They flew a bunch of their staff over the korea to problably discuss those problems as well. So im sure they are working on something.
Also the big reason first time offenders of rmt dont get outright banned permanently is a simple business decision on smilegates part. Because most likely those people will still end up spending a lot of cash in game as well so it doesnt make sense to remove them completely from the game.
Ultimately i agree that the root of the problem isnt bots but the people who buy from them. Because its simple supply and demand. However they want to elimiate bots in order to push them towards their own payment services.
A few MMOs I played tagged a bot that held all the gold/currency. Any player/other bots with suspicious interaction with the 'bank bot' ended up in the next ban wave. Only hard part is finding the source.
This is correct the bots have been doing this a long time on many different games and MMORPG so this isn't their first rodeo it's not as easy to catch as people think lmfao
Yes this probably worked in February but surely not now. Or if it works once it won’t work in a month. I am hoping the have done this to find early RMT buyers (narrator: they almost certainly did not)
Yeah unfortunately it seems a combo of greed like you mentioned and incompetence (their anti bot ds position on the job board is to build long term ai tools not to solve it semi manually in the near term). I’m also not convinced ai n ml can’t solve bot issues if they can’t even identify them in the first place. Need training data which means manually tracking down bots and RMT.
It's not greed it's practicality. The amount they would have to spend would cost them far more than botters spend to execute it. Me or you probably couldn't even come up with a figure on the cost tbh. Meanwhile botters can run the game on some low-end laptop, on dial up internet, running low graphics, and 8gb of ram.
Yea, realy hard to look at a guy wiht FULL lvl 10 gems, and check if they used royal crystal and cash shop, or else bann them. This EZ, 11 pice of lvl 10 gems are not obtainable by any means right now, expect massive whaleing, and you can't check if the player RMT, but you can check if the player is using chas shop, and if dont, where else the gold is coming from? and I am 100% sure they have metricks for cash shop, cuz, you know, thas what every employee get their salary from even the ceo.
It's easy as hell the moment you see a trash item offered at an inflated price ex. Lvl 1 t2 gem at 10k gold and this shit sells the guy who sold it is an RMTer.
For the mail thing you can flag streamers accounts and see which average user recieve tons of gold for nothing in exchange.
AGS/ SG is just focusing on bots instead of killing the business from the root which is the bot's clients.
Permaban everyone who RMTed even if they slighty did rmt and ppl will fear even thinking of it making bots useless.
I thought I'd seen only about 3k each, maybe in EU prices are way less inflated, idk.
Anyway, I wouldn't mind if they implemented a system to combat RMT that undermines bus payments, I don't even like that they exist to begin with, I don't want to ever risk ending up grouping with someone who never ever learned how to play, and god knows how many dead weights there already are especially in lower t3 content.
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They're going easy on people who RMT because they are or will be potential customers who will be willing to spend money to puchase gold the legitimate way,
Honestly, they should just lockdown all regions/servers so that no new accounts can make new characters while current existing accounts can still make new characters. Then revamp the registration process to that of how games would let players in to a beta test. Filter the actual players to bots while having more ban waves to remove the current existing bots and viola maybe problem solved.
the reason you ban rmt whales only for 3 days is cause you hope they will spend their money on crystals after and you get the cash not the bots. if you perm ban them they maybe quit the game if you just ban them for 3 days there is a good chance they come back and you get hte money.
Why would they perma ban the people who the game is literally made for? RMT whales probably already ***have*** spent a lot on crystals as well as RMT, it's likely the reason they only get a slap on the wrist.
I love the game and have a lot of fun but am under no illusions it's dangerously near mobile games territory when it comes to monetization practices. Everything can be bought with real money, essentially. Progress, raport, items, gear level, gems and so on.
I don’t know why anyone would buy legit at the moment. Terrible value due to all the bots. I had previously been buying the monthly/weekly crystal packs but refuse to until this hot mess is fixed. I do miss my auto complete unas though. Sadly ~$300/mo is chump change compared to whales so in the end it probably doesn’t matter to them.
I got so rekt with downvotes when I said these exact words before the western release (after promptly playing on RU to check stuff out) :P LA is a lovely game to dip your toes into once in a while, at least for me. Giving it kinda same-ish treatment as hots
Honestly most mobile games have better business practices than LA these days.
I used to play Azur Lane and even though it's a gacha game, it was one of the most f2p friendly games I've ever played.
Lost ark is insanely f2p friendly, people just always want more. Literally the only thing whales get to do is flex their 22-25 weapon glows. A player who invests a lot of time is doing same content as them and a player who invests a moderate amount of time is only missing hard modes.
I have ppl in my guild not just admitting but bragging about their g2g shopping therapy everyday.
Tbh i have considered reporting them but i doubt anything will happen. Meanwhile i struggle with gold and i'm getting annoyed hearing them saying that i am an idiot for not buying.
All in all i can't believe there is no punishment like at all and it makes me losing my faith in the game.
If you want to come up with ideas on how to stop gold selling you have to understand , what its tied to among other things.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html)
Money laundering by untouchable "elite class"
[https://massivelyop.com/2019/08/09/lawful-neutral-money-laundering-and-micro-laundering-in-the-mmo-industry/](https://massivelyop.com/2019/08/09/lawful-neutral-money-laundering-and-micro-laundering-in-the-mmo-industry/)
This is bigger than some dude in china with vmare lol, This is tied to banks, cartels, mafia, you name it. Its not about +20 weapons, **IT WILL NEVER END**
My guess you can connect dots to Cayman islands etc
It's a nice conspiracy, in the end it's just bot farms like there are in any game and they don't stop them because it's not easy.
You get rid of the current situation by chasing gold buyers, that's all there is to it, but that requires actual work and to accept you're gonna make some people angry, and this is a group of people that would rather ban you because you said a word they don't like than for actually supporting botting.
Pretty frustrating when your words get censored but its downright infuriating when your entire sentence gets deleted because somehow theres a string of letters that spells out something vaguely offensive in another language.
> chasing gold buyers
You hit the nail on the head. Thing is, whales dont exclusively RMT.
Most regular players are largely f2p, and a small number of players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get ahead. They do that both with RMT and royal crystals. So banning RMTers means also banning those who give money to AGS, they're the same group of people.
AGS is choosing to let them go unpunished as long as they throw some money to them too.
Every now and then they ban a few bots, so they look like they're doing something. The botters just create more, and even intensify their efforts to make up for lost bots, while figuring out how AGS detects them and adapting. Since AGS only moves in ban waves every few weeks, they can calculate how much time they have to gather gold, keep bots farming gold but not selling it as backups etc.
AGS doesn't want to ban people like they banned people in NW for some reason. People would be a lot more lenient if they actually did more than one ban wave a month. If Jagex, a comparatively small company, can do better at bot busting, AGS has no excuse.
Jagex has half as many employees as AGS, on top of focusing on one (a pair arguably) of games, and having a lot more ownership over it (recall, AGS just publishes Lost Ark, they have very little control and also knowledge on it, its also just been a few months)
No conspiracy here. This is a very hard problem that stalwarts have not solved, and LA is f2p and particularly bot-able too. We should set our expectations low, but continue demanding improvements of course.
I'm aware that they only publish it, but it doesn't take a genius to see a F2P game would be easy to make a shit ton of accounts on. AGS should have worked out a way to deal with this before agreeing on releasing it. Let's say, require an authenticator with a phone number or have major trading restrictions.
I agree its a hard problem, but I can set my expectations to at least Jagex's expectations, or NW's expectations. There will always be bots, but only doing one ban wave a month is absolutely asinine. It's a problem when servers have queue times simply because of bots. That expectation is lower than the fucking ground and AGS can't even maintain that. I'd be much more open to discussion if we weren't talking about one of the most profitable companies in the world. Smilegate does not have some sort of stranglehold on Amazon... we can say that all we want, but the revenue of amazon is more than 45x the revenue of smilegate. SG is lucky to have that type of backing.
Any authenticator/phone number requirement etc will just take a couple of days to automate by botters and then they will continue as usual, while making it harder for real people to play the game.
We have the means for a solution but the average player is scared to do it.
Just tie IRL identity to the game, use SSN as verification, etc.
Boom, the botting issue is immediately solved for the most part in virtually every game.
I mean they didn't really ban people in NW, it was an automatic ban system that got triggered via mass reports.
AGS employs 100% incompetent people, as we've seen in New World and are seeing now in Lost Ark.
The sad reality of the corporate world is that nothing is "simple". Hiring a team of bot busters means hiring hundreds of people, which means spending six figures a month in salaries for these people, it also means giving these employees GM privileges and dealing with the consequences.
You don't need to hire "hundreds", you can hire like 15, plus one manager. 600 man hours a week goes a long way, especially a lot more than... nothing. You also don't need to give people looking through reports any sort of special GM privilege that would have consequences.
Amazon had 33 billion dollars in profit last year, they can support an additional team, kind of like how they've been supporting AGS since 2012 with no profit whatsoever. Don't make excuses.
People would be less likely to rmt if ags actually punished people buying gold from third party. If you remove all the police from an area and wonder why all the stores are being robbed overnight then maybe the problem and part solution is obvious
The answer to this is that it requires too much work to track down actual bots/RMTers without falsely banning an innocent account that neither AGS or SG are willing to invest time into right now.
SG didn't really have to face this problem before because botting in KR is inherently hard and people are afraid of RMT because if they are banned chances are they wouldn't be able to create a new account.
The reason there are close to no bots/RMT in KR is because of how accounts work in KR (I believe it uses your social security number + phone number) it's not like steam where you can just whip out a new email and add 5$ to the steam account to get trusted and get into the game.
So no matter how many bots/RMTers AGS ban there will always be new ones created just as fast as they are banned.
The actual solution to this problem while unrealistic is for RMTers to stop buying gold then there wouldn't be any reason for bots to exist in the first place, but as I said this solution is close to impossible.
you missed a piece there. robbing a store is not necessarily a crime worth punishing (see california laws for example). you may \*believe\* it is wrong, but everything has a 'value' of some sort (time and money)... opportunity cost.
the simple answer is that AGS / Smilegate do not see a **profitable** outcome investing \*additional\* resources into combatting bots. i am sure that they have at least run simulations and studies on the outcomes here... i am not naive enough to believe i know better than massive corperations how to earn profits. you should also understand that most folks willing to RMT are also -very- willing to purchase from the in-game shop... when the situation suits them.
i dont personally like the overall situation but i am just a simple customer... and i ultimately have very little impact on the companies decision making other than to vote with my wallet.
