26 Reply by Pak

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Xira Indy Production wrote:
DEV Calvin wrote:

If a trail account can sell items, he can sell an ammo for 100 million NIC. From this point on, no money from exploits, RMT or any other unwanted activity can be traced.


Funny, WoW does it just fine. In fact they shut down RMT traders whiten seconds and often take the money they just mailed away from the recipient.

You aren't WoW devs, you aren't that good, but you should at least try.

Actually WoW does a very bad job with RMT. They only get the scammers. Those that intentionally do it the "easy" way because they do not care if the customer is caught: they already got his money. Nor they care of the trial account, of course. There's much much more "serious" RMT in WoW than in any other game.

Note: money laundering (and how it can help RMT) is the problem. Not someone creating a trial and using it to send NIC to someone else. That's easily traceable. But not a scheme where you create hundreds of accounts and rapidly make thousands of small transactions on the market, with a reasonable percentage of them involving innocent people (yes: a sizable percentage of RMT virtual currency is basically "donated" to unsuspecting innocent people by buying their items from the market, as a way to make tracing the real transactions difficult) but end up eventually "converging" several money flows (maybe after several trades). These schemes are very very hard to trace. And they generally involve hundreds of unsuspecting regular players that act as intermediaries by simply doing their regular business.

In WoW this is (at least was, as things may have changes since I last played it) actually very easy because you could see all the names of people associated with orders on the auction house. And even get the data with the client interface API (the same used by things like auctioneer). You could actually automate the search for complex schemes of transactions for money laundering.

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Um, last I played WoW, trials couldn't use the AH there either. Nor could they send items or money through the mail, or direct trade. Nor could they initiate conversation with someone.

28 Reply by Pak

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Alexander wrote:

It is profitable to make 10 trial accounts, macro (Legally according to a GM) all the accounts to respond to the same control input. Finish the 10 stage tutorial with around 1 million NIC+ of assets in less than an hour, transfer the NIC to a paid character and repeate.

The more trial accounts you make the more NIC you made.

Stop thinking so small scale. It's not hard to get 10 accounts tied into one input. People are known to do this with mining.

Liquid NIC should not be transferable. Ever.

Assets valued 1 million NIC should be transferable through the market as long as the buyer(s) pays them 1 million NIC.

Where exactly is the problems?

Also I can make 2 or 3 million NIC an hour on a subscribed account that is 18 days old, without multiboxing. And I'm very noob in Perpetuum. I'm sure someone with real skills (and I do mean player skills, not extensions) may be able to make more.

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29 Reply by Elsa (edited by Elsa 2011-07-22 22:09:36)

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

As it stands right now, replacing ammo and lost equipment as a trial is a rather expensive affair, at least relative to the amount of NIC real newbie trials are generating. Allowing them to see the market doesn't address this.

If NIC transfers from multiple trials to active accounts are a concern, why not cap the amount of NIC trial accounts can hold and give them a very limited access to the market? Perhaps allow trials to make "blind" purchases from the lowest sell orders instead of NPC orders, and no selling?

As far as Warcarft goes, it's not a very good model to look at. RMT transactions there are done on fully active accounts and fairly commonplace. $10 to open a new account is just a cost of doing business.

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

allowing a trial to buy stuff from market/players is a good thing, since you can not put NIC into those accounts unless you actually play, trading is prohibited anyway (getting stuff a bit cheaper is a good thing, transfering items to them can be done also via can drop and access code anyways) and you can't sell T2-3-4 stuff to NPC too


accessing the players sell list and to put buy/sell orders would be bad, trading should still be prohibited

just my 2 cents

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

You could either leave the system as it is + ability to see the player market.

Or allow them buy from the market, but not allow them to use field cans and trading, so basically cut down on interaction that can allow the loot to being traded to a  subbed account.

There would still be the problem of buying 1 ammo piece for 100k... This thing can't be helped unless we make artificial boundaries on the market (involving taking the average price of ores from the market and not allowing the trade to complete if the cost is 10 times lower than the sell order) But we know how setting something on average prices went, right? Not to mention it will limit the market from being free.

The last solution could be limited to trail accounts and only allowing the low prices bid to be used for them (like 2-3 times the price of the ores - I am not sure for what price would a regular agent buy ammo). The problem with this I could get a trail account and try to look on the market, who produces stuff with a profit margin of 2 times the ore price (if the limit was to 3 times the ore prices)) which would give me intel on his skills. The good part is I could lower the prices to the level he can't compete, but will also lead to 0.01 NIC bid wars - we see that even now. This would also lead to a dishonest market.

Like I just show there is a lot of way to do it and at least one or more ways to abuse the system. I am here to give tips how to do it, but at the same want to show you the dangers involved for the market.

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

lola wrote:

allowing a trial to buy stuff from market/players is a good thing, since you can not put NIC into those accounts unless you actually play, trading is prohibited anyway (getting stuff a bit cheaper is a good thing, transfering items to them can be done also via can drop and access code anyways) and you can't sell T2-3-4 stuff to NPC too


accessing the players sell list and to put buy/sell orders would be bad, trading should still be prohibited

just my 2 cents

you know, you can give trials ammo via field-can, direct trade (AFAIK) or even transfer NIC to them via direct trade. Thats all they need IMHO to test the game.

one thing could be discussed: Ammo-less weapons. Are they still impossible by game engine?

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Arga wrote:

Karbon - It's possible, at least until they nerf transport missions, to open 10 (20,50,100) trial accounts and run the triangle from day 1, and earn about 1 M NIC/hour/account. AC of course is not worried about the average player, just those out to abuse the system. Even after the transport change, there will simply be another 'best' way to make large volumes of nic with free accounts. Typically this person is going to be selling the NIC in RMT, so they have an actual incentive to find and exploit ways to make free NIC. In case you didn't know, it's possible to trade items in containers outside the outpost, so the trial accounts could buy a 8 M NIC riveler, then hand it back to the 'real acccount' so nothing of value ends up on the trial account, and they are just abandonded afet 15 days. Put a cap on it, no problem the accounts are free, so they earn the cap, xfer the NIC and open a dozen more.

^^This

Just say no to the chinese farmers!! RMT spam stay away. This was one area where EVE really screwed up.

34 Reply by Winter Solstice (edited by Winter Solstice 2011-07-28 17:16:45)

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Yes pls, I dont want to see blown up arkhes in patterns like this:

http://cthurau.fargonauten.de/files/corpse.png

WoW does NOT do a good job at RMT, even with the likely dozens of folks whose only job it is to catch them.. it's just that their coke bucket is so deep it doesn't effect their game enough to tighten things down.  It's not a matter of shooting 12 men to get the criminal.  It's a matter of not letting anyone have guns to start with.

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Re: Why are trial accounts not able to see player created market sales?

Biggest problem is that as a trial you struggle with ammo costs which doesn't make things look good and puts undue hardship on people you want to subscribe.

While I understand why I simply don't understand the thinking behind the design if a transaction path is only one way it can't be abused.

Not only that I think you've made the gameplay detrmental to the majority to deal with the few which is never good.