The ULTIMATE fix to RMT

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

RMT ruins AH for everyone, we all know that. come p2 it wount get better, but most likely worse.
If the GDKP runs stop, that gold now gets cheaper to buy, as there are fewer buyers all of the sudden.
So the goldprices on the AH will inflate, with goldbuyers getting more gold for less cash, and bidding higher.

fixes Blizzard COULD do:

1: implement a Bounty. Every player can report a goldseller, and IF and ONCE that account has been found in violation of LUA, the first person to report it, gets an ingame mail, with a nice letter, and 20 or 50 gold, whatever is appropriate in the phase. a significant amount, in any case, but not shocking.
this would make real players able to farm goldsellers for gold, and it would take a week to get every one of them.

2: Make trades over 50 gold (reward amount, scling with phase) pr account / day impossible, and that trade only possible on a maximum level character.
lower level characters could neither recieve or supply more than 1 gold pr day. this should not apply to characters on teh same acocunt, so we can trade our valuables between our own characters. 50 gold would still make duelling or deathrolling possible, at a safe and moderate scale.
Goldsellers would have to use max level characters to trade with, a far to high risk verus the reward.

3: track every interaction of every historic character on goldsellers accounts. where gold has been traded, give the recipient a 24 hour amnesty to either give back to GM the full amount of gold, or vendor all gear and pay that amount. Otherwise, the account is permabanned.

these three fixes would completely remove RMT in a short time.
bots would still exist for personal use, but not at the scale we see now, where its commercial.

2 Likes
2

i dont get why this isnt done years ago - its simple to do and has no loophole (combined with gdkp ban)

3

This guy should be employed
Not sure about first bit but yea trading gold requires max level etc unless Ur battlement.

Would make it a lot more difficult

2 Likes
4

u mean the bounty? its a fun way to chase the leeches out of town. in reality it would probably be a rare reward to see, after a couple weeks tho. the goldvendors would be gone pretty quick after all. their max lvl vendors would be permabanned real soon

5

how do you determine that some player bought or sold gold, if you don’t take part in that transaction? And also in that case players can abuse it, trade “free gold” to character they dont like and say that this player bought gold.

Some BoE items costs more than 200 gold even now (and this price is reasonable because of very low drop chance, even without goldsellers this price would be very high), so your suggestion is just ban selling of expencive BoEs?

6

you dont. u report if u know / are convinced u know, but a GM looks through logs and determines if its real or not. they have detailed logs of it, and they can pick out /w done and trades done when the reports been made.
if u look at point 3, u realize u can do a sting-operation - buy a small amount of gold, report the vendor, and yourself, get the 24h amnesty, trade the gold to the GM and walk away with your reward. buy 10g, get 50 for it.

ofc not. there is no restriction on spending in AH, only p2p trades. if u have a 200g item u wanna sell, ure best of posting it, even if someone bids in /w for it. he can buy it once posted, seconds later. if u want to give it to a friend cheaper/discounted, u get 50g at most for it. so either a huge discount, or other services traded then.alternatively, if u wanna help yr m8, sell it in AH and give the guy an amount of gold later.

7

problem is that there is no GMs and ban system fully automatized. And in that case there will be a lot of unfair bans. Blizzard need to expand GMs staff to implement this system but what we see? they recently fired most of customer support service.

Gold sellers can use AH too in case of p2p trades will be limited. (5% fee but better then nothing)

8

as for logs, they can implement code to save all coms by parties for a time prior and after a p2p trade of gold. should cut down on the time spent clarifying the situation, espess with AI. they do have GMs and with them only reading a summarized set of facts from the mined data, it shouldnt take many to determine it. but yea, they do need to want to service the community to actually handle this problem.

yes, but they cant get items other than to buy or farm them. and when they try to sell the gold, on a max level character, chances are, its a sting-operation and the player buying 10g is actually reporting him, and saving the 10g to hand back, for his 50g reward.

9

Problem is that blizzard system can’t ban people based on 1 or 2 reports (it can be fake reports), yes, if actual GM will check it, he can determine in most cases is it real gold buyer/seller, but in case of automatic system (even with some kind of AI), there will be a lot of unfair bans. This problem can’t be solved by Game team themselves because they don’t have enough resources in current situation to manually review hundreds of reports, only solution is expand GMs staff but Microsoft recently fired most of them.

10

yes, if actual GM will check it, he can determine in most cases is it real gold buyer/seller, but in case of automatic system (even with some kind of AI), there will be a lot of unfair bans.
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GM would be manually verifying all bans. pretty sure thats the case for the GDKP system as well, and they are doing that in a few days. so they have the scale and staff for it already. AI is just a timesaver for bigdata crunching, it wount make a ban-call without manual input. that would be mad, yes.
firing staff is ofc not great, but if the game is to function at a level where the MMO functions arent cheesed by RMT and cheating, and making players quit, then they will hire ppl to do the work. its a cost/benefit in the end. microsoft knows that as well as anyone. the point of this, is to reduce the datamining GM systems has to do by 99% from their bot solution, to running a log of these events for an AI to mine, based on a report from a player. basically taking over alot of the GM work, and making us partly police ourselves. its costeffective

11

Well… then how about the buyer posts a single linen cloth for 5000 gold and the gold seller buys that ?

Easy loop hole.

You put too much faith in blizzard if you think they’d actually track AH transactions

12

its as easy to track trades that are 500 or 1000% out of median rates, as it is to log anything else. and that guy posting the item in AH will be farmed by players reporting him for it, and his interactions will be checked. the point is, we help police the community and dont rely 100% on GM doing everything for us.