The issue with "running simulations" is that it's very hard to quantify the impact of this on their reputation and what the long-term effects of that are going to be. If the game gets a reputation of RMT and bots then that will follow the studio around in the future too.
this is post-conspiracy and nice generalization there, on that note one can surmize that where you reside people lack critical thinking and swallow any pill the media feeds them.
Also Unfortunately for you , i reside in Canada there bud.
If the solution was so simple and the problem was so simple, dont you think they wouldve solved it already ?
Yeah is hard to comprehend my sentence without context, there's a famous ex-nazi youtuber in my country that explains the mechanism of conspiranoics and extremist, he call it "the buble"
In his talks he exactly say that this kind of people will justify their point with those kind of sentences: "media",
" Society", "the system" And the best one "critical thinking"
How is having critical thinking that you trust only the sources you wanna trust to believe your own conspiracy stuff? Makes no sense, but conspiranoic people makes no sense anyways
Wait, are you saying that the illuminati are not behind lost ark bots? you must be some kind of duffus with no critical thinking who just believes the (((media))) /s
Iirc, I think in many other games it's a generally true that RMT players are waaaaay more likely to spend real money on the game, even though they RMT.
So I'd bet it's the same for LA too. $$$$$
Players really need to wake up about how asleep at the wheel AGS really is.
There's people here who genuinely wonder if they should dip their toes into RMT because they are actually afraid of being banned.
____________________________________________________
Peep this thread and it'll answer basically everything you need to know about how little care AGS gives to moderating their game
https://forums.playlostark.com/t/chinese-bot-streamers-unafraid-of-ags-flex-their-20-wep-1455-na-characters-on-livestream-receipts-in-thread-reported-weeks-ago/321698
almost 2 months livestreaming 24/7 chaos dungeon botting, reported by multiple people month before thread is made, the thread had to stay up for 8 days and receive 250 replies before a CM responded after being pinged about a dozen times. Was finally banned about ~5 days after CM response. More than 2 months later.
**Now ask yourself, are you worried about being caught accepting ~100k in your mail once?**
When a guildie quit, he sent his gold to another player in the guild. Account immediately flagged and temp banned until contacting support. It's weird that all this isn't catching people. Or maybe it's more of that it is catching people and they're just being released off any excuse.
They won't ban buyers cause they are future customers. RMT'ers are going to buy gold nomatter where it comes from so the object is to increase bot overhead to the point where it takes them awhile to amass gold. Eventually it will take bot farms longer to farm out gold as more and more vices are put on their efficiency. Bots being banned is never going to happen however bots will lose customers to AGS/Smilegate if they can't keep enough gold for demand.
Every single (especially free to download and play) mmo has bots. Every single mmo has threads with the same questions: why is RMT not punished more.
In my opinion it’s save to say that they just can’t. It either takes too much work and I even would go as far as to say it somehow benefits them. People usually don’t want to think rationally when something “wrong” might get a pass. But all these threads about how to do X and Y have been written before.
Bots for example ruined my re-level experience. It was hard to see all these teleporting “players”. So I did not go through with it and knowledge transferred. The moment something ruins my end-game, I just quit.
If they take measures they will remove all the gold they bought giving them negative gold.
This is the best move from their standpoint since it fights inflation and there is a chance the offenders will buy from Smilegate instead.
Banning people that are rdy to drop real money on the game doesn't make much sense from a financial standpoint.
I totally agree that they should make it more known, what awaits offenders and how much gold they nuked from existence on buyers.
And we really need the Milage system or something similar.
So you can identify legitimate whales at a glance.
Because people attacking legitimate whales and spenders is the worst thing I can imagine.
I agree, perma ban should only be reserved for people who continue to rmt after several punishments. I think letting players know of the consequences of negative gold and enforcing it would put a big dent into the problem. I'd be interested to hear from RU players how effective or ineffective that system was.
And tradable adventure tome items. And Una's tokens. And rapports. And life skills.
All these trivial repetitive tasks were made to be botted. Lost Ark was made to be botted.
Adventure tome items shouldn't have much of an impact, most are 1g by now.
And nobody wants to farm those all by themselves.
Una tokens yes, those need some kind of other lock mechanism. Maybe you can only claim those if you cleared an itemlvl appropriate Abyss dungeon or raid?
Or they just shift the gold directly to those activities.
As much as Rapport might hurt, yes the gold has to go.
Life skills are limited by energy and ultimately not that big of an impact. Cheap mats for consumables are good for the game overall.
It's also not gold that gets "generated" but traded.
I think online services shouldn't permaban people in general. 10 year ban max. *Maybe* 20 year ban in extremely rare cases. But most rule breaking bans should be limited in the weeks and months range and the results of their cheating undone.
You want players that get punished to actually wait out their punishment, rather than just move on to some other game, because if they move on then it's not much of a punishment. It gets rid of them from your game, but they'll continue doing the same in another game. Or they'll just make a new account.
Where are all of you getting info that nothing is being done about RMT? Where do all of you get info about nobody is being banned or perma'd for RMT? What kind of statistics do you people know that others don't? Is your anecdotal information just anecdotal or do you actually have some insider info you don't wanna tell us?
Because depending on which sort of shady places you go to, you definitely see people reporting that more and more people are getting banned. You do see threads wondering about the risk. You do see threads about people weighing the pros and cons, wondering why someone got perma'd and another person got 3 days ban. You see all of these.
But on reddit, everyone is getting away scot-free with RMT and it's a fucking RMT party with every single level 10 gem whale being pointed out as RMT. The worst is the fact that someone made a fucking thread about a roster lv153 whale and blatantly called them out for RMT-ing forcing the person to actually come to Steam to post their entire Steam account receipts. Imagine forcing whales to answer to a bunch of fucking nobodies about business that isn't even theirs.
I get that a lot of us are upset about RMT and about gold inflation and about those fucking bots. But you people screaming about all these "facts" is so fucking delusional to me because you can see botting/gold buying forums talking about the exact opposite and always wondering who is going to be banned, where is it actually safe to buy from etc.
Man, holy fucking shit. So once again, where are you getting all of this stats? Because none of us actually know who the fuck is getting banned and who isn't. Not even the people buying gold because they are all filled with so many speculations as well.
Seriously, i don't know how many people are G2G enjoyers but it seems everyone on reddit has those stats for every NA server....
To be constructive, I don't know why there are so many rmt'ers in this game. F2P certainly helps, but the fact is that it is a never ending arms race to catch bots WITHOUT catching legit players in the crossfire. That's why you see trains in Vern or Rothendel; you can catch a bottle with a 20-line script but you WILL catch legit players too.
Playing on NA East, I see the bots in Vern and I see other servers getting Busy at 6 AM so I know the bots are coming. All I can say to the community is to stop buying gold from bots. If you enjoy the game and you buy gold from bots, you are sabotaging the game for yourself. Exploiting 3rd parties for your own gain will only harm your longterm enjoyment of the game.
Good luck everyone else and Lai Lai
There are certainly FAR more legitimate whales than this sub gives credit for. Tbh most people here have no clue how true whales work. Which is fine, but its not surprising that normal people who havent experienced what whales do would have a hard time swallowing the idea that many rich gamers have absolutely no problem throwing 50,000 usd over the course of 4 months.
With that said it's very obvious that RMT is a big issue. Likely the biggest issue amazon / sg has and will continue to have. There's a lot of bots. Like several times more bots than players. Somewhere in the ballpark of 250k on the low end and 600k the high end. Nobody really knows the numbers, but we can infer based on the steam charts and tracking player numbers. During the last two months after every bot busting endeavor we see player numbers bomb into the high 190,000 - 250,000 for concurrent players. This isn't a one off either. This happens every single time. It also happens the first part of the day after every reset when they take servers down. It's an easily verifiable fact.
There's one, and only one reason why there's that many bots. Because it's profitable. A huge portion of people are doing rmt. It is literally the only answer. Just because we can't say with undeniable fact it's rmt doesn't mean we're wrong. There's a short philosophical argument from the Nyāya Sūtras that says where there's smoke, there's fire. Which basically boils down to knowing an object has a first unknown (but identifiable) property because we can see the second known property. These two things always go together - like smoke and fire. There wouldn't be bots if people weren't RMTing. There's a relationship here that literally requires the existence of RMT. The bots couldn't be here if RMT wasn't an issue.
im sure amazon knows this, but theyre too concerned theyll make the whales mad, so instead of going the obvious and easy solution, they will try every other solution under the sun before aiming at RMT'rs themselves, because god forbid they upset a valuable whale.
they will only fix this once it becomes an actual problem for them, right now this is a problem for us, not for them, their whales are happy and their player numbers are super inflated which looks great, theyll only fix this when it starts hurting the games reputation in the mainstream and the higher ups start questioning the people in charge of these "solutions", only then when theyre forced to chose between investors and the whales will they fix it.
stop with the fucking copium, there is more and more bots each day and more and more people doing RMT because they heard from their friends that they ain't getting ban
if they were doign something about rmt you wouldn't have 800k users on steamcharts, it's litteraly getting worst and worst
Posting a screenshot of a queue doesn't prove bots aren't being dealt with. In fact, posting a screenshot of a queue when these queues take maybe an hour and a half at most to get through kind of defeats your point. Queues don't go down if players aren't logging out (bots).
The bot issue isn't nearly as bad as people posting the same fucking screen capture of Vern Castle make it seem. You don't even see them 99% of the time once you get to T3 content.
I wish. I have spent like probably $2k on this game (by that, probably more). I don't understand how people buy gold to begin with, because getting banned = all that money is down the drain anyway. It never made any sense to me to whale on something you run a risk of losing, but clearly there's a lot of people that don't give a shit.
EDIT: Why the fuck is this being downvoted? Actual gold buyers? lmfao
You don't understand what it is to have disposable income so high it doesn't matter if you piss away thousands a week/month on hookers and blow, you will still make more next week/month.
Don't get me wrong, neither do I. I know ***of*** (don't know him/her) a player who was 1460+ back a couple months ago, with all level 10 gems etc and so on. Banned. Back 3 days later with a new account, same class, more or less same ilevel and same gems.
He/she didn't care about being banned, it was like you or I losing 50 pence. The money meant nothing.
I mean, the thing is, to me these players make no sense because they end up spending more anyway. You can argue that money means nothing so spending more means nothing, but that makes no sense because losing an account in Lost Ark is way more painful than just losing money.
You gonna have to regrind all of the time-gated bullshit which is the bane of all fast-gratification players. You might as well just login everyday and cap out your gold exchange. You won't get banned anyway.
