uve never heard of bounties? its quite common in most of the world. intended to incentivice common people to assist the police in locating a criminal. that same intent goes for in-game policing. Making it a viable way to make gold in game, for players who farm the goldsellers. synergy is the key to a good MMO.
if u like, sure. the better deal is to use the AH. post the item there, and the guy buys it 2 sec later, or someone else does. in any case, u get your 100g for it.
they arent manually checking account. they do today, and would adapt new versions of “crawlers” - software that picks up data and stores it on a server - it would not take up much space, and a rack of ssd’s can hold a zetabyte if u like, for a relatively small investment. serverspace is not an issue at all, for blizzard.
the AI sorting information, would just congeal it for a manual desicion made by a GM.
basically, the conversations between the characters, the trade done, and the conversations after. and the logon frequencies, the patterns of activity on the seller, the accounts activity aso would be there. its pretty easy to see if a lvl 40 (as the charater must be max lvl )is recieving gold from a lot of sources, and giving large sums to players with different accounts for no traded stuff of similar value, repetadly.
Yeah I know what bounties are but I don’t think they should reward gold. Would be hilarious having a bot mass reporting his own bots and getting hundreds of gold for it.
So what’s stopping a gold seller from buying a suspicious slab of meat that costs 1000g?
pressumably, every bot doesnt sell the gold. they funnel it to a character that sells it, in a network of goldseller toons used by a RMT’er.
if selfreporting becomes a great way to make gold, thats perfectly fine though. once the report is made, and the account banned, its banned. with all characters gone.
if the gold was traded to another account, that has to be given to teh GM that gives the 24 h amnesty to that account. if its not, the account is also permabanned.
if the goldseller who selfreported tries to sell that gold from yet another account, chances are some player who wants 10g quickly, is farming him for the 50g reward, like ive said earlier. and then that account is also amnesty/permabanned. the player who stung the goldseller gives back the 10g he bought, and gets his 50, and enjoys the amnesty.
i answered this to someone else further up. the crawler would also look for these transactions in the AH logs, and flag them. pretty sure they already do this btw. in addition, players would look for these trades, and report the sellers as fast as possible, for a free 50g reward.
fair.
but then the fact remains, its simple IF blizzard really wants to do something about this problem. its not a large investment in equipment, and manpower, compared to servers dying and expansions killing of playerbase, like this has done in itterations past.
will they do this? probably they will never read this thread, or think of it. so i doubt they will fix it.
@Lurkykiller: Actually, combining Muty’s points 2 and 3 would create a situation, where realms like Living Flame would trigger somewhere around 160 000 “red flags” every single day. If we assume checking each flag takes a human GM 1 minute… That is 160 000 minutes of work / day for a single server. 160 000 minutes is… divided by 60… round up… about 2667 hours / day… 8 work hours / day… Round up… 334 GMs doing nothing but flag checks all day, every day (including weekends)… and that for just a single server.
If you are wondering, why? The answer is simple. Muty’s system is not able to identify an illegal 1 gold deal from a legal 1 gold deal. Goldsellers would simply overwhelm the system on any non-locked realm.
You can not even assign a legal maximum value to say, linen cloth, because it does not have the same value on every realm (unless you insist on maximum being the vendor value (7 coppers, if I recall correctly)). In which case, due to the AH cut, all sales create an actual loss and most people will just vendor EVERYTHING they do not need now / very soon themselves. When it comes to more valuable items, things get even harder. A legal deal at 500 gold could be illegal at 450 gold on another realm. A concept that an AI can not grasp with ease. I suppose a very well written AI could spend weeks, maybe months trying to crossreference different realms, but it would be neither fast nor cheap.
As for the 24 hour autoban system… That would get abused, too. Do not like someone? Create a throwaway account with fake personal info, bot on it, send gold to your “enemy”, when you know the target is away from his/her computer longer than 24 hours, report the throwaway account from your main account (or better yet, ask your guildmate(s) to) and “Voila!”, instant, effectively untraceable ban achieved. Of course, the target can complain and the sentence might eventually get overturned by a human GM, but even that takes time, most likely days at the very minimum, given the limited amount of staff Blizzard has left.
