Integrity of the game

Actually I think this is an extremely viable concern and many people haven't handled it right lately. I think ESO and Archage are perfect examples of how NOT to handle things... I think GW2 is a great example of how TO handle things.

There was a vendor in GW2 that you could buy an item from one vendor for xx gold and sell it to this one for xxxxx gold (it was like 300% profit per item) and people sold THOUSANDS of them and essentially multiplied their gold unlimited...

So what did GW2 team do? They checked the logs weekly and found it and everyone who exploited (more than a couple times selling) got banned... the end. They lost their account and everything in it (including all their stockpiled gold). They then reset the gold (in-game currency) to diamond (premium currency) factors to the prior week.

ESO (and I guess now Archeage)? They let things roll and said "oh well". bad move *smh* bad move...

The economy will recover if you track and react quick enough to things like that... this team has AMAZING logs and we need to give them the $$$ so someone can sit there and watch those logs to make sure our economy doesn't get exploited ^.^

 

The Importance of Posting Things in "Our Forum" ...
It's posting our in game experiences here "in this forum" that provides our developers with the in game information they need to identify what is exactly happening so they can then fix any problem.
Some exploits are kept hidden from our developers (for whatever reason) in other SotA related forums and will not be seen unless our members engage themselves "in this forum" as their primary source for information...
Because that's where the developers can do something about it, which can only make our game better "for everyone" and not just for "the one". You won't see me posting anything on other forums because of this, and also because this is where our New Britannia truly lives. Currently there are many forums competing for our SotA audience... that doesn't mean that they are doing anything wrong, or bad...
Yet it does harm our game's ability to help everyone, "in everything"

Our game is moving forward at a rapid pace now, yet it was only this last May, when many other forums began popping up as the guilds began popping up. So I think it's important for our game, to remember which forum needs the most attention paid to it, in order to have us all more secure as to where our game is going, and all the humps and bumps becoming more openly identified. Archeage became what it is because of such dispersal of their players to other privet web sites, where information became a viable commodity between competing guilds. Such information thus became secret knowledge, because their server began it's consistent world too early, which caused such information of exploits to have real value.

And that is the true value for posting on "our forums" where things are still spoken of in the openness of true freedom
But then again... "I'm an Anarchist", so I may hold a different view about outside forums than others here do ...
~Time Lord~

 

We know that at least two in the dev team have previous experience of all of this. We know that Port mgmt have experience of this.
We know they have put metrics in place and track scene output over time. We know that as we progress they have put more and more of the stuff on server side.
So they are definitely on top of it and plan for it.

But if give a +1 to more account security than a single email+password combo.

 

/looks for sota autopilot.!

 

How is this any good, at all?

If this is a player run economy, then Port, price fixing, will not help anyone.

If someone sees a personal vendor asking at one price, and another selling at a lower price, that is not an exploit, that is a free market.

What you are supposed to do is be informative to the customers, not price fix, and definitely not punish the consumer.

ESO is not an open market -- their economy had nothing to do with people selling to each other, it was a player inventory duplication bug, and a bank inventory duplication bug. I was there.

As for GW2, same problem, its not an open, free market.

Which begs the question: WHAT IS THE MARKET/ECONOMY FOR SoTA? Is it a true, free, open market?

What are the regulations?
Is PORT the only regulator?
Will TAX fluctuate based on supply and demand?
Are there going to be things like INTEREST RATES that help govern the perceived value of certain goods?

Its all fine and dandy to just throw everyone out there crafting and hope we all set the same price(s), but that is utterly ridiculous if you want a living, breathing economy -- any amount of reading on basic economics will tell you thus.

Cheers.

 

I don't know anything about GW2. But I know SOTA plans to have fixed prices for every NPC vendor.

If an NPC vendor sells a Super Mega Death Sword for 10000 gold, all NPC vendors will sell for the same price. If you want a lower price, you'll have to find a player or a player owned vendor that will sell you the sword.

