@NinjaKnight
I never assumed 0.1% response rate, I said -if- there is a 0.1% response rate. Furthermore you are assuming that there is a person behind every bot which again is probably not true, there are probably a handful of people controlling many hundreds of bots, that is the point of using bots.
Furthermore, the figures for wage in Wikipedia are almost definitely wrong (I have been to China several times, I go there every year to give a speech) and are probably based on the “average” wage which is always scewed by high earners. The type of people working in a job such as controlling an army of bots are unlikely to be at the top of the bell curve, they are more likely to be in the left outliers (those earning under the average wage).
As of today (after months researching the issue) I have yet to find any empirical or reliable evidence supporting these myths of chinese sweat shops with hundreds of people farming gold for MMOs or prisoners being forced to do it.
I know several high ranking staff in various chinese government departments as well as a huge number of chinese lawyers and law professors and I can honestly say that in the years I have been doing business there I have yet to hear of prisoners working in gold farming sweatshops and given my area of expertise is the impact of technology on human rights, I am pretty sure the subject would have come up…
I would love to see a documentary on the virtual goods/currency industry though, it would be fascinating.
@NinjaKnight
I never assumed 0.1% response rate, I said -if- there is a 0.1% response rate. Furthermore you are assuming that there is a person behind every bot which again is probably not true, there are probably a handful of people controlling many hundreds of bots, that is the point of using bots.
Furthermore, the figures for wage in Wikipedia are almost definitely wrong (I have been to China several times, I go there every year to give a speech) and are probably based on the “average” wage which is always scewed by high earners. The type of people working in a job such as controlling an army of bots are unlikely to be at the top of the bell curve, they are more likely to be in the left outliers (those earning under the average wage).
As of today (after months researching the issue) I have yet to find any empirical or reliable evidence supporting these myths of chinese sweat shops with hundreds of people farming gold for MMOs or prisoners being forced to do it.
I know several high ranking staff in various chinese government departments as well as a huge number of chinese lawyers and law professors and I can honestly say that in the years I have been doing business there I have yet to hear of prisoners working in gold farming sweatshops and given my area of expertise is the impact of technology on human rights, I am pretty sure the subject would have come up…
I would love to see a documentary on the virtual goods/currency industry though, it would be fascinating.
I agree with you to say most gold bot farmers are Chinese is just racist. It is highly unlikely that in-game gold farming sweatshops exist in the real world but only in the mind of the gamers.
I say this for 2 reasons:
1) it is simply uneconomical to do so. With the PC gears, internet connections and the cost of the game. How much gold do you have to sell to gain a return? With that level of investment won’t you get a lot more return with legitimate activities using the internet?
2) It is more likely gold selling is link to organised crime as a mean to steal your identity and financial information. I can’t see how anyone could make a living selling in-game gold give the time and resources need to generate them. On the other hand, the credit information of the buyers are worth a lot more.
@ Paladine
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.
You as an “attorney” are arguing for the innocence of these Goldsellers. Either you are turning a blind eye or are incredibly naive. Do you really think the Chinese Gov would allow negative information about Goldselling sweatshops, prisoners etc. to get to the ears of a foreign visitor who may leak it back to the US?
A ton of accounts were hacked, most are hopefully shut down or returned by now. Maybe the early accumulated stolen Gold has now been moved through a chain of legit accounts. While the ones that haven’t been caught are still botting away. But the Gold was still originally stolen and laundered
IF I were running one of these scams that is probably what I would do.
@ Paladine
I guess we will have to agree to disagree.You as an “attorney” are arguing for the innocence of these Goldsellers. Either you are turning a blind eye or are incredibly naive. Do you really think the Chinese Gov would allow negative information about Goldselling sweatshops, prisoners etc. to get to the ears of a foreign visitor who may leak it back to the US?
A ton of accounts were hacked, most are hopefully shut down or returned by now. Maybe the early accumulated stolen Gold has now been moved through a chain of legit accounts. While the ones that haven’t been caught are still botting away. But the Gold was still originally stolen and laundered
IF I were running one of these scams that is probably what I would do.
Firstly I am not an attorney, secondly I am not from the US and furthermore, my work in China is specifically looking at issues of human rights and technology on behalf of the EU Commission in a relationship with the Chinese Government which has been formed over a 17 year period. So my knowledge of the Chinese penal system and human rights in China is based on fact and personal experience (not something you read on Wikipedia).
When I am in China I am there as a guest of Chinese Government, speaking directly to Ministers of the Chinese Government about many very sensitive issues in a very frank and open dialog.
Please do not assume that the world is based around the US and that everyone is as hated as the US Government.
Frankly your comments are incredibly racist and unfounded – you have zero evidence to support anything you are saying yet you think it is ok to say it anyway…
I agree with you to say most gold bot farmers are Chinese is just racist. It is highly unlikely that in-game gold farming sweatshops exist in the real world but only in the mind of the gamers.
Please don’t post foolish comments without more research. Not only is there evidence these sweatshop exist in China, there are actually video documentaries on it. Do a google search.
It isn’t racist, it is a fact. People in China are very poor on average. A few small gold sales per month per person would be more than they can make doing lots of other things. The incentive to steal accounts and sell gold is huge. They are fighting to buy food to eat while Americans waste money on games.
@Paladine
Even more reason for them to hide true facts from you. You are more naive than I thought.
Hi,
Please, keep the thread civil, friendly and constructive and avoid engaging in personal wars, as we do not like this kind of behaviour in our forums.
Thanks for your understanding.
The best way to address the issue of RMT in this game is to have the price of gems determined by the market.
That said, gold farming operations/sweatshops do exist, and hacking accounts, while it is a source of money for many RMT sites, is not the only source, nor is it the source for distributors that place a high value on customer security.
^^^ or customer trust/repeat custom.
Long time ago i did report something like this in another game * by phone *.