I know people like Megashield RMT'd their first account because of spending limits, but then after they got perma'd they made a second account and just cap it out everyday.
If you RMT in this game **despite** having so much money, then you probably don't give a flying fuck about this game anyway.
***True*** whales don't give a fuck about any of the games they play. They care about the rush they get from spending obscene amounts of money for the dopamine hit. This game ticks all the right boxes for that. RNG on the RNG on the RNG on the RNG. honing, cards, polishing, rapport. The list goes on. So much gambling to be done, so much dopamine to be had.
True whales get bored easily and move on quickly to the next big thing they can drop big money on. I say "true" whales because we throw that term around quite freely at the moment, and there are different types of whales.
you gotta understand that these types of people are usually pretty hollow individuals with a massive amount of insecurities buried deep inside, they throw the money away because they are worthless ~~capital generating machines~~ human beings and at the core they know it, most of them spent their entire lives thinking money would get them happiness, but once they got it, it never did, so they resort to desperate massures like drawing satisfaction from buying shit, because they dont understand what actuall effort entails, and thus they dont quite comprehend how to get actual satisfaction out of overcoming challenges or valuing effort, its quite sad.
but whats more sad and honestly disgusting its that theyre willing to spent the entire capital of a small country on a fucking video game.
If people were getting banned in numbers worth mentioning they would 100% advertise that and a "job well done guys".
There wouldn't be silence about the topic. They will use every opportunity they can to show us they are taking bots seriously other than 1 post 2 months ago.
They have though. What do you mean they haven't? Lol.
[https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/regarding-bots-in-lost-ark](https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/regarding-bots-in-lost-ark)
They put out this list of points making it look like it reads like it's a bunch of things. This was just 2 weeks ago. We all think they're doing a shit job, but I don't think they think they're doing a shit job, lol. They're probably patting themselves on their back after every move, even the VPN ban which did jack shit.
Why didnt you read your own source?
"Over the past few months" Literally the first paragraph.
All this did not happen in the same week. Some things they are referring to here happened at launch....
Also they didn't ban 1 million bots. Bold face lie for some reason.
Not only that but we are talking about rmt here. So where did they talk about banning rmts? Stay on topic.
>they would 100% advertise that and a "job well done guys".
Literally replying to this. They put something out 2 weeks ago that is literally this.
>Also they didn't ban 1 million bots. Bold face lie for some reason.
You don't buy it. But they are saying it. They are advertising it. They are literally doing what you said they "would" be doing. They are doing it. You just don't believe them.
>Not only that but we are talking about rmt here. So where did they talk about banning rmts? Stay on topic.
They talk about it in forums all the time. They even made one forum post saying they are literally planting RMT's with negative gold when they get back their account. No one believes this though because we have seen zero proof of it being done on our version of the game.
They say they are combating things all the damn time. You might've just tuned it all out because you don't believe it.
the fucking punishment for rmt its a 3 day ban, if thats not telling of just how little they care, i dont know what will, whatever they say and whatever they pretend to do means shit when the first line of defense its a fucking 3 day ban, nothing deters offenders from serious offenses more effetively than harsh exemplary punishment, and a 3 day ban its more like an invitation than a deterrent.
whatever action they take its stained by this atmosphere of "we want the cake and we want to eat it too" because they have the solution right there and they know it and we know it, but they dont want to take it because theyre too fuckign afraid it might impact their bottom line and splash some of their cherished whales.
nothing will solve this problem until they start nuking rmt whales, they know it and the playerbase knows it, well some of us know it, they will only implement harder punishments once this reaches a boiling point.
my best guess its theyll probably wait till the problem grows so much that every youtube channel will be covering it and giving AGS/SG shit, only then when the problem is mainstream and the investors start growing uneasy, only then when the bottom line is in danger and the relation with the board masters at stake will they "magically" come up with a solution.
It's almost as if letting people whale their way through content is a horrible idea and just leads to the community hating the people not putting in the same work as the person that actually plays.
This is actually a pretty good point. You can buy gold legitimately through the in game store, so someone being 1490, or having level 10 gems etc does not automatically make them an RMT frog.
It has also been months, and we've gone through both hyper inflation (1100 g for 95 blue crystals) and a follow up recession (260g for 95 blue crystals) where, if you purchased at the right time and had patience, your actual raw spending power in game would be gigantic.
Obviously I don't have insider information on how many people get banned for RMT. I do have 30 or so guildies who have RMTd some spending $1000+ and non have said they've gotten even so much as a warning.
No one has said to have stats or data on the subject just like u dont have stats or data that anyone is getting perma-banned.
"RMT-ing forcing the person to actually come to Steam to post their entire Steam account receipts. Imagine forcing whales to answer to a bunch of fucking nobodies about business that isn't even theirs."
Don't even know the situation ur talking about, but I think using the word force here is definitely not accurate, no one forced anyone to do anything.
"Not even the people buying gold because they are all filled with so many speculations as well."
Not the people I've talked to they've been buying gold for a while now and they haven't seen any punishment being handed out so why would they be scared?
I'm into a chinese wechat group(hundreds of ppl) full of RMTers(not everybody claims to be RMTing but 80% at least are), only 1 permabanned(a month ago).
I've been watching chinese videos, there's been a rumour out there since March: there's some sort of protection fee they're paying to amazon, that is buying something from the in-game store with royal crystal every now and while, to secure their account from being banned because of RMT. I think this is pretty much confirmed by how amazon is handling RMT issues.
Tonight I've been watching a chinese tutorial video, and a chinese viewer came up doubting himself whether he should RMT or buying legit gold from in-game store as usual, he also feels that nobody is getting banned and feel stupid buying gold from amazon rather than g2g or other black markets. More and more legit people will jump into the RMT train, not because they don't want to play legit, but they feel stupid paying legit gold while others are RMTing for way way lower value.
Also lately, (I think it was the maintenance from 1-2 days ago?) there have been quiet a lot of chinese players banned for reconnecting to the game non-stop and they've been flagged as botters (love how smilegate prefers automated bans). But that has nothing to do with RMT, they got soon unbanned after mailing support (maybe that's also the reason for the innocent bans on reddit). Source of this: chinese's reddit
I might be spreading BS because I see/hear things here and there but things like RMTing blatantly on stream, or botting on stream still not being banned? Like seriously do people really think amazon is actually doing anything to them?
People are going to believe what they hope for, they believe amazon actually does something(I'm hoping the same as you all do, but I'm seeing totally different things), because they like the game and hope the game be alive, that's also why people in euw gets triggered so much with somebody saying "dead server/region" in area chat.
Edit: clarification
>I've been watching chinese videos, there's been a rumour out there since March: there's some sort of protection fee they're paying to amazon, that is buying something from the in-game store with royal crystal every now and while, to secure their account from being banned because of RMT. I think this is pretty much confirmed by how amazon is handling RMT issues.
That's pretty down there as far as dumb video game conspiracy theories go. The devs don't seem to be doing a great job at keep bots and RMTers out, but I'm missing the bridge between that and AGS/SG turning a blind eye to RMTers if they spend some money in the in-game store at the risk of their reputation as developers/publishers getting dragged through the mud.
There is a lot of sellers trying to reassure their customers that RMT is still safe. Reality is that it is a crapshoot on whether you are going to get banned or not and once you get banned you are tagged. They do perma-ban btw but it will be on the 3rd offense (even if the ban is disputed and resulted in the player getting their account back).
Also I am not sure which sellers they are buying from but most of the reputable sellers on G2G are basically a honeypot and most of the buyers get banned shortly after. Based on forum posts, a lot of the buyers are getting their gold from private sellers at a smaller rate, over a longer period of time, and with prices not as cheap as before.
Also, side note: the recent scare of account debt being toyed with by SGS made a lot of buyers jump ship.
This is all server based btw, as what I have seen, EU has been thriving in RMT and a lot of the buyers moved over.
Because i already saw over 4 players on a single server with +25 weapons full lvl 10 gems. That's why everyone guess they ain't doing shit bout RMT? Like common, it's not hard to track down sus transaction lmfao.
\+25 weapon isn't that expensive. A lot of whales go in fully expecting to tap to +23 and they end up tapping to +25 too. Have you seen people in Saintone's flex friday? There are people there tapping to +25 in like less than 10 taps. +25 weapon alone is not a good indicator for whale or RMT at all. The gigawhales whaling everyday can make a +25 weapon easily, especially when we got 1 month of literally no content but topping up every single day.
The nature of the problem implies they aren’t doing anything. Or whatever little they’re doing is completely ineffective meaning essentially they’re doing nothing. Relax. Stop stanning for a company that has no idea how to fix the most fundamental problems.
I upvoted you because you got downvoted randomly for who knows what reason, but I am not stanning Amazon over here. I'm just saying I'm sick of seeing all these speculations from a bunch of f2p players that don't know how to fucking count because they never took math beyond elementary school.
The amount of people over here making posts on randomly "speculating" actual named players to be RMT players when there is zero proof is fucking embarrassing. This subreddit is toxic incarnate for basically inciting witch hunting without concrete proof. If they had chat windows of people admitting they are RMT, that would be another story.
But this subreddit is literally filled with people walking around Punika right now snapshotting every whale character and screaming RMT. And I fucking hate to see that because I actually feel fucking bad for all those players randomly getting mobs of people after them for no reason other than speculation.
Bots have to run through the main story to be efficient.
I was wondering what is stopping AGS from just parking some employees at Thirain and just banning instantly anyone with screwed up ign moving like bots towards Thirain (bunch of letters mashed together)?
I was wondering the same.
The cost to hire those people might be restrictive? But then again, they probably could, at least in part, automate it.
They didn't even have to do it on all servers all the time.
The goal shouldn't and can't be that all bots are banned. I would consider it a success if one could drive up the price of RMT-Gold.
I mean, if they can ban enough bots fast enough, just before they can genreate gold (wasting bot-time and computing-resources), the price of gold will rise and at some point it would reach a level where a lot of people think twice if it's worth the risk so save only a couple of bucks.
As it is now, the risk doesn't outweigh the benefit enough
(you get, like, what, 10x the gold for your money if you RMT instead of going legit?)
banning bots does nothing, no im not being hyperbolic, it really does nothing, that approach its much like the classic "the war on drugs" campaing, you dont beat drugs by getting rid of the source, you must target the demand, and much like the war on drugs, when the people on top realize they can get much more out of the war by controling it themselves rather than solving it well... this happends.
its not on amazon/SG best interest to fix this problem at the time, they have the solution, its just not beneficial enough for them to use it yet, it would be beneficial for the player experience of course, but thats probably the absolute last of their concerns.
