Gold Sellers, a serious question

[vayasen]

Ok, this could, along with many other factors decide if I bought Warhammer or not.


Firstly let me say this, I love Age of Conan, I think its a great game (my opinion). However, the goldselling is through the roof already. Any chance of a fair, balanced economey is already destroyed, guilds who cheat by buying gold get the early lead. They may as well exploit....its all the same, cheating!!!!

Funcom didnt do a thing pre release to counter this....sure they waffle about they will ban accounts...but nothing in truth is happening. Its already destroyed the race for Cities and keeps, the cheaters get there first.




Now, swap to WAR. Will Warhammer development include some form of Anti gold spam plan?

Will they take action BEFORE release to ensure people are not scared off by this scourge? Will the make people aware that if they buy gold, they will be banned (they are for other forms of cheating why not this?).



I dread to think they will release the game, post up some half arsed 'we are aware of gold spammers and we will ban their accounts' crap while in game we suffer a bombardment of advertisments!


Buying gold is surefire cheating over other players, end of. Its worse than exploiting.

Can anyone with any authority answer this in any form? Has it been asnwered already?

 

[Downanael]

They will always be here way unless Mythic does something really drastical like ban all asian IP's a la Lotro

 

[Aurelius LH]

They will always be here way unless Mythic does something really drastical like ban all asian IP's a la Lotro

Won't work, since IP addresses can be faked and when you are dealing with 'businesses' making a lot of money like the gold farmers do, you can be damn sure they will be faked if that is what they need to do.

The only way to limit the damage done by gold sellers is to have constant monitoring by in-game staff who can be contacted by players, to shut down the account generating the message. It certainly will not stop it, just make it more difficult for them to sell, but as long as they think people will buy, they will keep coming back - they even hit Pirates of the Burning Sea, a game that was always going to have a relatively tiny playerbase and an even tinier market for gold sellers.

The only way to stop it entirely? Don't allow trading of gold between characters.....

 

[Dreamor]

There are lots of things that can be done to counter Gold Farmers, but you will never get around them. As someone said, this is a business for people and they will use proxy's or any number of other ways to get online. The problem is made worse when they use 14 day free trials or a buddy key system.

Best thing to do is just STOP buying gold from these company's or make it easy for people to get the gold either by quests or something else. The other thing people should be doing, MMO Dev's, is coming down hard on people using bots and such, these 3rd party programs are the tools being used to farm this gold and ruin the economy of most games.

As a drastic measure usually the Country-IP ban can be used because most company's have it written in stone as to what country's they cover... EU being EU and US being US... unfortunately this means doing an Asian ban can hit Australian customers and one thing that is strange, you can even get Canadian people in that cone.

WoW is one of the biggest games and they have almost endless amount of money and resources for both catching botters/spammers and gold farmers, yet they get equal amounts of spammers as every other game. Go to Shattrah and listen to trade chat thats not including the ones that PM and mail you.

 

[Xandax]

What I'd like to see is them tracking the money in the game.

Every transaction between two players gets logged - because that way it is simple to track the flow of money and thus if somebody suddenly sends large sums of cash to some body else the transaction notifies that something is going on and the cash flow can be investigated.
For example if it is a level 1 sending (fictive number) 1000 gold to a L40, then it might be worth investigating.

They could also "imprint" each gold piece being generated with an id/serial number and thus you could track where the money came from originally - through multiple trades.


But most of all - I would like to see swift reactions to the problem, both in terms of investigating and taking actions.

 

[Effex]

just so long as somone makes an addon that automaticaly ignores all level 1 gold spammers I'll be happy..... infact Im going to add that to the top of my todo list!

 

[bindir]

From what I've read the inpact of gold seller should be less than with other games.
The fact that WAR doesn't have grinding will make the market a lot more stable and the fact that you get exp in RvR will make stuff like twinking a lot harder to do.
Both examples require tons of gold, but in the end the children will still have to be told not to buy gold.

Let's just hope is a bare minimum.

 

[Aurelius LH]

Whilst 'tracking money' sounds a good idea, it's impractical for one huge reason - the database involved in doing it expands to stupendous size, and corresponding slowness. Bear in mind, what you suggest would mean changing the amount of data records for a character from maybe a few hundred entries at present (for all their equipment, belongings elsewhere in banks and such, current stats and active abilities and so on) to potentially hundreds of thousands of items when each 'coin' is tagged and monitored. You think you've seen 'lag' in games before, you'd spend most of your time looking at a screenshot if you try that sort of data shifting for thousands of players.

