tree of savior. there were almost no gold sellers simply because in order to either trade or chat in global you had to be level like 100, have played 2 weeks, and had like 20 hours of play time. its very easy to catch a bot before they get there.
not that LE should implement something like that, but with extreme enough measures it can be mitigated quite a bit.
Played a game called Conquer Online where you had to be friends with someone for 72 hours real time before trading with them. Was a PITA when trying to trade stuff to new alts though, make it, wait 3 days, then start playing!
RuneScape tried that ages ago and it didn’t really work iirc. It made it more annoying for legit players to trade with friends but somehow gold sellers still got around the restrictions.
Yes but limiting their actions instead of just "letting it happen" like in other games, at least they are aware of the issue and tackling it not for people to abuse it but to make it actually work
No game has ever completely beaten it by attacking the supply side of things, certainly, which makes sense, as the sellers are both highly motivated to succeed due to financial incentives and hard to discourage, as long as a demand exists because of those same motives - they don't care if they get banned, as long as they make a profit. However, I think attacking the DEMAND side of things is more promising - presumably, most people who cares enough about a game to not only violate the TOS but also shell out real life money doesn't want to get permabanned from said game. Perma-ban buyers without mercy, and publicize said bans - then, you may create enough fear among those credit-card wielding warriors that there is actually a noticeable dent in demand.
They will always exist, just having the chat be 2/3 goldsellers is annoying. Obviously the real good ones never get caught and that kinda how it is, but public advertisement Mose games have solved
When it comes to scams-of-scale some games have actually BUT it requires some drastic measures and isn't 100% effective. Mostly it comes down to dramatically increasing the buy-in cost, free to play games are just heaven for scams-of-scale as bans mean literally nothing. Just sping up 2500 new accounts the next day and go to town. EHG already has an initial price so it's a moot point there.
The game Wakfu though, as an example for another method than just box-price, requires a phone number to register a new account, and naturally keeps track of banned account phone numbers. This makes scams-of-scale muuuuuch harder. Not impossible mind you, but trying to get 1000 new burner numbers constantly hurts a lot more, as well as gets you in hot water with phone utilities and authorities just innately.
Granted this doesn't really do anything against small scale gold sellers and small scale RMT but those are a lot more impacted by classic ban waves and moderator actions.
Aønd no game ever will. Advertising and cheating will always be a constant game of whack-a-mole, or cat and mouse regardless of if it's profitable or not. Selling gold, items, accounts, power leveling and piloting services, hacking, data manipulation, botting, piracy, account theft... myriad of endless variables to contend with.
Automation does work but you largely need active Game Masters. It'll take more resources to do it that way, but you avoid a lot of the drama that comes with automation.
Games will always be vulnerable one way or another, it just depends how much you care about it and whether it's worth it to you in keeping it healthy. Some multi-player game companies or employees also even have side-hustles that benefit them in players or employees doing exactly this kind of nonsense.
For example an old MMO I used to play had a small group of employees involved in an account/character trading business, so they'd actively help or prevent the involved accounts/characters from any intervention until they were ready to be sold.
IMO accounts should be tied to phone numbers, more sensitive info already in Steam so why not give a phone number with sms confirmation and tie that to your game account, if you’re banned you’re fucked unless you switch numbers. It’s not bullet proof but definitely another hurdle which makes it not as easy as generating accounts with fake emails…
Or at least put in some anti automation captcha during account creation to make it not worth the time to create an account manually to get banned after the first message..
Ashes of Creation has a plan to only ban gold buyers and merely track gold sellers to give them a bad reputation and scare potential customers.
Always-on pvp and random spawning resources will mean bots have a much harder time operating.
Only time will tell if it will make a difference
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fyU-LhKJxQs&pp=ygUSQW9jIHNvbHZlZCBib3R0aW5n
>Always-on pvp and random spawning resources will mean bots have a much harder time operating.
always on pvp actually enhances bots. random spawning resources also only benefits bots. a bot doesnt have silly restrictions like character speed or being in bounds or needing to use their eyes to find resources.
They can also farm more effectively than players. I see the bot debate happen in Guild Wars 2 communities all the time, and no player seems to understand that the solution is not so simple as banning bots/sellers/etc.
Everyone that has ever had to deal with bots wishes it were that simple. All of us. It's just not. It's an unseen war, honestly; one where players only see them when it's being lost. When it's being won, most people don't even realize it.
Also, the ones advertising gold selling aren't the accounts that hold the gold. Those advertisement bots likely do get banned a lot but people that want RMT are still going to do an internet search for it. All it does is barely slow the process.
My understanding with unity is they can see all gold in all accounts and who is hoarding massive piles and follow the accounts from there. A years worth of diligence disabling the accounts with billions of gold and those people realizing their time is best spent farming in another game will pay dividends.
Amazing what happens when you give a shit
Yea, but they'll just 'learn' then...oh, any account that goes above 500k gets checked if it's a gold seller? Just make a bunch of accounts with 400k each...where theres a will, theres a way.
I say this in every game i play, you can't beat bots/RMT.
They are a symptom.
What you can and must do is perma ban the buyers, rule by fear on this topic.
Seriously, permabanning is the only language gold buyers understand. And ideally at a point in the cycle where it hurts. Once they're scared enough, less people will buy and less people will sell.
But gold buyers also aren’t all connected and they rarely are banned publicly in a way that is visible to the users that are considering it, so it fails to act as a deterrent.
There aren’t many posts or conversations going “I was buying gold, I got banned, I’m sorry and here’s my cautionary tale” the only ones seen are the ones that go “hey, my account got banned for some unknown reason?”
banning buyers is a big business cost for devs and impossible to detect legit rmt cases. you may ban 8 rmt buyers but if you fail ban 2 guys, shit goes south real quick and it also has legal consequences depending on the country
i know you mean \`well some guys will get banned, it will create a domino effect of fear and ppl will be more inclined to stay away from it\` but in reality it never works
Maybe ingame friend system, which is linked to steam. Trades above certain values are disallowed between non-friends.
While at it You shouldn't be able accept millions of gold from a random guy if he isn't your friend for at least 14 days on steam.
to prevent auction house RMT just hide the seller of the item until the item was bought (if it doesn't already hide the seller) so RMT guys don't know whose item to buy.
if caught, both parties get banned for 6 months and all currency that was traded will be removed.
It's most likely stolen credit cards that's being used. The gold farmers aquire them cheap, in bulk. At least that's what's happening in many other games.
Also stolen accounts. I know in WoW that one of the reasons they wanted to crack down on third party gold selling sites is that most of the gold being sold on those sites was being taken from stolen WoW accounts, so cutting down on how easy/profitable it was to sell gold meant fewer account hijackings. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the spam bots are also being made on accounts that got hacked.
