RMT: Goldceo VS SE, SE losing

[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.

[Churchill]

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

[mmcsky]

If I was SE I would make bank out of RMTs, put a clause on your user agreement where if caught RMT and the proof was solid they could fine your account till you talked to them and settle your account with a lawyer. Kinda like a pseudo lawsuit, talk to us and get sued or we take your money kinda deal.

[sasakusaku]

Set up a gem card system or something and watch the gold farmers go away.

If you make a game that allows them to profit, they WILL come and they WILL take over. They don't care about you, me, the game developer, the health of the game or it's economy: bottom line is making money. If they have to jack your account and strip it for a measly 25 cents, they will and then wipe out all your characters for extra good measure just because. If their antics drive a game out of business, again who cares...there's always other new games to infest!

So if a dev actually controls their in-game 'money' then gold farmers won't bother.

Need proof it works? Well, check out Eve and GW2; gold farmers lost and moved ON. Heck with bandaid solutions that never work!

This might be pay to win but it all depends on how you set it up.

[Naunet]

Set up a gem card system or something and watch the gold farmers go away.

You don't need a full-blown money-to-gil market. Just sell items that can be redeemed in-game for a month of sub time (a la, yes, Eve, as well as TERA and more recently, WildStar). Restrict the number of these items you can purchase and list on the broker per month, make them untradeable so they can only be sold via broker, and poof. The implementation of chronoscrolls in TERA nixed gold farming spam to pretty much zilch.

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

Anyone who doesn't have disposable income for a data plan or who simply doesn't want one. This would include myself. No smartphone here!

[anceru]

did anyone consider the possibility of SE deliberately sabotaging the counter RMT features to get as much money out of them as possible?

[Ghammer]

if they had a function that locks your account when someone from another IP tries to log in that could help(they have it for GW2 it works pretty well). also make it so you cant whisper till level 10 or something unless its under your friends list.

[Noshpan]

So long as there is demand, there will always be someone willing to supply.

I had noticed that the RMT shouts were worst in Ul'dah, so I would try to avoid that city as much as possible.

Last time I checked there were 8 GoldCEO RMT on Leviathan and, last night, it felt like I had been messaged by all of them.

At the very least, I wish that there was a far more effective means to report gil-sellers, which feature automatically puts the offending RMT on "mute".

[Issac]

Come to think of it, over on Masamune I haven't gotten an RMT advert for some time now, am I just lucky?