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Nubatron wrote:
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TorsteinTheFallen wrote:
I think RMT can be exterminated but not with brute policing as it will only be cat and mouse game to infinity.
Idea that came to my mind is to make 2-step verification via phone app to be able to play the game. From first thoughts it seems pretty bulletproof for the level of game security.
App would associate phone number with it, phone credentials like imei and any shenanigans that would someone try to do will pop up on radar and raise suspicion.
In few leagues they could comb out the violators and we would have free and healthy game back.
People get around these with fake phone number apps and google voice. The idea that RMT can be "exterminated" is ridiculous. If a game is popular, and people want to skip something in the game, RMT will exist. Item Binding doesn't fix that (accounts sold instead). Having to buy copies of the game doesn't stop it (just viewed as an additional tax). Banning IPs/MAC/HW/etc. doesn't work (VMs and VPNs work very well to avoid).
You can combat it and do manual laborious reviews of logs for good verification but that will be impossible to scale massively. You can automate the process, but false positives will be rampant and permanently alienate players that are not cheating (including players that are not falsely accused). And everything in between those two extremes just accepts the risk of false positives or gets more and more difficult to do on a massive scale to be effective.
The best way to beat RMT is to not be popular enough to make it worth the effort. At the risk of being redundant and saying it again, pretending that there is some magical fix that huge developers have not figured out is ridiculous.
Requiring people to provide their phone number to play would be a very easy way to kill off your play base overnight, especially with the rampant Tencent paranoia. How many people are going to comfortable with that? I can't imagine very many would.
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AdRonZh3Ro wrote:
Honestly, i think tracking and banning RMT can be easily achievable. Not all of them, but at least the big ones.
How do they track drug dealers? An instance is to buy the drug and then make the seller squeal. How does this help Gx3? Well, they literally have the sell records from the drug dealer. You can easily track back to the main source and all associated accounts that way. Even if they delete each character after each trade, unless that also deleted all records from literally all characters involved, it's more than possible to reach everyone involved.
That's good for catching some low level street dealers, you don't catch the big players like that. I could imagine the same principle would apply to RMT, you catch and ban some alt accounts with small amounts of currency on them that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. You could make your currency virtually untraceable back to the source by trading between your own accounts and trading back and forth with unwitting legit players a few times, kinda like IRL money laundering.
Last edited by Randall#0850 on Feb 17, 2023, 11:33:18 AM
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Posted byRandall#0850on Feb 17, 2023, 11:11:51 AM
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Nubatron wrote:
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TorsteinTheFallen wrote:
I think RMT can be exterminated but not with brute policing as it will only be cat and mouse game to infinity.
Idea that came to my mind is to make 2-step verification via phone app to be able to play the game. From first thoughts it seems pretty bulletproof for the level of game security.
App would associate phone number with it, phone credentials like imei and any shenanigans that would someone try to do will pop up on radar and raise suspicion.
In few leagues they could comb out the violators and we would have free and healthy game back.
People get around these with fake phone number apps and google voice. The idea that RMT can be "exterminated" is ridiculous. If a game is popular, and people want to skip something in the game, RMT will exist. Item Binding doesn't fix that (accounts sold instead). Having to buy copies of the game doesn't stop it (just viewed as an additional tax). Banning IPs/MAC/HW/etc. doesn't work (VMs and VPNs work very well to avoid).
You can combat it and do manual laborious reviews of logs for good verification but that will be impossible to scale massively. You can automate the process, but false positives will be rampant and permanently alienate players that are not cheating (including players that are not falsely accused). And everything in between those two extremes just accepts the risk of false positives or gets more and more difficult to do on a massive scale to be effective.
The best way to beat RMT is to not be popular enough to make it worth the effort. At the risk of being redundant and saying it again, pretending that there is some magical fix that huge developers have not figured out is ridiculous.
This is all true for people who bot as well. Different problem, but same problem set that is difficult to solve.
Yeah, if some people have a goal of zero or close to zero RMT in the game they are going to be disappointed. The ability to create accounts at will wont allow for an "extermination", its just not possible.
The curious part is how it's currently being applied. Its seems there are some really big players in the RMT field continuing to do their work, and then some smaller folks picking up bans. (Like the Reddit story).
Meh none of this is really new though so I doubt we will see much change. The situation just had a spotlight on it because of the absurd proliferation of TFT recently. It's an open secret, and people now get to see it with their own eyes on a larger scale.
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
- Abraham Lincoln
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Posted byDarthSki44#6905on Feb 17, 2023, 11:16:21 AMOn Probation
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RandallPOE wrote:
Requiring people to provide their phone number to play would be a very easy way to kill off your play base overnight, especially with the rampant Tencent paranoia. How many people are going to comfortable with that? I can't imagine very many would.
