Tree of Savior Forum

How to buy RMT silver or abuse boletos and get away with it: How imc abuse mitigation strategies are and will continue to be failures

General Discussion
#1

#DISCLAIMER: The methods described in this post are absolutely not condoned by this Prinny and are theoretical in nature. However, If anyone thinks that I’m being diabolical for describing such methods, then maybe they need to realize that anyone with more than a few brain cells probably has this figured out as well.

So I finally got around to reading through the recent post on bans for Boleto abusers. After actually looking through the banned list of team names, I have to say, great job imc you’ve shown pretty much nothing. (Also great job imc cheerleading squad!)

Why do I say that?

If you take a look through the banned team names… does anyone actually think “hhhhh******” or “bbbb*****” or "jjjjj*****"would ever be a main team name?

If you said, “No, of course not, those are only shell names that would funnel funds towards a main account. That main account will be caught and banned!”, then you would be right and wrong!

You would be right to realize that those are only shell accounts, but you would be wrong to assume that the main accounts will ever be caught especially if they are using the following method:

Let’s say you’ve managed to illegitimately gain a large amount of silver either via RMT or via boleto abuse, how do you get it to your main account?

If you’re dumb, you’d use your main account to post normal items at outrageous prices and then buy them using the abusing shell account. Will there be some idiots who get caught this way? Sure…

But if you’re smart?

Take that silver and have many friends post items for sale at slightly higher but reasonable prices. Even better, buy a fair number of items sold by many random people as well. Yes, the amount of silver you’ll launder will be less, but will imc play the chicken game by banning any and all accounts that have received silver from your illegitimate shell account? Is imc willing to ban innocent bystanders that happened to receive money from a shell account that received RMT silver or abused boletos?

The potential for abuse is even greater than what I’ve described. Want to target specific users? If there is a specific user selling their wares on shout, all that needs to be done is to engage said user with shell account 1 and decide on a specific price to sell on the market. Then use shell account 2 (which contains the RMT silver) to buy the item. BAM, your unsuspecting target has participated in RMT. Would a careful investigation be able to figure this out? Sure, but imc is by all accounts short staffed…

So, that’s why I think imc will never actually catch and ban clever users who want to abuse the system and why I think their market restrictions don’t do jack.

I don’t think imc will ever end up catching the more clever boleto abusers. How should imc act to curb RMT abuse? I’ve outlined a method showing how an RMT buying player could launder their funds, so how does imc combat RMT? The answer is that they’re going to have to focus on the bots and implement better systems for mitigating RMT that don’t involve crazy restrictions that frustrate the playerbase.

Example:

I’ll end this post with some amusing quotes (make sure to expand them for maximum amusement):

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#2

I keep telling them, but they don’t listen… doooood!!!

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#3

The problem with the whole idea of IMC will track them and ban em’ is:

  1. It comes to assumptions to decide if a certain person is the owner of the main acc that is using the exploit.

  2. IMC have a lot on their hands and doesn’t have the time or the resources to track those ppl.

I heard that 2 BR guilds have “proud” members that are top players on their servers that openly tell everyone that they didn’t get ban using the exploit.

PS: I’ve already report those players, but it’s my word against theirs since IMC can’t know for sure.

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#4

Even if it’s distributed amongst “reasonable” market listings, a single account is still ending up with an extraordinary amount of total silver.

The only way to be perfectly safe and undetected is to not exploit much in the first place, so I’d say their solution, no matter how half-baked, is working.

#5

Yes, a lot of players who used this exploit don’t got banned .

#6

Who is to say that someone wouldn’t use RMT to ‘assassinate’ other users? Maybe a certain mischievous Prinny feels like loading up a shell account with RMT silver and then going on a buying spree just for the heck of it? Who is to say RMT accounts/sellers don’t already do this to throw imc off their tracks?

