As it stands to date, your efforts to curb botting and RMT competition to your own sales is eerily reminiscent of the game industries as well as the recording industries attempt to stop piracy:
- It does not seem to work at all
- It hurts mainly honest customers
- It gets increasingly worse as your attempt get increasingly desperate
What am I talking about?
Removing AD from Leadership is the first example. With a leadership army it was easy to provide RP and AD to a progressing character. It was finicky, yes, but it was equally available to everyone and entirely within the game system. Did it get exploited by macro programs? Yes, but that is mostly the fault of the awfully boring way the entire profession system is implemented. People will always find a way to automate mindless tasks because mindless tasks are not fun.
And that’s the point, entirely: Fun! We play games for a variety of reason, but all of us play games to have fun. If we do boring mindless tasks, we expect to get paid for it, not the other way around. Trying to equip a character atm, beyond the 3K mark is simply not fun anymore. It’s boring, it’s mindless and it’s repetitive. It is a barrier of entry to new players that will scare them away faster than a fox in a henhouse while at the same time putting an undue burden on already existing players that “weren’t fast enough” to use the system while it was still implemented.
Now, there are some that will cite that the ZAX at the time was backed to all hell because of the massive amounts of ad in the market and the limited sale of ZEN on the ZAX and while that got better for a while, we are back right where we were before the AD changes, with less AD income, Didn’t quite work out, did it?
I don’t want to harp only on the AD changes, as that’s practically beating a dead horse by now, so let’s look at the other “countermeasures” you decided to hazard:
- Dragon Hoard Enchantments – A Nerf to the income from these enchants had practically no effect on RMT botters, while reducing the effective RP income to honest players.
- Feytouched Enchantments – Adding Account and Character bound Enchantments (or other RP for that matter) to the existing unbound ones, drastically reduced player inventory space. While that might sound great for your bag sales, it’s a slap in face for your honest gamers.
- Quartermaster Enchantments – A way for players to get RP and surplus equipment, especially the latter, since your drop rates are beyond abysmal and your resource requirements for stronghold improvements ludicrous, you decided that the botters selling cheap stacks of R6s was a problem. And nerfed the droprate to a 20 min. gaming session. In your mind it seems that a stack of R5s for 25K is a reasonable price in relation to your RP insanity.
- Foundry – basically shredded to avoid instanced botting. It’s apparently way more convenient for honest players to get lagged out in Icewind Dale and Dread ring than to have botters do their thing on their own. And who needs player created content anyway, right? It’s not like it was one of your major selling points or anything.
It seems that every time you try to curb botting, you fvck your customers over even more while not even putting a dent in the RMT market. So, here’s my plea: STOP TRYING!
And to not only be a negative Nancy, here are some solutions you might want to try out instead:
- Remove the auction house listing fee reduction from VIP – It only truly facilitates inflated prices. Take a look at the celestial Lion: 48M AD? No one would list them that High if it cost them 4.8M AD if the auction went uncalled. Same holds true for a lot of the other high price items. I enjoy having the fee waved, as my VIP is high enough and I make a hefty profit off of it, but I’d rather see it done away with and have lower AH prices overall.
- Increase the ZAX cap to 1.000 – It provides an additional incentive to buy Zen for honest players while crashing the RMT AD prices. It hits RMT companies where it hurts most: in their profit margins, while providing honest and paying customers with an alternative AD source.
- Add a permanent Zen sale at the highest cap (ZAX) – The current bottlenecking is only because you don’t have enough players selling Zen, a problem largely due to your bleeding of customers as a result of your indefensible business and balancing decisions as of late. If you would sell unlimited Zen at the ZAX cap players would at least still have a way to progress without buying Zen for hard cash. That might not seem like a profitable idea to you, seeing as you are anything but business majors, but without your large base of “freeloaders”, your whales will look for new feeding grounds. A game lives by its playerbase. If that gets too small, the exodus starts and your revenue tanks.
- Remove Zen store sales and vouchers and simply drop the prices by 20-30% overall – Fave it: the prices are too high and thus your sales numbers too low. They are virtual items; they cost you nothing to produce, so every penny earned with them is profit. If you cut the prices by 30% and double your sales as a result of that you just increased your profit. As I said: not business majors.