Yup. Privacy advocates would just walk away. People who don't want to be bothered with MFA every time they log in the game will be irritated. Ironically, it will bother people who are playing the game for fun, but won't stop people who are doing it as a job. They'll view it as an extra level of tedium to make money -- another way to put it is just a part of the job. It would be a prime example of unintended consequences, with little effectiveness against the target group. The irony would be funny I suppose.
My post was focusing more on the technical effectiveness of it all, and the thing is, I don't do any of that stuff so my workarounds are superficial. People who actually do this stuff will be a ton smarter, pioneering and persistent with how to beat any measure that is put in place.
Thanks for all the fish! Last edited by Nubatron#4333 on Feb 17, 2023, 11:19:56 AM
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Posted byNubatron#4333on Feb 17, 2023, 11:19:36 AM
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Nubatron wrote:
People get around these with fake phone number apps and google voice. The idea that RMT can be "exterminated" is ridiculous. If a game is popular, and people want to skip something in the game, RMT will exist. Item Binding doesn't fix that (accounts sold instead). Having to buy copies of the game doesn't stop it (just viewed as an additional tax). Banning IPs/MAC/HW/etc. doesn't work (VMs and VPNs work very well to avoid).
You can combat it and do manual laborious reviews of logs for good verification but that will be impossible to scale massively. You can automate the process, but false positives will be rampant and permanently alienate players that are not cheating (including players that are not falsely accused). And everything in between those two extremes just accepts the risk of false positives or gets more and more difficult to do on a massive scale to be effective.
The best way to beat RMT is to not be popular enough to make it worth the effort. At the risk of being redundant and saying it again, pretending that there is some magical fix that huge developers have not figured out is ridiculous.
This is all true for people who bot as well. Different problem, but same problem set that is difficult to solve.
To stop RMt you need to ask yourself why people do it. It turns into a cost vs reward analysis. People RMT because it costs them less time to get RMt than it does to farm the item itself. A game like this suffers massively from that because of the RNG and rarity of items. If they made it easier to get items, less RMT would happen. That is the short and skinny of it. RMT exists because of these fake barriers the game imposes.
There will always be some modicum of RMT, but you can cut a massive majority of it if you made it so people could dial loot up to 100 if they wanted to.
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Posted byNulledout#3809on Feb 17, 2023, 11:19:59 AM
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Nulledout wrote:
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Nubatron wrote:
People get around these with fake phone number apps and google voice. The idea that RMT can be "exterminated" is ridiculous. If a game is popular, and people want to skip something in the game, RMT will exist. Item Binding doesn't fix that (accounts sold instead). Having to buy copies of the game doesn't stop it (just viewed as an additional tax). Banning IPs/MAC/HW/etc. doesn't work (VMs and VPNs work very well to avoid).
You can combat it and do manual laborious reviews of logs for good verification but that will be impossible to scale massively. You can automate the process, but false positives will be rampant and permanently alienate players that are not cheating (including players that are not falsely accused). And everything in between those two extremes just accepts the risk of false positives or gets more and more difficult to do on a massive scale to be effective.
The best way to beat RMT is to not be popular enough to make it worth the effort. At the risk of being redundant and saying it again, pretending that there is some magical fix that huge developers have not figured out is ridiculous.
This is all true for people who bot as well. Different problem, but same problem set that is difficult to solve.
To stop RMt you need to ask yourself why people do it. It turns into a cost vs reward analysis. People RMT because it costs them less time to get RMt than it does to farm the item itself. A game like this suffers massively from that because of the RNG and rarity of items. If they made it easier to get items, less RMT would happen. That is the short and skinny of it. RMT exists because of these fake barriers the game imposes.
There will always be some modicum of RMT, but you can cut a massive majority of it if you made it so people could dial loot up to 100 if they wanted to.
So, your idea is to develop the game to be easier? D3, that game where you can get everything you want within a few days, would like to have a word with you about your hypothesis to stop RMT.
If that's the level of RMT you're comfortable with, then okay, I guess.
But POE fills a niche for people that don't want a D3 like clone in terms of easiness. This is the market space they've carved out. Shifting the other direction puts them in more direct competition with a game with a larger following and I think would be a terrible business decision. Your idea sounds like cutting off your head to stop an infection from spreading to the brain :)
Thanks for all the fish! Last edited by Nubatron#4333 on Feb 17, 2023, 11:26:06 AM
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Posted byNubatron#4333on Feb 17, 2023, 11:23:08 AM
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Nubatron wrote:
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RandallPOE wrote:
Requiring people to provide their phone number to play would be a very easy way to kill off your play base overnight, especially with the rampant Tencent paranoia. How many people are going to comfortable with that? I can't imagine very many would.
