That amount in the Oracle picture isn’t how much they have on hand, but iirc, is how much they’ve received in the field. Also, if they’re transferring it to another account instead of selling it directly, then they’re reducing their earning even further thanks to the Market tax fee.
Now for the rest of the post:
Your example is set in the future though, not the past. Maybe Bots will be able to earn and inject billions into the economy within a 30-day timespan down the line, but the debate above you was referring to this present incident. Game was up for 3 weeks before they got hit, including the mess we had in the first week, and the large influx of farming-Bots didn’t even begin until the end of the first. There’s also the issue of tax, but I’ll just apply that to the example you already posted instead with increased numbers for Bots and silver earned so it’s closer to this incident:
So our Bot friends have roughly 4.2 Billion Silver in 30 days. That’s insane; our game is gonna take a hit with all that pumped into the economy!
But wait… Silver can’t be traded via 1:1, so those Bots are gonna have to use the Market to engage in direct RMT with customers. No problem, 4.2 Billion Silver straight into the market-- oh wait… there’s a 10%/30% tax fee for each transaction depending on whether or not the customer has a Token already. It would be silly to assume that all customers of that 4.2 Billion Silver are all Token users, and it’d also be silly to assume they’re all F2P’ers without Tokens, but we’ll just assume they all had Tokens on hand for the sake of the argument.
4.2b * 0.90 = 3.78 Billion
So there’s your final number, roughly 3.8 Billion with the odds skewed heavily in favor of the Bots. But there’s a few problems that are factored in during all this:
For this to all pass, IMC would have to completely ignore all of these Bots and let them operate freely for an entire Month. This would mean they’d be ignoring their 48-hour Market hold on transactions that they stated is in place so they stop unorthodox market trades before they complete. This would also mean they’d be ignoring all Report Bot functions during this period, including their new RII system: https://treeofsavior.com/news/?n=377 The chance of them being this neglectful towards the Bot situation given their current efforts, is very unlikely of happening anytime soon.
All of this is not happening on one server. We have 4 servers, and all of them are being utilized by RMT operations.
Having the Silver in their accounts is not equal to having it into the economy. They would have to have actually sold that 3.8 Billion via RMT transactions for it to count as:
But yeah, it’s certainly possible for them to pull that off in the future down the line within 30 days under extreme favorable circumstances. But as for here, in the past 3 weeks, this was not the case.
Ack, I originally had it as 2 and 3 weeks but changed it to 1 month and didn’t check things after.
So yeah, they can make 2.1 billion in 15 days, or about two weeks. Or a billion a week. Literally billions of new silver solely from bots. Not a laughing matter.
Silver can’t be traded, ok, so? Normal players can’t trade silver either, so they don’t affect the economy either? Sure, if they get banned while still holding a lot of silver, all of that never had the chance to enter the system, but no one bot is going to have tens of millions unless they’re being really careful about laundering it to not get banned.
Bots don’t just sell currency to other players, they also buy things like Arde Daggers to facilitate RMT trade. If one is worth 1mil, then they spend exactly 1mil silver that they’ve generated through botting. Tax is not a factor in this equation, because it has exactly the same buying power as 1mil from a legitimate player. They could also buy a token for 500k if they didn’t exploit the Steam refunds for free ones, then 1:1 trade said dagger away for cash. Whatever else they buy on the market for their own use is all on top of their normal silver exchange.
And what if they can make 200k per day? 500k-1mil is a lot, but doable at higher levels, but 300k? 400k? They don’t make nearly as much as an active player in endgame content per hour, but they can operate 24/7 (barring maintenance). So that could mean 2-3bil a week is generated.
10 billion in the game’s 3 week lifespan is a lot of currency to inject into the economy, even if it’s distributed across all servers, which I’m not sure why you brought that up. The original figure was never about a single server, just all bots in general, which would naturally be focused on the highest populated one. 4 billion on Klaipeda is still “billions of silver” so what are you laughing about?
I’m interpreting the above 1394+1678 banned accounts as a recent thing, seeing as it’s timestamped as April 19th, right after in-game bot reporting was implemented. Maybe I’m wrong, but I was under the impression that all those accounts went untouched until now. Other bots that were banned earlier wouldn’t be in this count. Otherwise how would they have been “most frequently reported” with the old system?
My whole point was that this isn’t “extreme favorable circumstances” for the bots. I’d expect the real numbers to be even higher than this, seeing as how IMC could not possibly have banned every bot, only the highest reported, and even from there they can’t be entirely sure some of those were actual bots. Even with all the numbers scaled back heavily AGAINST the bots, they still generated at least a billion usable silver that never would have existed otherwise.
