It´s a tossup really. If you restrict the players too much it feels like a Coop game rather than a MMO. If you have too many bots the market is flooded with items and the economy is ruined and you should rather play a Coop game than this MMO. I think the devs have to find the sweet spot in the middle and that is extremly difficult. Thats why I´m carful about criticising the developers especally before the game is out and running for a few months. It´s the same in politics by the way criticising the politicians is easy but for them th do a good job is many times harder.
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Very good point, and makes a lot of sense.
I think the current controls that players complain about, including the total removal of 1 to 1 trading, are lesser evils, and exist within the happy medium.
@Arcturce
My OP didn’t acknowledge that RMT was simply weak in PSO2 - neither did I say PSO2 was perfect. Merely a great success in that regard. My apologies for not being more clear.
The problem with ‘aggressive anti goldselling measures’ is that in the end they aren’t going to do anything to dedicated goldsellers. Look at black desert online. It’s a buy to play game, you cannot drop items, you cannot trade anything with players, the AH has ENFORCED prices which are generated automatically (so you can’t snipe valuable items for cheap) and make 90% of crafted items completly worthless. You’d think “hey that’s cool, people can’t rmt there”.
Nope. Goldsellers simply sell accounts with lots of money in them instead, or login with your characters to level them up and farm 24/7. There’s a multitude of websites providing these services. In the end you still have bots and at the same time ruined the MMO experience for your playerbase as well because you kill all sorts of interaction.
In the end the only things that prevent this issue are a strong client/server foundation against exploits (wishful thinking for korean games… they have to rely on garbage like gameguard and xigncode), some pay walls for trading items like they’re doing, a cap on the amount of goods you can trade, some server logging to fish any suspicious trades, good client security and actual GM presence in the game. Even then you will still have some gold sellers, that’s just the nature of the genre.
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My existence disproves this as i am the exact opposite. So its clearly depends on the person.
Well, you are the OP, can you guarantee that your mesures will 100% stop bots while maintaining the full potential of the game? We are both jumping throught alot of hoops and strechting our arguments.
So i’m going to ask you this: Do you believe that other games have solved their major bot problem with almost no restrictions by using anti-cheats and detection algorithms. And do you believe that can happen in this game and it would be better than your solution? I’ll even give you an example, blade&soul.
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That’s how it should be. Crafter classes shouldn’t be obligatory, they should be an option to considet.
If you are doubting about having one, then their position is right.
If you have to make one to keep up with economy, it’s wrong way. So I’d prefer to limit intercharacter silver trade even more but instead grant money making classes some opportunities to fight, so they would become more of a filler classes for faster growth and attribute upgrading over better late game power.
Pardoner is a good example but C3 needs some buffs.
Not sure about alche, but it has some utility capabilities besides money making and C3 may make it even better.
Squire is more like a support then crafter.
The problem with money trading lies within attributes.
Why would you grind with your low level character if you can just max all atttributes and one shot every mob on your way.
And you can still trade silver by giving expensive item to your small character in order to resell. Or just put very cheap item on the market at very high price and ask your friend to buy it to fund your low level character. Not sure if this issue occures in kToS.
But honestly I’d prefer totally free market, though I’m sure IMC will never provide one.
Just wanted to make sure you weren’t praising PSO2 too much. Since I’ve played it for almost 2 years now until recently…
Though I wouldn’t call it weak per say unlike the other servers spread out where RMT is/was more advertised in public. Though can’t deny the fact that RMT is actually still “alive” in it If you do manage to dig around properly.
OT:
Bots and RMT would always be around as long as they know that they can profit from it. Even if the methods are as ridiculous as having a captcha pop up every 10 minutes unless they are moderated which atleast would lessen their presence.
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Well spoken. Everything in this thread paints a clear picture - that no matter what your controls are, you need dedicated bot hunters to catch what slips through.
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I can guarantee no measures will stop bots 100%. History and every game ever are my proof there.
I have provided an example - PSO2, which has eliminated most of it. I understand that you probably haven’t played it enough to personally believe my example based on your own experience.
Similarly, I haven’t played Blade&Soul. What’s it like, there, in relation to our discussion?
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One of the best ways to solve the bot problem imo, is to value player to player interaction over player to npc interaction. May it be from completly removing the silver you get from random material drops from monsters or making it so you can’t get any outcome from npc-selling stuff/mobs droppping close to no silver per kill.
If there’s a good enough crafting system in this game in a couple of months, I think this is really possible. If bots rely on selling each and every item they get for a possibility of money from real players for profit, it’ll probably not be worth it for most of them to bot in the first place.
The best way to get rid of bots in a game, from my point of view, is by making it not as profitable as other games. Botting is a business for those who do it, and they’d rather do it in places where they can actually get a good outcome out of it instead of places that it’s too hard/too unpractical to get good outcome from.
It’s like they say, you don’t need to run faster than the bear chasing you, you just need to run faster than your friend.
The fact that you have to dig to find evidence of it, I’d say that’s a sign the RMT scene there is pretty weak, as opposed to my other example of FFXIV where you cannot avoid it without disabling your ability to see local and tell chats and never touching a market board and staying out of the open world where you are guaranteed to meet packs of 10-20 black mages named some variation of “Xsj Lntbhwn”.
Destroyers. Destroyers everywhere.
Destroyer trains leading from village to village.
Destroyers spamming in chat about their /|/| /|/|0–g0|_)
Destroyers in arenas making horrible plays but still getting gold rank.
Destroyers joining cross-server and afking at the entrance with their sub-Dokumo weapons.
DAMN my transparency.
The potential system and silver sinks is supposed to counter act this by removing items from the economy. If it works or not well see.
Me:
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Like @Shadeborn said, Bots still exist, but you only ever see them in low level zones, or doing derpy things like being stuck on wall. To a normal player you almost dont even notice them. They dont interfere much unless, of couse, you want to buy gold from them. But those people alog with the bots get flagged often by the system and are later banned. Most of the game is PvP and instanced dungeons. And the chat has really low amount of spam compared to the potential number of bots that try it. All of this while still giving players unrestricted access to the game.
Well what if the server was actually locally based on “english” then I bet publicity of such RMT sites and transactions would be more public but the reason why you’ll surely find it weak is due to how it’s on foreign ground.
Whereas we do not know how deep the underground market of the local community aka the Japanese players is.
But yeah when I mean dig, You can google the game’s name plus add in RMT or gold selling plus server.
Though I like your opinion and idea in regards to the fight against bots but if the management won’t help well I think this is their own problem.
Archeage was riddled with bots… Well Blade and soul is practically a fun place for bots in cross-server dungeon and even Pvp arena…
Then crafting classes shouldn’t be obligatory.
If crafting provided like 10 or 20% from average character HUNTING income, then free trading is OK. But now crafters bring too much passive money.
I might be wrong on this, and I’d like free market over closed market but I don’t know other ways how to make crafter classes less obligatory.
Also remember that you need lots of money for attributes and item enhansing. And crafters already provide extra money for attribute upgrades of lower level characters.