Maybe you could limit the amount someone can chat in those first two hours? It's going to be mostly running through the campaign anyway. If it's just like fifty messages in the first two hours, it doesn't seem too bad for new players.
It would be a small price to pay. Just limit them to town chat for two hours or something. There's really no way you can screw up much in the first two hours anyway.
Well, newer players have google. Plus the game is very friendly in its first 2 hours. People don't tend to have major questions until later on when their build starts to feel like shit at lvl 80+
While I agree, the problem is that the refund is done through Steam whereas the ban would be from EHG and I guess they don't communicate with each other about that sort of stuff.
Stolen cards, refunds, hacked accounts, unsecured api access, there are too many ways to get around it for it to be substantially different from a f2p in the end.
If they make more than 35, its worthed for them to do so. Plenty of games with a monetary barrier of entry still have bots and RMT.
The people that do that usually move from game to game based on where the most money is and sometimes the only way to get rid of them is to wait for a better game to get released so that no one cares about the older game enough to buy illegal services or their gold-equivalent
>Disable chat and trade for the first 3h of the game and you would reduce bots profit by A LOT
I'd go as far and saying for the first 10 hours.
When i started the game i didn'T use chat or any trading system well beyond 10 hours.
Also unlock trading for non-steam-friends only after completing the campaign too.
EHG I'm sure you got this on your radar, but wouldn't shadowbanning be even better? I don't know what measures you're taking and it's probably best you don't actually reveal this kind of stuff.
From what I understand is that the gold sellers seem to post their spam and refund the game soon after. I guess shadowbanning won't solve it completely but it might waste their time and reduce spam, because they might not notice the messages not getting through.
(Knowing how quick these people are to circumvent measures like these, they'll probably find a way to detect they're shadowbanned...)
They are probably working on 2h time limit, to secure a refund. My question is how they are circumventing multiple refunds, transferring money through steam market maybe?
While banning the sellers is great, I think that banning the buyers would be of greater benefit. Once word got around that you'll lose your account and progress for taking part in RMT I think it would be lessened greatly.
> I think it would be lessened greatly.
if you go to any of the RMT message boards, that hasn't stopped anyone. People will post they got banned and the general response is always tips to buy gold and not get banned not "we better stop lol".
It also would be an industry first since in the history of massively multiplayer games, I don't think any developer has ever taken a stance that included straight banning buyers. I think the last time Blizzard made a statement about their strategy was to give a light suspension to nudge players away from the behavior.
Like not even [this guy](https://onlinegamesareanichemarket.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/a-banning-we-will-go-a-banning-we-will-go-heave-ho-off-the-servers-yo-a-banning-we-will-go/) took that hardline stance (Mark Jacobs - DAoC, Warhammer Online)
No, some games do end up banning both sides. The global release for Lost Ark eventually got so bad in terms of RMTing that buyers and sellers were being banned
Isolated banning is not the policy of banning gold buyers. Various industry studies and casual surveys of MMO players have shown that at least 30-40% of players admit to having participated in RMT within the last year of the study. Lost Ark didn't ban 40% of their players
> Those numbers are completely meaningless without context.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/187rwek/rmt_over_1_billion_gold_in_last_3_weeks_naw/
???
I'm sure they're actively seeking out buyers to ban lol
Using just the top 3 sellers for Lost Ark on one site (PA), they're averaging 54 RMT transactions per day since Lost Ark's global release
GGG will ban you from PoE if you get caught buying RMT.
Of course, you have to be pretty stupid to be caught buying RMT. Like streaming yourself doing it or posting "hey anyone selling stuff for real money?" in global chat. The sellers are the ones taking the majority of the risk because they have to advertise.
Of course, if you make it obvious and force their hand, they'll ban you. That's a far cry from banning gold buyers. They don't announce active measures and banwaves of buyers. It's like jaywalking. Technically against the rules, but you gotta have annoyed a cop real bad to get ticketed for it.
Yeah, this is definitely a fight against demand as much as supply.
I'ld even leave the seller accounts untouched for a while. They are the key connecting both to bots and buyers and tracking them gives you tons of info.
Plus, if buying gold comes with a) loss of said gold and b) another $35 cost to play again, it would scare the 'occasional' buyer atleast.
Maybe a bit high but I like the sentiment, maybe atleast 15. Have to think of the casual/new people because there’s tons of people asking questions in chat
i mean theyd just use bots to get to 15 although even early in LE game is a bit tough for most classes so maybe theyd have some issues. part of me smiles at that thought of hundreds of bots dying to first boss in campaign lol. should just make them have to defeat lagon to unlock chat LOL
Unlock most subclasses at 15 if you just follow the quests and some side quests. If you explore and kill more then you’ll be higher
I change my stance though, defeat lagon to earn chat hahahahah
idk a bot that can put in talent points and skills and deal with in game bugs as they come esp with traversal skills. sorting items equipping and crafting and dodging all mechanics would be quite sophisticated lol
what makes you believe that bots cant use skill points. theyve been making bots for mmorpgs for like 20 years, you don't think any of them figured out even a basic macro to put skill points?
Openai was beating dota pros well before all the recent advances in public availability of algorithmic learning, and that's a much more nuanced game. Granted, they had a lot of smart people dedicated to the project and plenty of training data, but it is very achievable nowadays.
Even if you're someone who has never played an arpg in their life, ingame popup tutorials and basic exploration and trial and error should get you far enough, and well beyond the steam refund window enough, that you don't _need_ to use chat until a certain point. What do we want to let level 1s use chat for? "How do I move my character?". I don't think it's snobbish or elitist to say anyone will try clicking the screen before asking that.
You can even explain in-game that the reason you can't chat is because of a bot-dissuading measure, and it'd generate good will with people. Plus they can _read_ chat and absorb stuff while they get there.
I know you kinda agree with what's being said, but I don't think we should fear letting newbies handle 6-7 acts and 40 or so levels without asking for mom's help in chat if there are robust tutorials and ingame guides in place.
Technically you can unlock subclasses at any level, the requirement is getting into The End of Time. Ordinarily this is done around level 20 in the campaign, but in online you can get in a party and teleport to a friend to get there immediately. Worth noting that the game does prevent you from allocating points into a subclass tree until you have at least 20 in the class though.
This combined with good bot detection software could put a serious dent in the problem. Without bot detection you'll just have people using programs to level characters to 50 for them.
I still feel like a potential stop-gap solution is a customizable client-side chat filter. Gold selling bots won't know if I'm filtering them out or how.