So, for the love of everything that is holy, stop trying to “combat botters” before there is nothing left in your game BUT botters. You are driving away your honest customers, by making the entire experience with the game less fun with each “countermeasure” and you still do not provide content that is in any way, shape or form challenging to your paying customer base. If you need pointers on game design, feel free to drop me a mail, maybe I can help you out, setting up some encounters for your “new old” dungeons that are yet to come (content recycling at its finest), but for the love of life itself, stop fighting botters! Please!
Comments
Simply because the higher ups dont want to listen.
I actually kinda think they want to bleed this game dry and start anew. Basically this game is built on a really old system and needs to be updated to a newer one and its not as simple as porting it over.
But I'm just saying...if you want to ask people to stop doing something, there's two sides to this equation...
The way that the game is currently trying to stop bots/gold spammers, to me, is akin to an automobile manufacturer making thier cars go much slower because some people drink and drive. They're trying to cure, or at least mitigate, one problem while causing many more problems for everyone else.
Making things less attractive to bots in this game has had a seriously detrimental effect on legit players. I think it's time to come up with a new strategy.
And even that is besides the point: Their attempts to thwart them have direct negative impact on honest players and RMT customers alike. It's just that the RMT customers are less affected by it. Does that sound like an attractive solution to you?
On a sidenote please make harsher punishments for goldbuyers if it's still only a 3 day ban change it to permaban and publish number of banned gold buyers.
If the gold sellers aren't actually a subdivision of pve that is.
zhentarim-warlock-companion
Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
RP and the entire refinement system in general needs a serious "Fun-verhaul" in my personal opinion.
And the only reason that the ZAX is where its at now is because cryptic removed the wards from the T-bar store under the lie that they're policy is to not have the sane items in the zen store and the T-bar store.....nevermind the fact that Stone of health and scroll of mass life are still in both stores.
LoTRO was smart, they were charging $1 for some items, and found myself buying $10 to1$5 of them before i knew it. But if they had wanted $30 for the stuff I'd have refused.
I'ts easier for people to buy 1 component this month and then 1 component the next instead of saving 12 months to buy a pack!
Back on topick though; I have seen many many great ideas proposed in the forums (especially ones from ironzerg) that would be a much better path forward than the actions that cryptic has taken recently. It feels like the dedicated long term player base is just screaming into the void.
Traxus Atheanes GF
Bastiel Atheanes DC
Ellara Atheanes CW
Keira Atheanes TR
Sarasin Atheanes SW
Jerkface McGee HR
-MANTARA- OP
As an excemple: I keep selling black dye at 10K per stack of 3. Why? Because I sell them at that price. Do I sell every single stack withing 4 days? No, I have some trickle back, so I just go ahead and post them again. Eventually they will sell for that price. What incentive do I have to ever lower that price?
Then there is the next issue: extremely low drop rates. Legendary mounts come to mind. they drop so rarely that only very few will ever get them and as such they can ask for ridiculous prices. The first lions went up for 48M AD. Now it dropped to 20M AD and it will likely keep dropping as low as 10M AD, but even 10M AD is a ridiculous amount of money and most won't sell for that amount before at least 3 listings. So, rather than to lower the asking price or face a potential 3M AD loss, you can simply keep posting it at 10M until it sells. It is inherently anti-consumer as well as fundamentally anti-capitalist. It makes for a HAMSTER poor economy. The RMT sites have to compete with zen prices as well. They can't simply raise their asking price at will. If it becomes cheaper for a player to convert zen into ad than it is for a player to buy AD off an RMT site, the latter will cease its business. Now, we could argue whether we as players want that to happen (seeing the impact on RP costs, once they do), but that's an entirely different topic. I am not asking for a solution to remove RMT sellers from the game, I am asking Cryptic to stop trying to fight the bots, hurting legitimate players in the process. I entirely agree on this point, but it has nothing to do with RMT, botters or the negative impact of fighting RMT and botters on legitimate players. Balance issues have nothing to do with the topic or the negative effect of Cryptic policies on legitimate players. The same way it does now: selling Zen. If any, it will be even more lucrative to actually purchase zen, if the ZAX cap is increased.
