It's time for GGG to take back reigns of trade for the sake of the game

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Phrazz написал:

Just freakin' hardware ban them all. MAC address, motherboard ID, everything. At least make them go through heaps of trouble if they want to play on another account.

This doesn't work my dude. HWID is easy to spoof. The only real way to stop RMT is to pay people to actively police your game. They have shown they are unwilling to do this. Due to their F2P model, it is not a cost effective one.

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DarthSki44 написал:

Why do you think they don't? GGG has all the tools to stop, or at least significantly mitigate, this situation. You dont think they could have someone dedicated at GGG to perform Google searchs, go to Facebook, monitor global chats or DM's for a very short time, review reports from the players, or check outliers in the game logs? Its not like RMT is a hard thing to find, or identify, at all.

Using Google to check what people are saying on Facebook? Seriously? Pretty sure private Facebook groups aren't indexed on search engines and even if they were, how do you tie a Facebook account to a POE account when all you need to provide for an account here is an email address.

Anyone engaged in serious RMT wouldn't be daft enough to talk about it either in global chat or private messages, why would you need to when you could just talk about it over something they can't monitor such as Discord? I expect they also launder any trades through a network of alt accounts, guild stashes etc.

I think they do check logs, if you go to the site that sprang up from D2 trading you'll notice people complaining they got banned after trading with certain accounts owned by people who are very active on that site buying up currency. There is a limit though to what they can do if people are actively trying to hide it. And besides, you can ban people all you like, they can just come back shortly on another account. It's just a minor setback to anyone deep into RMT.

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DarthSki44 написал:

So if we Occam's Razor this, what conclusion do you come to?

From what I can tell GGG, imo, is picking winners and losers in the RMT space because they have interst in the winners and loser. That's all I will say, because I dont have evidence (and even if I did what would it matter given their history)

People are just naive to what's happening.

This is just pure tinfoil hat nonsense but at least you're happy to admit there's nothing to back it up.

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Nubatron написал:

And before anyone chimes in with but GGG has a silent hand in RMT, I don't buy into the tinfoil hat guilt by association stuff that attempts to indict GGG without any hard evidence of the sort.

There is evidence, and it's been posted before. I believe you even posted in the thread discussing GGG ownership also owning RMT currency website(s). Granted that was years ago, but absolutely not some weird conspiracy theory.

Is that happening now? I've not seen hard proof because its tangential. Its not even illegal, just shady af.

It would be very easy to just have a friend, family, or business acquaintance run a website under a general LLC, supply them however you want, and help mitigate their competition. It's all above board minus some "moral" or "ethical" standards which are all sorts of shades of grey in corporate culture.

I'm not saying this is happening, but if it got out thisn would be my reaction:

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RandallPOE написал:

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DarthSki44 написал:

Why do you think they don't? GGG has all the tools to stop, or at least significantly mitigate, this situation. You dont think they could have someone dedicated at GGG to perform Google searchs, go to Facebook, monitor global chats or DM's for a very short time, review reports from the players, or check outliers in the game logs? Its not like RMT is a hard thing to find, or identify, at all.

Using Google to check what people are saying on Facebook? Seriously? Pretty sure private Facebook groups aren't indexed on search engines and even if they were, how do you tie a Facebook account to a POE account when all you need to provide for an account here is an email address.

Anyone engaged in serious RMT wouldn't be daft enough to talk about it either in global chat or private messages, why would you need to when you could just talk about it over something they can't monitor such as Discord? I expect they also launder any trades through a network of alt accounts, guild stashes etc.

I think they do check logs, if you go to the site that sprang up from D2 trading you'll notice people complaining they got banned after trading with certain accounts owned by people who are very active on that site buying up currency. There is a limit though to what they can do if people are actively trying to hide it. And besides, you can ban people all you like, they can just come back shortly on another account. It's just a minor setback to anyone deep into RMT.

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DarthSki44 написал:

So if we Occam's Razor this, what conclusion do you come to?

From what I can tell GGG, imo, is picking winners and losers in the RMT space because they have interst in the winners and loser. That's all I will say, because I dont have evidence (and even if I did what would it matter given their history)

People are just naive to what's happening.

