Shatterjack

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Alright, in your opinion: If we manage to kill spamming (or reduce it to almost nothing), will the RMT'ers have enough customers to remain profitable?
I'm guessing that they will, as anyone wanting such services can just Google it.

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Hole in one. Generally, RMT spammers don't spam because it gains them new customers who otherwise would never have considered RMT as an option. Rather, they spam because it gets their names at the forefront of the minds of those who are already inclined to exercise that option. It's arguably more effective than, say, paying for premium Google placement, and probably cheaper (especially when the really big outfits are driving up the bidding).
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And if they continue to operate RMT operations, but are unable to advertise ingame, will it matter?
I'm guessing that the lack of spam will pacify most, but not all of the Anti-RMT folks.

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Well, not quite.

Assuming the spam problem is solved, the next big objection to RMT is inflation. The thing about that, though, is that while "everybody knows" RMT leads directly to massive inflation where either nobody can afford anything they need or everybody can buy as much of everything they want (depending on who you ask), it's nigh-impossible to prove what effects RMT is actually having. You'll find lots of people swearing that it, like, totally ruined [insert MMO here], but those testimonies are all post hoc and anecdotal evidence.

And because it can't be proven how RMT is actually affecting the game economy, it's extremely hard to know how to counteract those effects. Money sinks can help (and have merit unrelated to RMT anyway), but if you put in your money sinks as an RMT-inflation-fighting tool, you'll inevitably build them under the assumption that all players' funds contain the "dirty" money you're trying to get rid of, which is frequently incorrect. It's a bit like the "piracy tax" on blank CD's sometimes proposed in Canada.

But even if some brilliant virtual economist suddenly developed a perfect system to negate RMT's effects on the game economy, that still wouldn't keep RMT itself from happening (it might even increase, as it would be easier to justify). Any remaining objections would be the ones based on purely philosophical reasons (i.e. "it just isn't right"), and not everybody's going to agree with that. In the end, you pretty much just have to suck up and live with it.

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I just don't believe that RMT is the only thing going on with those guys. There has to be more sinister things happening that we never see.

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Honestly, you're overthinking it. You don't need shadowy conspiracies about money laundering and credit card fraud for RMT to be profitable. There's enough money to be made in the business without the need to resort to such things. I wouldn't go so far as to say that there aren't some RMT shops doing them, but most of them probably aren't, as RMT is a low-legal-risk, high-profit operation in and of itself.

BBQ Pork's assertion that spam is a symptom of the "real problem" is true in a sense, but not one that's practical. The reason for this is that short of taking all trading ability out of the game, there is no force on earth that can keep RMT from happening.

Banning buyers and sellers won't do it. GM honeypots/sting operations won't do it. Monitoring trades won't do it. Suing the RMT companies won't do it. NCSoft selling the money themselves would theoretically give them the ability to shut out the third parties, but if you view RMT itself as a bad thing then it still just shifts the problem elsewhere. Either way, RMT is here to stay. Period.

Since the "RMT problem" is unsolvable, the correct perspective is to look at spam as the real problem (even if you don't really believe it is). Three reasons for this:

1)It's the most tangible negative effect RMT has on the average player.

2)Unlike real-world spam, it really and truly can be solved since the whole system end-to-end is in NCSoft's hands.

3)It's annoying independently of the reason it was sent. While it's admittedly unlikely to actually happen, people could spam COH players for any number of non-RMT reasons; suppose the recent brouhaha with Champions beta invites had been done with mass emails instead of tells. You wouldn't even need Cryptic's involvement; a handful of disgruntled COH players would suffice.

The spam problem must be dealt with as a spam problem, not as an RMT problem.

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Better solution: make sending emails cost inf. Not much (somewhere in the 1000 inf range), but it would cut down on the spam oh-so much because now, in order to advertise, they've got to use their "product".

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That wouldn't even make a dent in their inventories. They sell influence in lots of 100 million and more.

User-configurable email filters are the only viable solution that I've seen proposed here so far.

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But it would cost time, which costs money. I believe that the toons they use to send out their advertisements are low levels off of new accounts, so that if they are banned it doesn't make a huge difference, and they can delete their advertisers to make it less traceable. If they had to transfer inf, or earn it at that level, it would take a good amount of time.


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Again, the amount of time (thus influence/infamy, and therefore money) taken up is trivial for them. They'll happily accept it as the cost of doing business.

Memphis Bill already explained why keyword banning doesn't work.

The email restrictions on trial accounts are a hamfisted approach that will buy us, at most, a short vacation from spam. The spammers' next path of least resistance is to start buying full accounts to spam with, and the cost of doing so is still trivial, even discounting the possibility of stolen accounts and credit card numbers being used.

Besides, the spammers can mitigate this by targeting offline players; this will buy them a few hours of spam-time on average by cutting down on the likelihood of a recipient hitting the Spam button as soon as the email is sent. I thought of that cost-cutting measure in ten seconds; imagine what people who do this all day will come up with.

Configurable client-side filters are a better solution in literally every conceivable way. They'll reduce the river of spam to a trickle, increase the usefulness of email for players, and they won't drop yet another obnoxious obstacle on legitimate trial players.

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Nerfing does not solve anything.

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Sorry, but it does. A "buff only" policy just leads to arms races, and in any event amounts to a nerf when X gets buffed more than Y.