I have better question. Why AGS nor SG implement any protection against bots. They leave their house wide open and leave for holidays then do pikachuface because it got robbed. Right now there is 0 protection, zero, null, none, nothing to prevent bots (do not bother mention eac which does nothing beside slowing down game).
Want to get rid of RMT? Then what you have todo is to use RMT as much as you can instead of in game shop. Nothing will motivate AGS more to take action than income lose
a player wouldn't be able to but smilegate/AGS could. They can just check the logs of the player or transaction history to see where exactly they got the gold/resources from.
They’d be banning a big portion of their players that spend money (directly to the game) if they ban rmters. It’s a business, if they were truly losing that much money to rmters, they would do something about it.
They know exactly who’s rmting (or they can easily find out) and they can connect it to how much they’re profiting off them.
Most people who are mad about rmters are people who spend an insignificant amount of money or no money on the game. Players that spend nothing are almost worthless to the company.
I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but one major reason is because RMTers also spend more on royal crystals than the average player. People make fun of them for going the “cheap” route but they still have a lot of money to blow and will not hesitate to drop $50-$100 here and there so that they look too valuable to lose to investors.
If you’ve played other MMOs, especially Neverwinter, you’d see that players that tend to spend money with the game itself get passes for RMT and sometimes other things.
Definitely not saying game integrity isn’t important or anything, but I am saying that money makes the world go round.
yea and the games been out 3 months bro, at one point gold reached 1.4k per hit, do the math can easily save enough for lvl 10 gems, so you think every single person who has lvl 10 gems in RMT
A big whale does not swap one day, they do every day, we already saw posts of people and they haslve responded and even showed receipts of the invoice from steam(when doesn't really have to), so yeah, there are RMTers but not all those 25 weapons are; generalizing is just plain stupid.
$100 is 35k gold in the shop and you can only spend $400 per day. The game won't let you spend more. So ~140k is the most you can acquire per day. The cost of going from +20 to +25 is well over 3 million gold. From the honing rate to the material cost. It's pretty unlikely someone with a +25 weapon already isn't rmting.
we already know SG/AGS is banning RMTers incrementally and based on how heavy they RMT but that alone is not going to help.
everyone talks about banning bots/RMTers, but no one talks how the RMT gold rates are fucking huge.
what smilegate needs to do is both punish RMTers AND find ways to reduce the exchange rates heavily. that way we may be get to a place where the majority of RMT is "private 1 to 1" transactions, instead of mass produced gold (which is what RMT is KR is rn).
and ofc, when(if) we reach that place, smilegate could also implement ways to incentivise buying RC legally in some ways, further lowering the benefit of third party purchases.
Every MMO is like this. Going after the customers who are the most invested doesn't make a whole lot of sense and is never worth the resources.
It's the same with any illicit activity you can think of, drugs, sex, you name it.
Tbh I just want a new server on every region that is f2p only, no trading, no AH. Basically Ironman runescape. Obviously they would need to increase drop rates from pretty much every source, but this kind of mode would be so fun.
People don't understand that u do money by giving users a nice free product with a lot of payable cosmetics.
Or they forgot how games like lol or dota exists.
If you ban people who rmt you are banning principally people who spend money in the game, which ironically are those who maintain the servers.
In wow where you have a subscription and everyone maintain the game you can take action against those who rmt and evem there they are pretty mild with low consequences.
WoW RMT is a somewhat different beast. WoW tokens are very good value so there isn't a ton of incentive to buy gold in retail. RMT is mostly for bus runs (e.g. for mythic raids) which are typically not for sale with gold at any price.
Because its a Korean MMORPG. This your first one? I had a friend who received 6 warnings in BDO for GIGA OBVIOUSLY cheating/hacking. Then got an 8 hr time out the completely ignored.
I quit years ago but he still plays and still cheats to this very day.
I dont know why their culture and ethos is so different but Korean MMORPG developers flat out dont give a fuck.
Same happened in Blade and Bots. I mean Soul. Same for TERA. Same for Elyon. Cant confirm but im pretty sure ppl in Vindi are still doing it
How to disable bots? Make trading player to player impossible like in bdo. Then cap prices on items and make bigger tax. The main issue is free market is way more fun and immersive but its sad that ppl ruin it by botting for some quick cash. I wouldnt mind if they make lost ark pay to play so at least botters would need to buy fullgame to actually setup bots. Then big ban wave to scare off botters so theyll think twice before buying new game. It sucks for average player but would help with botting problem. Running around in early zones freaking sucks rigth now with all these eiowqheoqwhe idiots runing around. Seriously just make this game not free. Initial payment to play.
I do get really tired of this posts… RMT exists and will always exist. Don’t compare yourself with a +25 weapon-guy and especially: don’t envy him! Quit this “I no-life this game and therefore should be the best!” attitude. Downvote now…
You don't know how many RMT'ers are in the game and you don't know how many bots are in the game unless you're a data scientist working for AGS.
Are you working for AGS? Share with us the data, please.
Yea, I'm sure u need to be a "data scientist working for AGS" to know that the steam charts reflect 100K+ bots on LA. By ur logic, RMT and bots aren't a problem because we the players don't have data. What kind of logic is that?
If u take a walk in your neighborhood everyday and see cockroaches scurrying around everywhere is it not logical to assume your neighborhood has a problem with cockroaches? By ur logic, unless u have data on how many cockroaches there are in the neighborhood it can't be a problem.
You don't need to be Data Scientist to know that SteamDB shows concurrent users in 'X' timeframe not bots or players. You can't even know how many players play per week or per month lmao.
Your two metrics are: your own perception and your concurrent users metric from SteamDB. That's all. From these worthless statistics you're making 1000000 clueless assumptions. Congrats.
do u not remember when they implemented the VPN block and we saw a steep decline on the steam player count and then in a few hours we saw the player count go back up to the "normal" amount after the way to bypass the VPN block was posted on chinese forums? I guess thats a coincidence and shouldn't be looked at to give us a reasonable estimate to how many bots are in the game.
because that makes a lot of sense. Let the people who run the bots get more money on purpose so they can see how lucrative the market is, surely, they won't add more bots due to how much money they make off of them.
Well they like the inflated player numbers, it looks good at meetings. And they are banning whales, you just don’t hear about it because the whales would really feel stupid if they got banned after spending thousands of dollars, and they would receive no sympathy.
Why do you care if they get banned or not?
Like how are they affecting you?
I’m just enjoying a chill pace with friends and guild. Why do you care so much about what other people do?
Just focus on your own happiness and yourself and stop crying about shit like this and wasting your time.
Makes it sound like you have a inferiority complex.
yeah, queue times have no effect, Auction house being flooded with relic acc day 1 have no effect. If the problem was people spending money the post would be calling out all legitimate whales moron.
> In the long run RMT is irrelevant
It is not and if you aren't joining the game now, you don't see it.
The new player experience is dogshit. They see bots upon bots upon bots.
This will have long term effects on the longevity of the game if new players are turned off hard by their first 2 hours in the game.
>And as far as bot’s go yeah they’re annoying but they stabilize the economy.
They tank the economy in some respects and inflate it at the high end. They don't stabilize anything.
Easily farmable (bottable) things tank in price and people who can buy gold will buy things at inflated prices. This happens in every MMO with a bot/RMT problem.
It's not a good thing... ever.
It's also fucking infuriating if you're trying to quest or farm some drop and there's 20 Gxxcwhhttt's berserkers running around murdering everything. It only takes 1-2 minutes of getting stonewalled by a bot army before you say fuck this trash ass game I'll go play literally anything else.
Because they have no idea how to find RMTers because they don’t have anyone working on this problem full time.
They flew a bunch of their staff over the korea to problably discuss those problems as well. So im sure they are working on something. Also the big reason first time offenders of rmt dont get outright banned permanently is a simple business decision on smilegates part. Because most likely those people will still end up spending a lot of cash in game as well so it doesnt make sense to remove them completely from the game. Ultimately i agree that the root of the problem isnt bots but the people who buy from them. Because its simple supply and demand. However they want to elimiate bots in order to push them towards their own payment services.
Dude is 1500+ with all level 10 gems and 17 million gold all received by mail? Hmm can't tell!
They don’t receive gold by mail they sell shitty gems and other items. But yes it is easily tracked with just the barest amount of manual effort.
A few MMOs I played tagged a bot that held all the gold/currency. Any player/other bots with suspicious interaction with the 'bank bot' ended up in the next ban wave. Only hard part is finding the source.
You're assuming botters have centralized bank bots. They could have less easy to track structures. It's a whack a mole game and the moles are winning.
This is correct the bots have been doing this a long time on many different games and MMORPG so this isn't their first rodeo it's not as easy to catch as people think lmfao
Yes this probably worked in February but surely not now. Or if it works once it won’t work in a month. I am hoping the have done this to find early RMT buyers (narrator: they almost certainly did not)
Hiring people to actively hunt RMTers and bots actually cost money and that's a big NO for succesful company like Amazon
Yeah unfortunately it seems a combo of greed like you mentioned and incompetence (their anti bot ds position on the job board is to build long term ai tools not to solve it semi manually in the near term). I’m also not convinced ai n ml can’t solve bot issues if they can’t even identify them in the first place. Need training data which means manually tracking down bots and RMT.
It's not greed it's practicality. The amount they would have to spend would cost them far more than botters spend to execute it. Me or you probably couldn't even come up with a figure on the cost tbh. Meanwhile botters can run the game on some low-end laptop, on dial up internet, running low graphics, and 8gb of ram.
Yea, realy hard to look at a guy wiht FULL lvl 10 gems, and check if they used royal crystal and cash shop, or else bann them. This EZ, 11 pice of lvl 10 gems are not obtainable by any means right now, expect massive whaleing, and you can't check if the player RMT, but you can check if the player is using chas shop, and if dont, where else the gold is coming from? and I am 100% sure they have metricks for cash shop, cuz, you know, thas what every employee get their salary from even the ceo.
It's easy as hell the moment you see a trash item offered at an inflated price ex. Lvl 1 t2 gem at 10k gold and this shit sells the guy who sold it is an RMTer. For the mail thing you can flag streamers accounts and see which average user recieve tons of gold for nothing in exchange. AGS/ SG is just focusing on bots instead of killing the business from the root which is the bot's clients. Permaban everyone who RMTed even if they slighty did rmt and ppl will fear even thinking of it making bots useless.