If you're after stopping the spamming though, rather than killing off the gold selling, there might be mileage in the way the chat channels are structured, depending on how fast and easily people can level. Gold sellers, and therefore spammers, are after fast returns from repetitive (ideally scriptable, but certainly doable by people with minimum input since they will be watching many screens at once, and quite likely barely understand the language being used by the players and the game messages anyway) and want to broadcast to as many likely 'customers' as possible quickly before they get shut off, so you can limit their audience.

Split chat channels so that anyone can choose to see higher level chat, but you can only 'broadcast' to a range of say +/- 5 of your level (obviously we're only talking about 'public' channels here, not guilds or groups where everyone can always talk to all their members) and you drastically limit the market a spammer could reach, whilst still letting folks ask for help, groups or whatever.

You still absolutely need in-game contactable staff to shut down spammer accounts quickly as they are reported, not least because most of the sellers won't even bother looking into what anti-spammer systems the game has, they will just set up a farming/spamming system as soon as they can and let it run.... they might shut it down later, if it doesn't make any money, but we have to face the fact it will be done, and we'll all get heartily sick of it, but at least if there is visible and strong control attempt by EA/Mythic/GOA there's some light at the end of the tunnel

 

[Xandax]

Whilst 'tracking money' sounds a good idea, it's impractical for one huge reason - the database involved in doing it expands to stupendous size, and corresponding slowness. Bear in mind, what you suggest would mean changing the amount of data records for a character from maybe a few hundred entries at present (for all their equipment, belongings elsewhere in banks and such, current stats and active abilities and so on) to potentially hundreds of thousands of items when each 'coin' is tagged and monitored. You think you've seen 'lag' in games before, you'd spend most of your time looking at a screenshot if you try that sort of data shifting for thousands of players.
<snip>

A decent database design can solve those problems pretty easily.

The data does not even need to be located in the same database as character data (equipment, stats, quests information) because it has no relevance for such information. So your scenario is irrelevant. Only poor datamodelling would assign such (control) data in the same "tables" as often used data character critical. So you would never as a player have to wait for the data to "load" as it has no relevance for the player at all and you'd not be looking at "lag" at all.
You can just move the transaction-information to a different database, then the "game" database used for the character data.

So no - it is far from impractical. It is just more work.

 

[IainC]

I don't work with that side of things anymore so I can't tell you how it's done for WAR but I know that for DAoC, everything was logged. We could trace any trade and almost every action for several months afterwards. As Xandax says, data logging is an entirely different thing to storing the current state of each character and their inventory.

Making gold not tradeable isn't a solution because something else will take its place as a currency. Gold is just a token of worth, if there isn't any actual gold in the system then the players will use something in its stead - Aurulite, Diamond Seals, shiny pebbles or anything that has a constant value and can be traded.

Back on to gold selling, we'll take action against anyone damaging the game in this way. Mark Jacobs is famous for his very strong views on RMT (real money trading) and so WAR is designed that just having money isn't as important as in some other games, there are other ways to get stuff and mostly they involve playing the game rather than reaching for your wallet.

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

What do you mean nothing is happening in AoC?

They did a system ban and temp. banned all accounts with too much gold in their books and investigated each account after.

They perma. banned many Goonheim accounts.

The first (a bit too harsh in my eyes) action shows that they're taking the issues seriously.

Full transaction logging is needed in each MMOG and making it a hard time for gold spammers to spam their adverts in the game.

Everything else you simply can't stop.

Worst move is to give out 1m trial accounts short after release who magically all end up in the hands of Chinese farmers.

 

[Howley]

As Requiel said other valuable items will take the place of gold or currency if there isnt any or a need for it. EA|Mythic designed the loot drops in PQ's well imo altho i havent been in beta to see it first hand on interviews the idea of 'IF' and when u win u will get something specific to ur class eg. u wont get engineer gloves if ur an archmage
also this design removes the need for pve bots tbh...
yup back in daoc i needed my own ickle shaman/supp sm duo at times and ani/druid... oh and caba/cleric (altho caba was my main anyways )

 

[Aurelius LH]

A decent database design can solve those problems pretty easily.

The data does not even need to be located in the same database as character data (equipment, stats, quests information) because it has no relevance for such information. So your scenario is irrelevant. Only poor datamodelling would assign such (control) data in the same "tables" as often used data character critical. So you would never as a player have to wait for the data to "load" as it has no relevance for the player at all and you'd not be looking at "lag" at all.
You can just move the transaction-information to a different database, then the "game" database used for the character data.