Also, I am under the impression that your idea about whale spending is off by a magnitude:
https://de.scribd.com/doc/245852483/EEDAR-2014-Deconstructing-Mobile-and-Tablet-Gaming-Free-Report
http://www.businessinsider.com/super-whales-are-spending-over-10000-on-social-games-2010-6?IR=T
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/195806/chasing_the_whale_examining_the_.php?print=1
http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers/
http://de.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales-freetoplay-spenders-virtual-value-gdc-2015
http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/03/01/why-its-scary-when-0-15-mobile-gamers-bring-in-50-of-the-revenue/#6ef843411ad8
http://kotaku.com/who-are-the-whales-driving-free-to-play-gaming-youd-1197333118
Also, you seem to grossly overestimate the impact of non-whales on F2P revenue. From an ecenomic perspective the only truly interesting customer is the whale. The rest could leave in droves and you wouldn't notice a difference. You see whales leaving and the ship will sink. Now granted, too many non-whales leave and the whales will follow, so you will want to retain at least a modicum of non-whales but to listen to their pleas or opinions is basically a non-issue. They would be entirely irrelevant if it weren't for their whale-retaining factor Automated systems are:
- Prone to error
- Prone to false positives
- unreliable
- easily circumvented
- easily exploited for malicious purposes
Take "Punkbuster" for example: You can easily manipulate Punkbuster to get players banned that you disagree with, regardless of whether they are actually hacking or not:http://mp1st.com/2012/01/24/hackers-attack-punkbuster-at-the-expense-of-battlefield-3-players/#.V1wjhPmLS70
Not to mention the sheer amount of false bans Punkbuster i known for:
http://www.pcgamer.com/punkbuster-false-positives-leading-to-battlefield-3-bans-ea-is-investigating/
http://bf4central.com/2013/11/punkbuster-bans-innocent-battlefield-4-players-violation-89265/
And not to mention that one of the simplest things for Macro programmers is to bypass security measures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hABj_mrP-no
Automated solutions are the worst solutions and lead to exactly the kind of negative repercussions for legitimate player that I am talking about. It's best to not even try to combat them, especially in a non-competitive game like NWO (no, I don't consider PvP relevant, not in this game, not with this engine and certainly not with this netcode).
Now :
i post a pet for 500k in the AH
it does not sell,
someone undercuts me at 480k
with the vip benefit i can cancel my auction and put the pet at 460
With a posting fee - I'll just wait till someone buys the 480k pet and leave mine standing at 500k
So with fee - two pets 480k and 500k
without fee two pets 460 and 480k
and when the other guy has vip and decides to undercut me price drops down even more.
zhentarim-warlock-companion
Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
Looking at NWO it seems to me that in this game this is exactly the strategy: BIS players have an outstanding position that can not be achieved by non-whales. They seem to constantly reassure that progression from a certain IL on (the IL that is appropriate for the PVE content they offer...so about 2.5kIL (for a toon that does not have a hilariously nonsensical build) is unbelievably grindy and well, pointless. So for a player like me (non-whale) there is nothing to do - which is ok because as long as new players come along it does not matter whether I leave. So they improved things for new players (campaign rework, leveling dungeons etc.).
Unfortunately, again, this economic concept has very negative consequences on game design. Good PVE design and even more so, good PVP design is just downright impossible.
But I wonder, is it really not possible (why not?) to run a game on a different model, namely relying on many smaller transactions - I mean, there has to be a range of people between the freerider who refuses to spend anything and the whale who spends several thousand € per year?
Better game design is obviously possible if you rely on many smaller and reliable transactions. Reliable because with this model you can far better bind regular players to the game over time/keep them interested in your well-designed game.
Whereas the whale-based model with its negative consequences on game design seems to be far less likely to ensure a long life for a game? And when it hits rock bottom there is no revenue anymore at all?
But I´m curious: although it seems to look like that...do you really think NWO is mainly financed by whales? And if so, it would still be possible to change course? Or not? Why not? Too late? I´m curious about these things...
Several things to consider:
Why is undercutting the least efficient strategy? It lowers your potential revenue and you get nothign in return except a higher likelyhood of sale. That higher likelyhood is only relevant, if there is a risk to a failed auction. With the waver, there is not. Even with a posting fee, undercutting would still be an inferior strategy to "buy high, sell higher":Most players will simply use the proposed listing price and be done with it
Most players will not check whether they have been undercut after they listed their item, even if they set their own price
Undercutting is the least efficient economic strategy
There is no incentive for you to undercut in the first place (I'll go into more detail below)
The VIP waver of the posting fee encourages auction sniping
The VIP waver of the posting fee encourages price gouging (more detail below)
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/08/buy-strength-high.asp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rsgN4wXLjQ
what that means for MMORPG economies is best explained by none other than Freelancer himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxqviXuS1vY
And that's not the half of it, either. There's still market and trend analysis, bottlenecking, supply and demand anticipation, etc. It's not exactly rocket science but it's not simply "undercut my competitor" either. The latter is actually eceonomic suicide for the most part. And brings us to the point of why undercut in the first place?
