How would you stop RMT?
Still stirring….
Post your ideas and hypotheticals on how RMT can be effectively stopped or controlled. Let's not focus on why or why not RMT is a bad thing (there's another post for that), but how you could effectively stop it. Feel free to poke holes in each others' ideas, but be nice.
June 30th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Well, the simplest way of slowing RMT, if not stopping it, would be to make all items in game (weapons, armor, money, chairs, houses) no-drop or otherwise non-transferrable. A game where the player is required to attain and accomplish everything themselves (or with a group). Of course, this style of game would encourage the sale of accounts, so you would need to police accounts and routinely ban ones that are “proven” to have switched owners. It wouldn’t even need to be a proactive system, just have a staff that monitors eBay and other auction sites, and any account that can be tracked to a completed sale is banned. Even if the sale wasn’t actually complete, ban them for attempted sale.
You can’t really prevent account sales until they start tying accounts to finger prints or blood tests.
June 30th, 2006 at 12:40 pm
As suggested before, by oh so many people, there are a couple ideas. I’ve heard so many ideas, I have a hard time of knowing if any of these ideas are orginal. Chances are someone already have thought of it.
I’m working on the idea that MMOs can be more than just putting in the time to reach end-game. Meaning the journey can be the focus not the end. Also I am assuming that the main reason to RMT is to be able to experience a desired aspect of the game.
Developement of character though leveling decisions, close to CoH/CoV. Play style heavily based on leveling up decisions.
Make it viable for a level 1 to group with a level capped character. Again something like CoH/CoV. Late comers don’t feel pressured to reach the end level to play with friends.
High-end type content accessable to lower level, imagine being able to run a raid content at level 1. Same idea about DAoC and RvR, make it accessable to everyone at an early stage. Of course the challenge of it is much lower, rewards are lower, but it eliminates the idea of having to be level XX to access a type of content.
Character resets, after a while everyone loses their stuff and start fresh. Or some level of leveling the playing field. Could be somewhere along the lines of Counterstrike rounds of play, you did well before, you start off better, but not so much better that the others that just started can’t compete. To keep characters unique even after resets, have them earn some token of accomplishment that lasts even after character reset, something like “MVP of Game Season 4″ or “The GM killer”. Have it affect the avatar visually, very much like ribbons and medals on military personnel. In the digital world, the bigger the better, instead of ribbons, back banners. Not only that, at reset retool character to play a different role than before. Not forced to play a set role for character’s lifetime. One more thing, the character now is less defined by the stuff he/she has, class, or spec.
Basically all these reduce the gap between the beginning character and the end-game character. The have-nots and the haves. RMT-ing doesn’t really put anyone that much ahead of anybody. However these ideas aren’t proven like the current MMO formula of leveling to the cap, end-game exclusive content, having stuff, etc.
June 30th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
I would attack the three major negative side effects that result from RMT:
1.) RMT farmers cutting “real” players out of markets and content.
You have to design your high end content so that people who want to experience it can. Contested mobs that drop tradeable loot are the bread and butter of RMT’ers. You also have to be careful to make sure to “spread the wealth” when it comes high end harvesting nodes. One final step: put a flag on every item so that it can listed only once on your automated markets. That will stop market monopolizers cold.
2.) In game advertising. Offer account credits to players who /report gold spammers.
3.) Third party hacks/dupes to make farming more efficient. Build a series of checks in the game engine to alert you to “impossible” behavior like a non-teleporting class beaming back and forth across the world. Also when your players make page after page of posts about “hunters with teleport hacks in Dire Maul”… believe them!
June 30th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
If only an answer were simple or straightforward.*
*I.e. this question has fried my mind and I will need to spend several days in recovery before being able to answer.
July 4th, 2006 at 10:06 pm
This is computationally and memory expensive, but I would track trade imbalances (the number and total value of the imbalances) between accounts (not characters). This also means you have to have a way of finding the values of items for sale, but this shouldn’t be too much of a problem once players determine what things should be worth. You track these trade imbalances over time and then you send a person to ebay or ige or whatever to buy an item or money so you know you have an RMT person. This is the initial shitlist. Then you perform a breadth-first search of the bad-trades space where you take the top element off the shitlist and then add anything that has a lot of bad trades (by some standard you will have to come up with but I am betting you can find a really good heuristic since these numbers will be very different than they are with regular players) with it to the shitlist (in either direction..either have lots of bad trades from this person or to this person), and put the current element into the closed pile.
After you’re done with this You take the IP addresses (maybe….since they can change), accounts, credit cards (if you have those numbers) and take the shitlist and use it as a starting point to apply to all other servers.
One issue here is that you have to repeatedly apply this algorithm to all servers to eventually find everyone involved in this RMT web, but I think you could get pretty close after several passes checking servers using your global shitlist as a starting point each time…or you could probably come up with a better way like putting a timestamp on each element in the shitlist then running this occasionally on each server where you only check new elements that have been added since your last iteration.
Then you should be able to find everyone who engages in a lot of bad trades in a chain with this person you know is an RMT’er and that should take care of a big chunk of the problem.
I know at least one problem with this is with guild bankers that keep items and trade them a lot with other players and it’s legit, and I am not sure how you deal with that…since if you ignore guild trades like that, then you can get around a lot of this by playing with the guild rules. Dunno how to deal with that. But, if the guild is filled with honest people, they won’t have lots of bad trades with the farmers anyway…so maybe no problem?
Well it’s still a problem but maybe you allow nodrop trades or something, or maybe try to discern between the two kinds of players. There’s probably a way to classify things in terms of the bad trade values so that you can tell the difference between a guild banker and a link in a farmer chain. Anyway, the short version of this post is “data mining”.
John
July 5th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
Two silly, simple ideas:
1. Why don’t we, as players, start advertising RMT-free servers? Yes, I realize there are always RMT players, and people that will buy from them, on servers. But, let’s face it, where there is demand, supply will be created. If we push out the demand, maybe we will lose some of the farmers. I realize that my idea is idealistic, but isn’t that what an idea should be?
Thinking this through, it would be easy to get a website that all players who want to be free of RMT sign up for a code of conduct, posting their toons/servers/games? Overtime, we could organize around new games (SoH, WHO, CtB are all coming soon) and make claims to certain servers.
2. Have the developers put limits on trades that are RMT-like. Imagine the scenarios where you can trade a total of 1 plat max / day or one bulk trade of up to 10 plat once a month. Everything else must be bought through a vendor. Even better, make these trades go through an NPC broker, this way you can log it and see if there is equal value.
July 5th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Shift the focus of the game away from “having” stuff to “doing” stuff. If the equipment has only say an aesthetic purpose, you’d have far less demand for RMT.
In one of The Escapist articles I read today they were talking about chess and how it has lasted so long, it’s popularity, and the like. Well, how much RMT do you think goes on in a game like that? Is there an Ebay market where you can buy a better bishop or knight? The game of chess is about the “doing”, not so much the “having”.
So many MMO’s end game boils down to “having” stuff, it’s no wonder there’s a huge RMT market. And even the ones that end up being about “doing” stuff require that you “have” better stuff before you can “do” stuff.
August 4th, 2006 at 7:22 am
[...] A while back, Amber asked how it might be possible to stop RMT. The simple answer is - it’s not. The more complex answer actually does go back to the point that people have made above: change the rules of the game. Many modern MMOs seem to stem from certain capitalist ideas, including the concept of a fully functioning virtual game economy. In game currency is in high demand and the best or most exclusinve items often cost a lot. So people with not enough time to be able to get a huge amount of money, pay “farmers” real money for in game money so that they can get the equipment they need. [...]