RMT, Responsibility, ETC...

[Zikh]

I thought about it... And if the only way to stop RMT is to be looking for them, why not ask players about their behaviors?

 

 

Think about it. What are the three things RMT rely on.

1: Resources for gold

2: Advertising

3: Transit

 

 

You could cut off a lot of RMT by destroying mail that contains the words gold and the $ symbol together.

 

Then you could autoban them by a strike system. Most players report these people in public, but lets just say they never leave shout and keep combining the same things. Instant ban on sales in game.

 

You can't change how people loot, because then the game breaks.

 

 

I'm not here to propose new laws in place or figure out a solution. I want to hear how you would solve it, in a way that hasn't been discussed yet. As for my statement, I merely want to know what players would think if this were used. Sure, you'd leave a warning in game saying be careful of using those combinations in game, so as not to get banned, but a bot from Korea isn't going to pick up on that.

 

Do you believe there is more we can be doing as players to discourage things that end up ruining games?

[Desphiria]

Question, what are RMTs?

[FreelanceWizard]

RMT means "real money trading" and refers to the practice of selling in-game items for real money. There's a wide range of opinions on that practice, but a lot of people (myself included) view RMT sellers as disruptive forces in game and RMT buyers as cheaters.

 

To Zikh's idea, I'm not sure that'd work. Frying in game mails by keyword match seems likely to cause issues, especially if a player wondering why his mails keep getting deleted gets banned (and you can't tell someone that their mail was deleted as spam, as then the RMT groups -- which have lots of accounts -- will probe the system to figure out how to get around it). One approach that seemed to help in EQ2 was marking suspected RMT spam mail and chat messages and forcing users to click through to see them. CoH and WoW made it easy to report spammers, though that didn't seem to help too much.

 

The only largely effective approach I've seen is to ban entire countries from the game or banish them to region-locked servers. That's a really ugly solution to the problem, but it does seem to reduce it substantially. Another less effective but still workable approach, at least according to SOE, is to run the market yourself as the game developer, which should shut the other outfits out entirely. Of course, you risk being called supporting cheating and pay to win, so there's no real way to succeed there.

[Asyria]

Running the market themselves sure has worked well for Guild Wars 2, but that game free2play.

 

Anything automated however risks annoying players as they can get auto-banned by mistake while, as mentionned above, the real troublemakers might figue out a way around it.

 

In the end, it's best to leave it to players to report the spammers or to sell in-game currency themselves. Or both.

[Mtoto Wamoto]

I honestly don't think RMT will be that a big of a deal in XIV as much as it is in other MMOs in the past. There already are several systems in place which deter gil farmers and RMT a bit. 

 

Gil for the most part is easy to come by. There's a myriad of ways an individual can make money in XIV quite easily, from leves, quests, FATES, guildhests, dungeons, etc, and this has been evidenced in 1.0 as well as what we're seeing currently in ARR Beta. Most of the better gear isn't obtained through use of gil, but through the dungeons themselves and through Grand Company seals, and these pieces are generally Unique and Untradable once they drop to an individual's loot list, making them useless in terms of generating income and limiting the effects of it crashing the market. 

 

Gathering has been streamlined and simplified, as has craftng. It's now much much easier to gather EXACTLY what you want as you need only select it from the gathering menu after finding a node. It's also much much easier for us to craft items and gear. Couple both these facts with the ludicrously CHEAP prices NPCs sell gear and supplies for, I doubt we're going to see the Markets take a huge hit from RMT who bot and farm. Sure, a RMT can likely still bot and farm for shards while harvesting, but that's the only way one can get shards outside of quest rewards and killing elementals now, and guess what? We can get shards/items too without having to compete with RMT as nodes aren't shared anymore and everyone has their own individual reset timers, meaning that RMTs can't hog gathering points and monopolize its resources like before. The Market is likely going to shift primarily towards selling gear that has materia equipped on it and HQ mats rather than focusing on generic gear or normal quality items which are easily accessible elsewhere.

 

I'm of the personal opinion of just letting SE's RMT taskforce investigate RMT reports as we report them. While they weren't very diligent in the past (let's face it, the game sucked in 1.0 and RMT likely weren't really profiting much nor was the economy in game hurt in a manner that a normal players couldn't affect otherwise), they've gone on the record to say that they will be increasing their efforts against RMT this time around. 

 

RMT who /shout, /yell, /tell are likely going to get a swift ban since we can screenshot these and send them to the GMs. The same goes for in-game mail.

 

What it all boils down to is that we all do our part as players to ensure that RMT is reported when we see it. That's really the best way to combat RMT, imo. The GMs can't be everywhere at once but its their job to respond to reports of RMT. Let's hope that SE has a more streamlined reporting system this time around.

[Varus]

Mtoto is right. The best we can do is report and hope the GMs handle the issues quickly. Until then, there's always blacklisting.

[Zikh]

To Zikh's idea, I'm not sure that'd work. Frying in game mails by keyword match seems likely to cause issues, especially if a player wondering why his mails keep getting deleted gets banned (and you can't tell someone that their mail was deleted as spam, as then the RMT groups -- which have lots of accounts -- will probe the system to figure out how to get around it).

 

 

Well if we, as real players, were informed that the combination of those things inside any said text document would be marked for scrutiny. think about it, if you send one letter, you'd be fine, but if you sent 20k letters and kept saying the same thing in yell the entire day, chances are it'd be a three strikes inside a time limit. Make that a week, and RMT vanishes on server roughly as quick as it places itself there.

 

Warn the players, and they could avoid those issues.

[FreelanceWizard]

But here's the thing -- if you warn the players about what constitutes spam to the computer, and that repeated spamming detects will result in bans, the RMT groups will just probe and probe until they figure out what the flagging phrases and ban limits are. Conversely, if you set a threshold of flagged messages in a time period to count as a strike, the RMT sellers will figure that out and either go just under the limit or use multiple accounts to evade it entirely. The reason they do what they do normally is because of the defenses arrayed against them (slow GM response time, players must report, etc.). If you throw a computer system against them, they'll adapt to its parameters.

 

You also have to assume that any information given to real players is available to RMT groups. So, telling any players about how the system detects and bans RMT sellers will get out to them, and they'll devise countermeasures.

 

The only way you can make this sort of thing work is to go the Valve route: be extremely vague about what's bannable, then ban a variable time after a variable number of offenses. The problem is that you then appear capricious, and when we're talking about something where it's much less clear-cut, you're likely to catch well-meaning players, and that's bad.

[Aysun]

Running the market themselves sure has worked well for Guild Wars 2, but that game free2play.

 

I hate cashshop. x_x

[FreelanceWizard]

I hate cashshop. x_x

 

Totally with you there. Personally, I love the fact that XIV is subscription based with no cash shop.

[racooperii]

I feel like SE is taking decent measures to counter act RMT without hampering the real players. Its always been a hard fight against RMT for MMO's, at least with a subscription plan they at least lose money on each ban.

 

I think making the items players really want by binding them to the character is a decent way, same with low yirlds on enemies for gil and junk loot, for ing a player into more dynamic means to procure money. Its not perfect, but its a step in the right direction from the companies stand point, bu its really us as players that have to put in an effort to report RMT activity.