- Well first off, Blizzard has their own dedicated anti-cheat system called Warden so that could be used to detect botting accounts. I’m sure they are a big enough company to employ more advanced server-side bot detection techniques as well. Here is an example strategy I wish imc could apply but everyone keeps telling me not to expect it to happen, so I’m not. We’ll just be stuck with a lot of bots…
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Free to play model helps, as it lowers the barrier to account creation. It doesn’t stop botting as RMT could just steal credit card information to buy accounts to bot on for a few weeks (they then launder the mats and gold) before the account gets closed because the game company got a credit card chargeback. But F2P means that they can skip that highly illegal or costly “buy accounts” step and just proceed to automating account creation.
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Asian MMOs are an RMT seller’s dream because pretty much all the progression is locked behind grind. Much more grind that you would find in pretty much any western MMO. And not everyone who plays online games has the time, patience, or desire to go through all the grind. Some people have a lot of money and not a lot of time. This is what RMT capitalizes on. They essentially try to sell you “convenience” in the form of silver, items, or power leveling. This just means you can always expect more RMT activities in games where progress is locked behind significant time sinks.
imc is trying to mitigate the RMT by selling tokens that can be traded for silver (essentially trying to cut out the middle man by becoming the real money trade dealer themselves), but because their $18 price point is a bad deal compared to every other MMO out there, it’s just going to crash hard in my opinion. In order for someone to want to buy tokens to sell, they’re going to probably want a lot more return than just 300-500k silver. It’s interesting to note that this amount of silver is not hard for a bot to gather which is why many of those RMT sites already offer the token equivalent amount of silver for less than the $18 imc token ‘subscription cost’.
- Final point is that the game may actually not be running with an anti-cheat at this point in time… we’ll see if this is true. If so, it was a really dumb idea on imc’s part.