In short, overextensive automated punishment systems are really easy to either abuse, wreck or evade or all of those and are therefore a REALLY BAD idea.
Flagging suspicious activity is perfectly fine, issuing automated permanent bans is a big no-no.
thats a huge datapool indeed. and im not saying every flag is checked in a week or day. an AI could easily prioritize this, on a gravity basis, pulling out the information and analyzing it for the GM, so the net resulting data would simply say as an example:
account [name] has traded 24500 gold to 16 accounts in the last 7 days - estimated value of items traded in responce= 12 gold.
accounts that have recieved gold:
x
y
z
1
aso
press “yes” to issue Amnesty to players.
that flag would take about 1 second to hit the big red ban-button on.
this also goes for players reports. the AI would mine the report from that flag almost instantly, in the same way.
i dont follow.
why would it not?
the system would check and verify automatically whether a trade done, either p2p or p2ah within teh parametres set. ie over 50 gold (which also would no longer be possible, and only possible on a max level character) and b: severely outside the median REALM price of an item, lets say by 1000% -so that 1 bolt of cloth or what ever it may be, costing 1000 gold, would lead to the sellers other activities being mined by the AI for a parametre of activities.
this is 2024. its perfectly doable.
they overwhelm the economy as we speak, and p2 will get significantly worse due to GDKP being banned, and the mined gold price will drop, and more will buy more for less.
this has killed the economy before, and that again, kills the playerbase, and that in turn nukes the income Blizzard has from the game.
its a very bad management of the business, not to fix this problem.
and bad for us, who love this game.
u can use the realms median value on ah, and set parameter at 1000% for the AI to start mining for other damning facts. if nothing else is found, that posting/flag is disregarded automatically as a fluke incident. no manual GM work required at all.
this is how u reduse the flags from 160 000 to 1600 before a GM even see’s it.
using the realms own AH prices.
not required at all.
letting the company loose its playerbase is the true cost here.
i covered that. the recipient would be given a 24 h amnesty (starting from next login, with an on screen message popping up), to return the gold recieved. if he doesnt, he can vendor all his gear, and return that amount, to keep his account. if that player has sent the gold on to someone else, that amnesty extends to the nxt player. if its used in fair trade, it doesnt warrant a reaction at all.(using realm median values parameter)if someone sends u a large (only large would be a problem in yr casestudy) sum of gold out of the blue, the first flag to be raised, is your own, right?
and now, thats a simple case of - return the gold u recieved, and its fine.
this one, you are wrong about.
as you so well emphasized, Blizzard does NOT have, and will not scale to have, the manual manpower to deal with the current situation. so its either abandon it (which seems to be the solution u are foreshadowing here), and see gamers leave (loss of profits to ensue) or implement a fix that works.
your examples have been examined and countered very well by me, i feel.
in every casestudy you presented, i have countered with how it would work faster, more ubiquitously and with better data, more compiled, to reduse fawlty desicions by GMs.
its the ONLY way to handle it. the issuing of permabans is always verified by a manual GM signing of on it, in every case. making the data compiled and the evidence plain and simple to verify in the vastly reduced amount of flags actually attaining status as : needs manual verification - is the key to doing it.
as you yourself say:
manual isnt possible, and not handling it is gamekilling.
having 300 000 players help police RMT for rewards, and an AI mining the corrobrating data for facts, would simply wipe out RMT. 334 GMs cant do that. 3334 couldnt either. but 3-4 could handle the highest priority flagged reports, and press the red button, at the tune of 10-15 pr minute if they read fast.
edit: i should add, irl i am a security professional, this is pretty much my field of expertice.
edit 2: solving this issue would not only work for wow, but every MMO with a similar economic system ingame. a net oppertunity for a business in the business.
Wrong, because the proposed trigger is 1 gold, if the sender is below maximum level or AH.