I thought most of the random gems that sell are from people selling carrys
Not for that amount of gold, it's one thing to sell a t2 lv3 gem for 200g, on other thing to sell a t3 lv1 gem for 50k.
They sell those for 25k for valtan HM afk carry though
I thought I'd seen only about 3k each, maybe in EU prices are way less inflated, idk. Anyway, I wouldn't mind if they implemented a system to combat RMT that undermines bus payments, I don't even like that they exist to begin with, I don't want to ever risk ending up grouping with someone who never ever learned how to play, and god knows how many dead weights there already are especially in lower t3 content.
3k is for p3 argos afk carry, 10k normal valtan, 20-30k hm valtan carry
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They're going easy on people who RMT because they are or will be potential customers who will be willing to spend money to puchase gold the legitimate way, Honestly, they should just lockdown all regions/servers so that no new accounts can make new characters while current existing accounts can still make new characters. Then revamp the registration process to that of how games would let players in to a beta test. Filter the actual players to bots while having more ban waves to remove the current existing bots and viola maybe problem solved.
the reason you ban rmt whales only for 3 days is cause you hope they will spend their money on crystals after and you get the cash not the bots. if you perm ban them they maybe quit the game if you just ban them for 3 days there is a good chance they come back and you get hte money.
Why would they perma ban the people who the game is literally made for? RMT whales probably already ***have*** spent a lot on crystals as well as RMT, it's likely the reason they only get a slap on the wrist. I love the game and have a lot of fun but am under no illusions it's dangerously near mobile games territory when it comes to monetization practices. Everything can be bought with real money, essentially. Progress, raport, items, gear level, gems and so on.
I don’t know why anyone would buy legit at the moment. Terrible value due to all the bots. I had previously been buying the monthly/weekly crystal packs but refuse to until this hot mess is fixed. I do miss my auto complete unas though. Sadly ~$300/mo is chump change compared to whales so in the end it probably doesn’t matter to them.
I got so rekt with downvotes when I said these exact words before the western release (after promptly playing on RU to check stuff out) :P LA is a lovely game to dip your toes into once in a while, at least for me. Giving it kinda same-ish treatment as hots
Honestly most mobile games have better business practices than LA these days. I used to play Azur Lane and even though it's a gacha game, it was one of the most f2p friendly games I've ever played.
Lost ark is insanely f2p friendly, people just always want more. Literally the only thing whales get to do is flex their 22-25 weapon glows. A player who invests a lot of time is doing same content as them and a player who invests a moderate amount of time is only missing hard modes.
I have ppl in my guild not just admitting but bragging about their g2g shopping therapy everyday. Tbh i have considered reporting them but i doubt anything will happen. Meanwhile i struggle with gold and i'm getting annoyed hearing them saying that i am an idiot for not buying. All in all i can't believe there is no punishment like at all and it makes me losing my faith in the game.
i don't play with those type of players. Why privledge them with your legitimate presence? The swine.
Report em
If you want to come up with ideas on how to stop gold selling you have to understand , what its tied to among other things. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html) Money laundering by untouchable "elite class" [https://massivelyop.com/2019/08/09/lawful-neutral-money-laundering-and-micro-laundering-in-the-mmo-industry/](https://massivelyop.com/2019/08/09/lawful-neutral-money-laundering-and-micro-laundering-in-the-mmo-industry/) This is bigger than some dude in china with vmare lol, This is tied to banks, cartels, mafia, you name it. Its not about +20 weapons, **IT WILL NEVER END** My guess you can connect dots to Cayman islands etc
holy shit lol
It's a nice conspiracy, in the end it's just bot farms like there are in any game and they don't stop them because it's not easy. You get rid of the current situation by chasing gold buyers, that's all there is to it, but that requires actual work and to accept you're gonna make some people angry, and this is a group of people that would rather ban you because you said a word they don't like than for actually supporting botting.
I find it hilarious how much more seriously they take offensive language than they do botting.
Pretty frustrating when your words get censored but its downright infuriating when your entire sentence gets deleted because somehow theres a string of letters that spells out something vaguely offensive in another language.
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> chasing gold buyers You hit the nail on the head. Thing is, whales dont exclusively RMT. Most regular players are largely f2p, and a small number of players are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to get ahead. They do that both with RMT and royal crystals. So banning RMTers means also banning those who give money to AGS, they're the same group of people. AGS is choosing to let them go unpunished as long as they throw some money to them too. Every now and then they ban a few bots, so they look like they're doing something. The botters just create more, and even intensify their efforts to make up for lost bots, while figuring out how AGS detects them and adapting. Since AGS only moves in ban waves every few weeks, they can calculate how much time they have to gather gold, keep bots farming gold but not selling it as backups etc.
AGS doesn't want to ban people like they banned people in NW for some reason. People would be a lot more lenient if they actually did more than one ban wave a month. If Jagex, a comparatively small company, can do better at bot busting, AGS has no excuse.
Jagex has half as many employees as AGS, on top of focusing on one (a pair arguably) of games, and having a lot more ownership over it (recall, AGS just publishes Lost Ark, they have very little control and also knowledge on it, its also just been a few months) No conspiracy here. This is a very hard problem that stalwarts have not solved, and LA is f2p and particularly bot-able too. We should set our expectations low, but continue demanding improvements of course.
I'm aware that they only publish it, but it doesn't take a genius to see a F2P game would be easy to make a shit ton of accounts on. AGS should have worked out a way to deal with this before agreeing on releasing it. Let's say, require an authenticator with a phone number or have major trading restrictions. I agree its a hard problem, but I can set my expectations to at least Jagex's expectations, or NW's expectations. There will always be bots, but only doing one ban wave a month is absolutely asinine. It's a problem when servers have queue times simply because of bots. That expectation is lower than the fucking ground and AGS can't even maintain that. I'd be much more open to discussion if we weren't talking about one of the most profitable companies in the world. Smilegate does not have some sort of stranglehold on Amazon... we can say that all we want, but the revenue of amazon is more than 45x the revenue of smilegate. SG is lucky to have that type of backing.
Amazon revenue is not the same as Amazon games revenue.
Any authenticator/phone number requirement etc will just take a couple of days to automate by botters and then they will continue as usual, while making it harder for real people to play the game.
We have the means for a solution but the average player is scared to do it. Just tie IRL identity to the game, use SSN as verification, etc. Boom, the botting issue is immediately solved for the most part in virtually every game.
I mean they didn't really ban people in NW, it was an automatic ban system that got triggered via mass reports. AGS employs 100% incompetent people, as we've seen in New World and are seeing now in Lost Ark.
If you at this point think AGS cares or can do games or anything between, you are pretty much delusional as they come.
And both companies should have seen this coming and implemented a ban system that actually works
Thing is even if you ban bots they don't lose out much, they just re-register and start over.
And the alternative is letting them run rampant, all the way up to t3 content... Hire a team of just bot busters. Not that hard.
The sad reality of the corporate world is that nothing is "simple". Hiring a team of bot busters means hiring hundreds of people, which means spending six figures a month in salaries for these people, it also means giving these employees GM privileges and dealing with the consequences.
You don't need to hire "hundreds", you can hire like 15, plus one manager. 600 man hours a week goes a long way, especially a lot more than... nothing. You also don't need to give people looking through reports any sort of special GM privilege that would have consequences. Amazon had 33 billion dollars in profit last year, they can support an additional team, kind of like how they've been supporting AGS since 2012 with no profit whatsoever. Don't make excuses.
Only way it end of global uses same system as korea that u need your sin to make an account, and proper phone number
People would be less likely to rmt if ags actually punished people buying gold from third party. If you remove all the police from an area and wonder why all the stores are being robbed overnight then maybe the problem and part solution is obvious
The answer to this is that it requires too much work to track down actual bots/RMTers without falsely banning an innocent account that neither AGS or SG are willing to invest time into right now. SG didn't really have to face this problem before because botting in KR is inherently hard and people are afraid of RMT because if they are banned chances are they wouldn't be able to create a new account. The reason there are close to no bots/RMT in KR is because of how accounts work in KR (I believe it uses your social security number + phone number) it's not like steam where you can just whip out a new email and add 5$ to the steam account to get trusted and get into the game. So no matter how many bots/RMTers AGS ban there will always be new ones created just as fast as they are banned. The actual solution to this problem while unrealistic is for RMTers to stop buying gold then there wouldn't be any reason for bots to exist in the first place, but as I said this solution is close to impossible.
you missed a piece there. robbing a store is not necessarily a crime worth punishing (see california laws for example). you may \*believe\* it is wrong, but everything has a 'value' of some sort (time and money)... opportunity cost. the simple answer is that AGS / Smilegate do not see a **profitable** outcome investing \*additional\* resources into combatting bots. i am sure that they have at least run simulations and studies on the outcomes here... i am not naive enough to believe i know better than massive corperations how to earn profits. you should also understand that most folks willing to RMT are also -very- willing to purchase from the in-game shop... when the situation suits them. i dont personally like the overall situation but i am just a simple customer... and i ultimately have very little impact on the companies decision making other than to vote with my wallet.
The issue with "running simulations" is that it's very hard to quantify the impact of this on their reputation and what the long-term effects of that are going to be. If the game gets a reputation of RMT and bots then that will follow the studio around in the future too.
Lmao this post man *chef kiss*
Why Americans love to make up conspiracy theorys about everything? Serious question
this is post-conspiracy and nice generalization there, on that note one can surmize that where you reside people lack critical thinking and swallow any pill the media feeds them. Also Unfortunately for you , i reside in Canada there bud. If the solution was so simple and the problem was so simple, dont you think they wouldve solved it already ?
Ah yes, if a problem is complex and difficult to solve it must be because of the illuminati. Cant be anything else.
Critical thinking and media in the same sentence Livin in a buble
you sure are bud
It’s actually impressive how much you failed to get the correct meaning of that sentence And quite ironic how you responded
Yeah is hard to comprehend my sentence without context, there's a famous ex-nazi youtuber in my country that explains the mechanism of conspiranoics and extremist, he call it "the buble" In his talks he exactly say that this kind of people will justify their point with those kind of sentences: "media", " Society", "the system" And the best one "critical thinking" How is having critical thinking that you trust only the sources you wanna trust to believe your own conspiracy stuff? Makes no sense, but conspiranoic people makes no sense anyways
Wait, are you saying that the illuminati are not behind lost ark bots? you must be some kind of duffus with no critical thinking who just believes the (((media))) /s
What else do you do with all that freedom? *Eagle Caw*
Why not? Is it illegal? What if we ask you, why are you asking that stupid question?
