As TFT -> RMT connection is confirmed, no action from GGG?

all tft and rmt do is make poe a p2w game plain and simple instead of the free game it's intended to be.

gating the better drop rates to party play is also something that helps keep rmt alive for the tft guys that also have a hand in price fixing.

banning/preventing any tft use somehow would be a massive step in the right direction. one easy way to watch tft use would be to monitor certain aspects of the game through the database so GGG database staff could have triggers set in place to flag certain activity. then actually monitor that activity ingame for the flagged account(s). not hard to do at all to all but stop tft use.

the temp accounts that post rmt stuff in chat are just random characters for a name. set the game up so in order to trade, you have to make it all the way through the acts. this would at least cull the number of those accounts. so in order for them to trade in the acts, it would have to be out of town and items have to be dropped on the ground which would be low cost items and make more of a hassle for the rmt accounts to move items and currency.

these issues are some of the reasons that i truly wish poe had an offline, full game version. i would pay upwards of $100 just to have it offline. you still have to have an account linked to it that regularly updates and it would make testing/making builds and learning content so much more fluid while being completely separate from the online game

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spaceace7373 wrote:

banning/preventing any tft use somehow would be a massive step in the right direction. one easy way to watch tft use would be to monitor certain aspects of the game through the database so GGG database staff could have triggers set in place to flag certain activity. then actually monitor that activity ingame for the flagged account(s). not hard to do at all to all but stop tft use.

This is not correct. It is INCREDIBLY hard to do. Because you would have to prove that certain accounts have broken the terms of service. They can't willy nilly ban random accounts. Example: i have friends that play the game a LOT more than I do. When I join a league 1 or 2 months in, they provide me with funding and gear to do whatever I want. From the developer's side, that would be indistinguishable from RMT. Just like any other major in-game trade would be indistinguishable legit vs rmt because rmt doesn't exist in the game.

Additionally, it is not against the game rules at all to list any given item at ANY price and have someone trade for it. It is suspicious in hindsight, but it is NOT suspicious according to the in-game rules and out-of-game rules. There would be absolutely no way to fairly police that. People, including myself, can give anything they want away for FREE to anyone else at any time. I should be banned for that?

Also, why the hell can't I scoop up every copy of an item being offered and hold onto them? It is entirely within my right as a player. I have no obligation to anyone else to trade my extra copies, nor do I have any obligation to leave things on the market for other people to buy.

"Not hard to do at all"...that is laughable. It is quite possibly the single hardest thing in this game to combat as a developer. As long as something is tradeable in some form to another player, it is open to exploit both in-game and out. There are already plenty of barriers in the game to combat RMT and botting....but they don't work because they CAN'T work. Anything that happens outside of the game is outside the jurisdiction and purview of GGG developers. If people aren't breaking the rules in the game, which they technically AREN'T (hence, no bans), then there is nothing for the developers to do.

Banning trade is literally the only recourse: account-bound items that can't be given to another player for any reason. But I suspect if this were to happen, then the RMT will shift to anything that CAN be traded to other players such as premade accounts, whatever is tradeable, etc. It's a never ending, losing battle.

"Your account has been banned because you wrote blahblah on reddit"....yea thats NOT going to happen.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

This is not correct. It is INCREDIBLY hard to do. Because you would have to prove that certain accounts have broken the terms of service. They can't willy nilly ban random accounts. Example: i have friends that play the game a LOT more than I do. When I join a league 1 or 2 months in, they provide me with funding and gear to do whatever I want. From the developer's side, that would be indistinguishable from RMT. Just like any other major in-game trade would be indistinguishable legit vs rmt because rmt doesn't exist in the game.

1. Your friends only give you gears ONCE, but RMT selling would continuingly give gears for people, and continuingly receive gears from other accounts.

2. There must be somewhere for RMT advertisement. You know I know but GGG devs don't know? It's similar that in a movie, everyone knows where drug dealing is, only polices don't know? it's quite a joke.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

This is not correct. It is INCREDIBLY hard to do.

i've been working with databases for well over a decade. it's not that hard to do at all.

also, an item on tft gets listed, add that items' stats to the database monitor and watch that item move from one account to another. now how hard is that? then those accounts can be monitored directly for what items/currency go in and out. very simple actually when you have server side access to the database. hell, let that player mirror the listed item and the person that is monitoring the action set it so both items acquire the mirrored tag... that would be funny as hell and actually quite easy to do lmao

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smtad wrote:

1. Your friends only give you gears ONCE, but RMT selling would continuingly give gears for people, and continuingly receive gears from other accounts.

2. There must be somewhere for RMT advertisement. You know I know but GGG devs don't know? It's similar that in a movie, everyone knows where drug dealing is, only polices don't know? it's quite a joke.

exactly

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smtad wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

This is not correct. It is INCREDIBLY hard to do. Because you would have to prove that certain accounts have broken the terms of service. They can't willy nilly ban random accounts. Example: i have friends that play the game a LOT more than I do. When I join a league 1 or 2 months in, they provide me with funding and gear to do whatever I want. From the developer's side, that would be indistinguishable from RMT. Just like any other major in-game trade would be indistinguishable legit vs rmt because rmt doesn't exist in the game.

1. Your friends only give you gears ONCE, but RMT selling would continuingly give gears for people, and continuingly receive gears from other accounts.