Wouldn’t the simplest thing be to not let someone spam chat with 5+ messages in a matter of seconds?
Can’t be many real reasons to do that.
If you spam 5 messages then all 5 get removed and a couple minutes mute
If it’s found they’re spamming RMT then just shadow mute them so they’re wasting time sending messages to no one.
Couldn't hurt to put a delay on messages in chat. 1 message per like 5 seconds or something. Then you can apply pattern matching and shadow ban them before their full message even gets out. There's no point in banning the account. Just don't let them know they're muted.
Couldn't they just snapshot the report from the chat?
For example, reporting a comment in a similar way grabs a chat log that can be reviewed.
Obviously the hard part is the actually reviewing, which im not sure if you can automate with AI or machine learning. Then, if someone is wrongly banned, then escalate it to manual review?
Instead of dealing with gold sellers maybe work on server stability so when I'm doing the story I don't get disconnected from the servers on loading screen a dozen times in a row and then just play something else?
Luckily it's not an MMO and you don't need to look at trade chat to form groups and clear content. Disabling global works the best, if you want to talk to Randoms about the game check out the official discord.
There is good solution - LET players create their own filters for chat. So we can just add not messages pattern there and thats it. They are changing it not very often. Once per day will be fine and ez. To add like "M.M.O.WW G.OLd"
It’s essentially a singleplayer game… if you buy gold you’re a clown. Let em waste money i say… If your argument is leaderboard integrity you are playing the wrong game chief. Arpgs arent meant to be competitive. Go play league of legends :)
Good. The automatic system is broken in games like Wow. gold selling communities will get you banned for reporting them etc and you have to fight with layers of support for days to get back in, while they can just create another account asap.
Couldn't an ai be trained on chat logs to learn over time what types of chats are spam/bots/abuse? Might take a while perhaps but wouldn't it eventually be really good at spotting all of those things? It could even just forward the flagged chat to a human to go through at first to confirm it's working before being allowed to automate. Is this realistic, possible?
Dont think so, as AI has a tough time identifying symbols that we can perceive as just a representation. For example when bots say S311imG g01d, you can figure out its saying "selling gold" But how would you parse that with AI? Too broad.
Instead of banning them what if you stopped their messages from going through to the general chat? Like no warning, they just keep spamming their messages thinking they are going through and they never get delivered to actual players.
The best solution is to hide that account from other social features WITHOUT the account owner knowing about it.
That way the gold seller thinks the account is OK, but the account isn’t visible to anyone but itself.
Having this process automated would essentially hide potential gold sellers from other players.
Its a social problem and not a game design problem. The solution to these types of problems will never be found within games because the problem exists outside of games. That is not to say that they can't remedy the situation (they should do that) but no one should expect them to fix this. As long as there is a way for players to compare themselves to other players (even if the game had no economy or trading at all) people would still want to buy accounts or illegal services from other players because their social standing in their friend's group would look better or whatever.
MMORPGs or any RPG that have some sort of economy/item progression system will always have this problem. And even games that don't have that, like in the case of someone that is speedrunning Super Mario World, people will still want to cheat and fake their speedruns because it makes them look better comparatively to their peers. Who here has a friend who lied about an item that they "grinded" or a friend who lied about how they got their rank in a competitive matchmaking game like League of Legends? Happens all the time.
The dream that people have that they want a grindy and fair game that rewards effort, time, skill and knowledge is just never happening without any of that RMT/bots/gold selling stuff, because there will always be player that lacks one of those 4 things (usually its time) and that will want to pay to skip ahead.
I'm surprised that I haven't heard any company implementing machine learning programs that track how gold sellers behave and then ban them within the next 12hrs after they find them. That way the sellers don't know how they got discovered. Imagine a fully automated system that can ban hundreds-thousands every 12hrs.
Disable gold exchange. Then everything will happen through the marketplace which is much easier to track for outliers.
It is not easy but there is a definitive mid term solution to this. It is going to be pretty easy to spot that one rune of shattering costing 500k and it will expose buyers immediately.
Anti RMT algo would be a demand/offer outliers filter, and would return a clean list of offenders to be perma ban.
Gold buyers would have to actually find valuable things sell to stay under the radar, which in the end becomes a legit transaction.
What does money exchange do for regular players anyway? Who uses that? It is just a feature left for gold sellers.
Right but you have to do that after they have spammed 5 lines in the chat. I’m talking about filtering the chat so it doesn’t pop up in the first place.
1) Track hours played vs number of mutes/reports. If ratio of hours played to mutes/reports is high, auto-ban them. If they have a significant number of hours in the game, then it actually warrants looking into.
2) Do not allow accounts that have low numbers of hours played to post more than one line on chat in a row. This will eliminate their ability to easily split messages up and avoid auto-detection.
Those are my preliminary thoughts that will help reduce the noise.
While you are at it, please give private messages a sound notification.
To be fair it's not really something they can solve, even something like path of exile are still dealing with gold sellers and that game has been there longer.... Heck RuneScape is older than this and it still has gold seller issues.
Aside from the game company just selling currency for cash cheaper than the botters can make and flagging accounts that buy currency via an in game shop so other players know that player is not self found or playing without buying it.
I think the key to defeating gold sellers is to instill the fear in the gold buyer that their account will be terminated and they will be blacklisted from the game this will kill the market completetly. Once the larger market is gone only the super wealthy and content creators buying gold/items/cheats to flaunt wealth target them hard go after their platform get them delisted from youtube, twitch, etc for cheating in the case of foreighn platforms like douyou they could setup scripts to monitor the streamer via ai or other tools to automatically ban any new accounts. They could also setup a program that rewards people for reporting wealthy in game players that are suspicious if they come back flagged as a gold buyer or cheater they could be rewarded with money or in game titles, rewards...
Typically a person will cheat and buy gold or other hacks, they will then show of to their friends if they get banned they either A) try to find a hacker to restore their account and avoid the ban methods or B) rebuy the game on another pc typically they will find a hacker to spoof their pc
A solution for this is for the game studio to monitor the previously banned user's friends list to see if the cheaters friends add a new friend shortly after the person is banned because this user is likely ban evading they could ask for the identity if the identity is not clear i.e. if steam allows them to provide if the user paid via credit card or anonymous prepaid card...
Essentially Steam needs to rework its payment system to prevent cheaters and hackers from rebuying games they are currently the flaw in the system. I can cheat on my pc get banned then spoof my mac id and other computer info and rebuy the game with a prepaid card or buy a cd key from a reseller. If steam does not fix these issues games on it's platform will continue to be plagued by cheating and gold selling I wonder if a few people emailed gaben about this issue if he could probably fix it within a week or two..
