Tree of Savior Forum

Thoughts on IMC restrictions from an ex-Goldseller:

General Discussion
#61

Thank you for this interesting read, Pappus.

Gold sellers are impossible to be stopped. Like it has been said before, even if IMC were to remove all trades and auction house completely, gold sellers would still be able to sell accounts. And people would buy it.

Even then if somehow account selling was prevented (by some sort of magic), gold sellers could still sell services in game such as rushing dungeons for your characters or leeching exp / items for you.

In my opinion IMC needs to focus more on stopping bots rather than trying to stop gold sellers. That’s their current main source of income and what hurts the player-base the most.

If all bots were completely blocked from ToS somehow, gold sellers would have to either transition to a real person farming system or moving towards another game to do their business.

If they were to hire real people to do the farming, IMC wouldn’t be able to do anything against them other than sueing those companies one by one (IMC can’t stop real players from playing afterall). But at the same time, those gold sellers would have a lot less profit and farming efficiency for using real people. Also, the game population would be way less flooded and economy would be a lot more stable (you’d have only 1 person per machine instead of 20 bots).

After all that being said, my point is: Gold sellers can’t really be stopped with trade restrictions or AH restrictions. What needs to be stopped are bots because those are the real issue to the game, overloading servers and making economy crumble into ruins.

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#62

Stopped reading here. Either you don’t know what diminished effectiveness means, or you forgot about the market tax. That’s a 30% reduction on your illicit good production which is the goal, or a 10% reduction AND an investment in the account.

Also the 48 hour delay not only gives IMC a chance to detect and cancel, but does not sit well with the instant gratification folks, who are the people who are buying silver.

Really, everything you’ve posted so far is in support of IMC’s trade and market restrictions, whether you realize it or not.

#63

+1
/20 characters…

1 Like
#64

Seriously, PM me how much IMC pays you, lol. depending on the number i might be willing to turn sides.

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#65

Dunno how to put it better, but farting next to a person is equally diminishing to the breathing capacity of the person as the tax is to gold sellers.

Grinders are overproducing constantly by a huge margin. Not individually of course since 4 bots can hardly meet the demand of the whole market, but as a hive. That is one of the reasons the price keeps dropping. It is dangerous for a botter to stay on the product since it is always a time race.

You want to sell before the account dies. Usually developers work with account flagging which is a manual process for the final decision and you always accumulate some until your routing is perfected.

The loss of a single seller account is probably what they would pay in taxes to transfer the stuff in weeks.

5 Likes
#66

Very good conclusion. Sueing the companies would yield little success aswell.

The target should indeed be the bots.

@dawnintodark I was expecting a lot more outrage. The civilness here surprises me. Don’t think that you are alone in the anger. I have no fun either blocking every 5 seconds and twinking against teleporting bots in the low level zones. That predatory exploitation is aggitating.

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#67

Thats good advice, thanks m8 :smiley:

#68

Would this solve the issues?

#69

Right. and he’s trying to say that it doesnt matter if its 30%, they’re bot income is so high that they can work with the 30% fee. You say this gives IMC a chance to cancel, yet these transactions successfully go through in daily basis. Maybe IMC will stop one or two but in a bigger picture goldsellers are still making money and these little one or two transaction delays wont affect them.

4 Likes
#70

If youre professional, why would you quit your money making because suddenly there is a gamer within you? You can have fun in the game at the same time make profit from it.

#71

I can’t say a thing about your virtues since I know very little about you, but you both had the gall to come on a raging forum full of steam on RMTers and tell your thought process, all the while also doing it in a fashion that people can learn. So honestly, if it checks out, you’re one ballsy fellow.

In any case, I do believe that IMC is split in several different directions: The players suggesting several things to focus on probably has them scattered. This system they have isn’t god awful, but the problem is they believe it’s definitive when anything can be outsmarted and over-run given enough time, greed, and technology. And because it has already been over-run, the usefulness over malice ratio is breaking itself.

Honestly it feels trivial to try and stop the RMTers through these means currently. A game could discourage them by making their existence unnecessary in an already thriving economy, but that wouldn’t really work here anymore since they seem to be making enough to continue deflating their prices. Most game protection services are pretty weak, and honestly it seems to be destroying a good chunk of the player’s morale to be unable to trade and such.

3 Likes
#72

That isn’t exactly how I stopped. I wanted to grow the business, got a partner and it didn’t pan out. Right now I am looking for one, but I was not in it for the money alone.

