Gold Buyers: the real problem?

[Dralek 5]

Lets face it, nothing can be done about gold farmers. If you nerf their farming spots, they will try to hack accounts or find new places to exploit. If you ban them, they will create new accounts. If you ban the VPN (like kronos did), they will DDOS the server for months making it impossible for everyone to play. No game that has a gold farmer community can succesfully deal with them. And most likely, we won't either.

The reason gold farmers exist is because there are people that provide a market for them. As simple as that. Given all the recent troubles the server is suffering because of gold farmers, shouldn't it be better we actually focus on the root of the problem? As usual, a few rotten apples create a problem for the servers, and by this I mean those that buy gold, and make gold farmers focus on Nostalrius.

I do have a few suggestions on how to deal with, but they are not blizzlike at all. However it would be nice if as a mature community, we can discuss these things and make proposals to the admins on how to deal with this problem.

 

[Modsat 1]

I very much agree. Probably the only way to really combat gold sellers.

But how to do it without pissing off the pure-vanilla guys is the real question.

[VladAtheris 1]

Don't buy gold seems like the obvious answer here, boys and girls. I don't really understand who these people are that buy gold anyway. After all, the demand must be huge is there is a business made out of the thing. Nobody would retaliate with heavy DDoS attacks if all they stood to lose was a few hundred bucks.

A second solution would be for the server to sell gold in exchange for cash. Have a shop and sell gold. It's not like selling gold makes the game pay to win. Gold is mostly for mounts and respecs in Vanilla. It won't be like the guy buying gold is breaking the game and making it impossible for the non buyers to play.

All it will do is fuck up the economy on the AH but that could be quite interesting actually. This way every guild will have to have their own designated farmers who focus on gathering stuff. There might be guild unions who decide to only trade among themselves and bypass the AH altogether.

Imagine trading federations brokering deals and establishing monopolies on materials. Could be fun.

Bottom line, gold selling is like drug dealing if you want the dealers out of business then make their stuff legal and sell it yourself.

[Hakoo 0]

like you said if the the server starts to sell gold for anyone that doesn't buy it, AH will be a total waist of time as prices will sky rocket. I have seen it myself on plenty pservers that never sold any in game currency, and from the moment they started to sell it it was a death sentence for the AH and anyone that didn't buy gold

[Geston 15]

An issue with that is that in certain cultures buying gold isnt really considered taboo, its considered a normal thing that plenty of people do. So they wont stop buying gold because in their mind theres nothing wrong with that.

[Outstanding 10]

Here's the deal: 

You say, accept the gold spammers on the basis that they find a way to win in the end, so let's all get together and stop buying gold.

I say, the same applies to players, in most iterations of WOW there are always a sizeable number of players who are too lazy/don't have enough time, and will buy gold.

Both parts of the equation need each other to survive, and for over a decade they already have done so. Elysium is not going to be any different.

Any research on player numbers, classes played, top guilds and the AH economy will show you that old Nost PvP economy was pretty rotten with gold farming and spamming. The old PvE was doing pretty good but heading in the same direction. Plus, you add all the password breaches, website hacks and everything else into the mix and you get exactly what you are getting now.

Can it be fixed? No. Will the staff and devs do everything they can to limit the issues? I am sure they will. They have been working 24/7 to get the realms up and running and killing themselves recently over the Christmas festive period just to stop things from collapsing completely. I am sure things will get better, and gradually. But it's not fixable.

I think releasing yet another realm to further pressurise staff and spread them over three realms is insane, but they have no way of going back on that decision now. The new realm will not be any better bar reducing pop numbers on the other realms. The same problems will be there, and the AH, the gold farming, the spamming will inflate along with the economy. You'll find that the gold prices for buyers are expensive to begin with, but will reduce in value as people farm more and level up.

There are four Chinese companies currently selling gold for Elysium realms that correspond with their advertising on the realms themselves. If you don't believe me do a /whois check on their websites. I am sure there are a lot more discrete versions around, but a simple decision to ban VPN connections will kill off 90% of the spam and remove the reason and access on accounts being hacked. As for retaliatory DDoS attacks, Elysium has been actively targeted on this since launch, the devs and staff talk about it all the time. So how much worse can it get?

It is really, really important that Elysium makes a success out of this server. If the server starts to spiral and people give up then it could sound the death knell for progress in Pservers as people give up and lose faith. Some very, very tough decisions are going to need to be made in the next few weeks because this will end up as death from a thousand cuts is they just band-aid there way through fire-fighting and not go for major surgery.

It begins with banning commercial VPN connections. You can always add white list options later 

[Dralek 5]

4 minutes ago, Outstanding said:

There are four Chinese companies currently selling gold for Elysium realms that correspond with their advertising on the realms themselves. If you don't believe me do a /whois check on their websites. I am sure there are a lot more discrete versions around, but a simple decision to ban VPN connections will kill off 90% of the spam and remove the reason and access on accounts being hacked. As for retaliatory DDoS attacks, Elysium has been actively targeted on this since launch, the devs and staff talk about it all the time. So how much worse can it get?
 