You did not, because the automated system would have to start the 24 h count from the time of report mail receipt and action taken, NOT from the person’s next login on that specific character, which could be 27, 49 or 73,5 hours later. You conveniently forgot that bans are account wide, you can not be permanently banned on just a single character within that account. In short, people could and would be autobanned while they might have not even logged in that character again yet. Also, since many people post large numbers of auctions, the question is: Does every single AH user examine every single mail separately? I am going to guess no. Even so… receive 137 gold in 137 mails of 1 gold allotment, two of those are from “hostile actors” and bang, you are banned! Even if Blizzard were to go as far as to immediately trigger an e-mail to the offender… How many people read their (gaming) e-mail every day and always within 24 hours from the last visit? I do to about 98%, but to my knowledge, I represent the minority, not the majority.
Short version, since you keep editing your post and I have already used too much time on this individual post:
I am not worried about individual large sales, I am worried about botters splitting into tiny units and using massive amounts of them. As I said, it is not that easy to differentiate between a single legal gold and a single botted gold, especially if the median amount transferred is that single gold. To use an animal reference: A huge horde of fire ants is far more dangerous than a single king cobra.
Make mounts close to free, every pattern etc trainable from proff trainers, repairs and skill training free. Heavily increase amount of materials gathered. If there’s nothing to spend gold on, it’s value will drop.
These are seasonal servers after all, grinding gold for things shouldn’t be a thing
u have misunderstood the original detail. the cap of 1 gold applies to p2p trade only, until max level cap. then it increases to[for example] 50 gold. The daily gold-cap does not apply to AH activities. there, anyone can spend any amount they have.
the 1 gold is not a trigger, its a cap for trade from or to a lower than max level character, then.
trading gold between characters on teh same account, is unrestricted.
i did cover it.
that is descibed rather elaborately id say. the amnesty-countdown starts once the person whos account it is, has logged in. the message pops up on screen once he does, in character select window. in order to select a character, he first has to acknowledge the message, making it “read” in the system. from that moment, he has 24 hours to either pay back to a mail account operated by the devs ingame (uniqe blue name) or in some other way, or vendor all items on his character(s) and send the amount recieved from vendors. the system would scan to verify that its been done.
if i said character, i appologize. i of course ment to say account. every character on the account is affected by the amnesty equally, and the ban.
so 1 gold from 2 mails? if those are flagged as above 1000% of median AH realm price, then it would be a soft flag in the system. the AI would prioritize large sums of gold either in total, from 1 account, to the other. 1 or 2 gold would not be a “red” alert, but stored until it may show this trade has happened 200 times. or some other number that makes the amount larger than the daily tradable gold amount between max level characters. then, it could generate a larger mining of data surrounding the sender of gold, and if there is this activity on a larger scale, flag it in a summarized report to the GM manually deciding how to proceed.
i already answered this section, so refer to that.
it is that easy - the AI gathers cooroberating data like /w and ingame mail, /s between teh "suspects when in proximity (which, because of teh bounty on goldsales - would be inside a lower level dungeoun or similar)- in short, all relevant data. and its like earlier stated, not 1 gold.
to find the botters, u have to reverse the way they find drugdealers. find the boss first, then his organization.
the system searches connections between a “suspect” and every account he has traded with. if 50 of these accounts have all, on a regular basis, sent gold to this one account - there is the entire cartel.
big red button.
yes, but both will kill you if u dont defend against it.
if this is Blizzards internal policy of handling botting and RMT - covering ears and closing eyes and lalalala… i really hope it isnt.
i keep editing because i dont want to be misunderstood and i see spots that are unclearly explained. saves me having to reexplain them.
so u just vendor everything all the time then? remove the AH? whatever the price on certain things are, some other ones will be valuable. the price of raidpots for example, might spike to x5, since no one needs gold for anything else. thats just the nature of supply & demand - and wow is exactly that, an economic ecosystem.
infected by a virus that is artificially inflating it.
Not entirely impossible, but I do foresee multiple problems and even one specific situation, which might turn out to be outright illegal and get Blizzard in trouble. Classic characters are only accessible when the account is active, but you can play retail (up to level 20) without paying. Threatening to ban the account, if player does not want to renew at that time could probably be seen as extortion. Also… Retail gold has a different value and additionally, not paying for game time also disables the mailing system.