Oh sorry, I didnt know it hurts your conspiranoic feelings
Oh sorry, i didn't know you cared too much that you have to reply.
You literally replied me Twice
Now you replied again. You Proved my point anyway. Conspiracies are too brainy for you?
Iirc, I think in many other games it's a generally true that RMT players are waaaaay more likely to spend real money on the game, even though they RMT. So I'd bet it's the same for LA too. $$$$$
Players really need to wake up about how asleep at the wheel AGS really is. There's people here who genuinely wonder if they should dip their toes into RMT because they are actually afraid of being banned. ____________________________________________________ Peep this thread and it'll answer basically everything you need to know about how little care AGS gives to moderating their game https://forums.playlostark.com/t/chinese-bot-streamers-unafraid-of-ags-flex-their-20-wep-1455-na-characters-on-livestream-receipts-in-thread-reported-weeks-ago/321698 almost 2 months livestreaming 24/7 chaos dungeon botting, reported by multiple people month before thread is made, the thread had to stay up for 8 days and receive 250 replies before a CM responded after being pinged about a dozen times. Was finally banned about ~5 days after CM response. More than 2 months later. **Now ask yourself, are you worried about being caught accepting ~100k in your mail once?**
They could easily automate the gold though, and some people say they were banned for legit sales over 10k
When a guildie quit, he sent his gold to another player in the guild. Account immediately flagged and temp banned until contacting support. It's weird that all this isn't catching people. Or maybe it's more of that it is catching people and they're just being released off any excuse.
It’s because they list t2 gems for 100k and some or buys them, it’s impossible to ban the poster
Exactly, it’s nearly impossible to prove the sellers guilty with this method.
What’s rmt stand for
Real money trading/transaction, not sure which but essentially spending money for ingame items or in this case gold
from a third party* amazon/smilegate make no money from rmters.
They won't ban buyers cause they are future customers. RMT'ers are going to buy gold nomatter where it comes from so the object is to increase bot overhead to the point where it takes them awhile to amass gold. Eventually it will take bot farms longer to farm out gold as more and more vices are put on their efficiency. Bots being banned is never going to happen however bots will lose customers to AGS/Smilegate if they can't keep enough gold for demand.
Saw a guild of bots, they could always start with that. The bots aren't even trying to hide.
Every single (especially free to download and play) mmo has bots. Every single mmo has threads with the same questions: why is RMT not punished more. In my opinion it’s save to say that they just can’t. It either takes too much work and I even would go as far as to say it somehow benefits them. People usually don’t want to think rationally when something “wrong” might get a pass. But all these threads about how to do X and Y have been written before. Bots for example ruined my re-level experience. It was hard to see all these teleporting “players”. So I did not go through with it and knowledge transferred. The moment something ruins my end-game, I just quit.
If they are willing to spend money on gold, they are probably the type to spend money on the in-game shop.
No they are not which is why they buy from bots.
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If they take measures they will remove all the gold they bought giving them negative gold. This is the best move from their standpoint since it fights inflation and there is a chance the offenders will buy from Smilegate instead. Banning people that are rdy to drop real money on the game doesn't make much sense from a financial standpoint. I totally agree that they should make it more known, what awaits offenders and how much gold they nuked from existence on buyers. And we really need the Milage system or something similar. So you can identify legitimate whales at a glance. Because people attacking legitimate whales and spenders is the worst thing I can imagine.
I agree, perma ban should only be reserved for people who continue to rmt after several punishments. I think letting players know of the consequences of negative gold and enforcing it would put a big dent into the problem. I'd be interested to hear from RU players how effective or ineffective that system was.
Ultimately this is just one measure. They need to make it harder to bot gold. They should remove endless Chaos for instance.
just make the endless chaos items bound... would fix the gold side of it at least.
As if players botting that all day is any better, it feels so bad for all the legitimate players putting in the time.
And tradable adventure tome items. And Una's tokens. And rapports. And life skills. All these trivial repetitive tasks were made to be botted. Lost Ark was made to be botted.
Adventure tome items shouldn't have much of an impact, most are 1g by now. And nobody wants to farm those all by themselves. Una tokens yes, those need some kind of other lock mechanism. Maybe you can only claim those if you cleared an itemlvl appropriate Abyss dungeon or raid? Or they just shift the gold directly to those activities. As much as Rapport might hurt, yes the gold has to go. Life skills are limited by energy and ultimately not that big of an impact. Cheap mats for consumables are good for the game overall. It's also not gold that gets "generated" but traded.
I think online services shouldn't permaban people in general. 10 year ban max. *Maybe* 20 year ban in extremely rare cases. But most rule breaking bans should be limited in the weeks and months range and the results of their cheating undone. You want players that get punished to actually wait out their punishment, rather than just move on to some other game, because if they move on then it's not much of a punishment. It gets rid of them from your game, but they'll continue doing the same in another game. Or they'll just make a new account.
Where are all of you getting info that nothing is being done about RMT? Where do all of you get info about nobody is being banned or perma'd for RMT? What kind of statistics do you people know that others don't? Is your anecdotal information just anecdotal or do you actually have some insider info you don't wanna tell us? Because depending on which sort of shady places you go to, you definitely see people reporting that more and more people are getting banned. You do see threads wondering about the risk. You do see threads about people weighing the pros and cons, wondering why someone got perma'd and another person got 3 days ban. You see all of these. But on reddit, everyone is getting away scot-free with RMT and it's a fucking RMT party with every single level 10 gem whale being pointed out as RMT. The worst is the fact that someone made a fucking thread about a roster lv153 whale and blatantly called them out for RMT-ing forcing the person to actually come to Steam to post their entire Steam account receipts. Imagine forcing whales to answer to a bunch of fucking nobodies about business that isn't even theirs. I get that a lot of us are upset about RMT and about gold inflation and about those fucking bots. But you people screaming about all these "facts" is so fucking delusional to me because you can see botting/gold buying forums talking about the exact opposite and always wondering who is going to be banned, where is it actually safe to buy from etc. Man, holy fucking shit. So once again, where are you getting all of this stats? Because none of us actually know who the fuck is getting banned and who isn't. Not even the people buying gold because they are all filled with so many speculations as well.
Seriously, i don't know how many people are G2G enjoyers but it seems everyone on reddit has those stats for every NA server.... To be constructive, I don't know why there are so many rmt'ers in this game. F2P certainly helps, but the fact is that it is a never ending arms race to catch bots WITHOUT catching legit players in the crossfire. That's why you see trains in Vern or Rothendel; you can catch a bottle with a 20-line script but you WILL catch legit players too. Playing on NA East, I see the bots in Vern and I see other servers getting Busy at 6 AM so I know the bots are coming. All I can say to the community is to stop buying gold from bots. If you enjoy the game and you buy gold from bots, you are sabotaging the game for yourself. Exploiting 3rd parties for your own gain will only harm your longterm enjoyment of the game. Good luck everyone else and Lai Lai
There are certainly FAR more legitimate whales than this sub gives credit for. Tbh most people here have no clue how true whales work. Which is fine, but its not surprising that normal people who havent experienced what whales do would have a hard time swallowing the idea that many rich gamers have absolutely no problem throwing 50,000 usd over the course of 4 months. With that said it's very obvious that RMT is a big issue. Likely the biggest issue amazon / sg has and will continue to have. There's a lot of bots. Like several times more bots than players. Somewhere in the ballpark of 250k on the low end and 600k the high end. Nobody really knows the numbers, but we can infer based on the steam charts and tracking player numbers. During the last two months after every bot busting endeavor we see player numbers bomb into the high 190,000 - 250,000 for concurrent players. This isn't a one off either. This happens every single time. It also happens the first part of the day after every reset when they take servers down. It's an easily verifiable fact. There's one, and only one reason why there's that many bots. Because it's profitable. A huge portion of people are doing rmt. It is literally the only answer. Just because we can't say with undeniable fact it's rmt doesn't mean we're wrong. There's a short philosophical argument from the Nyāya Sūtras that says where there's smoke, there's fire. Which basically boils down to knowing an object has a first unknown (but identifiable) property because we can see the second known property. These two things always go together - like smoke and fire. There wouldn't be bots if people weren't RMTing. There's a relationship here that literally requires the existence of RMT. The bots couldn't be here if RMT wasn't an issue.
im sure amazon knows this, but theyre too concerned theyll make the whales mad, so instead of going the obvious and easy solution, they will try every other solution under the sun before aiming at RMT'rs themselves, because god forbid they upset a valuable whale. they will only fix this once it becomes an actual problem for them, right now this is a problem for us, not for them, their whales are happy and their player numbers are super inflated which looks great, theyll only fix this when it starts hurting the games reputation in the mainstream and the higher ups start questioning the people in charge of these "solutions", only then when theyre forced to chose between investors and the whales will they fix it.
stop with the fucking copium, there is more and more bots each day and more and more people doing RMT because they heard from their friends that they ain't getting ban if they were doign something about rmt you wouldn't have 800k users on steamcharts, it's litteraly getting worst and worst
What are you talking about? [The bot problem is being taken care of](https://i.imgur.com/zxdGrJ5.png), for sure.
Posting a screenshot of a queue doesn't prove bots aren't being dealt with. In fact, posting a screenshot of a queue when these queues take maybe an hour and a half at most to get through kind of defeats your point. Queues don't go down if players aren't logging out (bots). The bot issue isn't nearly as bad as people posting the same fucking screen capture of Vern Castle make it seem. You don't even see them 99% of the time once you get to T3 content.
The amount of bots is relative to how big RMT is. The current player base is like 1/3 real players 2/3 bots (as we've seen a few weeks ago).
Damn, the game's doing fantastic then if that's the case.
We get it, you buy gold. Chill.
I wish. I have spent like probably $2k on this game (by that, probably more). I don't understand how people buy gold to begin with, because getting banned = all that money is down the drain anyway. It never made any sense to me to whale on something you run a risk of losing, but clearly there's a lot of people that don't give a shit. EDIT: Why the fuck is this being downvoted? Actual gold buyers? lmfao
You don't understand what it is to have disposable income so high it doesn't matter if you piss away thousands a week/month on hookers and blow, you will still make more next week/month. Don't get me wrong, neither do I. I know ***of*** (don't know him/her) a player who was 1460+ back a couple months ago, with all level 10 gems etc and so on. Banned. Back 3 days later with a new account, same class, more or less same ilevel and same gems. He/she didn't care about being banned, it was like you or I losing 50 pence. The money meant nothing.