So, again, what are they going to do about all that silver? Were “real” players who bought silver banned? Were a bunch of fraudulent market transactions reversed? Or was it just the bots that have already offloaded much of their earnings and can just be remade?
…So I guess we’re just gonna ignore the fact that the “2.1 billion in 15 days” is not confined to one server, in which case the 1394 Bots would also be spread throughout the 4 servers and have to run their services uninterrupted, and that we have to commerce this Silver via Market for it to actually do the damage. Oh yeah, every person who participated in the RMT also all had Tokens. Also, no, this conversation and situation me and you are having right now is not a laughing matter. The one I was having with Hue2015 up there, was (Well, the first post).
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. That “Silver can’t be traded” line was just stated so I could follow-up with the Market explanation afterwards. This way, readers who aren’t playing the game or know how the market system works will understand (Which is quite a few, since people keep using Shout chat to try and sell things for set-prices instead of just putting it into the Market). I didn’t say “Bots don’t affect the economy because 1:1 trade is restricted”.
Noo no no, Tax is a factor in all these transactions, because unlike real life, the taxed Silver disappears. We can’t just say “Bot earns 1M, Bot uses 1M to buy a weapon, 1M introduced into the economy.” So that’s 10% or 30% taken away from the seller’s profits.
And that would be 500k taken away from their profits per Bot that buys that Token, which would also be taxed. Then there’s the issue of RMT Item trade being an unpopular service to them that most of them don’t even engage in because of Silver selling being the usual go-to service for years in most MMO’s, and because of the Potential being at least -2 by the time it reaches the buyer. It’s more feasible for a customer to just buy Silver in this game than schedule a date and time for both parties to be Online to drop off a weapon that they could’ve got in the Market in a better condition.
Yes, what if! That could! But, at what map would they be making 200k a day per Bot? If I had to guess, would it be Stele Road? This is excluding selling any rare items they might have picked up via the Market, since the Silver from those would be coming from another player. I’d like to go in-game and farm that spot for a straight hour and x24 it so I could see if the numbers match up, before we start increasing the Silver for this. I’ll try mimicking their kill-speed too so I don’t kill too fast or too slow in comparison. Thanks in advance.
Yes, 4 billion on Klaipeda is “billions of Silver”, if we’re skewing the other factors in all this in favor of the Bots having that 4 Billion put into the economy in the first place. Enough!
Yeah, this announcement should apply to all Bots that were tagged by the Report function since it got put in.
It is actually, since you weren’t including the other factors in this such as level/tax/alive-time and I even went along with it in your first example, which was a mistake on my part. Yeah, I’m sure they didn’t hit every Bot with this either, but we’d both literally be speaking on hypothetical numbers if we tried factoring in how many were left over and what their levels were so there’s no point in discussing that part.
As for this line:
No, we’re not gonna use numbers scaled back heavily against either side. The responses above should be covered instead of us starting new arguments in favor of the economy.
Who knows? I’d like for RMT customers to get banned, but maybe they didn’t. I’d like for some of the Silver that was pushed out to have been reversed, but maybe it didn’t. But one thing we both know, is that they did not push out all of their Silver earnings into the economy.
Well I think you got my point. There is literally billions of illegitimate silver here. Even if it’s just 1-2bil.
And your point is that it’s not that big of a deal, because even if the total sum is in the billions, it’s distributed across all servers and is mitigated by market tax, trade restrictions, and bans.
Damage has been done, even if it’s not that much, and it’s right to wonder how that’s being dealt with. But I still say the moment the bot account has silver they intend to use, that exact silver value “enters” the economy. Before tax.
When does “legit” silver enter the system? When a real player kills a mob, NPCs an item, or cashes in an achievement level, silver that never existed before is suddenly created. Selling something to another player is not generating any silver, because that silver already existed, no? But if that player quits playing, the silver is lost.
If a player has a million silver on hand, and wants to buy one or more items worth one million total silver, they can afford it. True, after they buy what they want, 10-30% of their silver disappears, and is not part of the economy. But was it before? Now that the other player owns it, is THAT considered “in” the economy? It’s added to the total amount the player already earned from all sources, and if they quit or get banned, all their silver and items are effectively removed from the game. The same situation the first player was in before they purchased anything.
So what about the entire collection of all silver on the server(s) across all active accounts? It either all doesn’t count because it hasn’t bought anything yet, all counts because it has the potential to buy items worth up to the total amount, or is only “really” 70-90% face value since it’s guaranteed to be taxed once it’s used.
If bots contribute 1 billion silver, which is actually 7-9 hundred million after tax, then it has the exact same effect on an economy with trillions of silver, which is actually less after tax! When you calculate the tax is the same for both sides, unless you claim bots are less likely to have tokens than real players so they get taxed more, but how can you prove that?