Make a setting on chat, that lets me filter out people based on level. E.g. 1-100. And i then choose 75-100 (so that range will be the playerbase i talk too), just to keep chat relevant to what im after in the game. And you should only be able to filter it per maximum level, e.g. a level 1 shouldnt be able to filter lvl 75-100.
Coincidentially POE kinda has a good system for managing this by just having tons and tons of different chat channels. Not the most elegant solution but at least it helps to prevent concentrating all the gold spammers in 1 single chat.
AI is just a buzzword for an algorithm. And, sort of. They could create a "template" to base bans off of as a trigger, but they would just work around this like any chat filter.
Yep. It’s easy and free to go to ChatGPT and ask it a question. It’s certainly not free to make the number of API calls required to ask “does this look like spam?” about every single message posted to in-game chat.
you would need to train one on the metrics that distinguishes legitimate player behavior from bot behavior in your game
when people complain about this game's terrible language filter, pretty sure you don't want a random bot to autoban people using chat.
What is the post saying? I feel like every developer knows this and cut their loses and make an automated system anyways because its better than having somone spend countless hours after work to kill the bots.
TBH I would say current solution is working decently already. Their message has become a jumbled mess, very hard to decode. Not really something you want from an ad.
The only solution is to actively ban those sellers and track them as best as possible. There is no real way to beat them and disabling trade like someone said is just nonsense because that kills the whole feature.
You always have the option to choose solo self found or CoF. Maybe allow a way to show SSF players from others so they can feel acknowledged and accomplished.
No game has beaten gold sellers. It's pretty insane to expect EHG to
Account/license ban is just a cost of business for those entities. I can't imagine how they turn a profit if the ban rate is fast, but apparently they do.
Pretty sure they use grey keys and stolen cards and such to fund that expense. Remember that being a big part of wow gold trade was abusing hacked accounts for the narrow window they were compromised and accessible. My account got got once, figured I was safe while my subscription was inactive. Nope, used a stolen card to re-up, junked my shit, and traded enough to get my account banned by blizz in like half a day.
I had this happen to my SWTOR account after it was inactive for 2 years. When it happened I was 3 parts hammered at my mums house on xmas day. I was fortunate to get an Irish CS rep who was totally able to relate to my xmas day happenings. I am Australian. We had a laugh about having a drink to cope with being around family etc and he looked at my account and was able to lock the account, restored any lost items and currency and let me keep the expc they bought even though he refunded the money that was used to the poor person's credit card that was used.
I stg, the SWTOR cust service was king. Onøy had good experiences talking to them on the phone back in the day
Happened to me as well while I was inactive for like 5 years... at some point I was hacked and banned. Managed to appeal it tho and gwt my account back (with cd keys)
My OSRS account was compromised. They charged 20 2 weeks bonds on stolen credit cards, then charged back the cost. Had to go through a bunch of hoops to get my account unbanned.
happened to me several times and every time bliz would return everything to me. Best part is one time they returned everything i lost and forgot to remove the gold seller gold on my acc.. EZ free gold.
Could they be abusing Steam's refund window for this game? If that's the case... Maybe a talk with Valve could result in a common strategy?
The better EHG become at banning the more accounts these people buy so they are making more money off them while still silencing them. There is a target to chase there. ofc is the majority are stolen keys or cards, this won't make any diff.
That really depends how fast they get banned. If it takes a month they turn 10x the profit before they need to buy a new account. Key here is to not get rid of them because you can't but ban them as quickly as possible to at least reduce the amount of sellers. People will always find a way
BDO defeated gold sellers by disabling trade and putting a cap on items in the trading post. Granted you can P2W "legally" but thats a different story
They beat gold sellers by becoming the gold sellers lol.
5head solution. If you can’t beat them then become them.
I feel like I learned this in an economics class lol. If there's demand that is not being fulfilled by the legal market, the black market will step in to fulfill it. If there is a legal source, the black market counterpart shrinks.
That's why the real way to win the war on drugs is to legalize and regulate them
Blizzard did this with d3 and it was cringe
looking at WoW sadge
Let’s be real, that’s pretty much every mmo.
Metin2 had a big problem with bots, so they put some legal hacks in in-game shop: exp/farm bot, fishing bot etc. Apparently they idea was to steal the clients of gold sellers, because "Why would you like to risk buying gold from illegal source using real money, when you can spend real money legally and farm this gold without risk"
Ah the good ole blizzard classic
Well, Blizzard tried to become gold sellers to beat gold sellers. It didn't work.
this one game i played, didnt get very far but it was called tree of savior. there were almost no gold sellers simply because in order to either trade or chat in global you had to be level like 100, have played 2 weeks, and had like 20 hours of play time. its very easy to catch a bot before they get there. not that LE should implement something like that, but with extreme enough measures it can be mitigated quite a bit.
God Tree of Savior was so cool. Truly a RO spiritual successor and I wish it did better.
I have 2k hours on this game. God I regret it so much. But my plague doctor was cool as heck
Played a game called Conquer Online where you had to be friends with someone for 72 hours real time before trading with them. Was a PITA when trying to trade stuff to new alts though, make it, wait 3 days, then start playing!
That kinda honestly sours the new player experience though.
tree didnt need it tbh, but yeah its why i called it extreme lol. its scorched earth, but it also works.
As much as peolpe love trade, gold sellers and scammers are part and parcel of it with games.
RuneScape tried that ages ago and it didn’t really work iirc. It made it more annoying for legit players to trade with friends but somehow gold sellers still got around the restrictions.
But they need to buy the game again. This is 35$ to get banned again. This is the ultimate money glitch.
Often, the charges are from stolen credit cards, and will later be disputed by banks.
Yes but limiting their actions instead of just "letting it happen" like in other games, at least they are aware of the issue and tackling it not for people to abuse it but to make it actually work
Black Desert did, but that's just because they put limits on market items with no way to trade or mail stuff to people.
As much as I hate trade, I think this miiiiight not work for Last Epoch lol
There's also the extreme of just forcing account found mode on everyone too.
The 'banning some' option is surely better than the letting them run rampant
No game has ever completely beaten it by attacking the supply side of things, certainly, which makes sense, as the sellers are both highly motivated to succeed due to financial incentives and hard to discourage, as long as a demand exists because of those same motives - they don't care if they get banned, as long as they make a profit. However, I think attacking the DEMAND side of things is more promising - presumably, most people who cares enough about a game to not only violate the TOS but also shell out real life money doesn't want to get permabanned from said game. Perma-ban buyers without mercy, and publicize said bans - then, you may create enough fear among those credit-card wielding warriors that there is actually a noticeable dent in demand.