I got a clear answer from them. " We can’t do anything to What people do outside the game "or u can say What people do outside the game has nothing to do with the game company .
i really dont care this topic. there is no gears u can get more than exotic and legend weap so what is big deal ?
and some people actually sell it for living. if u r mature enough u should understand. in the end is just a game ….. a game dont get too drama with it just a game ….
Dhuum needs to come back. Also, ANet needs to send employees out looking for the places where bots farm. If the average player can see groups of bots in places, then ANet should have a better understanding of where the best places are to farm gold. Heck, I would create spots in game that would seem more attractive to bots so they can herd them into one spot and send their employees out to those spots.
The idea that Chinese ministers have open and frank discussions about human rights and technology with foreigners is laughable to myself and others who fled from China, and moreso to the hundreds of thousands who continue to fight against the censorship and oppression in the totalitarian system of the Mainland, where an academic suggesting that profits may increase if farmers could own their own land is dissappeared for sedition.
But I digress…
@Dark
You’re analogy is talking about finite manufactured goods sold by a legit vendor/producer vs. people stealing those goods and selling them…
Eh, then pirated software then. Both the legit vendor and the illegitimate vendor have roughly the same production costs in burning DVDs and printing jewel cases. The illegitimate vendor is acquiring the goods through illegitimate means, and distribution is also illegal. Botting and selling of gold are two separate offenses against the ToS. A better analogy?
Yes they do. They also aren’t catching all of them. I know because I know a lot of people who have bought gold and they are still around despite the warning on the launcher. In fact, I would say they haven’t even caught most of them.
How is this a problem? They don’t catch everyone who breaks the laws in meatspace either. The potential of being caught and punished is a deterrent in and of itself.
Remove the ability to trade in-game currency via mail, most of the problem solved.
There was no in game mail in GW1, but selling was rampant in that game also. How do you think they distributed the gold then? All they had to do is send them a message to meet in a zone and trade manual. You don’t stop a thing by doing that.
If I’m not mistaken you can’t trade manually in game.
It is still of my opinion that gold should just not be traded. Either that or a 5 gold gift limit on everyone each month. It’s cool that we can give each other gold but what’s the point? If someone needs gear or items, just buy it and send it to them.
I think given the choice to either trade gold or stop gold spammers, I’d pick the latter.
New accounts are already limited as to how much gold they can email. Blocking the transfer of gold is not an option – many people play with their friends/spouses/partners and want to be able to send gold without being forced to be in a guild. The “Your message has been stopped due to excessive messaging” or whatever the hell it is message is already very annoying. I was trying to email a bunch of stuff to my fiancée last night and it took over 30 minutes – don’t punish legitimate players for the actions of bots/gold sellers (which is what every solution ANet have put into place so far -has- done).
ANet need to
a: make their own conversion rate more competitive
b: increase loot in dungeons and off high level mobs (seriously have you seen the crap that falls from champions, veterans, dungeons?)
c: remove DR it only punishes legitimate players.Also I do wish everyone would stop using the word “Illegal” as someone who works in law I find it incredibly annoying. Buying gold is not illegal, selling gold is not illegal, breaching the ToS is not illegal. At worst all of the above are breach of contract but not even breach of tort since the maximum penalty is banning of account (and even that is dangerous from ANet’s perspective and is challengeable in court for any Pay to Play game (ask Blizzard who lost a similar case)).
You might not like Gold Sellers/Buyers (I am not particularly fond of them myself) but please do stop accusing them of criminal activity (which is what illegal means – breach of civil tort is unlawful – buying/selling gold is neither).
The terms of agreement ARE a binding document that is to be agreed to before you may play the game. Any conduct including selling or buying gold through third party sites are in violation of your contractual agreement. How is violating a contract not illegal? If your statement was true no one who downloaded songs without paying for them should have been prosecuted. The bottom line – ANET ultimately controls ALL content of this game and at their discretion may retract any or all permissions to an account in violation of the terms of agreement. I am reasonably sure the legal department of ANET has a lot of experience with these contracts.
(edited by VendettaDFA.9368)
What I find particularly interesting from a legal standpoint is the state of play with regards to anti-trust. From a legal perspective it is more likely that ANet/Blizzard et al are in breach of anti-trust laws by banning gold sellers than the gold sellers are in breach of any laws. I suspect it is only a matter of time before a group of these gold selling companies band together their resources and file a lawsuit against one of the big MMO companies on anti-trust grounds.
And speaking as someone who knows the FTC and the EU Commission very well indeed, I suspect that any such challenge would stand a very good chance of succeeding.
Realistically? No. I’m not sure about ANet, but Blizzard can definitely afford
legal immunitythe best lawyers.Besides, the boilerplate EULA for practically every online game is that the publisher/developer reserves the right to terminate your account for any reason*. While I’ve heard it gets trickier in the EU, at least here in the US, that’s good enough for just about any judge.
* And I see no problem with that. Do we really need a substantial burden of proof for banning bots?You are making the mistake that many make in that you are assuming a EULA stands up in law and it doesn’t always. Blizzard lost 1 case and have settled numerous others and that is just for banned accounts.
When you start to look at it from anti-trust perspective it gets even more interesting as I posted above.
No company by law has the right to prevent other entities from doing business by abusing their market position (or give themselves an unfair market advantage). The fact that ANet sell gems for real world currency and allow players to convert those gems into gold is a direct real to virtual exchange – they profit from this, it is a legal business. By banning other entities that try to do the same, they are giving themselves an unfair market advantage and preventing other companies from doing business – it is the very definition of anti-trust.
As I said I have worked directly with the FTC and EU Commission and know them very well – I also know one of the lawyers who worked on the Microsoft vs DoJ anti-trust case so I will have a chat with him about this, I am sure he will find it interesting.
I am just interested as someone who works in law and plays this game and as I said, I think it is only a matter of time before the gold buying companies pool their resources and file suit.
