[Lets have a talk]A more efficient way to ban bots, hackers etc

[c2gaming]

Hopefully to the point nobody will buy.

Another idea would be to just murder the economy. Make money untradable. Remove the market. Wanna trade? Trade in kind.

[Mirarara]

The economy is already murdered when the silver is so expensive to be traded. In game money is usually sold with the same or lower price than how much effort you need to earn it.

When the value of traded silver is high, it means that the effort to earn silver from trading activity is high, thus no one will be bothered to trade, resulting in a single player game.

[c2gaming]

So long as silver can be traded, the economy is alive. See, this is what happens if you choose a design that caters to bots but don’t have the power to prevent bots. IMC can catch them, but not prevent them.

If the result of such anti bot measures is a single player game then so be it.

A less drastic (but still drastic) measure would be to have fixed trade values for EVERYTHING. Have IMC dictate the value of everything in the game. There would still be trade and market but you don’t get to decide how much your things would sell for. This would fix RMT via market, but it does NOTHING to prevent it via 1:1.

[Mirarara]

Bot can actually be prevented if the dev is having the appropriate skills regardless of game design. Too bad they don’t. The community usually outsmarted them.

Also, any popular games that requires grinding effort will attract bots. I’m not sure if you know about Kancolle, it’s a browser game without RMT and there are still plenty of botter in it. It doesn’t even has interaction between players in game.

A true quote from my friend, an indie game developer who had so many hack/mod in his game (it’s pretty popular) and gave up on preventing it. “Why the hell would I be a game dev if I have the skill to fix security loophole?”

[c2gaming]

If there are plenty of botters, then there must be other reasons than RMT to bot. IMC either embraces the bots (develop with them in mind) or they take away the reasons to bot (can’t do that because they chose a design that “caters” to bots). Look at the case for tos. Let’s say IMC makes it “single player”. No trading with FFA party looting. There’s still botting for xp.

Here’s something to think about. What if they made money untradable? How would you “cheat” the system? I would propose to trade with pots. I get to decide how many pots my item would be worth. I could still use my money for other npc services (upgrading, repairing, buying pots for my own consumption). I won’t be able to buy money via RMT, but I could buy pots via RMT.

Basically, the system enabling RMT is trading. Take that away and no more RMT. We all know what that would do to tos though.

[nizidr]

What if they made money untradable? How would you “cheat” the system?

Then some item/consumable will become money equivalent. That works with stat potions in RotMG.

Anyway, trying to fight bots is like trying to cure symptoms instead of illness. As long as there are players that want to buy something (and thus creating demand for such services) there will be RMTers ready to provide it.

[Mirarara]

RMT is only a part of the botting’s reason. Most people bot without the intention to sell the money though.

[nizidr]

RMT is only a part of the botting’s reason. Most people bot without the intention to sell the money though.

What i was trying to tell is: as long as there is demand there will be offer. And ToS was designed to be grindy so trying to combat bots would prove to be an exhausting endeavor.

[tehtar]

This:

As long as there are players that want to buy something (and thus creating demand for such services) there will be RMTers ready to provide it.

And that:

as long as there is demand there will be offer.

As simple as that. If there are ppl willing to buy, there always be ppl willing to sell. It’s not really botters fault, the fault goes to those lazy players that can not just play the game like everyone else but instead they search easier/faster way to progress. But there is nothing we can do about it.

[Mirarara]

And this kind of laziness is what made the human progress this far (and the main reason you get to play MMORPG).

[nizidr]

[quote=“Mirarara, post:99, topic:126544, full:true”]
And this kind of laziness is what made the human progress this far (and the main reason you get to play MMORPG).
[/quote]The only “progress” that laziness brought is… remote controls for wide variety of home devices. Everything else was based on time/material efficiency, safety and entertainment.

[Mirarara]

Don’t forget the most important quality for a good programmer is laziness. lol.

[Snivs]

The higher the tax, the more expensive the silvers can be sold though

That’s the point, to make it harder to sell/buy silver.

Yeah sure. And I say again “Tax the sh*t out of that!”. The higher the amount they sell in the market, the bigger the amount they lose. Every time money changes hands a portion of that disappears. If someone can come up with a formula for an increasing amount of tax the higher the amount of money traded, then all the better. If botters decide to make smaller transactions you can trace that too.

Btw, “trade” is not limited to 1:1 since potential can track trades via market.

I already have proposed a formula for this:

Continuing the discussion from Preparing for a Healthy Economy in the International Server:

Preparing for a Healthy Economy in the International Server

From this previous topic, Noticing how expensive everything was in the Korean Cash shop made me worry about the game economy, not just the quantities of silver in the server, but actually the revenue that the game could generate in terms of real life currencies.

Well, My last haircut was roughly $3, I could have about 10 real life haircuts for the same amount a kTOS haircut costs.

Due to the current exchange rates, I’d have to pay ONE FULL DAY OF WORK for a Token or a ToS Haircut, and I have an salary that is somewhat average for professionals in their 20-30’s here in Mexico, so… The average 10-20’s wouldn’t be purchasing much, and quickly falling behind, not turning into a potential customer once they reach a more productive age.