Yup. Privacy advocates would just walk away. People who don't want to be bothered with MFA every time they log in the game will be irritated. Ironically, it will bother people who are playing the game for fun, but won't stop people who are doing it as a job. They'll view it as an extra level of tedium to make money -- another way to put it is just a part of the job. It would be a prime example of unintended consequences, with little effectiveness against the target group. The irony would be funny I suppose.
It's like when people advocate having captchas in game to prevent botting or auction house shenanigans. Captchas are easily solved by bots and would just turn legit players away, the harder you make your captcha to solve, the more people abandon your game.
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Posted byRandall#0850on Feb 17, 2023, 11:26:25 AM
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The cat and mouse game will go on forever. It's a free game so they'll just make 100,000 new accounts if 100,000 get banned. I don't play Lost Ark but apparently they have a similar problem there. IIRC Lost Ark is P2W so the incentive is even greater there because the sink is infinite.
I think the best way to combat it in a free game is to make sure the game is fun at all stages (not just endgame) and that items are chase but still achievable. I think the grind in PoE is in a pretty good spot after the archnemesis nerfs but many builds are holding on by a thread due to powerful items like Heatshiver and fractured items.
On the original topic, GGG has sided with TFT and declared them 100% innocent. TFT is immune from ever being punished for all eternity, whether guilty or innocent (we'll never know.) If GGG changes their mind the entire company will get dragged through the mud and they'll lose millions of dollars and all player goodwill. If coordinated shady business is going on I'm afraid it's permanently a fixture of PoE now.
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Posted byDiabloImmoral#7632on Feb 17, 2023, 11:27:05 AM
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DiabloImmoral wrote:
On the original topic, GGG has sided with TFT and declared them 100% innocent
Oh damn. Where or when did that happen?
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
- Abraham Lincoln
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Posted byDarthSki44#6905on Feb 17, 2023, 11:35:49 AMOn Probation
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DarthSki44 wrote:
Yeah, if some people have a goal of zero or close to zero RMT in the game they are going to be disappointed. The ability to create accounts at will wont allow for an "extermination", its just not possible.
The curious part is how it's currently being applied. Its seems there are some really big players in the RMT field continuing to do their work, and then some smaller folks picking up bans. (Like the Reddit story).
Meh none of this is really new though so I doubt we will see much change. The situation just had a spotlight on it because of the absurd proliferation of TFT recently. It's an open secret, and people now get to see it with their own eyes on a larger scale.
I don't think it's even a secret. If the game is popular enough to warrant RMT, there will be RMT. If that's a secret in gaming, it is clearly the worst kept secret.
And I don't know how you stop someone that is popular from doing it, even if you know they're doing it. Anonymity is too easy to achieve and it's not even required in the first place. Openly claim you do it -> get banned -> continue doing it with other non-attributed accounts -> laugh at still doing it while being "banned"
I hate to advocate for complacency because although it's a battle that can't be won, it should still be fought to provide friction -- even if that friction just effects the more common player base only. But expecting real change on this topic is an act of futility that would kill the game before doing anything of consequence to stop it.
Thanks for all the fish! Last edited by Nubatron#4333 on Feb 17, 2023, 11:50:40 AM
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Posted byNubatron#4333on Feb 17, 2023, 11:50:21 AM
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Nulledout wrote:
That is exactly why it will never happen.
They alredy employ people to fight against RMT because there's always waves of bans here and there, so your assessment is alredy not true. The only thing left to debate is if they are willing to commit more effort and bring down the biggest known RMTrs or just go after the small ones, which in the grand scheme is the same as doing nothing.
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RandallPOE wrote:
That's good for catching some low level street dealers, you don't catch the big players like that. I could imagine the same principle would apply to RMT, you catch and ban some alt accounts with small amounts of currency on them that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. You could make your currency virtually untraceable back to the source by trading between your own accounts and trading back and forth with unwitting legit players a few times, kinda like IRL money laundering.
Except it applies exactly the same with big players because as i stated before, they have all the records(i assume). It's different when the police doesn't have free access to needed files as to contrary to having all of them, which is exactly the case.
In the big picture, they have nothing to gain fighting RMTrs, only their reputation. Considering most of the time they tarnish it themselves, i'm starting to believe they don't really want to put all the work needed to catch the more orchestrated ones.
Ruthless should be [Removed by Support].
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Posted byAdRonZh3Ro#4713on Feb 17, 2023, 11:53:59 AM
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