Personally I dont see that happening , because just as easily as record companies banded together and shut down site after site of illegal music downloading, the gaming companies could pool their respective resources and pressure ISP’s into shutting down gold selling sites. Whose money is more valuable to the ISP , the legal game makers or the illegal gold sellers
(edited by VendettaDFA.9368)
Well it’s good to see actual discussion on this issue going on. Honestly though I don’t think buyers are the cause at all. That’s like saying junkies are the cause for the drug trade.
The solution is exactly the same as how the United States puts enemies in a choke hold. Freeze their assets, and then enact embargos. In other words, take all of their money and prevent them from getting more.
Identify their bank and trade accounts and eliminate them in a ban wave. This is where the ban wave tactic is most effective as it completely depletes their stocks leaving them with nothing to sell. There is no defense. It’s pure loss. Do it often enough and they simply can’t recuperate. No company could come back from having their stores burned to the ground every 2 weeks.
Then it all comes down to how they generate assets, the source of it all as it were, the bots and farmers. Ban waves are not effective at all here. The period between waves just allows them to generate enough gold to turn a profit regardless of the loss of accounts. They must be prevented from farming anything by immediate and persistent banning before any assets can be generated.
This is how you defeat the RMT industry, it’s what they fear MMOs doing. It’s not rocket science or some fancy new untested strategy. The basics of starving the enemy of their resources are as old as human history. The only real question is, do you want to destroy them as if they’re your and your player’s enemies, or are you just trying to manage them as a business looks to manage their sources of revenue.
Well it’s good to see actual discussion on this issue going on. Honestly though I don’t think buyers are the cause at all. That’s like saying junkies are the cause for the drug trade.
The solution is exactly the same as how the United States puts enemies in a choke hold. Freeze their assets, and then enact embargos. In other words, take all of their money and prevent them from getting more.
Identify their bank and trade accounts and eliminate them in a ban wave. This is where the ban wave tactic is most effective as it completely depletes their stocks leaving them with nothing to sell. There is no defense. It’s pure loss. Do it often enough and they simply can’t recuperate. No company could come back from having their stores burned to the ground every 2 weeks.
Then it all comes down to how they generate assets, the source of it all as it were, the bots and farmers. Ban waves are not effective at all here. The period between waves just allows them to generate enough gold to turn a profit regardless of the loss of accounts. They must be prevented from farming anything by immediate and persistent banning before any assets can be generated.
This is how you defeat the RMT industry, it’s what they fear MMOs doing. It’s not rocket science or some fancy new untested strategy. The basics of starving the enemy of their resources are as old as human history. The only real question is, do you want to destroy them as if they’re your and your player’s enemies, or are you just trying to manage them as a business looks to manage their sources of revenue.
I do understand where you are coming from but viewed from another angle I will ask you this. If there was no desire for drugs would there be a drug trade. Speculation of course but one difference in the parallel is the lack of a third party in that scenario.
When it comes to banning gold buyers at no time do I advocate not banning the sellers, and if there was an effective way to do that … freezing assets, embargos etc… I would agree with you. However the gold sellers are not bound by those rules that some countries may be bound byand they don’t operate that way. They hack accounts … and use bots and the resources stolen from those hacked accounts to remain in business. When banned they just do it again. There is no deterrent unlike misbehavior in the real world.
Therefore in order to move toward eliminating the illegal supply problem you have to remove their incentive. That would be the gold buyer willing to do business with them because he as yet has no incentive not to. It would be nice if honesty and fair play was enough but for some it is not.
To me the reason DR, chat suppression, disabled loot messages and other things that inhibit the way the game should be played and enjoyed by all is due just as much if not more to the existance of a set of players willing to ignore the terms of agreement and buy from gold-sellers.This only perpetuates the current chat spam and botting issues that fill these forums. My question back to you …… if a player is buying from goldsellers and knowingly contributing to all the previously described issues, is he truly someone you want to allow in the game?
(edited by VendettaDFA.9368)
Mmm, I just disagree that the buyers are the cause. There will always be a demand for addictive drugs no matter how harsh the penalty because dealers will and do actively try to turn new addicts to create customers. Gold sellers prey on the common need to get the most for the least work. They actively entice players with cheap gold and they get hooked on faster/easier progression than can be obtained legitimately.
I didn’t say that buyers shouldn’t be punished, in fact at this stage that’s pretty much expected without even needing to mention it. NCsoft in Aion regularly dropped bans on buyers, and if they gave them their accounts back it was usually minus all of their kinah and even their gear if the gear was purchased after they participated in RMT. In Guild Wars players were also banned for RMT.
But in the end punishing the junkies is just a minor deterrent. The solution is removing the source.
What would you add to the shop that is “worth spending gems for”?
I would be personally interested in at least 7 of the above.
As it exists, the gem store is basically a way for Arena Net to sell gold to players (sorry but I just don’t believe that the number of players buying gems with gold is anywhere near the number of players buying gems with money to trade for gold – Arena Net is effectively creating gold for players who paid for gems, and that’s why the exchange system is a black box, with no indication of the number of buyers or sellers, and no way for players to set their own prices).
Make the gem-gold exchange transparent, with visible buy and sell orders (like Eve does), let players set their own prices (like Eve does) and the vast majority of botters and gold spammers will go away (like they did in Eve).
The problem is, Arena Net seems to have very little imagination (or very little time) when it comes to creating items for the gem store, so selling gold is effectively the way they make money, and they prefer to keep the gold-gem exchange rate artificially high (making gems an appealing way for players to get gold), rather than let the market decide (which would bring the gold value of gems down considerably).
This increases their short-term profits but it also increases the profits of all the gold sellers, so they’re not going away. The number of bots will continue to increase and their behaviour will become more sophisticated. And if Arena Net manages to get really good at detecting bots, the gold farmers will simply hire humans from developing countries (i.e., cheap labour) to farm gold instead.
I doubt Arena Net will change their policy regarding gem trading or exchange rate transparency, so get used to the farmers, they’re here to stay.
(edited by Account.9832)
Also this, which should be obvious:
Ban waves are not effective at all here. The period between waves just allows them to generate enough gold to turn a profit regardless of the loss of accounts. They must be prevented from farming anything by immediate and persistent banning before any assets can be generated.