This is just pure tinfoil hat nonsense but at least you're happy to admit there's nothing to back it up.

Facebook and Google are two separate things, cmon man. If you want to buy PoE currency, 3rd party software, mods, etc.. you can do a Google search. This particular individual on reddit, who engaged in RMT, was just discussing the Facebook group.

As far as tinfoil hat nonsense goes, that's a sugar and rainbows view of the business world I cant help you with. CW admitting one of their co-owners ran an RMT site... I dont know what to tell you. Live your truth I guess.

Edit: for anyone that is new, or think I'm pulling something out of my ass, I will simply leave this and you can do whatever you want with it, and make up your own mind on what could be possible:.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2092913/page/1

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DarthSki44 написал:

Facebook and Google are two separate things, cmon man. If you want to buy PoE currency, 3rd party software, mods, etc.. you can do a Google search. This particular individual on reddit, who engaged in RMT, was just discussing the Facebook group.

No shit but how do you tie any of that to a POE account that only has an email address attached to it?

I think RMT can be exterminated but not with brute policing as it will only be cat and mouse game to infinity.

Idea that came to my mind is to make 2-step verification via phone app to be able to play the game. From first thoughts it seems pretty bulletproof for the level of game security.

App would associate phone number with it, phone credentials like imei and any shenanigans that would someone try to do will pop up on radar and raise suspicion.
In few leagues they could comb out the violators and we would have free and healthy game back.

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RandallPOE написал:

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DarthSki44 написал:

Facebook and Google are two separate things, cmon man. If you want to buy PoE currency, 3rd party software, mods, etc.. you can do a Google search. This particular individual on reddit, who engaged in RMT, was just discussing the Facebook group.

No shit but how do you tie any of that to a POE account that only has an email address attached to it?

You check the fucking game logs for currency, trade, and character outliers, or you have a GGG employee search out the sellers on their own. What do you think their existing methods to ban now include?

The problem is managing a F2P where you can just create new accounts all the time.

Honestly, i think tracking and banning RMT can be easily achievable. Not all of them, but at least the big ones.

How do they track drug dealers? An instance is to buy the drug and then make the seller squeal. How does this help Gx3? Well, they literally have the sell records from the drug dealer. You can easily track back to the main source and all associated accounts that way. Even if they delete each character after each trade, unless that also deleted all records from literally all characters involved, it's more than possible to reach everyone involved.

Would it involve paying an employee to do that full time? It sure would. Would it be a good investment for the company and it's overall image? Fucking bet it would. Hell, pay an outside source with knowledge of data mining. Gx3 is big enough to enforce their own rules and actually mean they care about RMT being fought against and not just having it pretty in the ToS.

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AdRonZh3Ro написал:

Would it involve paying an employee to do that full time? It sure would.

That is exactly why it will never happen.

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TorsteinTheFallen написал:

I think RMT can be exterminated but not with brute policing as it will only be cat and mouse game to infinity.

Idea that came to my mind is to make 2-step verification via phone app to be able to play the game. From first thoughts it seems pretty bulletproof for the level of game security.

App would associate phone number with it, phone credentials like imei and any shenanigans that would someone try to do will pop up on radar and raise suspicion.
In few leagues they could comb out the violators and we would have free and healthy game back.

People get around these with fake phone number apps and google voice. The idea that RMT can be "exterminated" is ridiculous. If a game is popular, and people want to skip something in the game, RMT will exist. Item Binding doesn't fix that (accounts sold instead). Having to buy copies of the game doesn't stop it (just viewed as an additional tax). Banning IPs/MAC/HW/etc. doesn't work (VMs and VPNs work very well to avoid).

You can combat it and do manual laborious reviews of logs for good verification but that will be impossible to scale massively. You can automate the process, but false positives will be rampant and permanently alienate players that are not cheating (including players that are not falsely accused). And everything in between those two extremes just accepts the risk of false positives or gets more and more difficult to do on a massive scale to be effective.

The best way to beat RMT is to not be popular enough to make it worth the effort. At the risk of being redundant and saying it again, pretending that there is some magical fix that huge developers have not figured out is ridiculous.

This is all true for people who bot as well. Different problem, but same problem set that is difficult to solve.