Because the NPC vendors will probably then only buy the same sword for 5000 gold, this will make it very easy for players to undercut the NPC vendors.

 

Which makes perfect sense. Just like in the real world. I have a Ford, I bought it for 10k. I decide to sell it.

The dealer will give me blue book + some bucks, or I can take a chance and sell it over dealer blue book myself, most likely NOT getting the full price I originally paid.

^^^^ there is the rub. If I do happen to find someone who is willing to pay MORE than the original cost, that is either because they really, really want the item, or maybe the item supply is dwindled, OR the are unknowledgable of the vendor price.

Note that last one, it is not my responsibility to educate people -- caveat emptor. Then, just like in REAL WORLD ECONOMIES, if I continue to do that over and over, people will make note that I am a disreputable, take advantage of people, seller.

The market outs itself.

So, we are all ok with everything being discoverable through use except for the economy? And need a regulator, PORT, to make fixed markets?

Regulations, standard practises, yes, banning and ripping money from people's accounts because someone got suckered? Or took advantage of poor economic price points?

Unless someone is flat out doing something like DUPING items for profit, hands off, just like everything else people want in this "sandbox".

Cheers.

 

I think you're misunderstanding the purpose of the fixed NPC vendor price fixing. It's a balancing factor that is being used to make players sellers more attractive than NPC vendors. Otherwise, people ignore the multiplayer aspects of the game and just "game" the system to their advantage.

I understand your aversion to over regulation but the real world doesn't have the exact same problem that we're talking about here. Although the real world certainly has NPC's (like Amazon.com) it's not controlled and owned by an omnipotent being that created the game for the purpose of "making money". In other words, the economy of SOTA doesn't follow the same rules as the real world because it's not the real world, it's a simulation.

If you really wanted to simulated further (or better) you'd get rid of all NPC's, something I'd be in favor of but something that would also be trickier to manage from Portalarium's point of view.

But back on topic. Since we know that NPC's are supposed to sell the same item for the same price no matter what NPC you're dealing with. If you bought a sword for 1000 gold from NPC X, walked across the street and sold the sword for 20k to NPC Y, then you'd be exploiting the system. If you did this 20 times in a row you'd deserve to get banned.

 

To play devils advocate...

I think NPC vendors should have some variation to each one....give it a percentage point value...or a chance some sword could be 5% off at this guy at some time.

Having all NPC vendors exactly the same works for online...but makes for a rather boring single player game...why bother going to different vendors if they are all the same?

All in all it shouldn't be a simple solution to vendors to make PC vendors viable.

 

I see your point. But NPC vendors will not all sell the same stuff...that's why you'd go to each one to see what they were selling.

Still, if your idea of fun is to carry one digital item from one digital vendor to another so you can min/max profit by the slim margins of random percentages....ok, go nuts...especially in single player mode. I don't really care what people do in that mode as long as it doesn't ruin the online economy.

 

It's not jut to maximize profits it's also nice to get a deal. Single player online will share the economy of the main MMO. I don't see how having slightly fluciating prices will affect the market for sellers, especailly if those flucations are tied into what is happening in the economy.

For example...say the economy gets flooded with flour, there is way more flour then there is demand....the price of flour will lower for both buying and selling....why wouldn't the NPC vendors react to said issues?

I'm getting a little concerned about how many descisions are based on what will work best for the online world with little thought on how it will affect the overall game.

 

rune, there's two things going on here...

1. If you're playing in the online world, then you have to accept that the online world is impacted by your playing. There's no way around that. If you don't want to deal with that, play single player only mode. Problem solved.
2. The reason NPC's can't have different prices is because it creates an opportunity for players to game the system. It would be exactly like farming monsters for gold, only in this case you'd be buying from one NPC to sell to anther NPC over and over again. Neither of those activities, monster farming or NPC trading are good for an economy if the players are just milking the game for profit.

 

Completely agree.