So no - it is far from impractical. It is just more work.

Well, not that easily solved, unless you design the data handling that way from the start, and I'd be surprised (pleasantly, but still surprised!) if it had been engineered that way - certainly most mmorpgs seem not to be! But we can hope....

 

[Xandax]

Well, not that easily solved, unless you design the data handling that way from the start, and I'd be surprised (pleasantly, but still surprised!) if it had been engineered that way - certainly most mmorpgs seem not to be! But we can hope....

Actually - it should also be pretty "simple" to extend a hypothetical database with such functionality even if only designed marginally sensible. Mostly because the system can work separated from the "core"/critical functionality of the storage. "Simply" extend a transaction between characters with dropping a transaction log into a separate functionality/storage and you are half way there.
Of course - as always with development/design - it is better to have it designed into the system at the start. But it is far from an unsurmountable tasks.

Some times I would love to see the designs of these companies databases, because often we hear that companies can't change the name of your character etc, but again if we think sensible database design - it should be relative easy
(yeah - I'm a geek, so sue me )

 

[Aurelius LH]

As Requiel said other valuable items will take the place of gold or currency if there isnt any or a need for it.

True, but we're talking around ways to kill the 'gold seller/spammer' market, so if there's no in-game currency they are dead already.... but if there is, the problem has always been that it's too easy to use automated processes to farm it and then sell on to people who think it's clever to buy game money. As long as whatever is the game 'currency' is hard to get, or takes time, the gold sellers fail since they are looking for easy, fast returns. The trick is making it easy enough to get that casual players remain hooked, but hard to farm.

 

[Cosyra]

you've gotta look at several issues when looking at the gold sellers.

1: Why do people need so much gold?
2: How do the gold sellers get so much gold?
3: How do they move that much gold?

If you can fix number one, then the other two will follow. The spamming is getting worse in WoW but i do think thats only due to one thing, doing dailys meens you can now get your gold for epic flying mount in about 2 weeks. People dont need the gold anymore, so the price has gone down and the spam is getting worse.

 

[Aurelius LH]

Some times I would love to see the designs of these companies databases, because often we hear that companies can't change the name of your character etc, but again if we think sensible database design - it should be relative easy

Although strangely, several companies found it actually was possible to rename characters if people paid for the service, or the names were so offensive a lot of bad publicity might be coming their way..

(yeah - I'm a geek, so sue me )

I'd never sue geeks, they design and maintain most of my hobbies!

 

[Bahumat]

Worst move is to give out 1m trial accounts short after release who magically all end up in the hands of Chinese farmers.

Why are all the magicians chinese dammit!

 

[Manisch Depressiv]

Well, not that easily solved, unless you design the data handling that way from the start, and I'd be surprised (pleasantly, but still surprised!) if it had been engineered that way - certainly most mmorpgs seem not to be! But we can hope....

You make it sound like magic where all that is needed to be done is to dump the text of a query in the (server side) stored procedure that the MMOG client triggers.

Where the log (dump) ends up is not important, it can be even the same database, a different one or a text file.

All new MMOGs will run some kind of RDBMS, most likely SQL based ones and they'll be set up for high performance and redundancy, some products provide full transaction logging or flash backing to any point in the past (for data comparison) so you don't even need to do it yourself.

I don't understand what you mean with designing something from the start, that's what design is for: pre-planning . Passing an existing SQL query to somewhere else for loging can be done at any time.

 

[Dreamor]

you've gotta look at several issues when looking at the gold sellers.

1: Why do people need so much gold?
2: How do the gold sellers get so much gold?
3: How do they move that much gold?

If you can fix number one, then the other two will follow. The spamming is getting worse in WoW but i do think thats only due to one thing, doing dailys meens you can now get your gold for epic flying mount in about 2 weeks. People dont need the gold anymore, so the price has gone down and the spam is getting worse.

1. surely its a reflection on real life... more money shows a bigger status (epeen? )
2. Exploits or duping in the most part, boting or using a program to constantly farm the same mobs (in WoW that would be fish hacks/exploiting raid instances for drops)
3. Farmed on high level characters and then moved to 'trial key' characters, which is why you always see level 1's on these transactions, what they don't know is that most companys now can track (as Requiel pointed out) through logs and find the transaction or id's for the 'data' being moved between characters.

