Combatting Gold Sellers - Limiting Communication Options

    • Combatting Gold Sellers - Limiting Communication Options

      Hey there!
      Gold Selling is not a new concept, as many MMO players are aware, and the people that run these Gray Market businesses know how to make money, a f**k tonne of it.

      One thing that I know that can be action-ed on from the game team's perspective is to remove the ease of communication between the gold sellers and the potential customers.
      I would like to suggest doing just that.

      Suggestion 1:
      Removing global/trade/help chats from all players for a week, and see how the game goes, or limiting chats to Local / Guild / Party.

      Why? This will allow mods to quickly find players using local chat to spam gold selling sites.

      Suggestion 2:
      Ban phrases commonly used by gold selling bots

      Why? Mods are people too, they can't be everywhere and do everything at once.

      Suggestion 3:
      Removing the ability to whisper a player you have never had previous contact with...
      This could be broken buy...
      Being mutual friends, purchasing an item from the player off the auction house, recently been in a party with, or been in the same zone or a couple screens worth of distance away

      Why? Gold sellers just whisper random people and it is very easy to catch the eye of a player since most players have whispers enabled in all chat windows.

      Suggestion 4: (My favorite)
      Disable chatting all together until players reach a certain Adventurer level.
      (This would not affect Guild / Party chats)

      Why? Gold sellers are lazy, they are attempting to make as much money as quickly as possible with the lowest amount of effort. If the bots take too long to get up and running, the gold selling spam will stop.
      However there needs to be an alright balance so new players are not too confused as to why they can not communicate with the world. So Adept level Adventurer may be right around the right level to enable chats.

      Let me know what you think, I want this game to succeed to its fullest potential, and gold sellers definitely put a wrench in that plan.
      Thanks for reading!!
      -Rushed <3

    • Emulated schrieb:

      Hey there!
      Gold Selling is not a new concept, as many MMO players are aware, and the people that run these Gray Market businesses know how to make money, a f**k tonne of it.

      One thing that I know that can be action-ed on from the game team's perspective is to remove the ease of communication between the gold sellers and the potential customers.
      I would like to suggest doing just that.

      Suggestion 1:
      Removing global/trade/help chats from all players for a week, and see how the game goes, or limiting chats to Local / Guild / Party.

      Why? This will allow mods to quickly find players using local chat to spam gold selling sites.

      Suggestion 2:
      Ban phrases commonly used by gold selling bots

      Why? Mods are people too, they can't be everywhere and do everything at once.

      Suggestion 3:
      Removing the ability to whisper a player you have never had previous contact with...
      This could be broken buy...
      Being mutual friends, purchasing an item from the player off the auction house, recently been in a party with, or been in the same zone or a couple screens worth of distance away

      Why? Gold sellers just whisper random people and it is very easy to catch the eye of a player since most players have whispers enabled in all chat windows.

      Suggestion 4: (My favorite)
      Disable chatting all together until players reach a certain Adventurer level.
      (This would not affect Guild / Party chats)

      Why? Gold sellers are lazy, they are attempting to make as much money as quickly as possible with the lowest amount of effort. If the bots take too long to get up and running, the gold selling spam will stop.
      However there needs to be an alright balance so new players are not too confused as to why they can not communicate with the world. So Adept level Adventurer may be right around the right level to enable chats.

      Let me know what you think, I want this game to succeed to its fullest potential, and gold sellers definitely put a wrench in that plan.
      Thanks for reading!!
      -Rushed <3
      1. Meh? They will just wait and come back when the chat is back again. Actually, they will find other ways (in-game mail?) to perform these advertising actions until the chat comes back. So this really isn't the best hotfix.

      2. Don’t they already do that? Which has been countered by bots typing: “3 VV . awihfaisf . com” and stuff like that?

      3. Pretty bad idea, counters a lot of other players gameplay. Not to mention the fact that they (the bot/gold-seller) doesn’t get players names until they come in contact with you.

      4. This could potentially be a good fix. However, the problem with this is if the new players have questions that could be solved by /help and stuff like that.

      All in all though, we would love to see them leave. It’s definitely a hard fight to fight as you can see the result of them “losing” (which they never do, they always find a way). I look forward to more suggestions on this thread.

    • #2 will be hilarious, and also a constant battle. Have seen this play out in another game.

      Starts with a pm going: cheap gold go to site.com to buy!

      you start blocking site.com.

      then you start getting pm's going: cheap gold go to site DOT com to buy!

      so you start blocking that phrase, then 5min later...

      cheap gold go to \/\/ \/\/ \/\/ site D0T C0M

      and it keeps going even after the whole thing is pointless, as it's almost impossible to read the website address due to how much they've distorted it to avoid the filters. but the point here is - it does not stop.

      goodluck with that one.

    • Emulated schrieb:



      Suggestion 4: (My favorite)
      Disable chatting all together until players reach a certain Adventurer level.
      (This would not affect Guild / Party chats)



      -Rushed <3
      thats a good one!

      but to be honest there also could be an option... a system that basicaly do not get damaged by "gold selling" Look at Star Citizen, they handled it! Of course they had to... in a gaming world where tons of 2-7K euro ships are flying and it has few million backer (already) so it would be a way too big risk + effort to handle the blackmarket.

      if any of you do not know whats their way to do so:
      - they constantly offering new ways of ship insurance that mostly overwrites the old sales with new benefits, also they have a ship smelting layer in their market, so you can smelt in your old ship to get SC coins to buy a new one, but transaction mostly disable the smelting process for a time interval and also you can not buy some of the new models by smelted credits.
      - So you can trade with 1-2K euro ships on the "greymarket" legaly, SOMETIMES you can even make great deals but mostly it's risky due to the lack of smelting option and due to the new official site offers (as insurance for example)

      I know it's a way too far example due to Albion.. but I'm sure that there could be a way... a way where the company would not lose great amount of potentional income, but the opportunity of rl money income would lure in 1000 and 1000 (if not 10 and 10K) new subscribers - so basicaly under a great system it can even generate more profit.