I think most of us can agree there’s a lot of space for improvement when it comes to the trading system. IMC’s rules don’t really do much to hamper their business while at the same time are a major detriment to real players as the amount of goldselling spam has made it obvious already.
Before we dive into this we should first understand what kind of RMT practices are out there:
1- Direct rmt (aka goldselling): The simplest (and most common) form where they directly trade you silver for $, however this isn’t quite as simple as just trading large amounts of silver to a person directly. Over the years, RMT sellers have become very good at money laundering and becoming almost undetected. This can mean buying a series of slightly overpriced goods, transfering items back and forth between players or “accidentally” dropping other items for the buyer to catch.
2- Indirect rmt: where they sell you items worth a certain amount (like arde daggers for $25 in some websites)
3- Services exchange: probably not as popular these days, but this consists of using one of your accounts 24/7 while attaining silver, items and levels.
4- Account exchange: least common method, but still prevalent in most games. You basically pay a large amount of money for an account of an already existing player with all items and money in it already. RMT websites love to buy accounts from players quitting the game and then re-selling for higher profit later.
Next, we should also examine what methods they employ to provide these services:
1- Bot farms. The most common one, allowing for a steady stream of silver. Some games like ToS are incredibly easy to bot on the open field for items and silver. This method is very prevalent in games with especially rare and worthwhile drops in regular maps. Most bot farms are periodically controlled by active players now and then.
2- Active farmers. Believe it or not, it’s very common to have active players farming silver for them especially in Chinese ‘companies’ due to their cheap labor and high profit margin. This ends up being far more efficient for some games (like those with difficult to automate tasks like quests or instances).
3- Existing players: a lot of the RMT’s stock actually comes from existing players who want some quick cash. When high leveled players are bored with the game, they periodically sell some of their gold/items or even accounts to RMT websites which later re-sell them for profit.
Number 1 is the easiest kind to deter. #2 is very difficult since they’re essentially a normal player to begin with. #3 is virtually impossible to monitor since anyone can sell their account or change IP address at any moment.
The way IMC is trying to deal with RMT is what you’d call security by obscurity. They try to make trading as inconvenient as possible so that RMTs hopefully “stop bothering” due to all the hops and obstacles between. This is a terrible approach because it affects legit players the most while barely doing anything to the actual goldsellers. Why? Because this is their business, there will always be ways of transferring money unless you turn this into an offline single-player game. Why is this the case you ask?
Adding annoyances and delays does nothing to stop bots. Bots have unlimited stamina and unlimited resources. Games like ToS can be boxed to run 10 on the same computer. They also have unlimited funds. This means token trading is worthless because bots don’t have a problem buying tokens themselves with stolen credit cards or abusing steam’s regional pricing (a $30 founder’s account costs about $7 when bought from Russia for example). This initial investment doesn’t do anything to stop them, they will simply charge more for their services. RMTing is a HUGE profit margin business for them. Their business is essentially running on zero cost (or extremely low costs) to begin with. Taking 2 days to retrieve silver is atrocious and nobody can seriously believe IMC is going to review every transaction going on the market.
Making the game P2P or B2P also does nothing to stop them if you ever heard of games like Lineage2. They are just as prevalent if not more as F2P games since they know their target audience is already willing to dish out money.
“Just ban them” is not an answer to bots since they have infinite resources and will just start over and over. The time it takes for a GM to manually monitor maps is hopeless most of the time without some kind of filtering early on.
So you may ask, then how can we stop goldsellers then? The answer is, as long as they don’t have a market, most of them will move on to easier and more profitable games. You see, the way to make them go away is to make most of their services redundant and increasing their entry barrier WITHOUT adding inconvenient to the player. This ultimately comes down to the game’s design.
Have you ever wondered why we have crappy spawn rates, experience moved from mobs to quests, low durability on equipment or a lot of quest-oriented progression early game? These are classic methods to reduce the amount of automation in online. It forces bots to adopt more complex AI or simply having a human monitor for certain tasks, however they are not enough. One of the biggest issues in ToS is the oldfashioned low droprate high value items present in several low level maps. This is a huge red flag for bots which can constantly camp places like crystal mines or tennet for vubbe blood or mythril ores and ghost hands. In order to combat bots, we need to restrict the amount of silver one can generate at lower levels by easily automated methods, as well as removing drops from farming enemies you’ve overleveled (so you can’t have level 60 highlanders in tennet anymore). This means:
1- Unlock basic privileges such as shouting or trading after certain quests or levels (it is harder to automate quests especially when they sometimes require more complex activities in this game). This completely kills the ‘level 1 mic spammer’ tactic.
2- Move rare drops outside low level zones and into less automated places (like dungeons).
3- Make class advancements mandatory after certain levels and add some complexity to those quests so they can’t be 100% automated without supervision (lots of bots can stay as swordsman and still effectively farm)
4- Reduce the amount of silver gained at low levels, but also reduce the cost of equipment and consumables for low level players accordingly. Make it absolutely useless to farm silver on any maps under level 100-150, even on mass amounts compared to what you can make at high levels. This drastically increases the entry barrier to the RMT business, making it much easier to report and ban whoever can reach high levels. One of the reasons botting is so prevalent in ToS right now is because the amount of silver earned from low level maps is not much different to high level ones so you can effectively make tons of silver from very early on several accounts.
5- Move any kind of valuable drop to instances OR into open maps that require organized parties to clear.
6- Stop making silver itself such a huge part of direct character growth. Silver can buy everything in this game from attributes to gear. Make most top-end gear character-bound or only obtainable trough difficult missions and instances, and not easily automated in open maps. Make high rank attribute leveling require other materials with 1 potential instead. One of the best ways to kill their business is by making it undesirable to begin with.
7- Unlock access to better silver-making maps trough questlines or titles requiring difficult objectives such as world bosses. Again, quests can be automated but they require a higher investment to bot programs or will require manual supervision instead.
None of these things are particularly intrusive or inconvenient to the playerbase, yet they are adopted by lots of games as an effective way to lower the amount of the common methods of RMT (botting). You will never fully stop all RMTing because it’s almost impossible to verify chinese farmers or account sellers, but in the end practice has shown the best you can do is simply increasing the barrier of entry to obtaining their goods, NOT to transfer them.
In the end, the answers lie in the game’s core design, not by adding ridiculous band aid restrictions.