I will first summarize the current trade restrictions, and then explain how they are easily being defeated in kToS right now. Finally, I will explain my idea for a “Market License” system, which would be equally accessible to f2p and whales alike.
I. The Trade Restrictions and How They (were supposed to) Work
Most of the anti-bot measures center around the Token. Bought with TP, and legitimately sellable on the market for Silver, the Token lifts the following trade restrictions:
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1 item listed at a time on the Market -> 5 items can be listed
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1 to 1 trading is enabled (with an item limit of 30 per token)
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Market tax is lowered from 30% -> 10%
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Most goods can now be shared among characters on your own account
Additional restrictions combined with the Token to create an environment that was supposed to make it impossible for bots, gold seller accounts, and their customers to create satisfactory transactions.
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Silver and certain high value goods cannot be 1to1 traded to other accounts, ever
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Market price caps on items prevent the sales of some items like level 1 monster parts for unreasonably high values (but this is still the root of the current problem – more on this later!)
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Buyers wishing to legitimately buy Silver can simply buy Tokens and place them on the market, thereby reducing their potential customer base
These factors all combine the create an environment in which a gold seller must purchase 2 Tokens for every 30 items his bots give to his sales accounts, assuming the Token trade limit is ticked at both ends of the transaction. The gold seller cannot have his bots sell what they farm directly because they cannot trade silver to him – the bots must generate high value goods to trade to the sales account(s), which he must trade directly to buyers, who must also have a Token to even engage in an illegitimate transaction of purchasing bot-farmed items.
So many Tokens are consumed in this process that it has a catastrophic effect on profit margins – and the illegitimate buyers cannot even purchase Silver directly!
But, for illegitimate sellers, there are are three alternatives available what I described above:
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The illegitimate seller can do transactions with his bots directly, avoiding having to have a token for his sales account by having no sales accounts, only bot accounts, and
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The illegitimate seller can simply sell accounts with things and silver on them.
The first alternative is only slightly better and still bad for profits. The second is undesirable by the overwhelming majority of customers because they want the valuable goods for their main characters.
The third alternative, unfortunately, works so well it deserves its own special section.
II. How the Trade Restrictions are Currently Being Defeated
Not all items on the market can possibly have a perfect market cap fixed on them. While it’s easy to prevent players from doing obvious work-arounds like selling Dingeles (a worthless, common monster part) for 100,000 each, it’s much harder to cap equipments.
Plenty of items in the same level range and rarity category have wildly different actual market values, just because one of them might have two or three more points of a desirable stat. This form of value is decided by the players and changes, sometimes in hard to predict ways. Consequently, attempts to assign max sale market prices on equipment have been failing miserably.
The dominant form of illegitimate RMT going on right now is Silver sellers asking buyers to place a piece of equipment at an extremely high price relative to what players would buy/sell it for, but a price that is still somewhat below the market cap. This is really easy to do, and you don’t even need to farm anything as a buyer to make it work. You just buy the figurative level 150 Staff of Mediocrity (market cap price: 2 mil, what players will pay for it: 100k) and list it for 1,900,019 Silver, pay your illegitimate Silver seller, and they buy the staff at the silly price. No tokens are needed to do this.
While there is the 30% (or 10%, if the Silver buyer is under the Token’s effects) loss to market tax, this easy, quick process still allows RMTers and botters to completely avoid all of the restrictions allegedly designed to slow them down. They can even use a similar process to launder Silver from their bot accounts to their sales accounts!
So, in short, all of the bullshit we’re suffering trade-related is for nothing, except for the fact that legit players can buy Silver legitimately by selling Tokens.
Obviously, this won’t do.
III. A Smarter Approach: The Market License System
The goal of this system is to restrict the movement of Silver on the Market in ways that penalize bots and not normal players.
Here how I imagine it could be done:
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All players start with 0 Silver allowed to be moved per week from or to them (either through buying or selling!) on the Market.
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Players earn Licenses that increase the total amount of Silver they can move simply by completing the main story quests and dungeons.
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These licenses, which are based on a ratio of player level vs instanced dungeons+story quests completed, would have weekly caps that are reasonable for what the players should be buying and selling based on maps and instanced dungeons they have access to, with a little bit of extra room to allow them to sell that lucky Arde Dagger they found. Edit: @SynysterOne suggested the the cap values should also be adjusted for inflation and total silver on server. I agree. These values should also have be visible somewhere in the interface/stats screens, and should possess a brief tooltip explaining how they work somewhere - or the NPC by the market could explain them.
Here are some examples of the capped market license values might be like under such a system. Keep in mind these values are coming out of my butt and are guess work. The devs would assign better ones.
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Level 10, 0% available main story quests/dungeons completed: 0 Silvers movable per week
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Level 10, 100% available main story quests/dungeons completed: 10,000 silvers moveable per week
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Level 100, 15% available main story quests/dungeons completed: 50,000 silvers moveable per week, account is flagged as possible bot for GM inspection
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Level 100, 90% possible story quests/dungeons completed: 2,000,000 silvers moveable per week
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Level 280, 17% available main story quests/dungeons completed: 1,000,000 silvers moveable per week, account is flagged as possible bot for GM inspection
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Level 280, 100% (!) available main story quests/dungeons completed: 50,000,000 silvers moveable per week
As you can see, this system forces all characters to play normally through the game’s intended quest progression in order to participate in the market system. While you can automate just about anything, how many bots did you know in RO who cleared really horrible storyline quests like Missing Child in Thor’s Volcano? Normal players all did, but bots of a similar level didn’t.
Considering that storyline quests are all completely sequential (or can be made so with little effort), meaning they require the story quest before it to access, suddenly every bot would have to run the Thor’s Volcano guantlet, so to speak. And if they had to run dungeons, too. Whoa boy. Suddenly it just
got real hard to make bots you can actually get silver from.
What would this do, exactly? It would:
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Force bots to undergo long periods of “prep” work before they can dump their silver load on their owner’s sales account
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Expose these same bots to the player base while they go through main story quests and dungeons, generating tons and tons of reports from angry players (and can you imagine bots trying to find instanced dungeon parties? lol)
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Finally, losing “working” bots that have somehow run that gauntlet will really upset their owners, who are accustomed to losing and replacing profitable bots easily
Under such a system, I would expect the dominant form of profitable bot to be level 30 or so, before any of the game’s instanced dungeons. They would complete the first few story quests to get their %'s up and then bot normally, flooding newbie areas and generating masses of angry reports in the process.
This system could be combined with an automated detection method that examines how much silver and drops a character has produced in a certain level range or area. So your bots swamping level 30 hunting grounds forever would be automatically flagged for inspection by a GM. That could be further combined with a system specific to low level bots that slows down and eventually stops silver gain and drops altogether until they move up the game’s map progression. Of course that would have to be done carefully to avoid punishing legit players looking for rare early game drops.
One last note: some trade restrictions would have to stay in effect for this system to work, including but possibly not limited to no 1to1 silver trading, and Tokens being required for 1to1 trades. The described market license system only works to stop RMT if RMT is already being forced by other restrictions to use the market system to conduct business.
Edit: Unless, of course, as @nordiccrayon has suggested, the system could possibly be adapted to control 1 to 1 trades as well, with scaling caps on silver, item quantity and item rarity controlled by the Market License system I previously described. This seems a lot more tricky, and might need more strict gating requirements to control the flow of Silver.
So, what do you guys think?
