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