Did anyone officially discuss how this system might be finalized? Tad early but not early enough to discuss the bottle necks some of us players go through.
If it hasnt been discused then maybe its not to far from discussing why each system is hard pressed against players.
Id like to see everything not tradeable. Yet i dont want the servers to turn into a dps race, fighting, disrespecting loot RMT system.
I also dont wish to see ecomonies ruined inside the game, such as selling in an open market (EC tunnel) or market system.
So far all i have seen is RMT systems being sold out of game for plat, or real money. I hope it doesnt go this way.
Maybe make plat non tradeable?
How do you feel? in a civil manner please, because these topics can get heated.
Crazzie said:Id like to see everything not tradeable. Yet i dont want the servers to turn into a dps race, fighting, disrespecting loot RMT system.
Help me understand this statement. How will making everything no drop promote an RMT system?
Crazzie said:I also dont wish to see ecomonies ruined inside the game, such as selling in an open market (EC tunnel) or market system.
Then we definitely don't want a baby out with the bathwater solution like wholesale no drop on items and even currency.
Crazzie said:So far all i have seen is RMT systems being sold out of game for plat, or real money. I hope it doesnt go this way.
Maybe make plat non tradeable?
They're going to have anti gold mining and RMT policies in place. I don't think they've gone into any real detail, and frankly they probably shouldn't at this point. The less info for people who want to exploit the system for RMT gains, the better.
One thing that has been mentioned is making the free to play "starter" level players unable to use channels for broadcasting messages. Only a player who has purchased the game and has a sub would be able to wide spread advertise. It's also conceivable that there will be no global or even regional channels, just zone wide. This will make it easier to ban the RMT advertisers who will hang out in the most populous zones.
If people have to pay $60 for the game just to spam their RMT ads, hopefully many will just give up. I'm certain they will have additional measures in place as well.
This is actually another reason why we as community members are so important. If we police ourselves on things like killstealing and training, then VR can devote more resources to banning RMTers.
I also hope we see a sophisticated ban/blacklisting system based on CPU and GPU ID and not just IP address. If components of the computer itself are banned, kiss the people in farming cafes goodbye.
Crazzie said:Maybe make plat non tradeable?
Making everything no drop should be a last resort type of solution, not one they go into the game with, and frankly, if they have to go that way, then the game has probably already been destroyed.
You cant really stop RMTing. You can possibly detect gold sellers and buyers, but you will never be able to stop people from selling items themselves.
As far as all items being no drop... well, that's just a bad idea.
Imo raid items should be no drop, quest items should be no drop. But everything else should be tradeable.
I'm typically for all tradeable items, but I wouldn't mind seeing a scattered amount of "No Drop" items throughout the world to lessen some of the open world competition. I do think that if the item is no drop (and not raid or Coldain Ring Style quests) that they should be worse than the tradeable item due to the competition for the droppable items. FBSS type at 21% haste, and a no-drop item at 12-13% - something like that.
As to your OP, I'd say whether it's confirmed or not, it will be a safe bet there will be a combination of droppable and no-drop items.
Removing player-to-player trade is a quick way to turn me away from an MMO. I play with my husband and close friends, and we support each other with money, materials, and crafted or dropped (BoE) items. If I wanted to play a game without trade, I would go play a single-player game.
Most items should be bind-on-equip. It simply doesn't make sense for some magic to prevent trade of an item except under the most unusual circumstances.
With a raid boss or a major storyline drop (such as an epic item gotten after a long and difficult series of adventures) I can see the benefit of bind-on-acquire. "The sword begins to glow as you pick it up. You sense it attuning iteslf to you and realize that for anyone else it will just be a normal sword with no magical properties."
Quest rewards are traditionally bind-on-acquire and I think almost all of us are used to that system and would accept it.
Note that bind-on-acquire could be bind-to-account on acquire especially if the drop is random or semi-random and not guaranteed to be usable by the character getting it. It can be very frustrating to get the Plate Leggings of Uberosity after 15 tries at a raid boss, but this time you are running your caster not your heavy armor user.
Sometimes the suggested cure ends up being worse than the ailment it's prescribed for.