(I tried to add it to my post above but some forum bug is making the “edit” buttons invisible now, not just the “quote” buttons).
But apparently Arena Net can’t even afford (or doesn’t care enough about the game to) have one GM per server, following city chat and checking if any major events are stuck (to reset them manually when necessary), so they obviously have no one to check for “bot-like behaviour” and do quick bans.
(edited by Account.9832)
What i don’t hear is one of the reasons people buy gold. That is the greed of the player base when they post items on the TP at over 300%. This is what happened in wow. So you guys can sound self righteous all you want, when prices for items start reaching insane price’s people will turn to gold sellers just to be able to play the game. No one ever mentions the greed from players trying to make money trading on the TP. But they are always talking about banning gold buyers. When the greed of players goes up, if arenanet wants to stop the gold buying then they will have to give more gold for gems.
No company by law has the right to prevent other entities from doing business by abusing their market position (or give themselves an unfair market advantage). The fact that ANet sell gems for real world currency and allow players to convert those gems into gold is a direct real to virtual exchange – they profit from this, it is a legal business. By banning other entities that try to do the same, they are giving themselves an unfair market advantage and preventing other companies from doing business – it is the very definition of anti-trust.
As I said I have worked directly with the FTC and EU Commission and know them very well – I also know one of the lawyers who worked on the Microsoft vs DoJ anti-trust case so I will have a chat with him about this, I am sure he will find it interesting.
I am just interested as someone who works in law and plays this game and as I said, I think it is only a matter of time before the gold buying companies pool their resources and file suit.
Hmm. By your logic, I should be able to stand outside casinos and sell people chips to use at their gaming tables. After all, what right does the casino have to control the only source of exchange into and out of the currency people use in the casino? Shouldn’t the free market allow everyone to compete to sell that currency?
This does not, of course, make sense.
Casinos, like video games, use virtual currencies that are only valuable – only meaningful – within the context of the closed systems run by these groups. So casino chips have no value outside the specific casino, and GW2 gems have no value outside GW2. Since these currencies are’t publikittenraded in any sense, there’s no need for the owners (the casinos and game devs) to worry about anti-trust issues.
Put another way, I can’t mint my own arcade tokens for an arcade like Dave & Buster’s and sell them outside the door. I might have the minting apparatus and all the metal I need, but it’s still not going to work. D&B would likely bring suit against me, and anyhow they have no obligation to accept my forged tokens. And yet the same anti-trust issues should apply there, that you’re suggesting would apply in GW2.
What i don’t hear is one of the reasons people buy gold. That is the greed of the player base when they post items on the TP at over 300%. This is what happened in wow. So you guys can sound self righteous all you want, when prices for items start reaching insane price’s people will turn to gold sellers just to be able to play the game. No one ever mentions the greed from players trying to make money trading on the TP. But they are always talking about banning gold buyers. When the greed of players goes up, if arenanet wants to stop the gold buying then they will have to give more gold for gems.
The downward spiral you open up is that people,being greedy just as you postulate, will not allow more gold for gems to work. They will simply make the items they sell in TP cost more gold to buy. Its simple economics. If 100 gems worth 40 gold by todays approximate standard were suddenly worth 80 gold. Then a rare item worth 20 gold on the TP today would rapidly be sold at no less than 40 gold tomorrow. It simply will not work.
How do you propose they keep tabs on who’s buying gold, considering the actual transactions are done outside the game, where they have no say? Unless the person that sold to you, or a friend you are stupid enough to tell is a fib and rats you out, no one’s ever going to know about it to report it.
It’s all good and well to say “Hey, guys, stop buying gold, you’re contributing to the problem.”, but let’s not kid ourselves…do you think they care? Nothing you can do about other people’s personal choices, even if they aren’t the brightest.
By your logic, I should be able to stand outside casinos and sell people chips to use at their gaming tables.
If you had earned / bought those chips inside the casino, it would probably be legal to do so in several places (although it might have been illegal to walk out of the casino with them).
Gold sellers aren’t “printing money”. They cannot create any of the game’s currencies. Unlike Arena Net.
mulch.2586It really doesn’t have to be a moral argument, and not everyone shares those particular beliefs.
I had a grad student from China who was avid gamer, and his belief in hacks/bots/cheats was very similar to how I view a nice mouse or fast computer. It’s not “cheating” to some — it’s just how you play the game.
That is like saying “I know this guy, when he plays chess he doesn’t move the pieces, he just picks the board up and batters his opponent into submission with it.”
I think you will find that making your own rules up to games is wrong by most people’s view of things, because once people start doing it, the game becomes unplayable. This is true of all games I can think of, including MMOs. However, because noone is smacking anyone with a chess board, it is harder to see the damage being done.
Play outside game mechanics = destroy game mechanics.
Several people have pointed this out, but it bears repeating. There’s a causal chain here.
1) ANet sells the Digital Deluxe Upgrade (DDU) for GW2 via the online store, for gems. That means that gems have a fixed price in real-world currency.
2) Since ANet has an exchange between gems and gold, and gems are tied to real-world currency, this means that gold is too. Therefore ANet can’t just sell gold for less than they currently do, without devaluing their own product, as per #1 above.
3) The amount of income in game needs to be tightly controlled, because of #2 above. Remember, income in gold is convertible to income in gems, which is convertible to income in real world currencies. Letting us earn or keep more gold in game isn’t a good idea, again as per #1 above.
4) Since money is so tight, players will be tempted to buy gold from goldsellers. That temptation is unavoidable here, due to that kittykitkittykitteny DDU from #1 above. ANet can’t lower their prices to undercut the gold sellers.
OK. So having the DDU available for gems is a problem. My first thought would be to remove that option, and replace it with something else, like Karma. I know, I know, we have other things to spend Karma on. The point though is, by removing the ability to purchase the DDU with gems, we remove any need ANet has to keep the price of gold where it is now. That, in turn, would free them up to lower the price of gold to the point where gold sellers wouldn’t make much profit. Believe me when I say these gold sellers are businesses, and they do what makes them money. Remove the profit, and the gold sellers will go elsewhere.
