Eradication of spam e-mails.
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If they are targeting other MMO's, (which they appear to be) wouldn't they shift thier focus away from this one if it started becoming unprofitable?
Business that continue to throw money into unprofitable divisions, rather than close that branch (or model line or product) tend to do poorly.
I'm just throwing this out there, but if there were no players buying thier product, they wouldn't be here. The spamming is a problem, but it's more like a symptom of a problem.
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Legitimate businesses work that way. RMT companies are far from legitimate.
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You're absolutely right. And I doubt that they work like a legit company, where there is usually a different manager in charge of each seperate department, each vying for a spot in the upper management.
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For example:
Let's say you play WoW, and you used your credit card to buy gold from Bob's Discount Gold RMT website. They in turn use your credit card to get $500 cash advance, and then open 25 CoH accounts and proceed to spam advertisements for their website. Those accounts eventually all get banned, but 15 CoH players decided to buy influence from them after seeing their advertisements.
Now where exactly did Bob's Discount Gold lose money?
Seems to me the only person that lost anything was the guy that had his credit card number stolen.
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Based on what you've given me:
For the Month of April:
Income from Fraud: $500
Cost of Advertising on CoH: $375
Income from CoH: ~$1500
Also Assumed:
Costs of operations in CoH: ~$90 (5-8 Farming/PL'ing Accounts, 1 $Inf-Mule/Delivery Boy Account)
Costs from RL: ?? (Electricity, Internet Access, Employee Wages)
Profit: $1000-$1400?
But the fraud you supplied was income from thier WoW arm of the operations.
If thier profit from WoW (or the other MMO's in thier stable) is a higher ratio, then it makes sense to focus there.
We don't know thier (Cost of Operations/Advertising) vs. (Income) situation is in this game or any other, only that it's probably a positive in thier favor.
If we could disrupt that, then I believe they would leave. Profit brought them here and sustained lack of profit will drive them out. Some ideas without the "How-to" details :
1) Find and Delete Delivery Boy Accounts. Costs them $15 to replace, and the time (time has a $cost) to farm the Inf the account was carrying at the time.
2) Find and Delete Farming Accounts. Costs them $15 each to replace, and the time to PL them back up and replace what inventory they had on them at the time.
3) Find and Ban thier customers. He who clicked [I Agree] and chose not to comply? You made your choice buddy. Advertise on the splasher screen "X number of RMT purchasers banned this month. Don't be one of them". That should reduce thier Income quite a bit, even if "X" is an exxagerated number.
The RMT Problem is three-part:
1-Supply. (Real or Faked to grab credit card numbers)
2-Demand. (Fools willing to give up thier money)
3-Spam. The symptom of the above, the annoyer of the Legitimate Player and what motivates the Anti-RMT crowd the most.
The problem I see is that until the RMT sites have their funds from illegal transactions cut off, there's no real way for them to lose money.
Another thing to consider is that we don't know the depth of the RMT's illegal activities. It's theoretically possible that some shady organization is using many of these RMT transactions to launder money for other illegal activities. All those small transactions add up into large sums of money. Like embezzling half cents from many accounts.
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.
As much as I like the changes to the game, things were much more peaceful RMT-wise pre-I9.
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But the fraud you supplied was income from thier WoW arm of the operations.
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Just to comment on this. If you think about it it makes perfect sense to operate that way. If they were to use a CoH players credit card to open CoH accounts it would be much easier for NCSoft to figure out which of their customers are using RMT sites.
WoW isn't going to share it's customers billing info with NCSoft, so the RMT sites can safely use peter to pay paul. The only risk they are running aside from the fraud is the chance that the WoW player is playing both games and using the same card to pay for both.
Also remember that the RMTers can draw from around 30 different MMO's so the odds that any given player has accounts on the same games is vanishingly small, and that's only if the RMT site used the customers card to make the transactions.
I think it's much more likely they are using things like cash advances and the like to steal the money first, then after it's untracable using it to advertise and keep farm accounts and mule accounts active.
And let's also consider how hard it would be for the devs to prove an influence trade is an RMT transaction.
For example off the top of my head:
Joe Smith places an order for Inf at Bobs Dsicount Gold. He gives them his email to confirm the transaction. They send him a response that says, "Meet us under the Statue in Atlas Park in ten minutes and enter the Costume Contest. You will be the winner and we will give you your Inf as the prize."
You get your influence and they toss out a few million to other contestants to make sure it looks legit. NCSoft can't prove that Joe did anything wrong.
You're right. We don't know the depths of thier other illegal operations.
Let's play with hypotheticals.
RMT Operation #1 "Bob's Discount Influence". BDI consists of 16 people operating out of a warehouse in the tiny island country of BoogaDoofa.
Internet access is free, because Bob's cousin Fred at the BoogaDoofa Phone Company hooks him up with the sweet DSL for arranging the marriage between Fred and Bertha (Bob's Sister).
Electricity is pirated by tapping the cables coming out of the local grocery store, Wages are $5/day per employee, with the all profits above that go to the boss man. The warehouse is already owned, and the government doesn't bother with property taxes.
They are running 7 days a week, sharing 8 Farming Accounts and 1 InfMule Account, and buy 10 (paid) spamming accounts per month.
If they sell more than $845 worth of $Inf and/or PL'ing services in a month, then they make a profit and continue. Before the limitations of trial accounts, (no longer able to send Email at any level) they only needed $695/month to break even.
If they fail to profit, they will shut down or reduce spending, most likely on the advertising.
RMT Operation #2 "Igor's Gold Mining Warehouse" is run by Igor, the one nerdy cousin in the Ivanna Stabbya crime family. It has a remarkably similar business model. If it profits, then it profits.
On the side, though, Igor gets a share of cousin Terry's drug sales and brother Doug's racketeering. In return he makes the money shift around and look good. Hey, he has his hands in other stuff.
If things change and the RMT starts losing money, he keeps the operation running as a side-hobby and takes the business loss as a "fee" for the cost of using it for laundering the source of ther more illicit activities.
Just a guess.
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And let's also consider how hard it would be for the devs to prove an influence trade is an RMT transaction.
For example off the top of my head:
Joe Smith places an order for Inf at Bobs Dsicount Gold. He gives them his email to confirm the transaction. They send him a response that says, "Meet us under the Statue in Atlas Park in ten minutes and enter the Costume Contest. You will be the winner and we will give you your Inf as the prize."
You get your influence and they toss out a few million to other contestants to make sure it looks legit. NCSoft can't prove that Joe did anything wrong.
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In response to the bolded: They can also make a little money selling Email addresses, can't they?
As for the rest of the quote: Well, that would certainly explain some of the ugly costumes I've seen win costume contests.
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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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The spam problem must be dealt with as a spam problem, not as an RMT problem.
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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.
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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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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If they are targeting other MMO's, (which they appear to be) wouldn't they shift thier focus away from this one if it started becoming unprofitable?
Business that continue to throw money into unprofitable divisions, rather than close that branch (or model line or product) tend to do poorly.
I'm just throwing this out there, but if there were no players buying thier product, they wouldn't be here. The spamming is a problem, but it's more like a symptom of a problem.
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Legitimate businesses work that way. RMT companies are far from legitimate.
For example:
Let's say you play WoW, and you used your credit card to buy gold from Bob's Discount Gold RMT website. They in turn use your credit card to get $500 cash advance, and then open 25 CoH accounts and proceed to spam advertisements for their website. Those accounts eventually all get banned, but 15 CoH players decided to buy influence from them after seeing their advertisements.
Now where exactly did Bob's Discount Gold lose money?
Seems to me the only person that lost anything was the guy that had his credit card number stolen.