NPC vendors should fluctuate on price from town to town and that fluctuation should depend on the amount of that particular item the vendor has.....the more you sell the lower the price will get, the more you buy then the price goes up. Yes.....this means players could make maybe 5-10% profit by selling to one vendor and then moving across the world and all those random instances in order to buy cheaper goods in another town.

Quite frankly the way GW2 dealt with there issue is absolutely shocking.......if it took them that long to realise there was an issue (ie the economy broke) then it is very poor. The idea that they then 'banned' accounts of players who used a perfectly legitimate buying and selling routine is sickening.

For me it's not about bots or macros, it's about identifying real holes that allow real hacks (duping etc) and identify unintended features that enable players to get rich quick through standard play. For unintended features, I don't believe a player should be punished..the GW2 is a perfect example of what shouldn't happen.

 

The continous respone to all problems seem to be to tell players to play offline....which to this date don't have any systems to deal with said problems.

A small percentage difference in price (not a set one but a fluctuating one where sometimes an item will be cheaper does not really make it a reality that it will be used as milking system...and I'm not even sure I ever stated that was what I was looking for.

You have to be able to get gold off of monsters and you have to be able to trade with npc's at the end the day. Now, there has to be checks and balances to enure they don't get taken advantage of.

For instance, UO had a ecology at start....if there were too many deer in an area more wolves showed up(I'm simplying this.) and vice versa.

That is how vendors should be affected by changing world conditions.

The last thing this game needs is NPC's like UO had that were basically vending machines.

 

I have to say I completely disagree......GW2 had an unintended feature, but it was a feature that players could use legitimately. This is something that should have been spotted far sooner.

To ban players who found a legitimate way to make fast gold by simply buying and selling is just wrong. They should have been monitoring their economy a lot better to establish what was happening.

In my opinion they should have removed the excess gold from the accounts that had stockpiled, compensated them with some free stuff from the store.....and then reset the economy. To ban them actually makes me sick to the core.

 

Expanding that idea, I'd also like to see NPC vendors not buying all the stuff either.

Why does the lease vendor buy swords, and leather armour, and sheep carcasses.

Makes no sense.

 

It's because most of the problems between single player mode and single player online mode are solved by just playing offline.

In the case of having fluctuating NPC vendors, you have to realize that the problem only exists when you introduce a broader online economy. If you take that away, there's no problem. It's not more complex than that.

 

I am also a player on Archeage and the hacking and exploiting on that game is unreal. From property claiming to the marketplace, it seems like it will never end on that game. I used an exploit on that game myself. I'm talking about the "rumbling archeum tree" exploit from the RNG marketplace boxes. I read about it on the AA forum, tried it once to see if it worked, and sure enough it did. I didn't care about getting banned or anything because ultimately I will close down my AA account and focus on SOTA, (dont worry, I will play legit) Not only did I not get banned on that game, but I also didn't lose any of the gains I had made either, even though the AA devs claimed they had taken action. Maybe they didn't bother me because I only used it once, honestly just to appease my curiosity, I guess I'd say that I abused the exploit without ABUSING it, if you get what I mean. One of the biggest problems I feel with AA was the release of content without having users test it on a test server. Trion would receive content from XL games, do some "in house testing" and then release it to the community only to find that it was severely flawed. One thing that will definitely make me feel better about SOTA, would be an early commitment to a Test Server. Giving players the ability to test and break content before it's officially applied to the actual servers will prevent a lot of economy breaking things from happening.

 

We're starting to veer off-topic, but I think the easiest solution is to use the categories they have already. All items in list view appear in certain tabs (House decorations, crafting, equipment, etc). They could just limit certain vendors to buying from some of those groups.

As for examples from GW2 and such, that seemed an overreaction if they didn't really cheat and just bought/sold items for a profit. That seems like poor game design. Maybe you reset the gold on those players and send them a warning but why a ban for that?

I do trust that Starr and Chris are taking security seriously and that the specifics of it shouldn't be discussed publicly.

 

Hopefully no one. For a true player-run economy, most if not all of the buying and selling needs to be between players, not computers.