By your logic, I should be able to stand outside casinos and sell people chips to use at their gaming tables.
If you had earned / bought those chips inside the casino, it would probably be legal to do so in several places (although it might have been illegal to walk out of the casino with them).
Gold sellers aren’t “printing money”. They cannot create any of the game’s currencies. Unlike Arena Net.
Fair point. I do not however believe that I have any legal right to engage in competition with the casino to sell their chips to their clientele. That’s directly comparable to a gold seller having some sort of inalienable right to compete with the game’s devs to sell gold for cash. The currency is created by the owners of the system, and the currency is only applicable within the system.
Then there’s the broader issue of whether antitrust legislation applies in virtual environments, and if so, what the prevailing laws would be.
How do you propose they keep tabs on who’s buying gold, considering the actual transactions are done outside the game, where they have no say? Unless the person that sold to you, or a friend you are stupid enough to tell is a fib and rats you out, no one’s ever going to know about it to report it.
It’s all good and well to say “Hey, guys, stop buying gold, you’re contributing to the problem.”, but let’s not kid ourselves…do you think they care? Nothing you can do about other people’s personal choices, even if they aren’t the brightest.
Regardless of the real money transaction … the gold transfer will occur within the game. If you had checked throught the thread you would have seen the logic on this point. Once a gold-sellers is reported and verified, his transaction trail can be investigated and both ends of those transactions can be dealt with accordingly.
@Foolsage – and you are wrong, it is perfectly legal to sell chips you win/buy from a casino.
@Foolsage – and you are wrong, it is perfectly legal to sell chips you win/buy from a casino.
In the casino? In the same context in which those chips are produced and used? We’re not talking about doing it on eBay or in my home, but rather in the very heart of the casino’s power.
You’re saying that if I tried to do this, the casino wouldn’t throw me out, or attempt to file suit against me?
Somehow I truly doubt it.
Also, you might want to consider the difference between “you are wrong” – which is a value judgment about another individual – and “your argument is wrong” – which is a claim about the logical validity of, or truthful premises of an argument. Just a friendly word of advice; your approach is unnecessarily antagonistic as well as being semantically incorrect.
I guess I’ll go buy all the doughnuts from the local bakery and try selling them in front of the bakery today. Hey, it’s anti-trust, they can’t do waltz about me. It’s perfectly legal, conscionable, and think of the people who need the doughnuts!
It’s a perfecto plan.
Paladine.6082@Foolsage – and you are wrong, it is perfectly legal to sell chips you win/buy from a casino.
Yes, but that’s because the chips do not affect the game through which you won them. A casino’s economy is not a trade, it is based entirely on mathematic formulae off odds calculation that scale perfectly no matter how many chips you introduce into the system.
In a few casino games you can occasionally “buy” a victory against other players, but most actual casinos are set up to prevent this (with stake limits, etc).
This compares to any game where trading is part of the game mechanic. Flooding the system with either currency or a game-significant item essentially breaks the game.
You wouldn’t be allowed to buy currency in a game of Monopoly and you wouldn’t be able to buy extra pieces in a game of Checkers.
The impact of gold farming is an indirect one and in the complexities of the trading system it is not so easy to get your head around the bottom line impact such things have on the game. But the impact is there nonetheless.
If you are indeed someone entrusted with negotiating at a governmental level, whether it be for human rights or something else, you really should have a decent grasp of how economies work. Economies are a fundamental underpinning of society and hence linked inextricably with human rights.
Ironically nobody in this thread has realized just how easy it is for Anet to track gold sellers. If someone buys 500 gold (I’ve seen it advertised about a hundred times now) in one shot, that means an account needs an excess of 500 gold, farmed from several bot accounts, in order to deliver the product. Lets look at the pattern:
Multiple bots/hacked accounts are pushing small quantities of gold to hold or bank accounts. These accounts will either hold gold for distribution to customers or to pool into main accounts before distribution.
This distribution, unlike the bot transfer, will have a great variety of targets. Congratulations, we just labelled the bots, the mules, and the customers. This can be discovered in minutes using simple queries to the database. Heck, they could set up a weathermap to watch farmed gold move around the economy. It’s insanely simple and works on the principle that normal players won’t be moving hundreds of gold per day.
Now that you’ve narrowed it down, you have a reasonable number of accounts that GM’s or other staff can investigate for banning. Better still, you’re destroying large caches of gold and making the gold selling operation lose money. You also have a very accurate hit on all the gold buyers, and you can remove their gold and hit them with a 72 hour ban.
Oh, and it’s simple math. In order for GW2 to survive, people have to buy gems. If people are buying gold from China instead of Anet, GW2 is going to crash and burn very, very quickly. So all that gold you people are buying is going to put them out of business and make it worth less than the 1’s and 0’s it already is..
ANET needs to do a bit mroe out of game too. The funny thing is I saw an ad on YOUTUBE of all places offering to sell gold. It was one of their side bar ads. I know youtube is independant of that kind of thing, but is it really out of ANETs ability to discuss with youtube and other large internet hubs to turn down business from gold farming sites?
Ironically nobody in this thread has realized just how easy it is for Anet to track gold sellers. If someone buys 500 gold (I’ve seen it advertised about a hundred times now) in one shot, that means an account needs an excess of 500 gold, farmed from several bot accounts, in order to deliver the product. Lets look at the pattern:
Multiple bots/hacked accounts are pushing small quantities of gold to hold or bank accounts. These accounts will either hold gold for distribution to customers or to pool into main accounts before distribution.
This distribution, unlike the bot transfer, will have a great variety of targets. Congratulations, we just labelled the bots, the mules, and the customers. This can be discovered in minutes using simple queries to the database. Heck, they could set up a weathermap to watch farmed gold move around the economy. It’s insanely simple and works on the principle that normal players won’t be moving hundreds of gold per day.
