Gold farmers, account hacking, botting...

[Mortal]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... qru7I#t=1s

I think this is worth watching, especially if you`re planning to develop an MMO.

What I got from this:

1. If the MMO is pay to play, the company will actually profit from the chinese gold farmers playing it. However, the greater the damage they do, the greater resources the company will have to put into customer service to satisfy the demands of players.

2. If it`s free to play, there will still be chinese gold farmers, but they will be competing with the prices of an online cash shop (the developers have to get their salary somehow). If the developers were to sell game currency in exchange for real life currency, gold farmers would have to sell it for an even lower price, which means they have to farm more cash for the same amount of money. If the cash shop were to sell ingame currency and end-game gear cheap enough, it wouldn`t be profitable for the farmers to even bother with the MMO. This basically means that the developers replace themselves with gold farmers without having the negative aspects such as botting and (account) hacking.

3. If nothing has value, there is nothing for gold farmers to sell. Imagine all you could do with your gold is buy potions at the shop. More or less how it was in Torchlight 1, so it`s not that bad. Ofcourse, then gold farmers would go over to the gear. High end stuff, uniques, set items. What if even they dropped often, and had little market value? Then the gold farmers would again have nothing valuable for sale.

4. If no one buys from gold farmers, they can`t make a living out of the MMO and will have to move onto something else. Ofcourse, it would be quite utopic if no one bought any gold. If it has market value, there will always be customers and providers.

5. Banning bots is only a temporary solution. Making the game "cheat proof" will not make it cheat proof. Look at Diablo III. The online DRM was said to stop all cheaters, but from what I hear it didn`t stop anything. Just have a look at these:

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4552427834

http://eu.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/4551698329

[SirRight]

I saw your first video link and thought, darn 40 minutes long! Highly recommend everyone spend 40 minutes to watch this! The last ten minutes talks about how accounts are stolen.

Highly educational! I don't necessarily agree with what the young entrepreneur is doing but have to respect his ability to capitalize on a need that exists in certain games.

[AllGamer]

the best way to make the MMO gold farmer and bot unfriendly, is simply to make items as no value at all in game

no notion of currency of any kind

just sell stuff straight out of Cash Shop, or Collect points in game, which are not transferable to another account, but you accumulate points to trade for stuff on a in game NPC shop, you can trade and give items to other players, but no currency or points of any sort.

setup a Teacher / Pupil "Job" per say, so people willing to help new players how to play can earn additional points for both teacher & student (to encourage the use of the system) for whatever they need. mostly potions / food / basic weapon & armour gears

the student automatically graduates after reach certain levels, to prevent abuse of the Teacher / Pupil system to earn points

I like the Cash Shop idea for Power Up stuff, and special weapon, armour, pets, mounts / rides not available in game

by using the Point system, instead of currency, people will not be able to profit by buying from Cash Shop then selling them for in game currency

Now, it's debatable if Cash Shop items should be allowed to be given away for free or not, the idea of Cash Shop item is to encourage specialty and uniqueness

but i guess there's nothing wrong if some one wants to give their friends / family members cash shop items since there's no value to be gained by giving it away.

maybe add a [THANKS] button on the trade window, and make each Thanks counts as "TBD" amount of points in return, and you can only press the Thanks button once per day per account

The items you can trade with points within the game NPC shops should have always have lesser stats than Cash Shop items, just to avoid Cash Shop people from feeling not worth their penny if they can get similar quality stuff using in game items only from NPC

[Zidders]

" If nothing has value, there is nothing for gold farmers to sell. Imagine all you could do with your gold is buy potions at the shop. More or less how it was in Torchlight 1, so it`s not that bad. Ofcourse, then gold farmers would go over to the gear. High end stuff, uniques, set items. What if even they dropped often, and had little market value? Then the gold farmers would again have nothing valuable for sale."

So, basically, if you make your game an utterly bland, boring and uninteresting game that noone wants to play, people will be less inclined to bot farm/base a sweatshop around it?

Good strategy. Future game developers who take this advice to heart, get back to me and let me know how that works out for you lol.

[nightwing497]

" If nothing has value, there is nothing for gold farmers to sell. Imagine all you could do with your gold is buy potions at the shop. More or less how it was in Torchlight 1, so it`s not that bad. Ofcourse, then gold farmers would go over to the gear. High end stuff, uniques, set items. What if even they dropped often, and had little market value? Then the gold farmers would again have nothing valuable for sale."

So, basically, if you make your game an utterly bland, boring and uninteresting game that noone wants to play, people will be less inclined to bot farm/base a sweatshop around it?

Good strategy. Future game developers who take this advice to heart, get back to me and let me know how that works out for you lol.

Yup exactly people will loose interest in playing an mmo anymore....

[adoomgod]

An mmo should be a bit, a BIT grindier than TL2 to add some longevity.

However, grind fuels botters who have multiple accounts and unlimited time.

Thus, make the best loot drop in events that take skill and have randomized pitfalls and traps so a bot has more difficulty surviving it due to their simplistic A.I.

Focus on fun and challenge rather than the grind.

[Elbozo]

" If nothing has value, there is nothing for gold farmers to sell. Imagine all you could do with your gold is buy potions at the shop. More or less how it was in Torchlight 1, so it`s not that bad. Ofcourse, then gold farmers would go over to the gear. High end stuff, uniques, set items. What if even they dropped often, and had little market value? Then the gold farmers would again have nothing valuable for sale."

So, basically, if you make your game an utterly bland, boring and uninteresting game that noone wants to play, people will be less inclined to bot farm/base a sweatshop around it?

Good strategy. Future game developers who take this advice to heart, get back to me and let me know how that works out for you lol.

Worked out for WoW pretty well.

Also, not sure how gold being valueless and items being non-important makes an "utterly bland, boring and uninteresting game". I thought game mechanics decided on that, not in-game economy? I think you sipped too much on D3 kool-aid!

[boot]

I thought game mechanics decided on that, not in-game economy?

Course they do, but let's not forget economy is also a game mechanic.
Once you setup a trading system and currency, botters seek to make money out of it.
If there's no such option, they won't be making money and there will be no bots.

If you setup item dependent competition, they will sell competitive advantage.
Unless the gear is just a visual with completely balanced stats = no advantage = no profit.

For those of you familiar with wow, there was this one mechanic called a title.
I've seen them selling gold all the time, but I don't seem to recall any decent titles.
Titles don't give any advantage so they're not as profitable as other mechanics?
Or it's because some titles like general or conqueror are impossible to bot?

My point : If you give these people an opportunity to profit, it's your own fault.
Personally, I think it's obvious, botting is not dealt with because of extra profit it brings.
RMAH system proves it. As long as the cash keeps coming in, screw the player experience, aye?

[AllGamer]

Path of Exile is currently using such system, and it's doing pretty good, and they are still in beta.

There's also another cute pie themed MMORPG NosTale, that also doesn't use currency for in games NPC items, the only way to get items that sort of resemble currency is through Quests, and you can repeat the same quest as many time as you need to gather enough items for your trade. The only downside of that game is the character running speed is waaaaaaaaaaay tooo slow.

They are all F2P, and supported by CashShop which i don't mind at all.

There many more MMO that are like that and don't use a currency and in game trading/selling of anything that resembles a currency in game to prevent those "Gold Farmers" from SPAMing the games