2. There must be somewhere for RMT advertisement. You know I know but GGG devs don't know? It's similar that in a movie, everyone knows where drug dealing is, only polices don't know? it's quite a joke.

Do a google search for PoE for almost anything and most of the time the first result is an RMT website.

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SilentSymphony wrote:

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smtad wrote:

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jsuslak313 wrote:

This is not correct. It is INCREDIBLY hard to do. Because you would have to prove that certain accounts have broken the terms of service. They can't willy nilly ban random accounts. Example: i have friends that play the game a LOT more than I do. When I join a league 1 or 2 months in, they provide me with funding and gear to do whatever I want. From the developer's side, that would be indistinguishable from RMT. Just like any other major in-game trade would be indistinguishable legit vs rmt because rmt doesn't exist in the game.

1. Your friends only give you gears ONCE, but RMT selling would continuingly give gears for people, and continuingly receive gears from other accounts.

2. There must be somewhere for RMT advertisement. You know I know but GGG devs don't know? It's similar that in a movie, everyone knows where drug dealing is, only polices don't know? it's quite a joke.

Do a google search for PoE for almost anything and most of the time the first result is an RMT website.

lol remember when poe.trade was a thing? there were people boycotting the site "back in the day" because it ran RMT ads.

and yeah, its super easy to find a website selling POE currency.

TFT gains the most of their profit from mirror services, because it provides something that other game systems can't - garautees. Even relying solely on discord vouches and badges, it's still obviously better than giving a mirror to a random guy on trade.
There is an easy solution for that without impacting the economy like putting mirror tags on both items or other limitations. Just provide an in-game interface for mirroring. And suddenly TFT will lose it's monopoly, as finding and mirroring item using official trade won't bear any risk. Even if only a small percent of players will use it, I believe it will have a huge positive impact on economy overall (can't proof, but at least there will be less price manipulations).
GGG could even make a cool MTX of it, something like a grand heist item stand, but inside a hideout, looking like an item behind a mirror, simultaneously acting as a public stash tab for one item, but usable for party members for a mirror + defined fee.

Well it's not like "Oh i finally found my Mirror. Now i can get that juicy bow from TFT."
The fee is paid by RMT in most cases one way or another. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that. Most of their custumers will not have farmed their currency. They will just buy it for real money. In the end it will result in people that used real money with the best items on sc trade. Great! Guess what that is? Right! pay2win.

I don't care if someone buys small amounts of currency, because they have two kids and a daytime job and just 1 hour of playtime each day. But GGG should go after the big fishes. Guys with permanent mirror service. Heck you don't even have to ban them from the game completely. Just ban them from trade league. Send them an email with a smiley and tell them that they are welcome to play ruthless ssf.

The ubiquity of sites/places to go for RMT is exactly why it is NOT an easy problem to fix...I don't know how you can possibly think otherwise. If GGG clamps down on one thing, in this case TFT, another two will pop up somewhere else.

GGG has no right to monitor other websites and then control people on their game for what they might perceive them doing elsewhere. I don't know for sure, but I would think that might even be borderline illegal. There are ample fixes in-game to cut down on RMT such as what has already been floated: single-use mirroring, account-bound items, etc. But to actually program or designate someone to monitor irregular gameplay...that ALREADY EXISTS. How else do people get banned in this game? The whole reason why this issue is so complicated is because even with the programs and protections in place, people will ALWAYS find ways around it. And they already have.

Sure they can track specific items, but they would have no proof anything was improperly traded within their game. That is what they would need to take action. People can say, plan, and do ANYTHING on other sites but if it looks legit in game, which basically every trade IS legit (however unbalanced), then there is no recourse for banning.

RMT don't take place with "one account": they likely take place with thousands of ghost accounts that are created specifically for that one trade, and then disappear. Likely all RMT are done on dummy accounts unrelated to the RMTer, so that even if the RMT account is banned somehow, they can just create another in a matter of seconds.

It is NOT a matter of simply monitoring, or assigning someone to run around with the ban hammer, or creating new programming to detect RMT. The game itself needs to fundamentally change to combat RMT. And again, even if that were to happen (single mirror, capped trades, auction house buyouts, etc), the RMT would just shift to something that can be traded for RMT. Take D3 for example: all items were account-bound (or are? Haven't played in a while). RMT still happens, except you have to trust someone with your account info. And people still do that. That's just one step more complicated than PoE's current system. And it doesn't solve the problem.

Banning the "big fish" with mirror services is a huge can of worms. You cannot prove they are engaging in RMT. Every single player with a mirror service deserves a ban? That is incredibly unfair. Why not ban everyone who has over 100 divines? Ban everyone who has a Mjolnir? Just because someone else has something you do not, doesn't mean automatically that they acquired it by non-TOS means. That needs to be proven WITHIN the game, not on 3rd party websites.

^

They could fix it tommorow if they wanted to commit the resources to doing so, but its like all internet policing issues - its very high hours with some elements requiring specific technical skills to fix a problem that largely can be ignored for only a tiny reduction in revenue.

Basically no business will tackle this problem, it has to be a point of principle to even be considered. This isn't the same as giving them an out however or pretending that its an unsolvable problem.

a solution not making financial sense is not the same as there not being a solution, the only real truth is there is no cheap/easy solution. Ironically revolutionising trade would be the most viable, but they have to want to do it and GGG drag their heels to a ridiculous degree on some key issues.