Cause its really needed, I’m on a quite a bit, and it seems you all are biting your tongues to get anything done properly.
If you wanna make a good server, you’ll have to get over your dream of disallowing RMT’ing. To be fair, the way you set up the game, and suppressed trading so much, you make RMT’ing look like a valid option to get anything (within reason) quickly.
I’m sure you have people who could be given a special job with the powers to instantly ban a boter. That’s all we the community are really wanting to happen. Better trading system for people that have purchased the game, a means to not have to block everyone you see via chat, and a way to discourage boters.
If you wanna leave your game the way it is, Fine but you’re gonna have to have people get in game and do the cleaning manually.
This definitely isn’t going to happen, nor should it. Normal players should NOT be given the ability to ban players. That’s just an unbelievably bad idea.
Normal players? nah Their own emplyees. lol because the way it seemswork is, they wait a few weeks to see if a situation changes, come up with some bull crap plan that doesn’t work just so they don’t have to get their hands dirty, or mess up in some way to cause more trouble.
My mistake. I thought YOU wanted the power to ban bots, which would have just been crazy as we both agree.
hehe yeah. i’d probably ban everyone that’s sassy towards me 
make the game b2p, if it helps them have enough money to hire an employee to sit there 24/7 and ban bots
It already is. I think you vastly underestimate how much it would cost to have someone online 24/7. It would probably be roughly $90,000 a year, or $7500 a month. That’s for three people (since it’s 24/7) on ONE server. Now expand this to 4 servers and you’re looking at $360,000 a year.
The game hasn’t even made any money yet. I guarantee they are still fairly far in the red. To tack on costs like this at this point is absurd. It’s not like it would eliminate RMT either. They would just find ways to get around it.
you keep saying “b2p” as if it’s some magical money-printing scheme.
i keep trying to point out “f2p” brings in twice as much money every month (on average).
Most proper application ever. 10/10 would hire.
Thanks Gangplank 
<3
i can clean it up with proper English but idk if i’d get accepted anyway, or if they would put their own employees to the job. However… lots of people have been banned in the current server maintenance. Naice!
People are not getting that much everywhere around the world, it would cost much less, since there is no difference from there such employe can do his job.
i don’t know how they find bots anyway. if they had some system where players can report bots and the server automatically records videos and logs of that player. then someone can just quickly go through all the reports that day.
i assume they just read players reports sent in and if they add evidence they block them and wait for the user to complain…
i can guarantee you, if i were in charge of hiring for a certain position, or even just considering opening such a position up… some guy posting randomly in the public forums saying “hey gimme a job!” wouldn’t even be considered for the job.
when – and by that i mean “if” – they ever decide to hire community mods, they will have an application method that they consider suitable… and just randomly posting in the forums will not be it.
on top of that, you wouldn’t have the power to ban people, or do cool stuff in game. your job would be to follow a suspected botter/hacker around for a while, and make a report to a real GM as to whether you consider them to be a botter/hacker, as well as why. then the gm would review the report, and make a decision on what to do about it.
yay, watch people and file reports on them for 8h a day. doesn’t that sound exciting?
no you can’t just play the game while you do that, you need to be observing the botters/hackers. even more fun.
Actually… if they could make it a no/low experience position and offer around minimum wage and a bit higher tons of people who are currently out of a job would probably leap on that job opportunity(Myself included probably, hell $9 a hour for patrolling maps on a game and watching and banning for suspicious behavior?! Count me in!)
The problem is, even if they didn’t do this… IMC stated they don’t believe in this primitive way of dealing with bots which is the real only way to control them… Stop them? No, it’s impossible. However they can be controlled to a reasonable amount.
yea, when you describe it that way, sure, it sounds like a great deal!
except that isn’t how it works.
you don’t get to “play”. you’re literally on patrol. you have a special account to log in to. your characters on this account don’t earn exp or level up. you’re invincible, and usually invisible. and you’re not just randomly running around, you’re told to either stand in a certain area, or follow a specific character/account. you can’t ban, you just file reports.
MOST mods like that would be working on a volunteer basis, earning cash-shop currency if they get anything.
i mean hell, i’d -still- do it. but it’s a job, not the super-fun “get paid to play” romp a lot of people seem to assume it would be.
and again, all this does it sweep the problem under the rug. covering up the surface issues while the botters/RMT find better ways to do it that are harder to detect.
When are jobs EVER play? The way I described it is exactly what it is. You’d be patrolling maps, writing reports. Following suspected botters and confirming whether they are bots or not and then providing reason for your analysis.
The account you’re on is a ghost, you can’t be seen. You can only chat to the GMs online… Even if I couldn’t ban and just filed reports I’d still do it because right now I’m out of a job and I’d take anything that isn’t flipping burgers or dealing with retail.
The thing is with botters/rmt coding more intelligent bots it’s still hitting them hard as they have to invest the time and resources to test these bots as well as make sure they’re coded effectively… so they’d have to hire outside help, again. If their profit starts ending up less then what they’re investing they’ll eventually give up the aggressive approach and just become passive about it.
hell i’ll gladly take flipping burgers, just as long as i don’t have to do retail.
and yea, absolutely the only effective way to fight them is by cutting into their profits.
but killing off random bot accounts actually does very little toward that.
now maybe… combining this 3-day restriction, and the 48h processing time… and etc… overall this might give them a larger window of vulnerability.
-shrugs- iunno… i’d rather have IMC take a bit longer to make a method that’s highly effective, than just mow down lots of low level bots and hope to papercut them to death.
Hell I’d take burger flipping if it was more local and I could walk to work, problem with that for me is nearest fast food joint is 1 hour by foot and they STILL rejected me anyways so yeah.
Anywho, You’re absolutely right on this. The only way to effectively fight RMT and turn them from aggressive(like now) to passive(like most games with RMT that aren’t hurting due to them) is to hurt their profits.
Having staff with the sole purpose of hunting down these bots and getting rid of them as well as the other team still trying to figure out other ways of fighting them would be near-optimal. The breathing room period is very good and it does hurt them once their main selling accounts are taken care of, however it doesn’t stop them…
Just an eye of the storm moment, really.
this is from -our- perspective though.
important question: how optimal would it remain once you factor in the expenses on IMC’s end, vs how much they save because of it.
That is true, this is only factoring from what we know and the perspective.
Server costs, hiring costs, hosting costs… flight costs?
Are the bots causing them that huge of a loss that they’d be willing to invest in something that would make more people buy TP? That’s really what it comes down to… and there’s a lot behind the scenes we don’t know.