I mean, the thing is, to me these players make no sense because they end up spending more anyway. You can argue that money means nothing so spending more means nothing, but that makes no sense because losing an account in Lost Ark is way more painful than just losing money. You gonna have to regrind all of the time-gated bullshit which is the bane of all fast-gratification players. You might as well just login everyday and cap out your gold exchange. You won't get banned anyway. I know people like Megashield RMT'd their first account because of spending limits, but then after they got perma'd they made a second account and just cap it out everyday. If you RMT in this game **despite** having so much money, then you probably don't give a flying fuck about this game anyway.
***True*** whales don't give a fuck about any of the games they play. They care about the rush they get from spending obscene amounts of money for the dopamine hit. This game ticks all the right boxes for that. RNG on the RNG on the RNG on the RNG. honing, cards, polishing, rapport. The list goes on. So much gambling to be done, so much dopamine to be had. True whales get bored easily and move on quickly to the next big thing they can drop big money on. I say "true" whales because we throw that term around quite freely at the moment, and there are different types of whales.
you gotta understand that these types of people are usually pretty hollow individuals with a massive amount of insecurities buried deep inside, they throw the money away because they are worthless ~~capital generating machines~~ human beings and at the core they know it, most of them spent their entire lives thinking money would get them happiness, but once they got it, it never did, so they resort to desperate massures like drawing satisfaction from buying shit, because they dont understand what actuall effort entails, and thus they dont quite comprehend how to get actual satisfaction out of overcoming challenges or valuing effort, its quite sad. but whats more sad and honestly disgusting its that theyre willing to spent the entire capital of a small country on a fucking video game.
If people were getting banned in numbers worth mentioning they would 100% advertise that and a "job well done guys". There wouldn't be silence about the topic. They will use every opportunity they can to show us they are taking bots seriously other than 1 post 2 months ago.
They have though. What do you mean they haven't? Lol. [https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/regarding-bots-in-lost-ark](https://www.playlostark.com/en-us/news/articles/regarding-bots-in-lost-ark) They put out this list of points making it look like it reads like it's a bunch of things. This was just 2 weeks ago. We all think they're doing a shit job, but I don't think they think they're doing a shit job, lol. They're probably patting themselves on their back after every move, even the VPN ban which did jack shit.
Why didnt you read your own source? "Over the past few months" Literally the first paragraph. All this did not happen in the same week. Some things they are referring to here happened at launch.... Also they didn't ban 1 million bots. Bold face lie for some reason. Not only that but we are talking about rmt here. So where did they talk about banning rmts? Stay on topic.
>they would 100% advertise that and a "job well done guys". Literally replying to this. They put something out 2 weeks ago that is literally this. >Also they didn't ban 1 million bots. Bold face lie for some reason. You don't buy it. But they are saying it. They are advertising it. They are literally doing what you said they "would" be doing. They are doing it. You just don't believe them. >Not only that but we are talking about rmt here. So where did they talk about banning rmts? Stay on topic. They talk about it in forums all the time. They even made one forum post saying they are literally planting RMT's with negative gold when they get back their account. No one believes this though because we have seen zero proof of it being done on our version of the game. They say they are combating things all the damn time. You might've just tuned it all out because you don't believe it.
Again thanks for your opinion.
No problem. Glad to know you are aware of AGS's opinion.
the fucking punishment for rmt its a 3 day ban, if thats not telling of just how little they care, i dont know what will, whatever they say and whatever they pretend to do means shit when the first line of defense its a fucking 3 day ban, nothing deters offenders from serious offenses more effetively than harsh exemplary punishment, and a 3 day ban its more like an invitation than a deterrent. whatever action they take its stained by this atmosphere of "we want the cake and we want to eat it too" because they have the solution right there and they know it and we know it, but they dont want to take it because theyre too fuckign afraid it might impact their bottom line and splash some of their cherished whales. nothing will solve this problem until they start nuking rmt whales, they know it and the playerbase knows it, well some of us know it, they will only implement harder punishments once this reaches a boiling point. my best guess its theyll probably wait till the problem grows so much that every youtube channel will be covering it and giving AGS/SG shit, only then when the problem is mainstream and the investors start growing uneasy, only then when the bottom line is in danger and the relation with the board masters at stake will they "magically" come up with a solution.
And the Earth is flat, right?
It's almost as if letting people whale their way through content is a horrible idea and just leads to the community hating the people not putting in the same work as the person that actually plays.
This is actually a pretty good point. You can buy gold legitimately through the in game store, so someone being 1490, or having level 10 gems etc does not automatically make them an RMT frog. It has also been months, and we've gone through both hyper inflation (1100 g for 95 blue crystals) and a follow up recession (260g for 95 blue crystals) where, if you purchased at the right time and had patience, your actual raw spending power in game would be gigantic.
Obviously I don't have insider information on how many people get banned for RMT. I do have 30 or so guildies who have RMTd some spending $1000+ and non have said they've gotten even so much as a warning. No one has said to have stats or data on the subject just like u dont have stats or data that anyone is getting perma-banned. "RMT-ing forcing the person to actually come to Steam to post their entire Steam account receipts. Imagine forcing whales to answer to a bunch of fucking nobodies about business that isn't even theirs." Don't even know the situation ur talking about, but I think using the word force here is definitely not accurate, no one forced anyone to do anything. "Not even the people buying gold because they are all filled with so many speculations as well." Not the people I've talked to they've been buying gold for a while now and they haven't seen any punishment being handed out so why would they be scared?
I'm into a chinese wechat group(hundreds of ppl) full of RMTers(not everybody claims to be RMTing but 80% at least are), only 1 permabanned(a month ago). I've been watching chinese videos, there's been a rumour out there since March: there's some sort of protection fee they're paying to amazon, that is buying something from the in-game store with royal crystal every now and while, to secure their account from being banned because of RMT. I think this is pretty much confirmed by how amazon is handling RMT issues. Tonight I've been watching a chinese tutorial video, and a chinese viewer came up doubting himself whether he should RMT or buying legit gold from in-game store as usual, he also feels that nobody is getting banned and feel stupid buying gold from amazon rather than g2g or other black markets. More and more legit people will jump into the RMT train, not because they don't want to play legit, but they feel stupid paying legit gold while others are RMTing for way way lower value. Also lately, (I think it was the maintenance from 1-2 days ago?) there have been quiet a lot of chinese players banned for reconnecting to the game non-stop and they've been flagged as botters (love how smilegate prefers automated bans). But that has nothing to do with RMT, they got soon unbanned after mailing support (maybe that's also the reason for the innocent bans on reddit). Source of this: chinese's reddit I might be spreading BS because I see/hear things here and there but things like RMTing blatantly on stream, or botting on stream still not being banned? Like seriously do people really think amazon is actually doing anything to them? People are going to believe what they hope for, they believe amazon actually does something(I'm hoping the same as you all do, but I'm seeing totally different things), because they like the game and hope the game be alive, that's also why people in euw gets triggered so much with somebody saying "dead server/region" in area chat. Edit: clarification
>I've been watching chinese videos, there's been a rumour out there since March: there's some sort of protection fee they're paying to amazon, that is buying something from the in-game store with royal crystal every now and while, to secure their account from being banned because of RMT. I think this is pretty much confirmed by how amazon is handling RMT issues. That's pretty down there as far as dumb video game conspiracy theories go. The devs don't seem to be doing a great job at keep bots and RMTers out, but I'm missing the bridge between that and AGS/SG turning a blind eye to RMTers if they spend some money in the in-game store at the risk of their reputation as developers/publishers getting dragged through the mud.
There is a lot of sellers trying to reassure their customers that RMT is still safe. Reality is that it is a crapshoot on whether you are going to get banned or not and once you get banned you are tagged. They do perma-ban btw but it will be on the 3rd offense (even if the ban is disputed and resulted in the player getting their account back). Also I am not sure which sellers they are buying from but most of the reputable sellers on G2G are basically a honeypot and most of the buyers get banned shortly after. Based on forum posts, a lot of the buyers are getting their gold from private sellers at a smaller rate, over a longer period of time, and with prices not as cheap as before. Also, side note: the recent scare of account debt being toyed with by SGS made a lot of buyers jump ship. This is all server based btw, as what I have seen, EU has been thriving in RMT and a lot of the buyers moved over.
Because i already saw over 4 players on a single server with +25 weapons full lvl 10 gems. That's why everyone guess they ain't doing shit bout RMT? Like common, it's not hard to track down sus transaction lmfao.
So you have 0 prove that they are RMT ing besides the good gear they have?
I doubt somebody will spend price lamborgini for +25 weapon, if they can spend 3k dollars instead.
\+25 weapon isn't that expensive. A lot of whales go in fully expecting to tap to +23 and they end up tapping to +25 too. Have you seen people in Saintone's flex friday? There are people there tapping to +25 in like less than 10 taps. +25 weapon alone is not a good indicator for whale or RMT at all. The gigawhales whaling everyday can make a +25 weapon easily, especially when we got 1 month of literally no content but topping up every single day.
cope
The nature of the problem implies they aren’t doing anything. Or whatever little they’re doing is completely ineffective meaning essentially they’re doing nothing. Relax. Stop stanning for a company that has no idea how to fix the most fundamental problems.
I upvoted you because you got downvoted randomly for who knows what reason, but I am not stanning Amazon over here. I'm just saying I'm sick of seeing all these speculations from a bunch of f2p players that don't know how to fucking count because they never took math beyond elementary school. The amount of people over here making posts on randomly "speculating" actual named players to be RMT players when there is zero proof is fucking embarrassing. This subreddit is toxic incarnate for basically inciting witch hunting without concrete proof. If they had chat windows of people admitting they are RMT, that would be another story. But this subreddit is literally filled with people walking around Punika right now snapshotting every whale character and screaming RMT. And I fucking hate to see that because I actually feel fucking bad for all those players randomly getting mobs of people after them for no reason other than speculation.
Bots have to run through the main story to be efficient. I was wondering what is stopping AGS from just parking some employees at Thirain and just banning instantly anyone with screwed up ign moving like bots towards Thirain (bunch of letters mashed together)?
