Given their latest statement, it’s clear they don’t want to change the trade limitations.
Now I have to ask you: Is it really worth it?
There’s many, MANY games that lives/lived for years and years with gold sellers simply by banning them as fast as they can, and it works. Gold sellers don’t exactly DESTROY the game and make everyone quit. They’re annoying but most of the time, that’s it.
You know what’s DEFINITELY more annoying to the players?
Being unable to trade. Waiting 48h to collect silver. Paying $20 on token and being able to only list 5 items on marketplace (and still being mostly unable to trade in the end). 50% tax on crafting classes. Being unable to properly play on crafting classes. Very slow 2/5 minutes respawn time.
I remember when runescape limited the trade for a couple years. They lost A HUGE amount of players on the go, and their new trade system was actually VERY good (Grand Exchange); the only real limitation being you couldn’t trade for nothing.
As a comparison, in this game you can’t really use the marketplace properly, and that’s after WAITING for the item to be listed and paying rather rough taxes (10/30%).
Give and take some time, Runescape removed their trade restrictions, and with that many of the bots came back. Guess what happened? The game got another surge of players and MANY of the quitting players also came back. And runescape wasn’t really half as restricted as this game was.
You couldn’t trade any real amount of money 0:1, but you sure as hell could trade, and even play the market for big bucks.
Making it even easier to understand, let’s talk of things this way:
Suppose you have a garden patch in your yard, and things have been a bit though lately with some fungus creeping on your lovely plants and slightly reducing their growth in the winter. This is an especially annoying fungus; although it won’t kill your cabbage, it’s really hard to remove and needs premium fungus Removelator™ 3000, which is quite expensive. You could also remove it manually by spraying and pruning leaves on every infected plant, but that’s obviously too troublesome and too difficult.
You need to make a decision!!!
How about…we lock all the plants in a huge transparent glass crate and leave it alone baking on hot artificial lamps for 2 days at a time without water!
Obviously this kind of fungus won’t survive without water and humidity, we’re geniuses.
And THAT is the current state of the game.
They’re drying the game up along with its “fungus” spread to stop the latter.
It’s working, isn’t it?
However, instead of a fungus that limites the growth of plants by 10%, they’re manually limiting the growth by 50% by removing the water the plants needed.
The fungus is killed as soon as it starts spreading, but the plants are even more so.
And you know the truth? The plants and just about any other reasonable person would think the fungus is just annoying. Either pay the Removelator™ 3000 or leave it be, the plants will be fine in the end.
Taking drastic measures that have no big benefit for the game just so people won’t make a relatively low amount of money off your game is an AWFUL solution.
I might be declaring myself the #1 public enemy of white knights, developers and musicians when I say:
Just let the gold sellers be. Ban them as they come along, DON’T LET THEM SPREAD HUGELY and control their overall number.
You DO NOT NEED to remove 99% of the gold sellers/bots (which you AREN’T, if I might add), just make it so people won’t quit ONLY because of bots.
In the end, people ARE quitting and are TENS of times more likely to quit because of the current state of this “economy” you spoke of than the bots. I have never played a mmo in which I said “Wow, these gold sellers are annoying, I quit”.
And I played runescape F2P before going member.
And we all played this when the bots were actually harming us by lagging the server using megaphones.
TL;DR: Trade restrictions are many times worse than gold sellers will ever be.
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Food for thought: The second theory.
There’s also something that latched itself into my mind and is very close to confirming itself.
The REAL reason they limit trade isn’t because of boo hoo the bots.
It’s to control the economy and limit the players from going over the content.
By severely limiting the players from trading and accessing the marketplace, players WILL be forced to farm for way longer, wait longer to play the game and theoretically keep playing the game for longer.
They won’t be going through the said lack of content as fast, and thus the game should last longer.
The steep marketplace taxes only reinforce this theory, if anything, it’s all the more clear this is what they really intended with this.
Am I right? Wrong? Please voice your opinion.
I just feel they’re handling us like cattle, and to make things worse, being flat out dishonest.