I don't believe you can ever stop Gold Farmers, but you can cut some of the spam / access for a few hours at a time

 

[Xandax]

Although strangely, several companies found it actually was possible to rename characters if people paid for the service, or the names were so offensive a lot of bad publicity might be coming their way..
<snip>

Yeah - and the same with character transfers
Uhhh - we can't do that. Oh you'll pay - well, we have a solution now

 

[Faeldawn]

People will find a way to make a profit from this game, if you can trade and buy things, it's virtually inevitable.

 

[Ashala]

i guess you could have 1 person pr server listening to the channels for goldsellers and have some form of gui specific banning tool that allows him to lockdown an account instantly when he sees a goldseller,

thats the most direct way i see it perhaps not the cheapest hehe

 

[Dervish]

Have a gui tool so that EVERYONE can report seller accounts. Enough hits at the same time flags it up to the server police who can investigate and swing the mighty "account management tool".

Then send a server wide message saying "Thank you to everyone who reported xxxxx as a gold farmer, that account has now been sucked into the warp".

 

[Flimgoblin]

that and ban the people who buy from them.

 

[Effex]

that and ban the people who buy from them.

Id go further and publicly name and shame at the same time, sure would stop a lot of people even considering buying gold if there was a great "wall of shame" / "banned for buying gold list".

 

[Reno]

Naming and shaming goes a lot further than saying " we banned 1001 ppl today for buying gold".
Putting a face on a number that would otherwise be just a meaningless statistic, gives it a lot more impact.

 

[DunRaven]

I'd love to see Gold-Sellers, after being reported and found to be gold-sellers having their little gold-selling characters locked in stockes within the racial capitals and everyone being able to pelt them with some rotten food etc.. etc..

Would be a great way to name & shame them and fun for everyone else too ingame.



I hope Mythic goes a long way to removing gold-sellers from the game as it really can spoil the whole atmosphere and enjoyment for many people.

 

[vayasen]

I still think the threat of action vs buyers would be more meaningfull.

Gold Sellers are facless entities who dont care about the GAME, the CHARACTER or the ECONOMY. They will do it until caught and then carry on doing it on another account.....and so on.

No, clamp down and put the fear of god into players that if they buy gold they will be banned and named on some form of cheat list.........interesting.

surely if the buyers ae cut out of the equation trhough a mix of fear of losing their account (a genuine fear, not a 'we promise to ban gold sellers'). Then the buyers would soon move on after no doubt dropping prices to silly lows.

Eventually if there is no demand for their service, they WILL move on.


I honestly cant see why MMO games dont treat gold buys VERY harshly. If you ask me, sending gold spam is cheating 100%, would I be allowed in game to spam people with 'Come with me, ive found a great cheat spot where I can chear everyone on the server, pm me to join team'.

Surely any1 who takes me up on my super cheating team is guilty as hell an deserves all they get?

IMO buying gold is exactly the same. You cheat EVERY normal player who plays the game for fun and plays it FAIRLY!

 

[Raven]

I don't work with that side of things anymore so I can't tell you how it's done for WAR but I know that for DAoC, everything was logged. We could trace any trade and almost every action for several months afterwards. As Xandax says, data logging is an entirely different thing to storing the current state of each character and their inventory.

Making gold not tradeable isn't a solution because something else will take its place as a currency. Gold is just a token of worth, if there isn't any actual gold in the system then the players will use something in its stead - Aurulite, Diamond Seals, shiny pebbles or anything that has a constant value and can be traded.

Back on to gold selling, we'll take action against anyone damaging the game in this way. Mark Jacobs is famous for his very strong views on RMT (real money trading) and so WAR is designed that just having money isn't as important as in some other games, there are other ways to get stuff and mostly they involve playing the game rather than reaching for your wallet.

There is very little you can do to prevent gold selling, WoW has been plagued with it for years. The things you can do is detect the bot programs and be quick to ban the accounts of the people who stand around in capital cities spamming the gold sites. For either of these you need to take the problem seriously and have staff on call to deal with complaints quickly. There are other ways which are possibly less popular, make it so people can't enter capital cities below a certain level, make it so people of a certain level can't use any trade channels (no idea if WAR has a trade channel) You can ofc monitor trades, flag anything above a certain amount.

Gold farmers also "farm" gold from account hacking, a few people I know in WoW have had their accounts compromised and it can happen to anyone, there was even keyloggers embedded in adverts on well used WoW sites, wowhead, alakasam etc.

Blizzard are talking about introducing a key generator Blizzard Entertainment - Press Release I am frankly disgusted that they are charging for it. Anyway, how viable is this solution? Obviously the cost has to be recovered somewhere but I think its a great idea.