While I don't disagree with this method, this can hurt the server deeply and should only be considered as a last possible solution. We should also consider that there are a lot of chinese players that do not partake in gold farming and will be affected by this.

I personally favour a more restrictive approach targeting those that buy gold, instead of the gold farmer themselves.

[Shayss 43]

Well right now the people who get caught buying just get their account permabanned.

That in and of itself should be a good enough detterent. The problem is that the people buying are so f.ucking dumb that they probably go do it again and it also doesn't stop the new people who come and buy.

I think there should be a seperate section on ban appeals that just lists the full list of people banned for gold buying/selling and when a new person registers to the site they get directed to this.

Edited December 30, 2016 by Shayss

[Sundanc_r 19]

maybe we should consider atomic bombs.

just ban everyone whos involved. buyers, sellers and their families.

[Outstanding 10]

10 minutes ago, Dralek said:

While I don't disagree with this method, this can hurt the server deeply and should only be considered as a last possible solution. We should also consider that there are a lot of chinese players that do not partake in gold farming and will be affected by this.

I personally favour a more restrictive approach targeting those that buy gold, instead of the gold farmer themselves.

In what way will it hurt the server deeply? By general estimations the population of Nost PvP was 13k max before closure and 30% of this population was Chinese. Of the top 10 guilds, 4 were Chinese. There were more AOE farming mages on each faction than there were warriors. So how do you determine the 'good' Chinese and the 'bad' ones? Not to mention the language barriers. 

The Chinese love Warcraft. The movie itself being was pilloried in the West but did fantastically well in China. They deserve a stable realm to play WoW without the restrictions of language they have here. They deserve to have a realm where they won't have people thinking they are bots, farmers and the like. Rather than doing a fresh PvP server, make one for SE Asia with a proxy server based there to reduce ping. Allow it to be VPN friendly. Then VPN protect the current realms, lose 30% of your populations, reduce lag, queuing, draw distances, reboot the economy, remove 100,000's of gold and reinstate all hacked accounts.   

 

[dodgykebaab 1]

Personally I think a warning system for those who buy gold.  Get caught buying gold, then you lose all the gold you have and receive a letter in game as a warning.

Get caught a second time and you get perma banned.

Instant bans for a one off gold buy are way too harsh.

[MaxIgnoramus 1]

9 minutes ago, Outstanding said:

In what way will it hurt the server deeply? By general estimations the population of Nost PvP was 13k max before closure and 30% of this population was Chinese. Of the top 10 guilds, 4 were Chinese. There were more AOE farming mages on each faction than there were warriors. So how do you determine the 'good' Chinese and the 'bad' ones? Not to mention the language barriers. 

The Chinese love Warcraft. The movie itself being was pilloried in the West but did fantastically well in China. They deserve a stable realm to play WoW without the restrictions of language they have here. They deserve to have a realm where they won't have people thinking they are bots, farmers and the like. Rather than doing a fresh PvP server, make one for SE Asia with a proxy server based there to reduce ping. Allow it to be VPN friendly. Then VPN protect the current realms, lose 30% of your populations, reduce lag, queuing, draw distances, reboot the economy, remove 100,000's of gold and reinstate all hacked accounts.   

 

The Chinese are welcome to make a chinese server and get on with it, why are we catering for them again?

[Outstanding 10]

6 minutes ago, MaxIgnoramus said:

The Chinese are welcome to make a chinese server and get on with it, why are we catering for them again?

The Great Firewall of China makes it exceptionally difficult for them to go about hosting servers, downloading clients and doing the itty-bitty research you need to do trawling for information on videos or on websites so that so-and-so boss is scripted correctly and so-and-so weapon procs the correct percentage. Far easier to just connect to someone else who does the work for you, it's not perfect, but better than nothing.

This wouldn't be pandering to the Chinese, these would be about removing the worst aspects of gold selling, gold farming, account hacking and reducing the population to manageable proportions. It also gets around the racist beatstick accusations you will get from the Pontificators.   

[MaxIgnoramus 1]

3 minutes ago, Outstanding said:

The Great Firewall of China makes it exceptionally difficult for them to go about hosting servers, downloading clients and doing the itty-bitty research you need to do trawling for information on videos or on websites so that so-and-so boss is scripted correctly and so-and-so weapon procs the correct percentage. Far easier to just connect to someone else who does the work for you, it's not perfect, but better than nothing.

This wouldn't be pandering to the Chinese, these would be about removing the worst aspects of gold selling, gold farming, account hacking and reducing the population to manageable proportions. It also gets around the racist beatstick accusations you will get from the Pontificators.   

im sorry but it really does not sound like Elysiums problem that the Chinese government dont want their people to play WoW.

 

I think it says a lot that the Chinese DO get to play WoW on western servers and repay the service by gold spamming it to фекал

[Outstanding 10]

12 minutes ago, MaxIgnoramus said:

im sorry but it really does not sound like Elysiums problem that the Chinese government dont want their people to play WoW.

