Let’s use Klaipeda server as example:
Roughly 9.2m silver was sold in the last 5 hours.
Here’s a list of open orders:
This is how RMT actually worked in this game:
First of all, there are three different groups of people.
Group A: Gold farmers (Or often called as workstation)
They create tons of botting account with stolen credit cards. Their sole purpose is to milk as much silver as they could before getting flagged or banned, and then proceed to create more accounts with more stolen credit cards, rinse and repeat.
Group B: Middleman (Or often called as the Spammer)
They spam gold selling messages in the game. Most of them have their own website but I can guarantee you none of them actually farmed a single silver themselves. They often act as a 3rd party middleman to hook up potential silver buyers and the gold farmers while doubling the silver price in process.
For example, if they receive an order of 100k silver for $3, they would then ask the player to list some random 100k item on the marketplace, and then message the gold farmers to buy off that random item from the marketplace for a price of $1.50, by doing so, $1.50 goes into the pocket of the middleman.
Group C: Buyer (Actual Tos Players)
Now let’s take a look at the restrictions: Token 1:1 trading, marketplace 48 hours delay, how are they affecting the whole RMT situation?
Botter still bots, spammer still spams, buyer still buys silver. Not a single bit has changed. Billions (not exaggerating, literally billions) of silver has been sold since the beginning of early access, both gold farmers and spammers have their pockets full of cash, meanwhile honest players are being punished for no reason.
Gold sellers are having a really hard time eh?
Edit: Replies to a few arguments
(Someone said: They would have sold 100m instead of 9m?)
This argument is completely false, reason? Let me ask you a simple question, if you were a gold farmer, and you have 100m sitting spread out in your armies of “soon to be banned” botting accounts, what would you do?
Answer: Lower the supply price of silver and make sure you sell every single last silver, some do it daily, some hourly, it really depends on the policy of the workstations.
So how does this affect the rest of the players?
Every game that has a tradable subscription membership will always have a tied economy with RMT, people will buy silver as long as it cost them less to buy a token.
Bottom line, silver price falls, token price and price of everything in game rises.
(Someone said: They are making less, pennies)
There are many others none recorded trades.
Data that was shown in the first post is from a single website, that was used to hook up gold farmers and spammers, they charge a flat 5% fee. Most spammers have their own contact and will try to skip through this website as much as possible, but when the silver demand is too high that their own contacts are not able to fill up the orders, they will look to buy from that website.
You need a bank account from China to use that website.
Most gold farmers are chinese.
Rate of USD:RMB 1:6.4
$30 usd is about $200 in China. Man power and electricity is extremely low. Some workstations even have branches in third world country such as Indonesia, Malaysia etc where labour and electricity is even cheaper.