Years ago I had substantially less knowledge about being self-employed. So in the meantime I fixed that.

To add a little fun notion: I actually got funds from the ESF. This involved a businessplan ( it is roughly 30 pages btw ) and having your idea be checked out. So yeah I had to talk to the Chamber of Industry and Commerce. Show them the plans and so on.

You can imagine how much these guys knew about MMOs, virtual currency, RMT etc. Good times, especially the guys that check the viability. They started to look very anxious when I told them that legality is jurisdictally uncertain.

So no - I didnt stop because I was a gamer, if anything it made me start.

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#73

IMC doesn’t pay me anything. I just happen to have the ability to think independently unlike the hater hivemind here. You should try it sometime. You can check my posting history, I arrived at the same conclusions IMC posted in their trade news article days before they posted it. It’s pretty basic common sense actually.

@Pappus

You can try thinking outside of the gold seller paradigm you pigeon holed yourself in. IMC is in business for everyone who plays the game, not just gold sellers and the scumbags who buy from them. Dropping 10-30k out of every 100k sold may not seem like a big deal to you, but it is a huge deal for the economy as a whole. Any illicit transaction is immediately chunked down by 10-30%. Comparing this to a person breathing is so incredibly stupid I’m starting to think that this is just a troll thread.

Sure you don’t care about the 48 hour delay, but the person buying from you certainly does. When IMC starts cracking down on botters, gold sellers and gold buyers as they have done in korea, the consternation will increase. When their auctions proceeds start getting cancelled with 5 hours remaining, they will certainly not be purchasing again.

1 Like
#74

I find your post… exquisite.

I often find myself amused by the amount of ways gold selling/botting is similar to illicit drug dealing. Both require:

  • Users that don’t care about the legality of what they’re doing;
  • Dealers that don’t care about their users, or the consequences of their trade to the society/gaming community (they will, however, try to look like they do);
  • Governments/Game publishers that often fail to address the issue properly and just go whack-a-mole in order to show they mean business.

Proper gamers, in a behavior very similar to good neighbors, often play by the rules and like their communities free of such… filth, because they know that it’s a slippery hill.

Unless an online game accepts the fact that there will be people with poor self-control and incorporates this paradigm from day zero (and I’m still waiting to see one that does) by, say, allowing all users to sell their silver for RL money for a value as low/high as they want, we will keep seeing people like you, OP, willing to make a business plan in total disregard of the consequences that your actions will cause to the game itself.

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#75

Um… to be honest, imc is pretty much encouraging very much similar things in its monetization…

Why do I personally think imc is more like a ‘Dealer’?

Magic scrolls: How is this different from gambling? Like you said there are people with poor self-control so how is imc acting any different from those ‘drug dealers’ that don’t care about their users, or the consequences of their monetization practices on society/the ToS gaming community? I guarantee you, there will be some individual who has poor self-control (perhaps they have an elevated risk for gambling addiction) who spends an unhealthy amount of money on magic scrolls once they open up TP buying.

Tokens: imc says you can spend real money in a way that allows you to obtain in game silver currency. If imc really cared about their community, they would have done some research into reasonable price points for their items… As things are, tokens at their current price point probably encourage RMT activities. Here’s why I think so:

  1. imc has already established that it’s okay to spend real life money to obtain silver. Of course they want the user to buy from them… but to a consumer with no specific loyalties, that’s a technicality. The smart consumer looks for the lowest price. Are you loyal to comcast or verizon for providing you internet? Then why the loyalty to imc?

  2. imc has established that $18 paying users (or those who use silver to obtain tokens) will have more bonuses than those who do not pay. If you are a F2P user who cannot afford the price point of the token, but still wants to be competitive, what do you do? Well hey, it looks like those gold selling RMT outfits sell more for less. Huh…

  3. I completely agree with you that people buying from RMT and botters who parasitize the game to make personal profits are bad for the game. But what I would argue is that the game in its current incarnation (and given the monetization strategies described) pretty much encourages RMT practices. Perhaps this is inevitable given that this game is a grind RPG (something that RMT love) which means there will be people with a lot of time and desperate people who don’t have time but want to get that 0.02% drop rate item.

So what do we do? I think the best strategy is to try to mitigate RMT supply. I think of the ideas I’ve seen so far. @ridleyco has one of the more fleshed out ones that doesn’t require a massive amount of game-changing in order to implement.