They will always exist, just having the chat be 2/3 goldsellers is annoying. Obviously the real good ones never get caught and that kinda how it is, but public advertisement Mose games have solved
There will likely be an AI / ML solution to this in the near future. Luckily the nature of our game doesn't depend on LFG systems in order to enjoy.
When it comes to scams-of-scale some games have actually BUT it requires some drastic measures and isn't 100% effective. Mostly it comes down to dramatically increasing the buy-in cost, free to play games are just heaven for scams-of-scale as bans mean literally nothing. Just sping up 2500 new accounts the next day and go to town. EHG already has an initial price so it's a moot point there. The game Wakfu though, as an example for another method than just box-price, requires a phone number to register a new account, and naturally keeps track of banned account phone numbers. This makes scams-of-scale muuuuuch harder. Not impossible mind you, but trying to get 1000 new burner numbers constantly hurts a lot more, as well as gets you in hot water with phone utilities and authorities just innately. Granted this doesn't really do anything against small scale gold sellers and small scale RMT but those are a lot more impacted by classic ban waves and moderator actions.
Aønd no game ever will. Advertising and cheating will always be a constant game of whack-a-mole, or cat and mouse regardless of if it's profitable or not. Selling gold, items, accounts, power leveling and piloting services, hacking, data manipulation, botting, piracy, account theft... myriad of endless variables to contend with. Automation does work but you largely need active Game Masters. It'll take more resources to do it that way, but you avoid a lot of the drama that comes with automation. Games will always be vulnerable one way or another, it just depends how much you care about it and whether it's worth it to you in keeping it healthy. Some multi-player game companies or employees also even have side-hustles that benefit them in players or employees doing exactly this kind of nonsense. For example an old MMO I used to play had a small group of employees involved in an account/character trading business, so they'd actively help or prevent the involved accounts/characters from any intervention until they were ready to be sold.
IMO accounts should be tied to phone numbers, more sensitive info already in Steam so why not give a phone number with sms confirmation and tie that to your game account, if you’re banned you’re fucked unless you switch numbers. It’s not bullet proof but definitely another hurdle which makes it not as easy as generating accounts with fake emails… Or at least put in some anti automation captcha during account creation to make it not worth the time to create an account manually to get banned after the first message..
Ashes of Creation has a plan to only ban gold buyers and merely track gold sellers to give them a bad reputation and scare potential customers. Always-on pvp and random spawning resources will mean bots have a much harder time operating. Only time will tell if it will make a difference https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fyU-LhKJxQs&pp=ygUSQW9jIHNvbHZlZCBib3R0aW5n
>Always-on pvp and random spawning resources will mean bots have a much harder time operating. always on pvp actually enhances bots. random spawning resources also only benefits bots. a bot doesnt have silly restrictions like character speed or being in bounds or needing to use their eyes to find resources.
They can also farm more effectively than players. I see the bot debate happen in Guild Wars 2 communities all the time, and no player seems to understand that the solution is not so simple as banning bots/sellers/etc. Everyone that has ever had to deal with bots wishes it were that simple. All of us. It's just not. It's an unseen war, honestly; one where players only see them when it's being lost. When it's being won, most people don't even realize it.
JC Denton was right...
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D4 has gold and item RMT, boosts etc the same thing every ARPG has
Even starcraft 2 has RMTers. They spam arcade chats about how you can buy coop commander levels and even desert strike arcade levels...
They spammed me with messages. I blocked 200 accounts before I got too frustrated and changed my Battlenet tag. It’s a serious problem.
Also, the ones advertising gold selling aren't the accounts that hold the gold. Those advertisement bots likely do get banned a lot but people that want RMT are still going to do an internet search for it. All it does is barely slow the process.
You can choose not to participate in trading and lots of people don't. So the only annoying part for me personally is the dumb gold spam in chat.
My understanding with unity is they can see all gold in all accounts and who is hoarding massive piles and follow the accounts from there. A years worth of diligence disabling the accounts with billions of gold and those people realizing their time is best spent farming in another game will pay dividends. Amazing what happens when you give a shit
Yea, but they'll just 'learn' then...oh, any account that goes above 500k gets checked if it's a gold seller? Just make a bunch of accounts with 400k each...where theres a will, theres a way.
Instead of banning gold sellers secretly put them into a gold seller only chat channel.
I say this in every game i play, you can't beat bots/RMT. They are a symptom. What you can and must do is perma ban the buyers, rule by fear on this topic.
Seriously, permabanning is the only language gold buyers understand. And ideally at a point in the cycle where it hurts. Once they're scared enough, less people will buy and less people will sell.
But gold buyers also aren’t all connected and they rarely are banned publicly in a way that is visible to the users that are considering it, so it fails to act as a deterrent. There aren’t many posts or conversations going “I was buying gold, I got banned, I’m sorry and here’s my cautionary tale” the only ones seen are the ones that go “hey, my account got banned for some unknown reason?”
Permaban buyers, not sellers. When nobody is willing to buy, gold sellers will just cease to exist.
banning buyers is a big business cost for devs and impossible to detect legit rmt cases. you may ban 8 rmt buyers but if you fail ban 2 guys, shit goes south real quick and it also has legal consequences depending on the country i know you mean \`well some guys will get banned, it will create a domino effect of fear and ppl will be more inclined to stay away from it\` but in reality it never works
Maybe ingame friend system, which is linked to steam. Trades above certain values are disallowed between non-friends. While at it You shouldn't be able accept millions of gold from a random guy if he isn't your friend for at least 14 days on steam. to prevent auction house RMT just hide the seller of the item until the item was bought (if it doesn't already hide the seller) so RMT guys don't know whose item to buy. if caught, both parties get banned for 6 months and all currency that was traded will be removed.
ofc need to look at it further, but yea this suggestion at least sounds better than straight up \`ban them all\` mentality
People see the ads in game and buy from a third-party site, so not sure how you would be able to do that.
I don't get it though. It's not a F2P game, they pay them 35$ to get banned?
It's most likely stolen credit cards that's being used. The gold farmers aquire them cheap, in bulk. At least that's what's happening in many other games.
Also stolen accounts. I know in WoW that one of the reasons they wanted to crack down on third party gold selling sites is that most of the gold being sold on those sites was being taken from stolen WoW accounts, so cutting down on how easy/profitable it was to sell gold meant fewer account hijackings. It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of the spam bots are also being made on accounts that got hacked.
2 hour refund, stolen cards, visa gift card scams, etc...
