Why do we not have an exalted exhange like how STO has a dilithium exchange?

It's pretty obvious that GGG isn't going to do this but I have an idea.

The only way to stop RMT seems to be enforcement of the rules, not only banning RMT bot networks/traders, but seizing those orbs/items from players along with warnings/bannings. They should know that RMT is against the rules.

But GGG doesn't have the manpower for this, so what do we do? There is a site called Block Explorer which supports Bitcoin (cryptocurrency). People have wallets with addresses such as 12TBjXumVzNGpy8k5ooFnJj5qbZkp51n6A, and you can see all of the transactions on the network, but never know who is actually behind an address (that is mine, please send BTC =).

GGG could give bounties in store points or something to people who monitor all of these transactions in some way and are able to find suspicious activity. This would still require some official manpower to look at cases and determine if it meets whatever criteria for punishment, but there could also be a middle layer like the volunteer moderators to mute troll/bad reporters and such.

So, rather than spending our time with years of threads about RMT and the problems it causes, we could take a look through transactions and get something for it. Hopefully someone would be motivated to make some sort of automated checker.

If you notice a transaction of 15 exalted for nothing, it would be suspicious, but 15 for a Lionseye would be fine. Just the real threat of losing your whole account for having bought RMT would reduce the practice. The fact that RMT networks would lose some revenue and they would need to split up transactions or whatever would possibly increase their costs to where it would be unprofitable. The whole thing sounds kind of far fetched, but maybe it would actually work.

Nice thread (except a few stupid trolls that hopefully get poisoned to death).

1. Direct pay2win is bad and GGG has made a clear stand against it.
2. The game has to be played as intended by everyone, no matter the risks of using p2w from external sources.
3. Making a different league for this type of transactions is not good since most certainly the external sites will undercut until they'll get a good share of the people returning to use them.
4. Since there are a few external sites for RTM it seems there is a certain demand for it, and more importantly a good supply, except the scammers of course.

So, economically speaking, there are two possibilities:

a) profit and try to get a good share of the demand-related profits, thus creating sort of a "market" (more or less, or something close to an oligopoly). But this implies that, due to a lower equilibrium price, more people are going to be drawn into it overall which makes the p2w even worse.

b) cut down the supply to such low levels that it's not going to be profitable anymore, after they exhausted they current stocks.

Thus, supposing b) is a better way to go about it, some steps need to be taken(or not):

I) People need to protect their accounts better so that there will be less stealing of their stuff and such. It's easy for a scammer to play with your character, trade the gear you had to some other "friend", and then proceeding to sell it on the trade channel for quite a bit, and getting a lot of value for their invested time. Unfortunately this cannot be done by GGG, and is ONLY up to us to do it.

II) The crazy farming of currency has to be stopped. Things like multiboxing and party farming (by future scammers that want to set up an RTM site) need to be changed. Simply making it illegal in your ToU is not enough - you'd still have to catch them, and fast!! Unfortunately no game has properly managed to do this since it requires a lot of manpower and time (e.g. look at WoW, they are still fighting gold scammers, and i know some people that have bought gold from chinese farmers for the last 3 years and haven't been caught... that's p2w while also paying a monthly subscription lol)

So in other words, there needs to be a tax applied to the large suppliers of currency in this game. How to do that? that's up to GGG, but it implies a change in gameplay. Lowering the drop chance or increasing difficulty IS NOT A GOOD SOLUTION. You want to affect only certain types of players, not all of them. Thus deal with the fact that there will always be a demand for RTM and p2w (and no one can change that), but what you can do is cut the supply heavily.

I would definitely take a look at the party bonuses for IIR/IIQ, party sizes, own loot (like in D3), encounter difficulty only in parties which now is too low, farming efficiency-related stuff like items with movement speed at vendors, highly concentrated packs of mobs + certain map affixes, etc.

The incentive for playing in a party should be only to have other people around you (i.e. your friends usually) and to overcome some difficult monsters using the idea that "the sum of the parts is lower than both of them working together", i.e. using auras/curses/etc provides a bigger advantage than just the X characters playing together. There should not be the benefit of better farming when playing in parties!!!

All in all, the problem can be solved in my opinion, but i do not know enough of the technicalities to conceive a real solution. That is up to GGG and i'm sure they can come up with something. And i propose a huge balance patch that will bring it all in + ignore all the whining that will follow. Those trying to use the current system to their advantage will most definitely not be happy about it and will try to sway others to their side.

After that, all it is left is a clean up. I believe a currency wipe is too much, but there needs to be something done, otherwise those people (and are not few) are going to be even richer from what they've farmed until then. Maybe one way to do it is to have a "manual" look at the accounts with an amount of currency higher than certain values ;) i'm not saying more, but it would simply be the fair thing to do.

The market will regulate itself afterwards and does not need any kind of high rollers to bring it down. Starting off at a relative equality for everyone is the way to go when a very good (new) system is in place, that prevents overuse.

"

Chypre wrote:

[...]
If you notice a transaction of 15 exalted for nothing, it would be suspicious, but 15 for a Lionseye would be fine.
[...]

Good enough behavioral analysis can fix most problems.

There's just too much data for humans and even good enough software is still hard.

@Devs
I would be fascinated to hear data on how many trades per day there are going on in POE.

Always blew my mind how many people are willing to throw money at video games just for an unfair advantage. Isn't the point of playing games to disconnect from reality even for just a moment to begin with? Leave your IRL bullshit out of my games, ty.

The second i see anything like the OP proposed, i'm out. I feel i'm not alone on this stance since it was one of the major thing that brought me to the game.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

"

AintCare wrote:

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

the problem isn't that people can p2w via RMT sites, it's that people can p2w at all.

really? then make everything account bound.... you definitely break your game, but hey not2win AT ALL

are even devs delusional in here? honestly

P2W being the problem at hand in this discussion does not mean P2W is the only concern.