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#76

Edgy guy on forum doing tl;dr

stops reading before OP explains himself

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#77

The tokens being buyable for silver is a compromise made for the F2P players. It is not a perfect solution by far. There is no perfect solution. That’s why we are having these debates. Complaining that it sucks doesn’t change anything unless a better idea is proposed. However it does alert IMC to the problem.

The current RMT restrictions appear to be focused on punishing the buyers rather then the sellers. That being said, there will always be ways around it. There is only so much you can automate. It is important to think of the consequences of an action before insisting that it is implemented.

Mitigating RMT supply is also important. But it is a much more challenging task. Bots will bot, spammers will spam, and without unintentionally harming legitimate players it is very difficult to create a solution that effectively stops them. This problem is compounded by the fact that this game has little to no hack prevention. I am sure IMC is aware of this, but it is a resource heavy task.

#78

Just like there are drug users that are not addicts there can be gold-selling without destructive property.

At least I believe there can be. Gold-selling and all similar services to me is selling time-saving. All the people that buy e.g. silver could farm it themself - technically. Now we have some as I stated that have children, tons of work etc.

A couple of years ago gamers would have rioted if something like a token that could be sold for currency was implemented. They would scream P2W so loud you would hear it through your night-rest. Nowadays that has changed.

So what the goldfarmer does is play in the customers stead. If you manually labor that though the silver would cost so much, that nobody would buy it. Think someone would buy 100k silver for 15€ now? So naturally the gold-seller has to produce more and outside of controlling several characters at the same time there can only be a software solution.

That doesn’t mean though that the gold-seller has to put hundreds of herbs on the market - taking the opportunity to sell herbs for profit for all legit players. Nor does it mean that he has to farm high density spots, nor hack etc.

They all could calm down on their currency/hour rate and toxicity and aquire the currency in an acceptable way. Unfortunately though a couple of aggressive players can easily inflate the economy on their own.

Personally I didn’t touch the market unless I needed something for my bots (leveling gear that isn’t worth a lot). D3 was funny in that regard. The only guys I knew that had full gold finding gear were botters. The normal player-base was trying hard to gear properly to get through A1 to finally get some decent drops. Hardly anyone even knew that good gold-finding gear was basically the best drop in terms of gold someone could have.

It doesn’t hurt anyone if a bot is grinding some undesirable mobs somewhere in the antarctica or if he uses a pickpocket rogue and pickpockets tons of mobs out of stealth for the whole day.

I am very much on the gold-buyers side since I know the gold in wow was often used to get a mount they liked, a collectible or raidstuff. I cannot see anyone at fault there. Not the developers to hide desirables behind time-walls nor the consumer that wants it but can’t play enough. It doesn’t change anything for me if I see someone on a rare mount. He has it either by being lucky, grinding hard or spending real money.

2 Likes
#79

You do know that bullshit remains bullshit unless proven right? If your intention of why making this thread is to hire an accomplice, youre doing it wrong, and professionals dont do it so openly and stays in the shadow to lower the risks? You on the other hand even post in the forum youre hiring someone, grabbing the attention not only that of playerbase but IMC themselves? Thats just doesnt make sense, business wise. In other words your premise doesnt hold true with your actions.

[quote=“Pappus, post:78, topic:184117, full:true”]
Just like there are drug users that are not addicts there can be gold-selling without destructive property.[/quote]

You clearly have no idea what drug addiction is. You better research a lot before you spout such ignorant post.

[quote=“Pappus, post:78, topic:184117, full:true”]
Personally I didn’t touch the market unless I needed something for my bots (leveling gear that isn’t worth a lot). D3 was funny in that regard. The only guys I knew that had full gold finding gear were botters. The normal player-base was trying hard to gear properly to get through A1 to finally get some decent drops. Hardly anyone even knew that good gold-finding gear was basically the best drop in terms of gold someone could have.[/quote]

Didnt you yourself said that youre doing this for business? Why only for yourself now instead of making profits?

#80

Interesting posts, though I think they’re going to be lost on IMC and this community. It’s depressing in a lot of ways how IMC are handling this, what they’re doing is more annoying than what the RMT guys are doing. Selling gold in of itself doesn’t really matter, it’s just that when the bots are intrusive as they are right now does it cause a real problem. Everyone complains about market inflation or whatever, but as soon as you actually start playing the game and finding something worth money such an issue is meaningless anyway. The only people really being hurt with all of what IMC are doing are the actual players. Gold sellers are still making their money and IMC is still getting their money for the time being. They should be trying to take care of things actually hurting the game instead of chasing some boogeyman to get us to pay more money, but eh, competency is hard to come by.

1 Like