Debate in another thread has revealed a fatal flaw in the current anti-RMT policies, and how the current trade restrictions do not perform nearly well enough to justify the problems they cause normal players. For a detailed explanation of the problem and how it might be solved, check this new thread:
We’ve all been worked up about 1 to 1 trading and bots. I myself have made posts on the subject, and even a thread about 1 to 1 trading in game. I’ve personally fought against the lack of 1 to 1 trading and item dropping as an unacceptable inconvenience.
I’ve seen a lot of arguments, some persuasive, most nonsense, for and against strangling the trade system to prevent gold selling to even be viable in ToS. I’ve given it some thought, and reflected on the games I’ve played, and how trading restrictions personally affected my play experience, and how bots have, too.
Two of my favorite games of the modern MMO era are FFXIV and PSO2. One’s subscription based, the other is F2P with uncannily similar restrictions to what we’re fearing will happen to ToS.
FFXIV has a robust market, expansive crafting systems, free and easy trade for everyone, and playing its markets is one of the most engaging things I can do in that game. I love every part of that. … But it’s also a stinking pit of gold spam tells, bots, and exploitation. It’s everywhere, and FFXIV’s GM teams lack the authority, the manpower and the resources to deal with the problem. Square Enix won’t give it to them because the gold sellers pay for accounts. They crunched the numbers and decided they’d lose more money than they’d save. Players put up with it, players don’t talk with their wallets by quitting, and the gold sellers and botters have free reign over FFXIV.
PSO2, on the other hand, doesn’t let you trade with anyone who isn’t using their version of the token system. You can’t even sell things on the market without having a token. You can actually earn the tokens through accumulated logins - this feature prevents most of the f2p bots from getting into the market. They’re caught before they can accumulate enough of the login “points” to earn a 7 day market token. I sold a lot of good stuff to vendors in PSO2, before I managed to jump through the insane hoops foreign players had to jump to even give them money. But I was happy and the game was fun even when I was broke.
Part of PSO2’s financial success and relative lack of botting comes from the culture. You have to go through a battery of japanese captchas to even register an account - and even when you’re in, Sega JP has an alarming tendency to “accidentally” configure their servers to ignore foreign IPs. PSO2’s got a good f2p model - the best in the business, I’m convinced - but I don’t think an international release would have fared so well, particularly against bots. Sega seems to agree - and that’s why the promised PSO2 english version never materialized.
ToS is in every botter’s crosshairs. They’re all looking back on RO as the good old days - when you could just run your farms forever and not expect the GM teams to have the resources or the ability to stop you. They think ToS will suffer from the same, and based on what I’ve seen so far, they’re probably right.
Botting can’t be stopped. Not through automation - superior automation can always be created to beat the safeguards. There’s no hope there - not without dedicated, educated, teams of in-house employees paid well enough to care about their jobs and provided with robust tools to monitor player movement data, login patterns, server ip logs, transaction histories, in the grand sense and down to fine details. Blizzard does that - and they’re the only ones I know of who are truly aggressive about it. They have enormous resources behind them - and it still isn’t perfect. But it’s unreasonable to think IMC can step up to that level as a fledgling company.
So all of that makes me think: Forget 1 to 1. Forget my token trading. Forget all of the things I said about trading with your friends. I take it all back. Do what you have to do to stop the bots by making the simple act of trading so frustrating and impractical that no one can work out a good system from getting silver from point A to point B.
You have my total support, IMC! Be draconian about it. I’ll take a bullet if it goes through me and hits a gold farmer. I’ll enjoy the game with the restrictions.