 

I think it says a lot that the Chinese DO get to play WoW on western servers and repay the service by gold spamming it to фекал

But it is our problem as we're the ones affected by it.

[Glenzig 34]

The only real solution is to ban VPN services. Banning the buyers is great, but, it doesn't stop the sellers. They don't care how many people get banned. And people will always buy gold. There will still be gold sellers, because people from China are not the only ones doing it. But, it will greatly reduce the amount of sellers, farmers, and hackers.

Personally, I don't care if this means that the server gets ddos attacks for the next 3 months. After that's over with, the server will be better for it. 

[Kazuma 11]

All these "big" chinese gold seller websites are scams btw.. the real gold sellers are mostly non-chinese lone wolfs doing business over skype.

It's just spam. Ignore it, they aint selling shit.

Edited December 30, 2016 by Kazuma

[Outstanding 10]

6 minutes ago, Kazuma said:

All these "big" chinese gold seller websites are scams btw.. the real gold sellers are mostly non-chinese lone wolfs doing business over skype.

It's just spam. Ignore it, they aint selling shit.

So these scams as you call them them, the ones that have hacked hundreds of accounts and stolen all their money, before spamming the chat channels ad nauseum, and then getting these accounts banned, we can just ignore them right? Because all the gold they took was just fooling right?

[Aveton 8]

The real problem for now is hundreds of hacked accounts which is used for goldselling.

Rough but working solution is: to generate new passwords for ALL and send it to ppl via email.

Of course it is too late already... But the admins should have predicted this.

[Sundanc_r 19]

5 minutes ago, Aveton said:

The real problem for now is hundreds of hacked accounts which is used for goldselling.

Rough but working solution is: to generate new passwords for ALL and send it to ppl via email.

Of course it is too late already... But the admins should have predicted this.

good idea. it will lead to some cunfusion first and trouble for those that cant access their original email address anymore, but will fix the password leak issues

[Oakenlix 79]

2 hours ago, Geston said:

An issue with that is that in certain cultures buying gold isnt really considered taboo, its considered a normal thing that plenty of people do. So they wont stop buying gold because in their mind theres nothing wrong with that.

As a Russian I must say I'm highly offended by your racist post!

On a serious note, just permaban goldbuyers and use anti-spam addons, don't see much of a problem here. It's not like it ruins economy, the gold they're selling is the gold that was already on the server.

[DarkZt 0]

3 hours ago, VladAtheris said:

Don't buy gold seems like the obvious answer here, boys and girls. I don't really understand who these people are that buy gold anyway. After all, the demand must be huge is there is a business made out of the thing. Nobody would retaliate with heavy DDoS attacks if all they stood to lose was a few hundred bucks.

A second solution would be for the server to sell gold in exchange for cash. Have a shop and sell gold. It's not like selling gold makes the game pay to win. Gold is mostly for mounts and respecs in Vanilla. It won't be like the guy buying gold is breaking the game and making it impossible for the non buyers to play.

All it will do is вау up the economy on the AH but that could be quite interesting actually. This way every guild will have to have their own designated farmers who focus on gathering stuff. There might be guild unions who decide to only trade among themselves and bypass the AH altogether.

Imagine trading federations brokering deals and establishing monopolies on materials. Could be fun.

Bottom line, gold selling is like drug dealing if you want the dealers out of business then make their stuff legal and sell it yourself.

Blizzard tried the whole real money for gold/stuff thing and it was a disaster in Diablo III.  I definitively wouldn't take that route at all.  All it did was turn the game into a full time job for people that were trying to get drops to sell for real cash.

Deterring the gold market seems like the correct solution, but it's probably not going to work.  This is akin to the prostitution market.  You can try to deter Johns, but there's still way too much demand and people will just work around it.  Same goes for illegal drugs.  There's still huge demand for it, and the actions taken haven't really done anything to stop it.  You can't really control others actions or feelings.  You can only control your actions.  

Really, this is a software problem; more precisely, a spam detection problem.  Email servers have these kinds of protections in place for spam emails to your inbox and most of them work fantastic.  SpamThrottle is a great addon, but it's pretty rudimentary.  It's still the best one we have right now, but until someone implements spam detection like yahoo's or google's, simple tools are the best bet.  

[kasual 0]

I bought gold on Nost and my account was banned. I can't play here now because of it. I didn't have the time to invest into the game but loved getting some PvP with my friends. Players who buy gold shouldn't be banned. This is a private, stolen intellectual property server, why be high and mighty. Should let the banned accounts on and let everyone enjoy the ride until its over. 

[Ironsides 35]

2 hours ago, Aveton said:

The real problem for now is hundreds of hacked accounts which is used for goldselling.

Rough but working solution is: to generate new passwords for ALL and send it to ppl via email.

Of course it is too late already... But the admins should have predicted this.

I wasn't retarded and changed my account name every time I switched private servers, why should they fuck around with my password?

[Aveton 8]

No. No privilege for money at all.