13

No. Just no, it is fact, in December there were a lot of threads on forum and reddit of unfair bans for “Botting”, most of people were unbanned (so it’s a fact that bans were unfair) but it took a lot of support tickets (20+ in some cases) and most of them were automatic response. SO they definitely not verefying bans manually and even if you send ticket there is very little chance that actual GM will review your case. And it was before microsoft fired most of GMs staff.

14

Yes, it is easy, Yes it should be done.

But blizzard is not going to :smiley:

We’ve had 20 years of experience with them ignoring these issue,

15

if u are right and no GM exists then the service provided in SoD will ruin the playerbase, and their ATM revamp dies in their hands. that doesnt make much fiscal sense, does it?

the gold influx that is about to happen to the AH in p2, will destroy teh viabillity of the economy on many servers, as gold prices drop a lot, and ppl buy more for less euros. the prices on everything spike hard, and the players rage and as time passes and they are goldcapped from professions, consumes and items, they give up.

maybe that will happen. i know blizzard has not been very good at combatting this, but then again, they CAN be if they actually want, and implement what i suggest. also, it would actually be just weeks until the RMT in the game where gone, and the staff taking reports could be reduced by a huge margin.

true, but the above reply

16

Who “They”? Their resources is limited and they can’t do it even if they want without a lot of unfair bans or expanding staff, but expanding staff is not WoW Game team decision, it is Microsoft decision, and i doubt that microsoft management cares about it.

17

maybe. i also dont have much credence in them, neither blizz nor microsoft. their trackrecord isnt great.

but from an economical standpoint, it doesnt make sense to not spend an extra 5 mill to keep making 500.

Happy players keep paying

…and they do understand that part, they have seen the death of many expansions and servers, and the playerbase go from almost 12 mill in TBC to what…1.5 at worst? thats why classic is here, and sod. and they know the players who return, have this experience, and will be wary of the services provided to keep the game not only fresh, but also playable as a functioning MMO with an economy that isnt artificially inflated by RMT - hence their action on GDKP now. thats a good sign of awareness internally at Blizz.

18

Could just cap gold per character to 2g:1level with a maximum realmwide gold cap of 200.
So at lvl 60 you can have 120g on a character at maximum.
At which point you can no longer receive gold from anything and quest completion will pop up a window reminding you that you have reached cap.
If you currently have 600g then you don’t lose it but you won’t be able to receive any gold from anything until you spend the gold, this goes across all characters until your realm-wide gold amount is below 200g.
Realm transfer (if available) would become unavailable if you’re trying to transfer a character who’s gold amount on their body exceeds the gold cap on that realm where you have other characters.

Cap would increase with phases as the natural inflation (especially with lvl 25/40/50 quest reward gold) increases.

“Oh but people will just trade X item instead then”

I guess you could limit the amount of gold you can charge for AH items to 5x the amounts they can vendor for. 10x for greens, 15x for blues. Probably would require a rework based on some items that are white or green but rarer in nature. Still. simple enough start.

This would infuriate a lot of people and I’m not certain I agree with its design either but I mean… RMT becomes kinda pointless if it is impossible to buy 2K gold. If all you care about is destroying RMT there are ways of doing it through simple caps of gold per character, gold per realm, and gold you can charge on the AH and potential limitations on just trade as well.

Just playing around with a few ideas for fun. I don’t care what happens. We’ll get tokens one day and Blizzard will control the RMT anyway.

19

im sure we will, but tokens wount work unles they are so cheap that a sweatshop running 500 accounts in a lowcost country cant make a profit, and that would make it VERY cheap.

capping the gold would hurt the economy overall, as there would be no value in the rarest epic crafts and in the effort to farm consume-mats over a certain amount. players with 30 000 gold ( i knew a guy who reached account cap on 3 charaters in vanilla, think that was 80k or smthn) would rule the server then, even more so, than now, if they still held the gold. and if they didnt, im sure they would instaquit, and those players are what make the wheels turn.
its a capitalistic system, it cant be managed using communist planned economy solutions, and not fail.
thats been tried before irl.
a fully functioning economy with the least amount of regulation is the best thing in the long run, for all parties.
IF the RMT is removed, and not acting as an inflatory function.
making gold should never be disallowed, its part of the game, and fun, for plenty of people who find playing the AH more fun than farming bears. the game should still cater to them, as well

even GDKP is not really a problem, economically, if the RMT is removed. it might be a social issue, but it does cater to the more retail-minded players who feel less social, and dont want to form relationships. its just not their way.
and thats fine, without RMT as a factor. and fully geared, boored mains at the end of a phase, why should they even play, when they are done with BiS? GDKP is a clever way to play for pay, IF RMT is gone.

i used to finance my raiding in vanilla TBC with selling bear mounts with a 5 man grp, and a whale. i never bought gold in my life, so it was a fast way to make enough to parse at peak and have my fun in sunwell raids when i was done with BiS. i see the value in GDKP as well, but atm the cost is far to high for the community as a whole.

(im not advocating against the ban at all, given we have massive RMT atm)

20

???
no?
Why even give a reward? you don’t see the police giving away stuff for people who report crimes. The reward is the bot getting banned.

What about people who want to sell BOE’s that cost 100g? get the first 50 and hope you don’t get scammed the next day?

Doubt Blizz has the man/machine power to fact check each of these accounts to be 100% they’re not naughty boys