RMT: Goldceo VS SE, SE losing

[ChriskoOnAnotherLevel]

SE did it to themselves. Anytime you make crafting a major part of the game, you open yourself up to this level of RMT.

I would say it is not fixable by anything less than extreme measures.

If you made gil borderline worthless in game, RMT would be a non factor.

People want to EARN their house, relic and gear and it is a shame that SE is encouraging people to BUY their house, relic and gear rather than earn them.

Anytime people feel that they can buy a resource many many times easier than they can earn it themselves, your entire game design is flawed.

Even people who work at Mcdonalds for a living can buy gil cheaper than they can earn it, unless they do DOH/DOL as the main aspect of their game.

And you really expect people who make 50k+ a year to spend hours farming tiny amounts of gil? Stupid.

I do not buy gil out of principle, but if I did not have a decent amount from 1.0 there is no way I would have my relics and the ability to teleport around as I please.

Make every single thing in the game that costs gil consumables, vanity, convenience or luxury items and you will NEVER have RMT problems to this extent.

[EvokerKeii]

I think part of the condition of recovering a stole/hacked account is to require the user first purchase and/or apply an authenticator/security token. If there's a free iOS and Android version of this app, there's absolutely no excuse not to have it. Whining about it is like whining about having to register an account or typing in a user name and password. Just get it done.

[Obreck]

Wouldn't be surprised if there's a keygen program involved with this RMT scam. Why bother hacking into players' account if you can create an army bogus accounts with a key generator, then send them out on their annoying, spamming way? Not like the ad bot accounts getting caught & banned is a concern to these people.

Sqaure just needs to keep making better automated systems to deal with the ad bots; just as others on this topic have said the human aspect of their task force would be better suited to burn the mules and buyers. For example I think if you send 10 tells that get immediately blacklisted you should be blocked from sending tells & making new characters for 24-72 hours. Would shut these Tell bots up pretty fast without being invasive to the normal players.

[AlmaMalma]

XI eventually flattened the gilsellers, by making worthwhile ingame currency untradeable between players. Abyssea for instance you could only get items by collecting npc-only tradeables like cruor. ARR is similar when it comes to tomestones, but there's still a market for crafter made gear that's only buyable with gil. If they can sort that out, they'll have ruined the market for buying and selling currency, they're almost certainly working on doing that.

[Kith]

What SE needs to do is simply mandate authenticators for the entire playerbase. As others are saying (and this seems to be the case for most RMT in mmo's these days), a good portion of both the gil/gold and the spam comes from "hacked" accounts and this is generally done as people use the same passwords (or weak passwords) everywhere so when one company gets compromised, accounts all over the web get compromised with them; just as an aside, Riot who runs League of Legends had an intrusion shortly before ARR came out and given its playerbase there is probably a lot of data out there right now.

What SE needs to do is simply mandate authenticators for the entire playerbase. As others are saying (and this seems to be the case for most RMT in mmo's these days), a good portion of both the gil/gold and the spam comes from "hacked" accounts and this is generally done as people use the same passwords (or weak passwords) everywhere so when one company gets compromised, accounts all over the web get compromised with them; just as an aside, Riot who runs League of Legends had an intrusion shortly before ARR came out and given its playerbase there is probably a lot of data out there right now.

Given this method of "hacking" accounts, mandating an authenticator would nip it in the bud almost entirely; even for people who lack a phone and don't want a physical one, using an emulated one or heck, even a downloadable 'app' by SE themselves would still fix the problem to a large extent. Even people whose machines are absolutely riddled with malware to the point of keyloggers which would ruin the usefulness of a local app, it would still mean an account could only be taken over during the 30s code refresh window and RMT couldn't sit on the data for weeks/months at a time until using it. While RMT could start making malware that would compromise the local SE app, it would be less likely to be as profitable at that point and they may move on to easier (mmo) targets.

Would probably (almost certainly) cause a bunch of outrage to mandate the usage of authenticators but it wouldn't half put a dent in the RMT 'economy' once it was done. Or setup a 'restricted' account system that prevents more than X tells or shouts per hour to people not on your friends list (have to be added by said friend so the spammers don't switch to mass friend invites) until an authenticator is added; there are lots of levels between no authenticators and mandated, though the closer to 100% it is, the more effective it'd be.

[Cikala]

I think part of the condition of recovering a stole/hacked account is to require the user first purchase and/or apply an authenticator/security token. If there's a free iOS and Android version of this app, there's absolutely no excuse not to have it.

First, the security tokens are not a guarantee that your account won't be hacked. Second, not everyone has a smart phone. While I agree they do improve security, forcing everyone to purchase one is not a reasonable option.

And really, this wouldn't even be an issue if SE took a look at Rift's coin lock system. If someone logs into an account from a different location than normal, the account is basically locked down. No trading, no selling, no anything that a hacker would want to do with your account. It takes the whole purpose of hacking an account away, and completely got rid of all gold selling spam in Rift.

The industry has already solved this problem, but like with many other things, SE doesn't want to do things the accepted way, they want to go their own questionable way.

[Churchill]

The tokens are actually pretty easy to hack, all you need is a token to hack most other tokens.

[EvokerKeii]

First, the security tokens are not a guarantee that your account won't be hacked. Second, not everyone has a smart phone. While I agree they do improve security, forcing everyone to purchase one is not a reasonable option.

And really, this wouldn't even be an issue if SE took a look at Rift's coin lock system. If someone logs into an account from a different location than normal, the account is basically locked down. No trading, no selling, no anything that a hacker would want to do with your account. It takes the whole purpose of hacking an account away, and completely got rid of all gold selling spam in Rift.

The industry has already solved this problem, but like with many other things, SE doesn't want to do things the accepted way, they want to go their own questionable way.

This is 2013. Show me someone who doesn't have a smartphone.

XI eventually flattened the gilsellers, by making worthwhile ingame currency untradeable between players. Abyssea for instance you could only get items by collecting npc-only tradeables like cruor. ARR is similar when it comes to tomestones, but there's still a market for crafter made gear that's only buyable with gil. If they can sort that out, they'll have ruined the market for buying and selling currency, they're almost certainly working on doing that.

This was one of the things I hated most about FFXI. There were a dozen different currencies with a dozen different purposes and none of them overlapped. There was no synergy at all.

[Vanguard319]

SE did it to themselves. Anytime you make crafting a major part of the game, you open yourself up to this level of RMT.

When was the last time you heard of an MMORPG that didn't have a crafting system or a player run economy?

[Vanguard319]

Didn't IGN do a documentary on chinese gold farming?

Yeah, and the gilsellers were like "just leave me be" like they were the victims. No mention of all the more criminal actions they do. (like stealing accounts) It wasn't a good doc.