I have rambled a lot about it… but now, I want to offer a couple suggestions that I believe would help the game be more successful in the west, therefore, I suggest IMC as the sole publisher of iToS:

• Drop the prices about 85% for haircuts, these are just too expensive. Think of sales volume. Some players like to change haircuts every now and then, some of them even do it recurrently given the right price, it’s a long run shot. Edit: Haircuts seem to come in as pieces of gear for a special slot, think wig collection!
• Remove EXP Boosters, these are detrimental for the Western F2P experience and a frustrated F2P player is less likely to ever spend and more likely to leave the game or not take it seriously at all.
• Drop the price of the VIP Token by 66%, I’m talking to about 10 USD, so more people can afford it, the more, the merrier; and the merrier, the more likely to spend more again, think of sales volume and people purchasing over and over.
• Replace the +3 Movement Speed buff from the VIP token in kOBT with an additional simultaneous attribute. The movement speed attribute makes any potential PvP unbalanced beetween Free and Token players, and 3 simultaneous attributes makes the token more attractive.

In the ingame economy, I think silver is pretty worthless and easy to come by, and when everybody can be rich, nobody is really rich, these are my suggestions:

• Make silver drops scale based on level difference, like experience, so, botters can’t just slow-farm silver low level mobs, this doesn’t address bots farming loot.
• Make instanced dungeons reward silver, an incentive to run dungeons in a daily basis.
• Create daily quests that reward silver, an alternative to grinding for money in endgame.
• Make Tax a more complex and iterative formula, like this:
  – Base tax = 0.80% = 0.08
  – Define multiple silver limits, each 10k, 20k, 30k… up to 100k, 200k, 300k… each 100k up to 1m, each 1m, 2m, 3m… up to 10m, each 10m, 20m, 30m … up to 100m, 100m, 200m, 300m … up to 1000m and so on.
  – For each limit that a sale suprasses, add an iteration for the tax to be calculated with it.
  – So your tax formula becomes: (1-BASE_TAX)^(1+ITERATIONS) (This is the iterativity I’m talking about).
  – Your tax is recalculated every time you get raw income (market sales, npc sales, silver from trades), based on the total amount of income you’ve earned from previous sales/trades that day. This makes it so that the more you sell/trade during the same day, the more tax % you actually have to pay, even if you sell bunches of cheap items.
  – Your total income tax is reset periodically, maybe daily, weekly or during maintenances.
  – This system emphasizes on avoiding players from getting extremely rich, while helping players with less who handle less money (mostly during the earlier levels), pay a lot less taxes than rich players.
  Example:
• Your base tax: 0.8% (it does seem low, but it scales up).
• You sell an item for 50k, you have 1 base iteration and suprased 5 limits so far (10k,20k,30k,40k and 50k), so you’re getting 6 iteratinons. Your tax is
  1-(1-0.8%)^(6 iterations) = 1-0.92^6 = 0.0471 = 4.71%
  Your taxes will be 4.71%, so your item will be charged for it:
  50,000 - 4.71% = 50,000 - 2355 = 47,645.
• In this same scenario, you sell another item for 100k, accodring to this system, you have already sold 47,645, so your total income will be 147,645 you have 1 base iteration + 10 iterations (10k-100k, the next iteration not being until 200k), meaning you’re getting 11 iterations, your tax is
  1-(1-0.8%)^(11 iterations) = 1-0.92^11 = 0.0846 = 8.46%
  Your taxes will be 8.46%, so your total income will be charged for it:
  147,645*8.46%=12,491.
  But you’ve already paid 2,355, so only 12,491-2,355 = 10,136 are applicable taxes, meaning you will earn 100,000-10,136=89,864, by making these calculations, you pay the same when you sell a single item for 150k, or several items for 150k in the same period (day/week/maintenance).
• Daily Income should tracked account-wide.
• Any amount of Silvers spent with an NPC should be sustracted from your daily income, so the more silvers you spend with NPCs, the less taxes you have to pay in your future transactions with other players.
• I’ve made an estimation spreadsheet, so you could try fiddling with the base tax, daily income and sales amount.
• Notice that the higher amounts of silver you recieve in a small period of time, the higher the taxes you will be charged, towards 900m, you are charged the following (when base tax is 0.8%: you get charged 30.89% which I consider fair for earning that large sum in such a short time period, while, when base tax is 2%, you get chraged 60.89% for the same quantity, which I consider way too abusive).

Please, let me know what you think about my ideas, Like if you want to let IMC know we want a healthy economy both for the company and the server.

Edit: an amount was wrong in the example calculation.
Edit: Corrected some percentages I wrote wrong.

It is a complex formula, and a somewhat complex implementation compared to what we have seen so far, but I’m very positive it would work on keeping the riches distributed more evenly between players.

The main point is to tax the amount of silvers you earn as a whole, instead of a per-transaction tax.

[c2gaming]

Oh look, silver is no longer tradable in ktos.

[Snivs]

It has never been directly tradeable. You have always been able to Buy/Sell items in the Market, though.

[nizidr]

It has never been directly tradeable.

it has been in iCBT2. You could input amount of silver you want to give during trades and it worked fine.

[MementoMori]

I like how Reddit punish users : shadowbanning.

Instead of showing a red sign “You have been banned!”, it doesn’t tell to the banned guy anything so he doesn’t know he is banned.

He can still use the game normally, but nobody except him will see his messages or his items on the market. The bot thinks it is still playing except that it won’t be able to interact with anybody.

[Anarth]

I like the idea.
Strictly limited access to the game’s features is more painful than just not being able to get into the game at all.

[Snivs]

Yeah, I meant in since kOBT, and even now on full release.

[Nakano15]

I believe I saw a bug in some games that also results in that,
when a player gets disconnect, the player character actually
can move and do anything, but monsters and objects
would not be able to be interacted or will not even move.

That happened to quite a number of mmos, sometimes
the player even gets the notice of disconnect a few minutes later (or never).