Now that you’ve narrowed it down, you have a reasonable number of accounts that GM’s or other staff can investigate for banning. Better still, you’re destroying large caches of gold and making the gold selling operation lose money. You also have a very accurate hit on all the gold buyers, and you can remove their gold and hit them with a 72 hour ban.
Oh, and it’s simple math. In order for GW2 to survive, people have to buy gems. If people are buying gold from China instead of Anet, GW2 is going to crash and burn very, very quickly. So all that gold you people are buying is going to put them out of business and make it worth less than the 1’s and 0’s it already is..
Indeed they can track it if they are fast enough and they know who the bots are.
Apparently they weren’t prepared for this which is why bots stay up for days even after players report them.
It becomes more difficult to track when the botters are using hacked acounts and sophisticated methods to constantly move small amounts around thousands of accounts.
Then there is a foolproof way to cut the trail in the end assuming they haven’t already sold the Gold through a hacked account.
Find a thinly traded item on TP. Clean it out by buying and filling all the listed orders. Relist the items from a Genuinely purchased account at a slightly inflated price not too high to elicit suspicion. Buy it with the hacked account using the botted Gold. This efffectively cuts the trail dead. A sophisticated Gold selling house could do this pretty fast with systems or cheap labor.
Now we have the Gold in the genuinely purchased account which can freely trade with little ability for Anet to prove it is not legit. The only cost is the 15% transaction fee. So obviously this is the last resort. When there is excess gold not yet sold through hacked accounts.
Ironically nobody in this thread has realized just how easy it is for Anet to track gold sellers. If someone buys 500 gold (I’ve seen it advertised about a hundred times now) in one shot, that means an account needs an excess of 500 gold, farmed from several bot accounts, in order to deliver the product. Lets look at the pattern:
Multiple bots/hacked accounts are pushing small quantities of gold to hold or bank accounts. These accounts will either hold gold for distribution to customers or to pool into main accounts before distribution.
This distribution, unlike the bot transfer, will have a great variety of targets. Congratulations, we just labelled the bots, the mules, and the customers. This can be discovered in minutes using simple queries to the database. Heck, they could set up a weathermap to watch farmed gold move around the economy. It’s insanely simple and works on the principle that normal players won’t be moving hundreds of gold per day.
Now that you’ve narrowed it down, you have a reasonable number of accounts that GM’s or other staff can investigate for banning. Better still, you’re destroying large caches of gold and making the gold selling operation lose money. You also have a very accurate hit on all the gold buyers, and you can remove their gold and hit them with a 72 hour ban.
Oh, and it’s simple math. In order for GW2 to survive, people have to buy gems. If people are buying gold from China instead of Anet, GW2 is going to crash and burn very, very quickly. So all that gold you people are buying is going to put them out of business and make it worth less than the 1’s and 0’s it already is..
Indeed they can track it if they are fast enough and they know who the bots are.
Apparently they weren’t prepared for this which is why bots stay up for days even after players report them.
It becomes more difficult to track when the botters are using hacked acounts and sophisticated methods to constantly move small amounts around thousands of accounts.
Then there is a foolproof way to cut the trail in the end assuming they haven’t already sold the Gold through a hacked account.
Find a thinly traded item on TP. Clean it out by buying and filling all the listed orders. Relist the items from a Genuinely purchased account at a slightly inflated price not too high to elicit suspicion. Buy it with the hacked account using the botted Gold. This efffectively cuts the trail dead. A sophisticated Gold selling house could do this pretty fast with systems or cheap labor.
Now we have the Gold in the genuinely purchased account which can freely trade with little ability for Anet to prove it is not legit. The only cost is the 15% transaction fee. So obviously this is the last resort. When there is excess gold not yet sold through hacked accounts.
But Anet already knows hacked accounts and bots by the reports (and because it’s so laughably obvious) that they could simply track who the bots are transferring money to. Parsing this data will reveal where the gold is flowing. I bet they could find the primary gold holders very easily. That’s not even counting the huge transactions of hundreds of gold. Once the tracking system is in place, it’s extremely easy to tell if that 300 gold was farmed legit and just being gifted to another player, or if the sender is tied to a bot net.
It would be nearly impossible to ban all the low level bots this way. With the volume of currency sent via mail, you could grab the bots pretty easily. Because all banks are central to an account, there is no reason to mail gold or items to yourself. This greatly reduces the amount of gold travelling through the mail, and therefore the number of times someone is likely to mail gold. It should be pretty easy to pick up regular gold shipments. If the farmers slow down the frequency of shipments, then they have to ship larger quantities at once, which would still flag the account.
The idea is to hammer the large gold transfers (20+ gold). It’s kind of like busting drug dealers – go after the source. Except in this case, Anet can see where all the drugs are at a glance. They know exactly how much gold any person has, where they got it, where they spent it, and what’s in the mail. Why they haven’t implemented an automated system that detects large gold transfers is beyond me. It’s not like gold selling is new. I figured they would have put a system in place, knowing it would become a problem.
Instead it looks like they had no clue this practice existed and left the doors wide open.
(edited by Moderator)
Indeed they can track it if they are fast enough and they know who the bots are.
Apparently they weren’t prepared for this which is why bots stay up for days even after players report them.
It becomes more difficult to track when the botters are using hacked acounts and sophisticated methods to constantly move small amounts around thousands of accounts.
Then there is a foolproof way to cut the trail in the end assuming they haven’t already sold the Gold through a hacked account.
Find a thinly traded item on TP. Clean it out by buying and filling all the listed orders. Relist the items from a Genuinely purchased account at a slightly inflated price not too high to elicit suspicion. Buy it with the hacked account using the botted Gold. This efffectively cuts the trail dead. A sophisticated Gold selling house could do this pretty fast with systems or cheap labor.
Now we have the Gold in the genuinely purchased account which can freely trade with little ability for Anet to prove it is not legit. The only cost is the 15% transaction fee. So obviously this is the last resort. When there is excess gold not yet sold through hacked accounts.
