I’d be surprised if they’ve deleted “most”. If you’re going to dupe gold why would you leave it hanging around on the original character?
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I think some are not understanding what is meant by “obfuscate”. Item and listing should be changed just enough to make it very very difficult for seller and buyer to identify each others account. GGG also already had an idea of limiting what each player sees for sale in the bazaar. So even without obfuscating the item and listing, how could you be sure your RMT buyer would be able to see your item?
I am offline on CoF, so I am just writing out of curiousity and with zero knowledge of MG:
I think EHG should employ a small team of guys with experience in Computational Statistics, Data Warehousing and AI.
To address this one for example I would compute internally an expected value, which probably needs to kept secret in order to avoid instant exploitation, and, if the asked price is 20 times higher than that, disallow the price, flag the seller (Scam, Usury, RMT) and issue a warning. Too many warnings would result in a ban.
In general I would advocate proactivity.
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You don’t need to identify the account. As I’ve shown with my examples, you just need an item with specific stats for a specific price. And you can’t obfuscate that.
You can see any item for sale. That’s part of the whole point for MG. If someone can’t see your item for sale then there’s something wrong because people are placing items for sale and it’s not showing up, so they’re not selling.
This doesn’t work, though. Not only do you have naturally rising inflation during the first week, you also a huge explosion of inflation after an exploit. There were people legitimately selling items for 100x what they were being sold the previous day. And they didn’t do anything wrong, they just looked at the listings.
Not only that, but the value of a price depends on the people buying them. A T7 mana affix might be worth 100x more than a T7 hybrid health one because people want one more now, whereas it was reversed in 1.0.
You can’t predict how the market will change and grow. And you can’t set an AI to analyze gear affixes and their value properly because AI isn’t there yet.
What you could do is flag those for internal review, not issue warnings or bans automatically. But I’m pretty sure they already have internal tools for that as well.
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Sure, the system would have to be dynamic of course. That why it isn’t a one-time thing but a process.
And this idea might actually slow the hyper-inflation. Also alarm bell ring and counter measures could be taken earlier.
So far my experiences with AI were disappointing, your statement is never the less too bold. The way I see it AI is made exectly for these kind of problems. In any case, that is why I was also suggesting date warehouse and computational statistics specialists.
In any case, that was my idea after thinking about the subjst for 5 minutes. My actual suggestion is to have a team of specialists monitoring and regulating the market.
It’s quite likely they do already. At least monitoring, there isn’t much regulating they can do when there isn’t any trade tax. If there were a trade tax, they could just raise the tax until gold levels stabilized.
The problem is that when exploits happen they happen fast and get out of control in no time. And they usually do it while the main devs (the ones that have decision power over these things) are (presumably) asleep. So when they become aware of the issue and take steps to solve it, it already snowballed.
Placing a tax on trades does seem like the simplest solution, really.
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I do not think so.
It should have been pretty easy to see that the money supply and the prices suddenly increased quickly. And at point the best thing to do would have been to suspend trading immedeately and automatically in order to assess the situation. If need be until the developers return to the office.
There also should habe been bells ringing that suddenly certain players ammassed money way beyond a reasonable limit. Those accounts could have been suspended and the account owners asked to provide an explanation for the sudden wealth.
It’s likely that the people monitoring don’t have the power to stop trade. All they can do is warn those that can make that decision.
I don’t actually know what EHG is doing or not, but I highly doubt they don’t have monitoring. They might likely need to improve in that area, but I highly doubt they’re not doing anything. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any bans.
They actually DON’T have any kind of monitoring.
I had Chinese screenshots walking around with 1.5B on their inventory since day 2. The whole thing smells like a high school project when we’re talking about monitoring/security department.
First Cycle there was a known dupe method with videos lurking around in Chinese language. They couldn’t even fix it while having a video showing the method.
Instead, they claimed they fixed it, just like now. Later they asked in discord for someone to reproduce it step by step so they can actually fix it.
U N R E AL
And now the CHEAPEST Red Ring is 950 Million