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RMT spam and player experience.
genemaricadie
Member, NW M9 Playtest Posts: 12 Arc User
There is an aspect of this game that has baffled me from day 1. RMT players (and bots) are given free reign to ply their trade with impunity. In zones like Protector's Enclave RMT spam makes up, very literally, 50% of the text seen in zone chat. To combat this we can report these toons as spam. However, if you're like me and reported a number of spammers that is only reasonably presented in scientific notation, you will probably have noticed that reporting spammers just adds the account to your ignore list. Out of sight, out of mind. Right guys?
This isn't just a complaint about a personal pet peeve. Aside from being the RMT spam capital of Neverwinter, Protector's Enclave is also a gathering point for players looking for content. That's game content, not $12 USD for the dragon race content. 12 bots with their user ID bashed into the home row putting an identical message into every conceivable chat channel every 30 seconds has a tendency to interrupt the content search interaction.
As a final note; someone charging $5 for 100k astral diamonds is very, VERY literally taking money from you, Cryptic.
So what do you do? Give a warning then ban IPs for the second infraction. Charge $5 for 10k astral diamonds, It's not like you're strangers to micro transactions. so people don't have to go through a sketchy third party site.
Improve player satisfaction, create a new source of revenue for yourself. Win-win.
This isn't just a complaint about a personal pet peeve. Aside from being the RMT spam capital of Neverwinter, Protector's Enclave is also a gathering point for players looking for content. That's game content, not $12 USD for the dragon race content. 12 bots with their user ID bashed into the home row putting an identical message into every conceivable chat channel every 30 seconds has a tendency to interrupt the content search interaction.
As a final note; someone charging $5 for 100k astral diamonds is very, VERY literally taking money from you, Cryptic.
So what do you do? Give a warning then ban IPs for the second infraction. Charge $5 for 10k astral diamonds, It's not like you're strangers to micro transactions. so people don't have to go through a sketchy third party site.
Improve player satisfaction, create a new source of revenue for yourself. Win-win.
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Comments
And yet still no MMO I've played till now managed to fight spam bots succesfully
Not only - if enough people report the same toon it gets muted for some time
Yeah, I havent played WoW. I did play, for longer or shorter times, most major f2p mmos, diablo2, 3 and guild wars 1. I was spammed with currency offers in all these games
Edit: after googling I found this: http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Gold_spam
So it seems even WoW has gold seller issues
EVE Online. RMT is explicitly forbidden in the EULA. Players found breaking that particular rule are promptly given a permanent IP ban. The result is purchased game currency comes directly from the parent company, farming is present but kept to a minimum resulting in both self-controlled inflation, as well as a more dynamic market, FINALLY players are not repeatedly encouraged to give cc info to websites whose only claim to legitimacy is "We probably have AD."
Thank you for revealing yourself as an RMT spammer on the forums by providing a link to your sketch website.
Concise. Insightful. Agrees with me. Solid +1
ALSO: I found this little gem posted by a dev last year.
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums#/discussion/540213/third-party-web-sites
While I'd love less rmt, and a good filter, let's stop with the ip ban bs. I can have a new ip in seconds.
Its explicitly forbidden in PWE's TOS as well - for what that's worth.
Sekhmet@kvetchus_
Guilds: Greycloaks, Blackcloaks, Whitecloaks, Goldcloaks, Browncloaks, Spiritcloaks, Bluecloaks, Silvercloaks, Black Dawn
Tredecim: The Cloak Alliance
To prevent this from devolving into counterproductive accusations about respective "intelligence levels" let me move this thread back to its original subject.
Neverwinter has a problem. RMT, and the associated spam is destructive to the game. Players find spam irritating and try to use the tools Cryptic has given us to block it. Spammers know this and use bots to create infinite spamming accounts so we will never be able to block them all. Aside from being irritating, this behavior and Cryptic's continued tolerance of it contributes to game market inflation, exposes players to potentially malicious websites, and takes income directly from the developers of the game that, I assume, we all enjoy.
This is not a problem that needs some homebrew bandaid; it needs Cryptic to take the modicum of effort needed to improve the game for both players and themselves.
