This is a simple proposal to allow trading of items amongst friends whilst heavily restricting the potential of RMT sellers.
The suggestion would be to allow trading to and from accounts that have been on an accounts friends list for at least 1-week or more. While this will provide some inconvenience for fair-use players the benefits of this system would far out-weigh these. Not only that but this system can actually be used alongside an in-game marketplace, which I’ll explain later in this post
How would such a simple system restrict RMT?
A 1-week friend trading restriction will prevent most basic third party real-money transactions from taking place (because how many players would be willing to wait a week for an in-game item when they could potentially find an item in-game fairly in that time?).
You may think that this would not eliminate more sophisticated systems, and it may not entirely in itself, but it would provide significant protection against them. Consider the following examples:
Scenario A: Due to the 1 week friend trade limitation a player decides they will RMT (real-money transaction) a full set/build from a third-party source, adding all the relevant accounts to their friend-list and then just wait out the one week to receive a full build at once:-
In this scenario the 1 week trade restriction will complicate the matter significantly for both the player and the third-party seller(s) and they would most likely need to purchase the items they need from multiple sources, creating an easy target for an algorithmic anti-RMT system to highlight the account for investigation. Additionally any account flagged by an algorithm in such a manner could have soft bans implemented, for example an inability to use the in-game trade system until it is manually lifted (such as a successful appeal to the ban), or an extension of duration to the usual 1 week trade restriction for the account.
Scenario B: A third-party system is built in which players and RMT sellers friend a single each account each, both of which would be owned by the third-party system, the friend they add would not need to be mutual between the seller and purchaser because the third-party system could design and build a web of interlinking bot accounts which the system could then use to transport items through until the two accounts are connected.
With this scenario there are inherently significant weaknesses to this bot network as it would not only be very easy for algorithms to detect but also be extremely vulnerable to attack from ban-waves. Taking down just a single bot in the network would destroy transport connections for many accounts, and the strength of a ban gets stronger the lower the maximum number of friends it is possible to have on one account.
Marketplace
As I mentioned you could also have a system in-game to allow the sale of items which would not invalidate the 1-week friend trading system. This system is also rather simple and yet would be very effective whilst at the same time only inconveniencing fair players in a minor way. How?- Allow items to be placed on the Marketplace for auction with a minimum listing duration only but with the option for a reserve (the highest bid must reach a price set by the seller for the item to be sold). The currencies accepted on the marketplace can be set by the LE developers, also options for the marketplace to automatically convert currencies either statically by the system itself or even don’t convert currencies but allow the seller to set which in-game currencies they will accept when listing an item.
Such a marketplace would prevent third-party RMT sellers from abusing it to bypass the one-week trade restriction as any item they list could be bid on by the entire playerbase.