This gets tricky, too. There are plenty of 100% legitimate players, who actually play AH more than the game. We also return to my fear of botters splitting up things. Botters have the option of sending smaller sums and from multiple different accounts.
The problem is that botters do not have to do this. In fact, if they choose suitable items, the price might actually be below the median AH price for that realm.
This also represents a problem. If they use the AH as a middleman, there might be absolutely no other ingame traces, all the details can be set up entirely outside the game.
Interesting comparison. However, botters (at least those, who do not want to get caught) do not operate as drug cartels, but rather as terrorist cells.
All in all… I am not saying the idea is impossible. I just think it is far less easy than it appears at first glance. If it is was cheap, easy, fast AND reliable… both Blizzard and numerous other companies would have done something like it. WoW is not the only game that suffers from botting.
The link above might be of some interest to you or at least I hope so. Remove the spaces, for some reason I can not get the link bypass function to function.
im not familiar with retail, but in general, id say just disable the free character creation function - i realize its a recruitment tool, but it seems like a loophole for botters to exploit far more detrementally than a few customers lost because they couldnt try the game. in any case, the effect of countering RMT effectively, is player retention.
the weight of gold as a currency would have to be treated on a server to server basic anyway, as a factor of presetting the caps, tradeable values aso for each version of the game. in SoD which i play now, id say a daily tradable / bounty reward of 50 gold is reasonable as a cap for max level characters. (accountwide, so one cant collect/deliver more from 8 max level alts per day)
indeed, i know many who treat wow more like monopoly than a fightclub. its completely legitimate and should never be interfered with. forcing prices up on stuff they have collected and can monopolize in the AH is a legitimate strategy of play, and smart. they just should be aware of the 1000% limit, the fact that doing this in a significant way - for example posting Mantle of thieves for 5000 gold, and buying it back oneself - will not cause a flag on teh trade as the trade is done with one account, and not two.
Botters that transmit smaller amounts would go undetected. the detection happens when the cartelleader starts selling it, and either is picked up by the AI, or reported by a player looking for a bounty-reward.
in that case, the entire tradinglog of that account is datamined, and the plethorah of bots sending small amounts regularly to the vendor account would be revealed, and be actionable. thats all datamined automatically and generated as a report to the GM who examines and determines the actions and reactions manually.
same as above really - the bots are too many and insignificant to catch individually, but they form part of an ecosystem in a RMT account. cut the head of the snake, and ban the body.
they could definitely do that - and the trades would have to spike a valuedifference to actually transmit value to be usable as a strategy of delivery. we all use addons already to scan AH, and i am confident they would be adapted to seek and alert to possible RMT activities. for the player to then report in the bounty system.
id say no - terrorists do not rely on outside customers to be viable. RMT relies on contact with the customer. and the customer would more than likely be a player who hates, and farms RMT’ers. make a small transaction (due to the limit) and the account has been revealed to the player (name of teh max level character selling the gold) and theres yr bounty on the way. the cartel/terroristcell infrastructure is in the logs and traceable by teh AI, confirmation is a matter of seconds with an elaborate structure and signifcant gold given, against no, or very little value.
yes. it takes a strategist in threat&countermeasures, a few coders who can build teh AI, and a few GMs/gamedesigners to help understand the more advanced strategies to counter. and time.
AI was not at the point it is now, and the threat to the health of the game has become more obvious over time. these are converging facts that will lead to something similar in a while. i just want it for wow asap, so the game stays healthy and fun.
yea, interesting, strategcally speaking, it looks abit like chasing the chickens to get them before the fox does, instead of shooting the fox. the botters are not the problem, they are a symptom. the transactions of gold for cash is what fuels the botter-army. it will die on its own, if the RMT vendors have to level to max, risk their entire infrastructure with every sale in game, and make a relatively small amount in return for every risky transaction. from videos ive seen, a botter has 400-600 characters in SoD running 24/7. he is fine with them being banned in weeks, the cost of an account is low, and the system is ready to go once he makes new ones.