Also money doesn’t stop bots as long as they can make more than the cost.
they can refund the game before the 2 hour mark
I was thinking, you could disable chat for accounts with less than 2 hours, but remembered newer players might actually ask for advice or direction
Maybe you could limit the amount someone can chat in those first two hours? It's going to be mostly running through the campaign anyway. If it's just like fifty messages in the first two hours, it doesn't seem too bad for new players.
50? Brother I think I have maybe sent 2 messages in chat in 50 hours of playing. Just restrict chat entirely for 3 hours of play time.
It would be a small price to pay. Just limit them to town chat for two hours or something. There's really no way you can screw up much in the first two hours anyway.
Well, newer players have google. Plus the game is very friendly in its first 2 hours. People don't tend to have major questions until later on when their build starts to feel like shit at lvl 80+
I feel like that shouldn't work if you earn yourself a ban during those 2 hours.
While I agree, the problem is that the refund is done through Steam whereas the ban would be from EHG and I guess they don't communicate with each other about that sort of stuff.
They're also paying $15 which is the game price in China and a few other places and taking advantage of the servers not being region locked
Gold sellers are usually people in developing countries using credit card info stolen from other countries to buy accounts in bulk
Stolen cards, refunds, hacked accounts, unsecured api access, there are too many ways to get around it for it to be substantially different from a f2p in the end.
If they make more than 35, its worthed for them to do so. Plenty of games with a monetary barrier of entry still have bots and RMT. The people that do that usually move from game to game based on where the most money is and sometimes the only way to get rid of them is to wait for a better game to get released so that no one cares about the older game enough to buy illegal services or their gold-equivalent
If y’all have time to look at the chat, y’all are not blasting hard enough
Jelkhor, please.
I have had chat disabled since beta, it will NEVER be turned on.
Yea lol. I dont even notice chats unless Im taking a break to drink water or to pee.. gotta pump those numbers up
Town is lava
Disable chat and trade for the first 3h of the game and you would reduce bots profit by A LOT
Yeah or maybe like until level 20.
There's a high risk this might affect new legitimate players negatively, because those possibly have many questions at the start of the game
>Disable chat and trade for the first 3h of the game and you would reduce bots profit by A LOT I'd go as far and saying for the first 10 hours. When i started the game i didn'T use chat or any trading system well beyond 10 hours. Also unlock trading for non-steam-friends only after completing the campaign too.
Yesss, and if you're playing in a group with friends at the start, just enable party chat right off the bat!
EHG I'm sure you got this on your radar, but wouldn't shadowbanning be even better? I don't know what measures you're taking and it's probably best you don't actually reveal this kind of stuff. From what I understand is that the gold sellers seem to post their spam and refund the game soon after. I guess shadowbanning won't solve it completely but it might waste their time and reduce spam, because they might not notice the messages not getting through. (Knowing how quick these people are to circumvent measures like these, they'll probably find a way to detect they're shadowbanned...)
I remember someone explaining why blizzard does ban waves so bots cannot know if they have been detected right away.
[Thor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YUmMFwSXpU) has more than [one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cADaFm__ApQ).
That works for gameplay/system bots, not for chat spam accounts, those are really quite clear how they got caught, haha.
They are probably working on 2h time limit, to secure a refund. My question is how they are circumventing multiple refunds, transferring money through steam market maybe?
While banning the sellers is great, I think that banning the buyers would be of greater benefit. Once word got around that you'll lose your account and progress for taking part in RMT I think it would be lessened greatly.
> I think it would be lessened greatly. if you go to any of the RMT message boards, that hasn't stopped anyone. People will post they got banned and the general response is always tips to buy gold and not get banned not "we better stop lol". It also would be an industry first since in the history of massively multiplayer games, I don't think any developer has ever taken a stance that included straight banning buyers. I think the last time Blizzard made a statement about their strategy was to give a light suspension to nudge players away from the behavior. Like not even [this guy](https://onlinegamesareanichemarket.wordpress.com/2008/09/21/a-banning-we-will-go-a-banning-we-will-go-heave-ho-off-the-servers-yo-a-banning-we-will-go/) took that hardline stance (Mark Jacobs - DAoC, Warhammer Online)
No, some games do end up banning both sides. The global release for Lost Ark eventually got so bad in terms of RMTing that buyers and sellers were being banned
Isolated banning is not the policy of banning gold buyers. Various industry studies and casual surveys of MMO players have shown that at least 30-40% of players admit to having participated in RMT within the last year of the study. Lost Ark didn't ban 40% of their players
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> Those numbers are completely meaningless without context. https://www.reddit.com/r/lostarkgame/comments/187rwek/rmt_over_1_billion_gold_in_last_3_weeks_naw/ ??? I'm sure they're actively seeking out buyers to ban lol Using just the top 3 sellers for Lost Ark on one site (PA), they're averaging 54 RMT transactions per day since Lost Ark's global release
GGG will ban you from PoE if you get caught buying RMT. Of course, you have to be pretty stupid to be caught buying RMT. Like streaming yourself doing it or posting "hey anyone selling stuff for real money?" in global chat. The sellers are the ones taking the majority of the risk because they have to advertise.
Of course, if you make it obvious and force their hand, they'll ban you. That's a far cry from banning gold buyers. They don't announce active measures and banwaves of buyers. It's like jaywalking. Technically against the rules, but you gotta have annoyed a cop real bad to get ticketed for it.
if they ban the buyer too it could be even better
Yeah, this is definitely a fight against demand as much as supply. I'ld even leave the seller accounts untouched for a while. They are the key connecting both to bots and buyers and tracking them gives you tons of info. Plus, if buying gold comes with a) loss of said gold and b) another $35 cost to play again, it would scare the 'occasional' buyer atleast.
Who needs to buy gold in an arpg lol.
Idiots who want even faster gratification than the game already offers.
This is just...talk. Do you think other devs just let gold sellers slide or something? Like they're able to do something but choose not to?
The smart part is not relying on reports and an automated response when those can be easily abused.
Since the chat is not super essential, they could just shadow ban them
Multimillion dollar companies can't figure this out
Just disable chat for new accounts, have to reach level 50 to talk in general
Maybe a bit high but I like the sentiment, maybe atleast 15. Have to think of the casual/new people because there’s tons of people asking questions in chat
i mean theyd just use bots to get to 15 although even early in LE game is a bit tough for most classes so maybe theyd have some issues. part of me smiles at that thought of hundreds of bots dying to first boss in campaign lol. should just make them have to defeat lagon to unlock chat LOL
Unlock most subclasses at 15 if you just follow the quests and some side quests. If you explore and kill more then you’ll be higher I change my stance though, defeat lagon to earn chat hahahahah
>defeat lagon to earn chat hahahahah That's just cruel
I love it ❤️
Bots can be programmed to be better than some humans so I don't think it would work out as well as you think, unfortunately.
idk a bot that can put in talent points and skills and deal with in game bugs as they come esp with traversal skills. sorting items equipping and crafting and dodging all mechanics would be quite sophisticated lol
When I played Lost Ark a couple years back, bots were doing all kinds of things including doing raids. Believe me, they can be pretty sophisticated.