But Anet already knows hacked accounts and bots by the reports (and because it’s so laughably obvious) that they could simply track who the bots are transferring money to. Parsing this data will reveal where the gold is flowing. I bet they could find the primary gold holders very easily. That’s not even counting the huge transactions of hundreds of gold. Once the tracking system is in place, it’s extremely easy to tell if that 300 gold was farmed legit and just being gifted to another player, or if the sender is tied to a bot net.
It would be nearly impossible to ban all the low level bots this way.With the volume of currency sent via mail, you could grab the bots pretty easily. Because all banks are central to an account, there is no reason to mail gold or items to yourself. This greatly reduces the amount of gold travelling through the mail, and therefore the number of times someone is likely to mail gold. It should be pretty easy to pick up regular gold shipments. If the farmers slow down the frequency of shipments, then they have to ship larger quantities at once, which would still flag the account.The idea is to hammer the large gold transfers (20+ gold). It’s kind of like busting drug dealers – go after the source. Except in this case, Anet can see where all the drugs are at a glance. They know exactly how much gold any person has, where they got it, where they spent it, and what’s in the mail. Why they haven’t implemented an automated system that detects large gold transfers is beyond me. It’s not like gold selling is new. I figured they would have put a system in place, knowing it would become a problem.
Instead it looks like they had no clue this practice existed and left the doors wide open.
Your idea is theoretically good if Anet had a system in place before hand. The situation is actually reversed it would seem. Goldsellers had multiple systems in place ready to deploy as soon as GW2 launched.
You assume that all 2M+players play regularly. It is possible that many haven’t bothered to change their login becuase they weren’t hit by the first wave of hacks. With that many accounts out there even a 0.5% number of hacked accounts is 10,000 accounts.
Also ATM 10-20G is a small amount to transfer. A full exotic lvl 80 set could easily cost much more than 20G. Genuine players can make 1G+ per hr grinding and more in the TP.
Who is to say it isn’t a friend sending 20G if both accounts are legit? I personally send stuff to my daughter all the time. So do i suddenly get banned if I decide to send 20G?
If the sending account is hacked, well the buyer can be permabanned but the Gold seller is still in biz.
The state of the system is bad, they really need to act faster, maybe buyout multiple Goldselling companies and turn them into agents to find and combat the others.
ANET had a good idea to deal with the problem but they did it wrong. The exchange rate from MONEY to GOLD on the AH is way to high. I mean 1 to 1 would be bad but it is much much higher then that.
So if ANET would lower that conversion rate then the problem would largely be solved. I would go as far as saying most that buy gold would much rather buy it from ANET to help support the game. But if ANET’s prices are so high that it feels like they are getting ripped off then why buy from ANET.
The only real way to get rid of these gold sellers is to replace them. There have been gold sellers from the get go of MMO’s and until there isn’t money to be made they will still be around.
Along with all this RMT-banning, can we also get some way to link GW2 accounts so I don’t get tagged when I (actually have money to) send money from one account to the other? I do have two accounts and wouldn’t like to be cut off for 3 days just because I tried to fund the Chef/Jeweler or Hunstman/Leatherworker on my “girls” account with the “boys” account.
Lots of text in this thread. Yuuup.
Actually ANet´s “Gold 4 Gems” is a good solution already. Properly implemented, that is.
It´s basically copied over from EVE Online´s "Isk 4 PLEX ( gametime ) " and it has hugely impacted gold seller profit margins over there.
Well, except it’s not really a copy of EVE’s PLEX system.
In EVE, players buy and sell PLEXes for in-game currency. Therefore the price is a price which sellers are willing to accept for their $15 PLEX, and which buyers are willing to pay for a month of game-time.
In GW2, the gem-gold exchange rate is some nonsense fictitious number which ArenaNet have plucked out of thin air and does not reflect supply and demand at all. That’s why everyone who has bought gems for gold has been delighted at the price, and everyone who has bought gems for cash and sold them for gold has been disappointed at how little they got. That’s why legit gold-buying via gems costs something like five times as much as black market gold-buying.
The only way the currency exchange can have any effect whatsoever on the black market goldsellers is if players are allowed to buy and sell gems to each other for gold. Just put gems on the Trading Post as another commodity.
ANET needs to do a bit mroe out of game too. The funny thing is I saw an ad on YOUTUBE of all places offering to sell gold. It was one of their side bar ads. I know youtube is independant of that kind of thing, but is it really out of ANETs ability to discuss with youtube and other large internet hubs to turn down business from gold farming sites?
And Google would tell them exactly what to do with their request because Gold Sellers are doing nothing illegal ergo ANet have no right to request their ads be removed.
Fair point. I do not however believe that I have any legal right to engage in competition with the casino to sell their chips to their clientele.
How would you be “in competition” ? If you had the chips, then surely you had bought them from the casino in the first place, no? And if you didn’t sell them to other casino clients, you’d simply cash them in, so the casino would be no better off.
Gold sellers aren’t generating gold through some external means; they’re doing it by playing the game (or using bots – but some people use bots for personal gain too, not just to sell gold).
The issue here is that Arena Net is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by controlling the printing of two currencies (gold and gems) and by controlling the exchange rate between them.
Would you trust the Bank of China’s dollar-yuan exchange rate if they were allowed to print both dollars and yuans…?
With this kind of “black box” exchange come hordes of gold sellers, because they know that all they need to do is sell gold slightly below Arena Net’s price. And with bots staying in the game for weeks, it’s trivial for them to cover the cost of new game accounts, even if they get banned. Which I guess Arena Net sees as a good thing, because it means more (real money) profits for them. As long as they keep the game profitable for gold farmers, the gold farmers will keep buying new accounts.
And as long as players accept this “black box” currency exchange, the gold farmers will continue to fill the game with their bots and the chat channels with their spam.
There were several posts during the beta weekends warning Arena Net that this would happen if they didn’t allow the players to control the exchange rate, and guess what, those posts were right.
