And what do you think happens in 95% of RMT? It’s exactly that measure which can’t be properly overseen which is used, obviously so.
You just need to think about how that works, a LE account costs 34€ currently (in my country), so what does it mean to make profit? Minus the power usage you get 40€ per account out of it.
If it’s achieved from bots or through buying Gold from people which get the flak and be banned is of no concern, also not if the people receiving your gold get banned, that’s common, you just want to make sure your customer has the least risk involved that’s possible… so the least risky strategy is chosen since it means return customers.
So, basically all that account does is get access to MG, getting miniscule amounts of favor and sitting there using it up through low favor items to get tons of gold together from seller for cheap… then re-sell that for a higher price. This can easily be automated with a bot for the in-game part, even more so if they make an input for which item the respective seller puts up for which price, causing the bot to scan an automatically buy/sell that.
So, what happens if they make 100€ out of a single account? Yes, 66€ in pure profit. Energy cost? 3-4€ maybe?
That’s a decent chunk! Let’s invest into another one… another 66€… then another… until a second bot suddenly sits there and does the same.
You think the RMT spammers are the selling accounts? No chance, those are just the visible aspect, you won’t see the account actually owning the gold, this detaches them from the risk.
RMT is one of the main issues for modern online gaming. As soon as you have wanna have a market then taking measures to remove as much RMT as possible is the lifeline on how your game survives or dies.
OSRS Runescape died nearly from RMT.
Silk Road did die from RMT.
Eve Online nearly broke down from RMT twice.
You only find out about a miniscule amount of bots nowadays. Input-measures of bots nowadays are handled in a way to include RNG aspects to a large degree, often in the measure of seconds of possible delay between actions where a human would also be slower and being quicker when a human would react quicker. Not to speak of a RNG layer for where the mouse-pointer is positioned when clicking to avoid that as well. What gets banned are joksters which don’t know a thing about quality programming. We’re not at D2 RMT times nowadays… those companies can spring up out of nowhere, have 20+ games under their control and 10+ years of knowledge on how to get the most out of their avenue.
It’s not realistic to say ‘Oh yes, we’re banning bots’ when you have a friggin hard time to catch the important ones. The ones actively farming gold will run either a customized client to allow multi-clients, to be open on a single machine or emulate a windows space on minimum specs - hella laggy - with the bot to forego the need of custom clients, because the bot doesn’t care if they lag a bit as long as they can re-run the same bit of content over and over and pick up all the loot showcased in their filter, just gotta take the time to offload it all into the market and make 500+ mil a day per machine… which is a decent return if you run 2-3 machines on the side, energy profit still and a not highly contested market for now.
Overall don’t underestimate modern technology, we got such intricate setups that you’ll fail to spot them with any common anti-cheat system easily. The only way to remove the majority of RMT is through sheer mechanical stop-gaps to prevent it and make it really really hard to profit properly.
This means a 100 mil 200 favor idol listing being the main suspect of those situations, there the devs can’t interfere easily and it’s a golden goose for RMT. Hence why I’m repeatedly saying ‘what the fuck has EHG thought would happen there?’ because it’s such a immediate red flag in terms of botting and RMT usage coming up that it’s baffling, new devs or not.