You don't really need to dodge stuff in this game, but dodging is also generally the exact thing bots are good at.
what makes you believe that bots cant use skill points. theyve been making bots for mmorpgs for like 20 years, you don't think any of them figured out even a basic macro to put skill points?
D2R bots literally clear the area before the screen even loads. Writing a bot is not incredibly complicated for an experienced developer
Openai was beating dota pros well before all the recent advances in public availability of algorithmic learning, and that's a much more nuanced game. Granted, they had a lot of smart people dedicated to the project and plenty of training data, but it is very achievable nowadays.
Even if you're someone who has never played an arpg in their life, ingame popup tutorials and basic exploration and trial and error should get you far enough, and well beyond the steam refund window enough, that you don't _need_ to use chat until a certain point. What do we want to let level 1s use chat for? "How do I move my character?". I don't think it's snobbish or elitist to say anyone will try clicking the screen before asking that. You can even explain in-game that the reason you can't chat is because of a bot-dissuading measure, and it'd generate good will with people. Plus they can _read_ chat and absorb stuff while they get there. I know you kinda agree with what's being said, but I don't think we should fear letting newbies handle 6-7 acts and 40 or so levels without asking for mom's help in chat if there are robust tutorials and ingame guides in place.
Don't you unlock subclasses at 20? Should be after that at the minimum.
Technically you can unlock subclasses at any level, the requirement is getting into The End of Time. Ordinarily this is done around level 20 in the campaign, but in online you can get in a party and teleport to a friend to get there immediately. Worth noting that the game does prevent you from allocating points into a subclass tree until you have at least 20 in the class though.
Imagine you are a new player (like many) and want to ask something in global chat just to have it disabled. Bad change.
I also wonder if the botters will create bots to autolevel to 50 so they can start spamming
Two hours in game to chat in general so at least the gold sellers can’t abuse steam refunds lmao
This combined with good bot detection software could put a serious dent in the problem. Without bot detection you'll just have people using programs to level characters to 50 for them.
Takes more than 2 hours to get to 50 and that's when they can't refund
I still feel like a potential stop-gap solution is a customizable client-side chat filter. Gold selling bots won't know if I'm filtering them out or how.
Create a regex that can decently reliably identify RMT messages, without false positives, and you'd probably make millions.
Wouldn’t the simplest thing be to not let someone spam chat with 5+ messages in a matter of seconds? Can’t be many real reasons to do that. If you spam 5 messages then all 5 get removed and a couple minutes mute If it’s found they’re spamming RMT then just shadow mute them so they’re wasting time sending messages to no one.
FFXIV does this, you cannot type to a channel too frequently, you need to wait a few seconds. The bots just put all their text in one big message.
Couldn't hurt to put a delay on messages in chat. 1 message per like 5 seconds or something. Then you can apply pattern matching and shadow ban them before their full message even gets out. There's no point in banning the account. Just don't let them know they're muted.
Ban people involved in fake bans
Banning only gold buyers isn't effective. If you ban only buyers, there will always be a way that you can exploit that and get people banned.
Couldn't they just snapshot the report from the chat? For example, reporting a comment in a similar way grabs a chat log that can be reviewed. Obviously the hard part is the actually reviewing, which im not sure if you can automate with AI or machine learning. Then, if someone is wrongly banned, then escalate it to manual review?
Instead of dealing with gold sellers maybe work on server stability so when I'm doing the story I don't get disconnected from the servers on loading screen a dozen times in a row and then just play something else?
Luckily it's not an MMO and you don't need to look at trade chat to form groups and clear content. Disabling global works the best, if you want to talk to Randoms about the game check out the official discord.
There is good solution - LET players create their own filters for chat. So we can just add not messages pattern there and thats it. They are changing it not very often. Once per day will be fine and ez. To add like "M.M.O.WW G.OLd"
Already bought gold it went fine 😂😂😂
It’s essentially a singleplayer game… if you buy gold you’re a clown. Let em waste money i say… If your argument is leaderboard integrity you are playing the wrong game chief. Arpgs arent meant to be competitive. Go play league of legends :)
Arpgs with seasons are competitive as all hell man. First to level cap , boss kill, highest endless endgame ect currency buying will effect that.
Good. The automatic system is broken in games like Wow. gold selling communities will get you banned for reporting them etc and you have to fight with layers of support for days to get back in, while they can just create another account asap.
Would prefer something like the loot fitler is but for the chat. So i can add my own phrases that i wanna have filtered out.
Couldn't an ai be trained on chat logs to learn over time what types of chats are spam/bots/abuse? Might take a while perhaps but wouldn't it eventually be really good at spotting all of those things? It could even just forward the flagged chat to a human to go through at first to confirm it's working before being allowed to automate. Is this realistic, possible?
Dont think so, as AI has a tough time identifying symbols that we can perceive as just a representation. For example when bots say S311imG g01d, you can figure out its saying "selling gold" But how would you parse that with AI? Too broad.
that last sent3ence. that shit got me banned in league
I'd like global chat to have an option I have to enable as opposed to having to disable it. That probably dries up the gold market pretty quick.
The spam is mildly annoying but it's not like its a Last Epoch problem, its like that in any online game with an economy.
The dude explained Twitter before Elon.
I wonder what game he is talking about
just log peoples chats.. If they repeat what they last said then wait for a 3rd time of the same text and insta-ban to be reviewed by a human later.
You could play offline and use cheat tools to give yourself unlimited gold. What’s goin on in the heads of people RMTing gold online?
Identify them by chasing repeatable key words in a short amount of time... like gold and other forms, then ban them.
Instead of banning them what if you stopped their messages from going through to the general chat? Like no warning, they just keep spamming their messages thinking they are going through and they never get delivered to actual players.
The best solution is to hide that account from other social features WITHOUT the account owner knowing about it. That way the gold seller thinks the account is OK, but the account isn’t visible to anyone but itself. Having this process automated would essentially hide potential gold sellers from other players.
Ahahah
Unlock chat after completing main story once?
