Tree of Savior Forum

Thoughts on IMC restrictions from an ex-Goldseller:

I will just open with this: Your current line of fighting would not prevent me to reach my customers if I were still in the business and furthermore it would never be able to.

I will list the reasons further down, although I should technically charge you a consultation fee.

First off what does a goldseller have?

  • A huge amount of currency
  • A constant income of rare items
  • Cannot be tired
  • Huge profit margins (especially if they are using illegal methods)

Currently there are two different types of customers possible:

  1. Activated Token Customer
    Let’s assume he wants to buy 500k, then I have several options:
  • I could simply give him an Arde Dagger that I purchased or grinded myself and let him sell it. 500k are easily guaranteed and there is no way for you to revert that. The customer could be my friend after all. If it isn’t the Arde Dagger, 3 Battle Bracelets etc etc.

  • I could give him crafting mats + a recipe and let him put the finished product on the market. If for example the buyer is a cleric you could give him let’s say Valia + opal + 36 horns + 79 ellom bells. Suddenly a medium priced valia appears on the market.

  • Finally I could just buy something from the customer at a ridiculous price, which you would likely detect. Personally I would not use this method.

  1. Token is not activated
    Now this is a bit trickier, but it can still work. It depends on the starting funds of the customer. It largely revolves around double transactions
  • I put up an item cheap so he can afford it and resell it to me. It would have to be gear though. I sell it at min price, he puts it up at max price. Goat horns are an example of where you could move right now in the system. Minimum price was something around 12k ish, maximum price was 741k

  • I can make him a token user. Currently it just costs 350k - if the customer has that kind of silver on hand I can ask him to purchase a token and be reimbursed those 350k from me.

  • I can buy an item for a ridiculous price from him.

I could go on, but I doubt you will even read this. The bottomline is that your way of fighting only covers a fraction of possibilities.

If you want to learn how to combat botters effectively get in contact or leave it be. In the meanwhile they will keep abusing you from angles you never expected since I kept my method list short, there are still more someone could use.

However I appreciate that you are fighting back hard and not giving in. Keep it up

Edit: Just for clarity - I didn’t bot Tree of Savior so asking me exactly how it is done here is futile. Use google for that or just watch a bot go.

65 Likes

Costumer - a person who makes, sells, or rents costumes.

5 Likes

Fixed that for you :slight_smile:

I was going to get angry, then I actually read your post.

Thanks for helping the community and IMC fight these scum by providing constructive feedback :smiley:

8 Likes

Only 1 instance of that word out of 8 is fixed. 7 left untouched. :imp:

nooo dont make me waste more time to actually spellcheck it completely.

The 2nd method wouldn’t work because anything other than gear traded over becomes untradeable.

But the 1st and 3rd method definitely is possible.

I’m totally with you on the point that the restrictions currently doesn’t do anything against gold sellers.

1 Like

Thank you for no longer being a goldseller. I can imagine the huge sum of money you were getting, and that it could have been hard to get away from.

I would still do it, but to grow bigger I would need a partner - which I don’t have flying around right now.

Especially since those pesky asians need to be opposed by a goldseller that is at heart a gamer and doesn’t go into a game guns blazing just caring about his own profits.

Spamming the chat, making the market un-useable for the casual player etc should not be something that is done for the sake of profits.

Even more props for opening up and admitting it, let alone sharing their filthy methods with us to help the devs deal with them.


A few of my thoughts on this:

There is no way to stop the gold sellers. Going as far as to completely disallowing trading would result in account sharing for powergrinding service. This can be detected and stopped on a case by case basis but cannot be completely deterred beyond destroying players ability to play the game.

Method 2 is prevented by mats only being tradeable once. Method 3, as you’ve said, is highly deterred by the current system.

Method 1 is possible because IMC allowed trading in this way. It is a compromise between the community completely boycotting this game and stopping RMT. There is legitimately no way to both stop RMT yet allow players to trade without restrictions.

1 Like

yep thats the must responsible argument ihave heard since yesterdays series of trollings and discussions

2 Likes

Goldsellers are tenacious, that’s for sure. I’m just reminded of Maplestory REBOOT, where trading is disabled altogether. Still, Goldsellers opted to sell entire accounts instead.

Ohhh you are right stuff is restricted too, but well then take recipes and give the guy the mats to built it aswell, then the finished product can be traded again.

Or send the customer farm a low level region for an hour it is usually fine and they will grab some stuff.

Edit: Let me implement your wise words into the OP in case someone in charge actually does read it

Or… you can just trade him 10 gold or silver bars and have him sell it to the NPC for 50k or 30k a piece and make it more simple. Customer pays you real money, you give him gold bars. He’ll end up with 500k / 300k without having you go and make things so complicated through the auction house.

I mean, if what you claim is that you can endlessly obtain rare items, gold and silver bars should be no problem right? They’re farmable from mobs.

So much for pretending to be such a sophisticated gold seller.

Either way, the majority of gold sellers aren’t legit. It’s basically all just scam and anybody who seriously thinks it an actual business model is either an idiot or very ignorant. There are some gold sellers that might actually pay out, but good luck with that. You’re better off clicking random ad pop ups in hopes that what their selling is actually working.

they cannot be traded in 1:1 trade.

Yes. This. I don’t get why so many people don’t get this. Spammers in game, tons of bots, transaction histories on the website, lots of happy customers means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with regards to actual RMTs.

Also like @nizidr mentioned, can’t trade those items. And stuff you can trade becomes untradeable after one transaction.

It doesn’t matter, it’s still sellable in the auction house and its price is guaranteed to be placed at whatever the bars value is worth compared to trying to sell 100 materials for 6k each.

Unless the GM’s are also tracking the silver or gold bars sold.

Concerning rare materials: I can only tell you that I started throwing away sought after items after days, because I couldn’t handle the storaging in a feasible way.

It is just hard to imagine what a single computer with 10-20 accounts can do in terms of grinding. They don’t tire and they can do the same for hours. We get less effective within 2-3 hours of doing the same thing.

If you assume you could e.g. make a bot route that kills 100 of a mob per hour (which is very conservative already) you multiply it with 20 instances and suddenly 0,1% start dropping.

Okay gold bars are restricted - is it restricted to give someone 500x white recipe that sells to the vendor for e.g. 5k each or 2k etc? The vendor should still accept it.

Really interesting and insightful post.
Thanks for sharing and bringing up some valid points and techniques.
Hopefully they do take a glimpse at this.

2 Likes

Well, most of the methods can be stopped with an easy solution: limit the amount/times a character can trade per day based on the adventure points.

Bot accounts tend to have really low adventure points since they don’t do quests/craft/explore.

If a bot cannot transfer/receive silver, then how much silver it farmed is pointless