"The solution presents us with a new problem so we should do nothing." Well said. It's a well known fact that apathy makes everything better.
Looked at Akro's profile and saw "developer" in the 3 lines of his descriptors. So, yes, my bad but probably understandable. That said: YES. I agree with everything you said here. I didn't give drkbodhi much attention because, honestly, with the "millions" comment I wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or is just very bad at estimations. While I wasn't talking about botters to begin with, you are correct. As far as gameplay goes, they fit exactly into the same category as the RMT spammers.
I played EVE for 2 years. RMT does exist, but is extraordinarily rare. Not only does ccp (The parent company) take a hard line against it, the player culture is generally adamantly against RMT and tends to be vigilant to the extreme when it comes to botters.
WoW had a very useful add-on called Spammenot, which blocked all gold sellers and spammers. Ah the good ole' days...
The most important thing in life is to be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Always be Batman.
You will know when I am being sarcastic... it will be pink in color. Not to mention Kvet knows me well enough to know I do not like cheaters, bots or exploiters.
Good to know. I like seeing other people who are tired of tolerating botters and spammers. I would love to get enough people willing to let Cryptic know that this is a serious detriment to their product.
I shouldn't need to say this, but "I use bots in this game because it is easy to use bots in this game." is not a problem with the game. It's a justification and an excuse on your part.
You've totally misunderstood that post. The point was that if there is nothing that bots can sell, because they can't obtain the materials, and/or there's no market among the players, then there no reason for them to be advertising in a game either. Neverwinter is so rampant with botting and spam because the game itself has created an environment that fosters their market.
Neverwinter Census 2017
All posts pending disapproval by Cecilia
exactly. Not to overuse this example, but in Marvel Heroes...I don't think I've ever seen a botter spam ANYTHING...ever. But then again...there's nothing in that game for them to bot and sell. everything you get that's mission critical is bound, it's all your account ONLY, and the entire game is designed around providing the player with vendor options to take advantage of those drops. T
here is no market, anything that you can actually trade (that doesn't bind), is either unnecessary in the end game, or is simply not worth trading. but, there is some trading...however, it is basically "drop on ground and trust the other player" ala diablo 2 style. and most of that isn't worth anything anyways. people will often "clean house" and drop dozens of equipment right outside the storage containers...so if you hang around long enough you can even get nice stuff w/o having to do anything but say thanks!
and, ironically, there are no botters! no need to have GM's tirelessly browse chat channels and kill hundreds of bots a day, no need to make clumsy and hard to interact with interfaces to slow down bots (and players), no need to constantly have to adjust prices and crafts and artificially inflate/deflate the market. and it works. And its a f2p game. and it's still around, with quite active forums.
path of Exile is a bit different, but shares similar mechanics. There IS no currency in game, and everything you want drops pretty regularly actually. the only things of value that are trade-able are the materials you use to upgrade your items (skills really, as all your skills rely on gems you find that you level up with you). yeah....sounds allot like enchantments and relics, but it works differently. this process (and the materials) are isolated to the game. the actual cash shop is NOT involved in this process...thus the companies ability to make money is not dependent on player trading. Their cash shop is fully customization only.
But PoE is very much an indie game, with a small budget (though very nicely designed for an indie game), and thus they have more flexibility then someone like Cryptic who not only has cooperate policies and command chains to respect, but they also have to meet certain numbers for the shareholders on the top floor. but it's still a good example of an approach that works.
I don't think I've misunderstood anything. Bots exist because they are being allowed to exist. Cryptic has made, very literally, no attempt to curtail their proliferation. Off the top of my head, farming AD then selling it for whatever USD per million has simply GOT to be copyright infringement. And if, somehow, that isn't against the EULA then Cryptic dropped the ball hard and needs to fix that HAMSTER immediately. That said, you are correct about the market aspect of the game. That I can't play a dragonborn without paying for it is HAMSTER, and that it is given to buyers as an unbound in-game item is embarrassingly poor design on Cryptic's part.
You know I never noticed that it wasn't a fixed number of rares up in game. I'm going to have to look at that now.