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It just isn't working so what we need is a quick and easy way to report the individual to NC SOFT. A button on the email that automatically sends a report to them with the senders account so they can be banned.

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Uh, that's exactly what the Spam button does.

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Now if the entire account gets banned after a few reports and they have to start PAYING over and over to create a new one it may actually have some effect.
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They want to get truly serious then set something up so that after a certain number of reported cases the individual doing the advertsing can't even use the same credit card to establish a new account. Now they not only have to pay again to get a new account if they plan to continue but either need multiple Credit cards or need to file the paperwork to get new ones.

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You can't lock out their credit cards because they don't need them to set up accounts. Mostly because they usually use trial accounts, which don't need a credit card to set up. But even if you could somehow keep them from using trial accounts (short of eliminating trial accounts entirely), regular accounts don't need a credit card either; you can just buy account codes from third parties and use those. The cost of doing so is nothing to the RMT outfits.

Trying to keep RMT'ers out of the game is a fool's errand. All you can do is limit their ability to be obnoxious to everybody else.

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Or better yet, lets say that the RMT's stop advertising their services due to not being able to email anyone that hasn't added them as a friend, or is not apart of their coalition, or is not in their supergroup.

Perhaps forcing folks to add people to their contact list will not get in the way if its the contact list is sincerely inteded to be just that, and not some advertising market.

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I'm fine with that, provided it's configurable. If I want just anyone in the game to be able to email me for whatever reason, I should be able to allow that to happen.

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Keep in mind what their likely hit ratio is. If they send out 1000 emails (1 mill inf at my cost), are they going to get even 1 hit or does it require more? If anything, it's going to increase the price by decreasing their available stock.

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Let's be pessimistic and assume that every single RMT operation sends five emails to every single COH player every single day.

The player population tends to hover around 120k or so. But let's be generous in light of I14's release and mark that up to 150k.

150,000 players x 5 emails per player x 1,000 influence per email = 750 million influence per day as an operating cost.

Look at the price list on one or two of those sites. That's forty, maybe fifty bucks. One medium-sized order. Per day.

It's trivial to them. They'll eat that cost and not only will they not care, they might not even notice. It's a speed bump in front of an Abrams tank.

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Better solution: make sending emails cost inf. Not much (somewhere in the 1000 inf range), but it would cut down on the spam oh-so much because now, in order to advertise, they've got to use their "product".

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That wouldn't even make a dent in their inventories. They sell influence in lots of 100 million and more.

User-configurable email filters are the only viable solution that I've seen proposed here so far.

I would like to see some of the various "currencies" folded together, but that's coming much more from a QoL and newbie-friendliness perspective than from any desired effect it would be speculated to have on the game economy.

Influence/Infamy, Prestige, Vanguard Merits, Reward Merits, AE Tickets...enough already, cut this down a bit. The rewards system doesn't need to be this fragmented.

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Also, you'd have to ignore some of the realities, like robots and ghosts really don't have pressure points the way organic beings do.

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That's not really such a big deal, given the need for us to accept that we can shoot ghosts to death with guns and use mind control on robots.

Still, I have to give this the thumbs down. Martial Arts already covers this concept adequately, in addition to the animation problems mentioned above.

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It means when a Player is hit with any attack, if they would go from 100% to 0% in that one hit, they are instead brought to 1%.

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I doubt that. The way I'm reading it, it would essentially only work if you were at 100% to begin with. Otherwise you'd see situations where an attack doesn't kill an injured hero because the damage is too high.

Incidentally, am I the only one who was disappointed to see the "Biggest Doomsayer" category removed from the Heroes' Choice Awards?

I think London was probably the best.

Yes, London, you were right. Fixing Smoke Grenade destroyed the whole game. Now nobody plays it at all, Cryptic has gone out of business, and the Statesman had to hawk his helmet for booze money. All because you can't win the game with Smoke Grenade.

Here's your third option: Act your damn age.

But I'm finished with trying to coax a little logic out of someone who clings to his own tantrums like a security blanket. Clearly this forum will be a better place with you on my ignore list.

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That all seems pretty valid.

Though its not like I have any other recourse. Well I do but its along the lines of.

"Well golly, I wish I had a chance in the arena. But you did work awfully hard getting those enhancements. It would be really wrong of me to want to win and undermine all your hard work. I guess if I never win a bout against any of you its okay. I mean you are superior to us casual gamers in every way!"

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You act as if the only two possible ways to approach the issue are insult-laden stonewalling and unconditional surrender. This prevents you from making an intelligent contribution to the discussion.

You are more arrogant, not as arrogant. You also have a tendency to exaggerate other people's words well past the point of bald-faced lying. This, and not your playstyle or your opinions, is the reason you are the laughingstock of this forum.

Even if this was EQ (and it isn't), it doesn't logically follow that there's automatically something wrong with people who choose participate in a raid.

You keep getting hung up on this asinine notion of "Hamidon killer==powergamer==embodiment of evil".

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Okay then, how about instead of casual gamer we call it Normal gamer?

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Yeah, because that's certainly an objective, non-loaded term.

Name's Derek Talbert. Don't have what you'd call "powers", but my katana'll drop a pack o' bad guys cold all the same. Never really meant to get into the hero thing, but sometimes things don't turn out like you think, y'know?