but if he has to make a new max level account for every other transaction, that cost is very high in terms of time/effort, versus risk.
if his customers also get amnesties, and a bunch of high level characters pop up in major cities with no gear, asking for alms from friends and boosts in raids to re-gear up - they will have to explain what happened. and thay will serve as horrorstories to other potential goldbuyers, that realize the risk.
its a complex issue indeed, and building a system that works takes alot of detailed insight in the game, and in countermeasures as well as coding. the problem is partly that gamedesigners are smart people, and they make a world for people to play in. so they think they understand it. but they dont really understand the mechanisms that arent designed, the social ones, any better than the regular person. this isnt about gamedesigning - its about security. and they dont actually understand security. its not their field of expertiece. have you ever heard of a security consultancy job for a gameworldesignteam? i have not. im used to this, people who run companies or even police, military and securityservices think they understand all aspects of what they do, since its under their umbrella of perview, and thats loophole number one, for anyone posing a threat to its integrity. that is a universal truth.
but its a worthy investment if it destroys, or atleast very significantly impacts, RMT.
this GDKP ban will btw open the door for a new strategy to run GDKP, with real world transactions directly, using a Poolpay solution running on Paypal and managed in discord. we are weeks away from that happening, if not hours. like prohibition did for Al Capone, this will make the GDKP capo’s stronger and richer and more greedy.
edit: THAT, will be hard to detect. players that discuss pay in the game get kicked without reply and banned from rejoining. any report made wount garner any evidence from datafiles at all, and the player will look like he is disgruntled. The GDKP team will split according to presets in the poolpay app, and make anywhere from 30 to 300 euros, depending on the bidding and the whales. this will expand into betting on duels, deathrolls and more very soon. people love to gamble if they have that gene. some cant stop.
they are currently creating a prohibition that will make the crime less detectable. Al Capone would have approved this.
the right play is to allow GDKP and kill off RMT. GDKP is on its own, a perfectly ok way to play/farm, if its free of RMT. Much like legalizing pot, because banning it didnt work and made crimesyndicates instead.
…which is why the next hire should be a threat/countermeasure analyst with a decent real world cv, and some insight in wow/games
I read an amazing idea from youtube. What if all gold buyers that blizzard identified got a lifetime icon on ALL characters that said ”gold buyer” or something alike. I think this would make alot of people fear buying gold because of the mark. Then the rest of the community would know if someone is a gold buyer and react accordingly (mby decline raid spots or whatever). Cancelling has been a thing for a long time in other parts of society and whatever people think of it, it’s damn effective to publicly shame people.
that swings both ways. it might become a sign of rebellion against the cost of raiding, a badge of honor. it says u show up prepped every time, and cruise through everything and u dont let gamedsigners own 5 hours of your life everyday, doing meanial tasks.
culture changes quickly, when u make a subculture.
people start to own it, and make it their identity instead.
alternatively, u would see 300 streamers talk about Blizzards star of David, and thats not a good look.
No2. Can only use gold though the Auction house.
No trading gold to other players no mailing to others except your account example characters on your battlenet.
No3. Items in raids can only be traded once boss dies and stays on boss until rolled out then winners receives, no 2 hour window after raid so then someone can go and put a linen cloth for 200 thousand gold then buyer buys it then raid leader gives item to player.
This used to be in effect in some form. Blizz would take more effort to take down goldsellers and then chain-ban every account that the seller traded with or mailed gold to. Now they don’t have the resources to look into reports that deep.
i know. like i say further up, they will face a choice between letting servers die and players quit, or fixing the issue. that seems to me to be a financial desicion they will make, probably too late. investing in building a solution that has been designed by actual security experts and not only gamedesigners, whom dont understand security in a social structure which this in reality is, is a prerequisite.
yes. but thats not done correctly yet. they need a solution that works, and i have made one.
fair suggestion, but i think a lot of players would revolt if this happened, and one could still, very easily, transfer gold through the AH so it would solve nothing in reality. it would limit gameplay and hinder no RMT activity