Also if there are smart abusers, then they would realize the point you made and try to split the money 33-33-33 or 50-50 with some other unsuspecting users via market. When you can get 500k silver for ~6 bucks then 3 bucks for 250k is probably tolerable for someone who is dead set on using RMT.

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#7

I’m not sure how you can really “assassinate” someone when they’re limited to a single item for sale at a time, which would be priced competitively. You can’t unload a million silver of pure profit onto someone unless they allow it.

#8

You’ve never seen an item stack on the market before?

#9

Actually it would be effective to just take a look at the IP’s behind these banned names.

If they are smart, they used vpns. If not, you get a list of all the other accounts managed by that IP. Steam should be able to track that down I’d assume.

#10

VPN is but one method. Another would be if they’re regularly accessing from public IPs as well…

#11

Every lvl +200 has a extraordinary amount of silver, due the fact that most of the items they sell is what ppl call “extraordinary amount of silver”.

I just retrieve 875 000 silver from the market, because I sold 5 Gliz heart from the cheapest price on AH “250 000” and this was because I just happen to have this low lvl item stacked on my inventory since early game. A rare lvl item can be sold for 3~5x times that value.

Unless ppl wants IMC to look every item vs every price to identify the “standard value” of said items, and then filter using that data to maybe find those involved. I don’t think is that easy.

Let’s say the scammers were selling headgears with absurd prices, it’s untraceable, because headgears can be sold for ridiculous prices since it can have OP enchants. Do you understand that selling a headgear for 900 000 isn’t “suspicious” because honest players can sell and buy headgears for similar prices?

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#12

OP you are aware they can only do what they can? GM/IMC are human as well, there is no 100% prevention on hackers/RMT. It’s call trying their best, if one or two manage to slip off, well good for them they survive through sheer luck.

IMC will definitely do their investiagtion and IF you are really “Not Guilty”, just send them a ticket or send them 10 tickets. The Support section is there for a reason. Bottomline is everything is being logged, it’s just too huge for them to track every single exploiter.

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#13

Uh, I mean compared to the regular price.

How could selling a bunch of items for their normal market value ever be considered an exploit?

All they’d have to do is compare a player’s market history and see “oh, every single item is below the average” and they’re legit.

How could you benefit from cheated accounts if you’d sell just as many expensive things to normal players anyway? Like great, you overpriced your stuff by 10-20% and got away with it. Is that worth risking everything with an ever growing list of banned accounts under your belt?

#14

Public IP’s are trackable as well. However, having a list of accounts being managed by IP’s with banned accounts already limits the suspicious accounts which needs further inspection greatly. If they have suspiciously much silver and weird transactions, you get a winner :wink:

#15

What is the “normal market value” of Keppa Doll hat?

#16

Nothing… 5 silver?

#17

What are current trading restrictions and the 48 hour wait period for then? I’ve just described a method that bypasses these restrictions… how do they stop RMT or boleto abuse? How can it get worse than it already is?

#18

dude, the boleto issue lies with Steam. It only happened due to the lack of testing. There were other games that had the same issue as well in the past.
And you can’t stop RMT as I said. If the game is hackable, there will be hacks.
Simple facts.
If they could had used some hackshield crap(which sucks anyway) they would had, but no. Their previous game granado espada was already a well known game for players themselves to bot.
And I didn’t say the trade restrictions are working fine. In fact they don’t.

#19

That’s a terrible answer honestly. You know, that bots are expendable right?

The RMT’s who control the bots are the colony. IMC just focusing on the bots is like focusing on just stomping on ants. You are getting rid of ants and not the ant colony. RMT’s don’t care if you ban their bot because they will just make another bot. If you get the RMT, you get all his bots.

Some strategies companies use is to monitor a certain bot and see where it goes and who it interacts with to catch RMTs’. They don’t outright ban some bots immediately for that reason.

#20

They really need a system to account for enchants, anvils, and gem slots. And not just for RMT.

Should be easy enough to exclude those cases, though. Or if someone’s selling blank items for max stat prices, that’s an easy indication of abuse.