Since Arena Net even has an “in-house economist”, I doubt they don’t understand these concepts. They just choose to keep the game profitable for gold sellers because (as long as players don’t complain and leave the game), it also increases their profits.
There’s a causal chain here.
1) ANet sells the Digital Deluxe Upgrade (DDU) for GW2 via the online store, for gems. That means that gems have a fixed price in real-world currency.
They have a fixed price regardless of that. The only way to create gems is (or should be) with real money. $10 for 800 gems.
2) Since ANet has an exchange between gems and gold, and gems are tied to real-world currency, this means that gold is too.
No, it doesn’t. Not if they let the gold-gem exchange rate fluctuate according to the market (by letting players sell gems to each other), anyway.
That will never alter the value of gems (which is still fixed at $10 for 800 gems, regardless of the gem-gold exchange rate, nor will it alter the price of the Digital Deluxe Upgrade (which costs 2000 gems, or $25).
The only way the cost of the DDU will change is if Arena Net decides to change its price or to change the real-money cost of gems. The gem-gold exchange rate never has any influence over the real-money price of the DDU.
Therefore ANet can’t just sell gold for less than they currently do, without devaluing their own product, as per #1 above.
Now you’re not just missing the point, you’re seeing it backwards. If gems are worth less gold, then it will take more gold to buy gems, and therefore more gold to buy the DDU, which means people will be more likely to just buy it with real money.
In other words, the gold value of the DDU would increase, while it’s real-money value would stay exactly the same.
You did get one thing right, though: Arena Net is effectively selling gold (while pretending not to).
Remember, income in gold is convertible to income in gems, which is convertible to income in real world currencies
Also wrong. You cannot take any real-world currency out of the game.
As long as Arena Net doesn’t create any gold at the gem store and only creates gems when people actually buy them (with real money), they can then let people trade gems directly with each other and the system works perfectly.
This is what Eve Online has been doing for years, and it’s how real economies and currency exchanges work.
That is how we thought GW2 would work, after Mike O’Brien specifically mentioned Eve’s PLEX as an example of how gems would work:
O’Brien highlights EVE’s PLEX system as a model. “As in that case, our system takes gold trading out of the hands of real-money trading (RMT) companies and puts it directly in the hands of players.”
This is what we were told by Arena Net’s president during the pre-purchase period. But it’s not what we got. Instead, we got a single “official gold seller”: Arena Net itself.
Arena Net’s “black box exchange” model lacks transparency and promotes gold farming and external trading, but, as long as players accept it, Arena Net won’t change it, because it also increases their short-term profits.
Even more so when you consider that as long as the system is profitable for gold farmers, any gold farmers they ban will buy a new account, giving Arena Net another $60.
It’s a win-win-lose system (for Arena Net, gold farmers, and players, respectively).
(edited by Account.9832)
Even so, I will farm my own gold “legally”.
Sigh……At least there will be 1 less gold buying customer for them.( gold farmer)
@ sir twist
If implemented correctly, and I believe ANET can, your transactions would never be flagged or tagged because they should only be flagging,tagging identified and verified illegal gold-sellers to find the illegal gold buyers.
I keep seeing a repeated suggestion in this thread: that ANet work to make the gem store more attractive to players…
Now, fine, I think most players would agree that the game itself would benefit from a more varied, more robustly designed gem shop, but what in the seven kittens would that do combat gold sales? It’s not exactly a secret that the “best” way to get gems is to buy gold from a gold seller (it’s currently down to about $1/gold) and buy gems with them on the exchange (it’s around 200 gems/gold) → $8 = 1600 gems (via gold seller) vs $10 = 800 gems (legit), hmm…
The gold sellers negatively affect cash sales of gems, which affects ANet’s bottom line. A better, more attractive gem shop isn’t going to change that, if anything it will make life even better for the gold sellers.
Hopefully, ANet is taking a long term strategy on this: data mine 100% of currency transactions for extending periods of time such that it’s clear who are the sellers, farmers, launderers, and buyers then ban permanently in one fell swoop and then start the process all over again. They’re never going to protect their bottom line nor “our” game without such a tactic, and with all currency transactions going through a single, united, servers wide hub, they can track and data mine it all… fingers crossed.
if you cant fight them, join them. simple as that.
Well then if thats how you feel … hopefully you wont bother posting about DR or the anti-farming codes as you have in the past. Your current complaints, from your other threads, are a direct result of this issue.
I am amazed at how many players can be oblivious to the reasons behind the majority of issues they are unhappy with in this game. DR, chat suppression, anti-farming code,bots, server lag, disabled loot,account hacks, inflated TP prices AND deflated prices in the TP are all casualties from the activities of gold-sellers. They dont play by the terms of agreement and never will. The buyers on the other hand risk losing their account and that is where the true leverage is.
Quote:
Hellmood.2097
Well, Arenanet really drives people to the gold sellers because
a) EVERYTHING costs tons of money in this game + it’s hard to earn money regularily
b) the gold sellers sell at a MUCH better rate than Arenanet
end Quote"
The problem starts with the players that want everything asap. This is a question of character and maturity.
See I am fine with things being expensive and even though I could afford to buy lots of gems or from goldsellers (I will never do that though) I won’t. I like the feeling of accomplishment, to earn something. So if it takes me a year to get great gear etc. I am fine with that and once I accomplish this it will feel great.
Many players do not want to wait that long and need everything here and now but they want to pay as little as possible hence your point b) being valid.
ANet needs to have some things in the game that either take a long time to get or will cost you money.
On a last note: I do not find it that difficult to earn money in the game. Do some clever trading, crafting, events etc. and you have enough but not to afford everything. Again this needs a change of attitude from players.
Just improve the Gem:Gold ratio. Whatever prices the gold sellers are offering, ArentNet just needs to undercut them. It’ll put them out of business in short order, and as the problem decreases, ArenaNet can restore the Gem:Gold ratio to the level they intended. If gold sellers pop up again, then rinse & repeat.
This is simple stuff.
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