This almost turned into a bit of a ramble… but It’s honestly pretty simple
There’s a lot of people that will try this game, enjoy it for a while, and move on. Of all of those people, every single one of them will notice the restrictive trade. Some amount of them will end up leaving pretty quickly because of it.
Then there’s the rest of the people, lets say all of them stay and start nearing endgame. They’ll start to quickly notice that they simply cannot reasonably get the proper gear they need for their characters, due to the restrictive market and inability to trade the games most common resource, silver. Increasingly large amounts of people are not putting their equipment on the market because of the imposed limits on it. What’s left is bartering with one another to, hopefully, get what each is wanting.
Because of that the game practically does not have any kind of proper currency. Games without a proper currency only work if theres a -lot- of alternative currencies that can be traded, Path of Exile is an absolutely perfect example of this. Due to the restrictive trading and forcing items to go untradeable, you kill any attempt at having proper bartering resources. When both currency and bartering resources(currently talt and dilgele, which dont quite work for previous reasons) are gone, what are you left with?
Economic stagnation. In this game, that would happen at the higher levels. Right now, thats at 170. The majority of anything at that level or higher is becoming increasingly harder and harder to get, because people simply refuse to sell things below a tolerable price which the market forces. You can hunt for it, sure, but then what?
You’ll have a hell of a lot of people that will get fed up with it, and they will also leave. That leaves you with a considerably small percentage from the original group of players that are still willing to play, simply because you refuse to allow something that is standard across nearly ALL MMOs - free trade.
What happens when all trade restrictions are removed? RMT? Yes, it’s something that will happen, but as it stands now, it will have another affect.
That effect would very, very likely… result in less RMT bots spamming their services all over the place. Could it make it even worse, however? Yes, that’s not entirely out of the question either, but it is far less likely than what we’ve got to deal with now.
It’s completely understandable to try and find a solution to the bot and RMT problem, but there is no realistic way to do this without ultimately killing your game. Where are the simple anti-botting measures that literally everything else uses, such as gameguard? (I cannot stand it either, but its better than nothing.)
The report bot function is a start, but also extremely abusable with its current system. Say you got a group of players that went around and correctly reported bots, making them more favorable to your system. What if they were, after a while of reporting proper bots, to target other groups of players, or even guilds or bossing groups? Your system would likely end up banning them. They could send in a ticket of some kind, sure, but that just causes needless grief.
I have no real proposal other than to use an anti-botting program of some kind to lessen the amount of bots, and to have a group of GMs or what have you go around and go ban happy on their asses, on an extremely frequent basis. Anything else that could realistically be suggested will only hinder everyone else’s gameplay experience. Allowing open PvP wouldn’t help, neither would Captcha. The report bot function only goes so far, and you can’t report RMT sellers through the shout chat (unless i’m mistaken).
The point is, if you want people to stay and enjoy this game in the long term, allowing full, non-restrictive trade without -any- compromising, and having some sort of actual anti-botting measures, along with people actively banning bots instead of going through a system, are very, very large steps headed towards achieving that goal.
@STAFF_Ines @STAFF_Ethan @Staff_Julie @STAFF_John @STAFF_J @STAFF_No (Sorry if i tagged some of the incorrect staff, wasn’t quite sure who was best for something like this)