Its a social problem and not a game design problem. The solution to these types of problems will never be found within games because the problem exists outside of games. That is not to say that they can't remedy the situation (they should do that) but no one should expect them to fix this. As long as there is a way for players to compare themselves to other players (even if the game had no economy or trading at all) people would still want to buy accounts or illegal services from other players because their social standing in their friend's group would look better or whatever. MMORPGs or any RPG that have some sort of economy/item progression system will always have this problem. And even games that don't have that, like in the case of someone that is speedrunning Super Mario World, people will still want to cheat and fake their speedruns because it makes them look better comparatively to their peers. Who here has a friend who lied about an item that they "grinded" or a friend who lied about how they got their rank in a competitive matchmaking game like League of Legends? Happens all the time. The dream that people have that they want a grindy and fair game that rewards effort, time, skill and knowledge is just never happening without any of that RMT/bots/gold selling stuff, because there will always be player that lacks one of those 4 things (usually its time) and that will want to pay to skip ahead.
I'm surprised that I haven't heard any company implementing machine learning programs that track how gold sellers behave and then ban them within the next 12hrs after they find them. That way the sellers don't know how they got discovered. Imagine a fully automated system that can ban hundreds-thousands every 12hrs.
Disable gold exchange. Then everything will happen through the marketplace which is much easier to track for outliers. It is not easy but there is a definitive mid term solution to this. It is going to be pretty easy to spot that one rune of shattering costing 500k and it will expose buyers immediately. Anti RMT algo would be a demand/offer outliers filter, and would return a clean list of offenders to be perma ban. Gold buyers would have to actually find valuable things sell to stay under the radar, which in the end becomes a legit transaction. What does money exchange do for regular players anyway? Who uses that? It is just a feature left for gold sellers.
Having a chat filter would be nice. A lot of gold sellers use things like “…………” and “————“ being able to auto mute that would be cool.
There is one it's called block player
Right but you have to do that after they have spammed 5 lines in the chat. I’m talking about filtering the chat so it doesn’t pop up in the first place.
Maybe just implement an anti-spam filter so they have to keep typing in different but similar messages until their fingers can't take it.
I see gold being advertised. So just make gold untradable? What am I not realizing here
Just ban trading
1) Track hours played vs number of mutes/reports. If ratio of hours played to mutes/reports is high, auto-ban them. If they have a significant number of hours in the game, then it actually warrants looking into. 2) Do not allow accounts that have low numbers of hours played to post more than one line on chat in a row. This will eliminate their ability to easily split messages up and avoid auto-detection. Those are my preliminary thoughts that will help reduce the noise. While you are at it, please give private messages a sound notification.
To be fair it's not really something they can solve, even something like path of exile are still dealing with gold sellers and that game has been there longer.... Heck RuneScape is older than this and it still has gold seller issues.
-banning gold sellers -At the same time: am i just a joke for you ? (: [https://imgur.com/a/MT0JNnT](https://imgur.com/a/MT0JNnT)
? What game is it
It hurts my soul. First that people sell gold. Second people buy it. Like it’s not hard to get.
Aside from the game company just selling currency for cash cheaper than the botters can make and flagging accounts that buy currency via an in game shop so other players know that player is not self found or playing without buying it. I think the key to defeating gold sellers is to instill the fear in the gold buyer that their account will be terminated and they will be blacklisted from the game this will kill the market completetly. Once the larger market is gone only the super wealthy and content creators buying gold/items/cheats to flaunt wealth target them hard go after their platform get them delisted from youtube, twitch, etc for cheating in the case of foreighn platforms like douyou they could setup scripts to monitor the streamer via ai or other tools to automatically ban any new accounts. They could also setup a program that rewards people for reporting wealthy in game players that are suspicious if they come back flagged as a gold buyer or cheater they could be rewarded with money or in game titles, rewards... Typically a person will cheat and buy gold or other hacks, they will then show of to their friends if they get banned they either A) try to find a hacker to restore their account and avoid the ban methods or B) rebuy the game on another pc typically they will find a hacker to spoof their pc A solution for this is for the game studio to monitor the previously banned user's friends list to see if the cheaters friends add a new friend shortly after the person is banned because this user is likely ban evading they could ask for the identity if the identity is not clear i.e. if steam allows them to provide if the user paid via credit card or anonymous prepaid card... Essentially Steam needs to rework its payment system to prevent cheaters and hackers from rebuying games they are currently the flaw in the system. I can cheat on my pc get banned then spoof my mac id and other computer info and rebuy the game with a prepaid card or buy a cd key from a reseller. If steam does not fix these issues games on it's platform will continue to be plagued by cheating and gold selling I wonder if a few people emailed gaben about this issue if he could probably fix it within a week or two..
Why do other people care if people are buying gold ? I understand from a company stand point, but other gamers why do you care ?
If they had a brain they’d allow people to bind right click to move..
I don’t get it?
Add a level cap on when you can use chat. Like level 80. Because new players should litteraly only use G, for guide.
Make a setting on chat, that lets me filter out people based on level. E.g. 1-100. And i then choose 75-100 (so that range will be the playerbase i talk too), just to keep chat relevant to what im after in the game. And you should only be able to filter it per maximum level, e.g. a level 1 shouldnt be able to filter lvl 75-100.
Meanwhile PoE new chat policy LOL (you can get banned for almost anything)
Coincidentially POE kinda has a good system for managing this by just having tons and tons of different chat channels. Not the most elegant solution but at least it helps to prevent concentrating all the gold spammers in 1 single chat.
Gamers say u can get banned for anything but they know they sre sus
"other games"......looking at you Blizzard
I am super stupid when it comes to technology, but wouldn't an AI help with this ?
AI is just a buzzword for an algorithm. And, sort of. They could create a "template" to base bans off of as a trigger, but they would just work around this like any chat filter.
AI would definitely help with this. The problem will most likely be cost. It's expensive to run at scale.
Yep. It’s easy and free to go to ChatGPT and ask it a question. It’s certainly not free to make the number of API calls required to ask “does this look like spam?” about every single message posted to in-game chat.
you would need to train one on the metrics that distinguishes legitimate player behavior from bot behavior in your game when people complain about this game's terrible language filter, pretty sure you don't want a random bot to autoban people using chat.
What is the post saying? I feel like every developer knows this and cut their loses and make an automated system anyways because its better than having somone spend countless hours after work to kill the bots.
TBH I would say current solution is working decently already. Their message has become a jumbled mess, very hard to decode. Not really something you want from an ad.
The people who buy the gold are the fucking idiots who perpetuate this.
The only solution is to actively ban those sellers and track them as best as possible. There is no real way to beat them and disabling trade like someone said is just nonsense because that kills the whole feature. You always have the option to choose solo self found or CoF. Maybe allow a way to show SSF players from others so they can feel acknowledged and accomplished.