Making coin non-tradeable - doesn't this completely kill player commerce? How do I purchase a breastplate from a player crafter if I can't put coins in a trade window? For whatever system that you put in place which still allows for commerce, what stop players from circumventing it by paying 10K for a rat tail? I would think that "laundering" coin would be a trivial process.
A more salient approach would be to handle RMT internally within the game data. The devs can watch for significant coin transfers and flag them. There are specific patterns which are common to RMT vendors when it comes to aggregation and dispersal of game currency. Rather than penalize the vast majority of hard-working legitimate players with Draconian rule sets, the focus needs to be on identifying the problem players - through analysis. Unlike a drug lord who amasses a fortune off-shore through untracked accounts and currency exchanges, Pantheon knows how much is in every player's account and where exactly it came from. A significant investment in auditing tools for GMs will go a long way to ensuring the long-term health of the economy of Terminus and the Pantheon community.
RMT must be a completely illegal and bannable offence for both the seller and the buyer, reflected in the game rules. The community will favour players who earn their way honestly and shun the E-bay type acquisition of accounts or gear.
Farming only becomes a serious issue within a game in two instances: The first where there is RMT involved and the second where a particular quest item is perma-camped by a small group or a single guild. The solution to RMT is data analysis. The solution to perma-camped drops is to have them drop in more than one place. Rather than having the item drop from one named dragon, have a short list of named dragons of similar difficulty in various locations on Terminus, any one of which has an equal chance to drop it or other rare items sought by the vast community of players. It's OK to have to kill 20 dragons to get your drop over the course of many months. It's not OK if your guild never has a chance to kill a specific dragon because one uber group has it locked down. There shouldn't be a reason why that one dragon is critical to class advancement for epics. If it absolutely must be a one dragon to one specific piece of loot relationship, then it should be extremely unpredictable as to both where and when that dragon is going to spawn.
Other than these two farming examples, I believe that all other acquisition of goods by players is desirable and that players questing, harvesting and slaying for loot is what makes a vibrant economy in a game. We don't need a lot of restrictive loot mechanics.
I'm not a big fan of multi-questing, especially like we saw in P99 where players would farm and corpse items that were supposedly lore/nodrop. If you explored the waters just off the coast of the isle with the ancient cyclops in Ocean of Tears, you would often seem 10-20 player corpses for one or two players who were monopolizing the camp and selling jboots in EC. The AC camp could be brutal. You could spend 12 minutes or 12 hours killing 6 minute placeholder respawns to get the ancient's ring. So what's a worse scenario? Would you rather a game where players can camp and sell cyclops rings to players who don't want to spend 12 hours killing placeholders or do you take the attitude that if you want the reward that you must do the camp? I don't think there's any middle ground here. Players always seem to find ways to circumvent game mechanics intended to restrict farming (ie using corpses to store multiple lore items). Do we mostly solve the problem in the P99 example by closing the corpse/lore loophole? Does this at least make the camp more available so you don't have an 3-day lineup/list of players re-inserting themselves into the queue to take over a drop location?
I definitely favour a more open economy and I think with some minor tweaks, we can largely avoid a scenario of having too many loot mechanics hard coded into the game.
RMT is very, very hard to defeat, it's insidious. And frankly impossible to remove 100% without removing a ton of game features like trading.
RMT is even harder to identify and prove. The simple act of having VR Mods spending precious time chasing down RMT possibilities would be ridiculous.
The bottom line will be mechanics that steal from game functionality, just to battle RMT. I see no way around it.
Celandor said:It's OK to have to kill 20 dragons to get your drop over the course of many months. It's not OK if your guild never has a chance to kill a specific dragon because one uber group has it locked down. There shouldn't be a reason why that one dragon is critical to class advancement for epics. If it absolutely must be a one dragon to one specific piece of loot relationship, then it should be extremely unpredictable as to both where and when that dragon is going to spawn.
I think its naive of you to think that if 1 guild is able to prevent you from killing a dragon 20 times in a row, they won't be able to do the same in your system. That guild probably scouts, detects, mobilizes and engages better than you. Which means it doesnt matter if 6 dragons all spawn in different locations at unpredictable times... that guild is going to beat you to them and kill them anyways.
No drop/No trade items imo should be very limited and not as plentiful as other items.
Outright making plat not tradable would be a huge disaster due to it killing any sort of economy or player to player relationships regarding trading.