As long as we are talking about bulk products, like RP stacks, it's not really individual prices that matter. Yeah, if you place a stack of R5s at 4K you will sell it immideatedly. The one selling it for 21K will still sell his, though. So all you actually achieved was lowering your own profits in the process. Had you kept your offer at the same 21K, you would have sold your stack at 21K as well. The sheer volume of sales will guarantee that. (That's why I can still sell my dyes at 3K a piece, even if the proposed lisiting price is currently at 2K a piece). What's more, if there are only a few listed at 21K it might even be wiser to simply buy those out and sell them for 23K a stack. Undercutting on a continuous demand product is rarely ever a lucrative bunsiness decision. But how about rare, high value items, like legendary mounts? To answer that question, let us look a bit into the history of the NWO market:
Before the AD Leadership nerf, tenser's floating disk was the single highest priced Legendary mount at 10M AD. Since there was no VIP at that time, listing it at that value carried the risk of losing 1M AD if you didn't sell it within 4 days. Tenser's was exceedingly rare and as sch the only mount valued that highly. It was mostly a prestige item. Other legendary mount, like the emperor beetle were priced around 4-8M AD instead.
Compare that to the current prices of legendary mounts (lowest - highest per listed item):
Do you happen to notice a difference? Do you know what might be different since then, now that leadership armies can no longer produce 450K AD per day?Beholder Personal Tank [13M - 16.5M]
Armored Griffon [16M - 25M]
Swift Golden Lion [16.9M - 30M]
Armored Axe Beak [23.5 - 45M]
Champion's Armored Bullette [24M - 40M]
Emperor Beetle [30M]
Armored Giant Strider [34M - 39M]
Coastal Flail Snail [48M - 62M]
Tenser's Floating Disk [48.8M - 80M]
Imperial Rage Drake [60M]
Thereis simply no incentive for them to sell them for lower other than the fact that most players don't have the cash anymore and those who have might be unwilling to part with it, but such convictions can be eroded over time and as such it makes economic sense to wait for the sale rather than reducing the price. Sure, 80M is rather unlikely to be sold, but 20M is within economic feasibility atm.
So not even on the rare goods market is undercutting a lucratvie stragety. Sure, ecessive gouging isn't either, but selling a legendary mount for 2M AD atm is idiotic! Why would anyone do that? Not when you can realistically expect it to be sold for at least 10M AD. Especially now that the ZAX is slow and backed up and 40% off voucher lose their attractiveness to most players. Fewer opened boxes = more lucrative legendary mount market.
That's why price gouging is the logical consequence of waving the auction listing fee and I see myself vindicated simply looking at the market trend over the last 3 months.
You see, you might be feeling clever and cheekiny, undercutting your competitors, but you are actually the sucker in that tradeoff. Your competitor might as well have been the very one buying your companion and selling it with a profit in the process.
P.S.: You can keep any and all typos you may find, too lazy to fix them right now. Maybe later.
You can visit a site that is not allowed to be named here, but i am sure you are familiar with - and check the AH data of the Tenser's disk price - dropped from 20 to 12 mil. AD in a month after the VIP was released, or the emperor beetle from 8m to 4.5m (before the patch making it 140% that is.)
zhentarim-warlock-companion
Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12
Possible explanations for the delayed onset are incremental rather than bulk VIP purchases, seeing as the fee is waved only from VIP rank 8 onward as well as declining player rates, leading to fewer opened boxes and an increased scarcity of prestige goods.
Either way, prices are nearly 10 times what they were before. Are you still denying this? If so, then I know to stop. I know better than to argue with quixotics.
Second after your statement that prices rose ten fold and everyone playing since before vip knows that this is simply false i will just assume you are pretty bad at playing the AH and are simply jealous of the vip benefits and with that i wish you good luck in the game.
zhentarim-warlock-companion
Pure -> Transcendent Plague Fire weapon enchantment giving 80damge/20 seconds for 500k+ AD is a joke.
plague-fire-weapon-enchant-r11-vs-r12