Merchant's Guild Bot Solution

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Suggestion: Implement a token system for the Merchant’s Guild.

Implementation: You acquire tokens by completing random objectives. Similar to how CoF works now; however, the objectives would have to be random enough that they’re not just selected from a list of 200 possibilities. This would make it nearly impossible for a bot to interpret and farm correctly, but simple enough that a player could farm them fairly easily.

Discussion/counterpoints (will be edited as needed): While this won’t stop them 100%, it would certainly slow them down.

Isn’t this the same as Favor?

  • No, favor (in its current implementation) is passively earned which can be accomplished by bots. A rework of the favor system so that you can only earn it through randomized objectives would be more in line with the proposed suggestion.
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u mean like every trade needs certain number of tokens? so clearing monos/bosses etc give tokens and the tokens needed go up with item rarity and or gold value so for example a 10.000.000 item needs 100 tokens… to buy (also in direct trade) so the one that pays needs the tokens^^

3

What I’m thinking is that both the Seller and the Buyer would need the tokens. And yeah, per item. This would also have the effect of getting rid of a lot of the garbage on the Market. You wouldn’t want to post a crappy item because it will cost you tokens that you’ll have to farm.

4

…The token you are talking about is CALLED FAVOR, and both seller and buyer needs favor to buy and sell items. Did you just wake up?

5

Favor is easily earned by bots. If you want to call the tokens favor and change the system so that you can only earn it through the randomized objective-based method suggested, so be it. But what’s proposed isn’t the same as favor.

6

First of all before offering a suggestion:

What’s the bot problem you’re talking about in the first place?

Putting up too many items in the market? PLease, let them put up more! There’s not enough in it currently anyway, hard to find some things you’re searching for.

Buying things? Why would they buy things in masses? Wouldn’t make sense either.

So I don’t see how bots and the interaction with them towards MG itself is any form of problem. Bots themselves are… but what does it have to do with MG?

7

What’s the bot problem you’re talking about in the first place?

I’m talking about the issue that EHG addressed by disabling Steam family sharing “due to a ‘significant amount’ of botting and real-money trading that was abusing Valve’s share system.”

Also the constant spam in general chat telling people to buy gold. The only reason a player would ever need to consider buying gold is to pay for expensive items on the Market.

The biggest motivation driving the bots is RMT. Gold buying, item buying, etc. They use the Market as a vehicle.

Why would they buy things en masse?

We saw this in Lost Ark. If they keep all of the gold that they’re farming on 1 character and EHG finds and targets that character, they lose a crapton of gold. So rather than having 1 character with 10 million gold, they have 10 characters with 1 million gold.

So let’s say a player RMT’s 10 million gold. The botters first have the player post a shitty item for 10mil on the Market. Next, the botters have a ‘trading character’ and that character posts 10 shitty items for 1 million gold each on the Market. The 10 bots each buy 1 item. That trading character now has 10 million gold. Finally, the trading character buys the RMTer’s shitty item for 10 million gold. This mitigates the risk and ensures that the botters only have the gold amassed on one of their accounts for an extremely short period of time.

The Market is crucial to RMT operations. RMTing becomes significantly more challenging without it, but since people put up a big stink about shutting down the MG altogether (which I personally wish they would do), this is a way to make trading a significant ass-pain for the botters.

Edit: let’s also not forget that the servers are still having issues, especially in towns. The bots put a significant strain on server resources. These botting companies aren’t stupid, I’m sure they spun up their botting farms on day one.

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Ah! That’s where that came from, good to know, missed that entirely.
Thanks for clearing it up!

Not fully, but the major reason I guess.
Secondary would be buying more stash tabs.
Tertiary I imagine Lightless Arbour could play a very very miniscule role.

Yes, that’s an inherent situation you get with any form of market.
Reducing the amount of possible RMT and heavily punishing it is the way to go hence. Not trying to strangle the market itself… because that doesn’t work.

Also RMT is minized by enforcing the need of obtaining ranks… but that’s a bit messed up since the rank balancing is a mess. EHG needs to re-do that part entirely and a decent amount of RMT would be gone as access to it wouldn’t be available easily.

In general… access to any type of equipment should be a slight bit later then it usually would throughout the market, hence by design leading the prices accordingly to a degree. Which is a tricky balancing act though, as pushing them back too far in terms of acquisition means that people loose the reason to strife for it.

Ah yes, a well thought out system! Kudos to them I would say, or with an old meme which fits perfectly to it: ‘I’m not even mad, that’s amazing’.

Obviously, but it’s also crucial to alleviate RNG issues when it comes to any sort of big-number game. Pure luck only makes things enjoyable until a specific point, afterwards it’s just the gambling dopamine rush.

I have to disagree there heavily.
The majority of botters need to be active in monoliths to farm up the required resources, not in the town. Just the selling or advertising characters need to be in those areas, limiting the load immensely as monoliths aren’t directly connected to the town servers.

But overall they need to put a stop to the RMTers in a more rigorous manner by quickly banning the accounts rather then allowing those to stay able to spam for hours on end at times. If they loose too many accounts given the initial cost to access the systems it means profit will be harder to achieve.
Also a barrier for using the global chat is a good thing, I would say Act 2 is the starting point for that as a good point, needing a decent chunk of time investment and hence causing a severe time loss for RMTers to get through it in the first place, only to have their account banned nearly right away. If RMTers are banned in 10 minutes it’s already enough then, Act 1 takes the longest, hence their ‘uptime’ is not 100% anymore but something like 20-40% depending on how efficient they can make Act 1 clearing bots.

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