Honestly I don’t even think all quest rewards should be no drop. Just certain ones, and even then I want that limited.
RMT will never be compeletly preventable without damaging the very core fundamentls of the game we want to play.
Celandor said:Sometimes the suggested cure ends up being worse than the ailment it's prescribed for.
Making coin non-tradeable - doesn't this completely kill player commerce? How do I purchase a breastplate from a player crafter if I can't put coins in a trade window? For whatever system that you put in place which still allows for commerce, what stop players from circumventing it by paying 10K for a rat tail? I would think that "laundering" coin would be a trivial process.
A more salient approach would be to handle RMT internally within the game data. The devs can watch for significant coin transfers and flag them. There are specific patterns which are common to RMT vendors when it comes to aggregation and dispersal of game currency. Rather than penalize the vast majority of hard-working legitimate players with Draconian rule sets, the focus needs to be on identifying the problem players - through analysis. Unlike a drug lord who amasses a fortune off-shore through untracked accounts and currency exchanges, Pantheon knows how much is in every player's account and where exactly it came from. A significant investment in auditing tools for GMs will go a long way to ensuring the long-term health of the economy of Terminus and the Pantheon community.
RMT must be a completely illegal and bannable offence for both the seller and the buyer, reflected in the game rules. The community will favour players who earn their way honestly and shun the E-bay type acquisition of accounts or gear.
Farming only becomes a serious issue within a game in two instances: The first where there is RMT involved and the second where a particular quest item is perma-camped by a small group or a single guild. The solution to RMT is data analysis. The solution to perma-camped drops is to have them drop in more than one place. Rather than having the item drop from one named dragon, have a short list of named dragons of similar difficulty in various locations on Terminus, any one of which has an equal chance to drop it or other rare items sought by the vast community of players. It's OK to have to kill 20 dragons to get your drop over the course of many months. It's not OK if your guild never has a chance to kill a specific dragon because one uber group has it locked down. There shouldn't be a reason why that one dragon is critical to class advancement for epics. If it absolutely must be a one dragon to one specific piece of loot relationship, then it should be extremely unpredictable as to both where and when that dragon is going to spawn.
Other than these two farming examples, I believe that all other acquisition of goods by players is desirable and that players questing, harvesting and slaying for loot is what makes a vibrant economy in a game. We don't need a lot of restrictive loot mechanics.
I'm not a big fan of multi-questing, especially like we saw in P99 where players would farm and corpse items that were supposedly lore/nodrop. If you explored the waters just off the coast of the isle with the ancient cyclops in Ocean of Tears, you would often seem 10-20 player corpses for one or two players who were monopolizing the camp and selling jboots in EC. The AC camp could be brutal. You could spend 12 minutes or 12 hours killing 6 minute placeholder respawns to get the ancient's ring. So what's a worse scenario? Would you rather a game where players can camp and sell cyclops rings to players who don't want to spend 12 hours killing placeholders or do you take the attitude that if you want the reward that you must do the camp? I don't think there's any middle ground here. Players always seem to find ways to circumvent game mechanics intended to restrict farming (ie using corpses to store multiple lore items). Do we mostly solve the problem in the P99 example by closing the corpse/lore loophole? Does this at least make the camp more available so you don't have an 3-day lineup/list of players re-inserting themselves into the queue to take over a drop location?
I definitely favour a more open economy and I think with some minor tweaks, we can largely avoid a scenario of having too many loot mechanics hard coded into the game.
I thought this was a very nice post.
It's not a nice post. He hoists a lot of oversight work on dev's, and all based on assumptions RMT can be easily identified via countless code hooks.
News Alert. It can't.
All that will happen is functionality will be stiffled to block some assumed RMT mechanic.
An example of absolutely ridiculous anti-RMT code used in Vanguard: The max amount of wealth a single character could have was 10p per bank (there were three, one on each continent). If you had more than 10p you needed to make an alt. Oh and have two accounts so you could pass the plat back and forth.
It's even stupid that they put a cap on it in an MMO that players played for years. Did they not think people might easily collect that kind of wealth over time?
And the most ridiculous part, there was nothing to actually spend that kind of wealth on. Well not until they introduced KDQ and turned the game into a grind2win and abandoned any skill based aspects.