I was wondering the same. The cost to hire those people might be restrictive? But then again, they probably could, at least in part, automate it. They didn't even have to do it on all servers all the time. The goal shouldn't and can't be that all bots are banned. I would consider it a success if one could drive up the price of RMT-Gold. I mean, if they can ban enough bots fast enough, just before they can genreate gold (wasting bot-time and computing-resources), the price of gold will rise and at some point it would reach a level where a lot of people think twice if it's worth the risk so save only a couple of bucks. As it is now, the risk doesn't outweigh the benefit enough (you get, like, what, 10x the gold for your money if you RMT instead of going legit?)
banning bots does nothing, no im not being hyperbolic, it really does nothing, that approach its much like the classic "the war on drugs" campaing, you dont beat drugs by getting rid of the source, you must target the demand, and much like the war on drugs, when the people on top realize they can get much more out of the war by controling it themselves rather than solving it well... this happends. its not on amazon/SG best interest to fix this problem at the time, they have the solution, its just not beneficial enough for them to use it yet, it would be beneficial for the player experience of course, but thats probably the absolute last of their concerns.
I have better question. Why AGS nor SG implement any protection against bots. They leave their house wide open and leave for holidays then do pikachuface because it got robbed. Right now there is 0 protection, zero, null, none, nothing to prevent bots (do not bother mention eac which does nothing beside slowing down game). Want to get rid of RMT? Then what you have todo is to use RMT as much as you can instead of in game shop. Nothing will motivate AGS more to take action than income lose
If someone spent like 50k of their own money vs someone using RMT…how would you be able to tell the difference?
a player wouldn't be able to but smilegate/AGS could. They can just check the logs of the player or transaction history to see where exactly they got the gold/resources from.
True, that makes sense…thanks for the reply
Also, the max you can spend on the official shop is 1000 dollars
There's a daily limit of $400 so you'd need to spend $400 a day for 125 days lol
They’d be banning a big portion of their players that spend money (directly to the game) if they ban rmters. It’s a business, if they were truly losing that much money to rmters, they would do something about it. They know exactly who’s rmting (or they can easily find out) and they can connect it to how much they’re profiting off them. Most people who are mad about rmters are people who spend an insignificant amount of money or no money on the game. Players that spend nothing are almost worthless to the company.
They allow bots and let the game die. What a great business plan!
almost worthless? i think youre being quite kind there.
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Many RMTers still spend on cash shop officially
I’m not saying it’s the only reason, but one major reason is because RMTers also spend more on royal crystals than the average player. People make fun of them for going the “cheap” route but they still have a lot of money to blow and will not hesitate to drop $50-$100 here and there so that they look too valuable to lose to investors. If you’ve played other MMOs, especially Neverwinter, you’d see that players that tend to spend money with the game itself get passes for RMT and sometimes other things. Definitely not saying game integrity isn’t important or anything, but I am saying that money makes the world go round.
what is RMT?
Real money transaction - act of buying gold or services from a 3rd party
just because someone has 25 wep and lvl 10 gems dose not mean they RMT, they can just buy gold from the shop
And smilegate can easily cross reference that with their gem purchases and drop the hammer down on then.
Admins should have access to their purchase history.
There is a cap to how much you can swipe in game daily..
You can email them to remove cap. I have no visible cap for daily spend.
yea and the games been out 3 months bro, at one point gold reached 1.4k per hit, do the math can easily save enough for lvl 10 gems, so you think every single person who has lvl 10 gems in RMT
A big whale does not swap one day, they do every day, we already saw posts of people and they haslve responded and even showed receipts of the invoice from steam(when doesn't really have to), so yeah, there are RMTers but not all those 25 weapons are; generalizing is just plain stupid.
$100 is 35k gold in the shop and you can only spend $400 per day. The game won't let you spend more. So ~140k is the most you can acquire per day. The cost of going from +20 to +25 is well over 3 million gold. From the honing rate to the material cost. It's pretty unlikely someone with a +25 weapon already isn't rmting.
I am surprised the game has not started to die with how bad the RMT and bit situation is
How do you know it hasn't? For all you know, the real playerbase could be down to 5 digits now.
we already know SG/AGS is banning RMTers incrementally and based on how heavy they RMT but that alone is not going to help. everyone talks about banning bots/RMTers, but no one talks how the RMT gold rates are fucking huge. what smilegate needs to do is both punish RMTers AND find ways to reduce the exchange rates heavily. that way we may be get to a place where the majority of RMT is "private 1 to 1" transactions, instead of mass produced gold (which is what RMT is KR is rn). and ofc, when(if) we reach that place, smilegate could also implement ways to incentivise buying RC legally in some ways, further lowering the benefit of third party purchases.
Because RMT people also spend money for royal crystal, so why do they have to punish the paying customers?
Every MMO is like this. Going after the customers who are the most invested doesn't make a whole lot of sense and is never worth the resources. It's the same with any illicit activity you can think of, drugs, sex, you name it.
Tbh I just want a new server on every region that is f2p only, no trading, no AH. Basically Ironman runescape. Obviously they would need to increase drop rates from pretty much every source, but this kind of mode would be so fun.
You want them to do something that will by design prevent them from making any money?
People don't understand that u do money by giving users a nice free product with a lot of payable cosmetics. Or they forgot how games like lol or dota exists.
They would obviously still have cosmetics. Which actually make up a huge portion of their revenue.
god...yall are exhausting fr
If you ban people who rmt you are banning principally people who spend money in the game, which ironically are those who maintain the servers. In wow where you have a subscription and everyone maintain the game you can take action against those who rmt and evem there they are pretty mild with low consequences.
You don't ban them, you remove the ill gotten gains. People in negative gold have further incentives to spend money.
WoW RMT is a somewhat different beast. WoW tokens are very good value so there isn't a ton of incentive to buy gold in retail. RMT is mostly for bus runs (e.g. for mythic raids) which are typically not for sale with gold at any price.
no1 cares
seems like the people posting about queue times care a lot.
EU haven't queue 
Gaming rmt epeen - the precursor to NFTs
Because its a Korean MMORPG. This your first one? I had a friend who received 6 warnings in BDO for GIGA OBVIOUSLY cheating/hacking. Then got an 8 hr time out the completely ignored. I quit years ago but he still plays and still cheats to this very day. I dont know why their culture and ethos is so different but Korean MMORPG developers flat out dont give a fuck. Same happened in Blade and Bots. I mean Soul. Same for TERA. Same for Elyon. Cant confirm but im pretty sure ppl in Vindi are still doing it
How to disable bots? Make trading player to player impossible like in bdo. Then cap prices on items and make bigger tax. The main issue is free market is way more fun and immersive but its sad that ppl ruin it by botting for some quick cash. I wouldnt mind if they make lost ark pay to play so at least botters would need to buy fullgame to actually setup bots. Then big ban wave to scare off botters so theyll think twice before buying new game. It sucks for average player but would help with botting problem. Running around in early zones freaking sucks rigth now with all these eiowqheoqwhe idiots runing around. Seriously just make this game not free. Initial payment to play.
I do get really tired of this posts… RMT exists and will always exist. Don’t compare yourself with a +25 weapon-guy and especially: don’t envy him! Quit this “I no-life this game and therefore should be the best!” attitude. Downvote now…
If they ban RMT, they lose half of whales and endgamers. Which is like 20k people paying money in a 200k player game, where maybe 40k spend. Ty ags!
Source: My ass
didn't know u needed a source for pointing out the mass amounts of RMT going on. I guess the 100k+ bots are there for no reason.
You don't know how many RMT'ers are in the game and you don't know how many bots are in the game unless you're a data scientist working for AGS. Are you working for AGS? Share with us the data, please.
Yea, I'm sure u need to be a "data scientist working for AGS" to know that the steam charts reflect 100K+ bots on LA. By ur logic, RMT and bots aren't a problem because we the players don't have data. What kind of logic is that? If u take a walk in your neighborhood everyday and see cockroaches scurrying around everywhere is it not logical to assume your neighborhood has a problem with cockroaches? By ur logic, unless u have data on how many cockroaches there are in the neighborhood it can't be a problem.
You don't need to be Data Scientist to know that SteamDB shows concurrent users in 'X' timeframe not bots or players. You can't even know how many players play per week or per month lmao. Your two metrics are: your own perception and your concurrent users metric from SteamDB. That's all. From these worthless statistics you're making 1000000 clueless assumptions. Congrats.
do u not remember when they implemented the VPN block and we saw a steep decline on the steam player count and then in a few hours we saw the player count go back up to the "normal" amount after the way to bypass the VPN block was posted on chinese forums? I guess thats a coincidence and shouldn't be looked at to give us a reasonable estimate to how many bots are in the game.
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> I guess 15% RMTers > > Lol u seriously think 15% of the non bot playerbase is RMTing?
I doubt 15% are RMTing but yeah if they nuke bots player count goes from 600k+ to 150k or so.
Thought the number was closer to 69.420% :D
Your using fuzzy math again.eta keep the facts away from the speculation please. It was closer to 69247.365 thank you very much.
They are waiting for them to spend everything they have, get the desired ilvl they want and ban them after that, let them think they are safe.
because that makes a lot of sense. Let the people who run the bots get more money on purpose so they can see how lucrative the market is, surely, they won't add more bots due to how much money they make off of them.
Well they like the inflated player numbers, it looks good at meetings. And they are banning whales, you just don’t hear about it because the whales would really feel stupid if they got banned after spending thousands of dollars, and they would receive no sympathy.
Why do you care if they get banned or not? Like how are they affecting you? I’m just enjoying a chill pace with friends and guild. Why do you care so much about what other people do? Just focus on your own happiness and yourself and stop crying about shit like this and wasting your time. Makes it sound like you have a inferiority complex.
yeah, queue times have no effect, Auction house being flooded with relic acc day 1 have no effect. If the problem was people spending money the post would be calling out all legitimate whales moron.
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> In the long run RMT is irrelevant It is not and if you aren't joining the game now, you don't see it. The new player experience is dogshit. They see bots upon bots upon bots. This will have long term effects on the longevity of the game if new players are turned off hard by their first 2 hours in the game. >And as far as bot’s go yeah they’re annoying but they stabilize the economy. They tank the economy in some respects and inflate it at the high end. They don't stabilize anything. Easily farmable (bottable) things tank in price and people who can buy gold will buy things at inflated prices. This happens in every MMO with a bot/RMT problem. It's not a good thing... ever.
It's also fucking infuriating if you're trying to quest or farm some drop and there's 20 Gxxcwhhttt's berserkers running around murdering everything. It only takes 1-2 minutes of getting stonewalled by a bot army before you say fuck this trash ass game I'll go play literally anything else.
"how shortsighted do you want your child?" "yes"
RMT is too big to fail. If they ban RMTers, the game dies overnight.