Murder will never be completely eliminated by traditional methods of law enforcement, but could be completely eliminated by keeping every person in a small padded room and providing them the necessities of life without letting them come into physical contact with another person. That doesn't mean that's a reasonable solution to the problem because the problems with that system are greater than the one it solves.

The goal of people being able to actually play the game as intended is more important than the goal of people not being able to pay real money to gain advantage. Thus everything being account bound is not a reasonable solution.

I have asked and repeatably asked other users for an acceptable solution. Then I've asked some more. It may be I owe a few of them an apology, but quite frankly I do not care after this grueling discussion. I appreciate GGG's commitment to integrity and am quite irrevocably done trying to discuss anything with this vitriolic community.

I did not present the solution as the only solution and would not have even tried to address it unless I believe that there was at least one good solution which is obtainable within the ethos set out by GGG and subscribed to by much of the community.

Unfortunately the community chose to focus not on the question of what a good solution to the problem might be, but rather about how my solution is not the right one and how I am a plague upon the game for presenting it. This is so far removed from what a productive discussion actually is that I have lost all faith in the community, and don't worry... I will not be suggesting anything again.

I do appreciate your time and thought in replying to this thread and your commitment to integrity and the core values of your company, especially when any other businessman would have seen the original proposal and started wringing his hands and thinking about how much money they were going to make. I was more than a little bit disappointed that it took a GGG employee posting in my thread for the community to actually read through it give insightful analysis of the problems.

Anyway, I wish you all the best, I'm going to go muck about in my shop thread (if I can even find it).

Increase drop rates 10 - 30 fold the more people have and can use the less people will use RMT.

I will take a bet with anyone here that thinks this game is not Pay2Win that I can right now go buy a Kaom's or any other unique with real money.

As long as I do it with alternate accounts, I won't even be caught.

.

"

Chypre wrote:

It's pretty obvious that GGG isn't going to do this but I have an idea.

The only way to stop RMT seems to be enforcement of the rules, not only banning RMT bot networks/traders, but seizing those orbs/items from players along with warnings/bannings. They should know that RMT is against the rules.

But GGG doesn't have the manpower for this, so what do we do? There is a site called Block Explorer which supports Bitcoin (cryptocurrency). People have wallets with addresses such as 12TBjXumVzNGpy8k5ooFnJj5qbZkp51n6A, and you can see all of the transactions on the network, but never know who is actually behind an address (that is mine, please send BTC =).

GGG could give bounties in store points or something to people who monitor all of these transactions in some way and are able to find suspicious activity. This would still require some official manpower to look at cases and determine if it meets whatever criteria for punishment, but there could also be a middle layer like the volunteer moderators to mute troll/bad reporters and such.

So, rather than spending our time with years of threads about RMT and the problems it causes, we could take a look through transactions and get something for it. Hopefully someone would be motivated to make some sort of automated checker.

If you notice a transaction of 15 exalted for nothing, it would be suspicious, but 15 for a Lionseye would be fine. Just the real threat of losing your whole account for having bought RMT would reduce the practice. The fact that RMT networks would lose some revenue and they would need to split up transactions or whatever would possibly increase their costs to where it would be unprofitable. The whole thing sounds kind of far fetched, but maybe it would actually work.

Well, don´t you think if there were a possibility to automatically check in-game trades and sort those out which are suspicous / fraudulent, such a system would be in place in AAA titles for a long time?

But that´s only one problem, the other problem is: RMT is much like porn-industry. They make billions of dollars a year, but if you ask around seemingly with no customers at all. We grew up in a society that thought us, porn is bad. So almost noone will ever admit to consume porn. Same goes for RMT. RMT is bad, so customers of RMT sites will not even tell their best (ingame-)friends that they bought ingame currency or items from a RMT site or Ebay.

If you just imagine the sheer numbers, if you want more information on that matter, Wall Street Journal made a very good article on that subject, but there are also lots of other articles now, it´s not a minority of players who use RMT to take advatage in a game, actually it´s much more likely that the majority is involved. 2005 RMT made a total revenue of 900 million dollars, 2006 it already raised to 1.5 billions. The last number known to me is 7.3 billion dollars in the year 2010. So even if we presume it didn´t rise any further, this number just can´t be reached if only a small percentage of players are buying.

And that leads to one more intellectual pastime. Why should the gaming industry let 7.3 billion dollars pass around them, not even getting the slightest share of that money? In the end, it´s their product that makes those revenues possible in first place. Of course, they cannot just start to sell ingame-items on their own sites, but why should they not decide to deliver the gold/credits/whatever the RMT sites sell? So they would at least get their fair share of a business that wouldn´t exist without them and that cannot be stopped.

"

AintCare wrote:

(to me frankly it doesn't matter, i play solo and self found... so i AintCare lol)

So why are you arguing ? Stop.



-------------------------------------------------------

This game will never be P2W.
This game will never have a Diablo 3 AH ! And;
Noobs/trolls are ruining games :

http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/7u16q6/the-final-bosman-lazy-rich-people-are-ruining-games

"

Andromansis wrote:

I have asked and repeatably asked other users for an acceptable solution. Then I've asked some more. It may be I owe a few of them an apology, but quite frankly I do not care after this grueling discussion. I appreciate GGG's commitment to integrity and am quite irrevocably done trying to discuss anything with this vitriolic community.

Well, i tried to give a solution on the previous page, or at least a direction - impose very high costs on the large suppliers of currency. Unfortunately I don't have access to enough data from GGG to actually come up with a clear solution, but on the macro level i strongly believe what i said would work.