Edit: I am all peace and quiet now . The following personal takes are to give an example that someone might be able to relate to. It's not about me. It's not about if I do or do not understand the rules correctly or if the wording of the rules could've been done better. Obviously in no case should RWT be tolerated. Beside this being another step in a direction I do not support. It's the current strategy and resources spend by Royals to fight this issue that have me sincerly worried. I might not hold up to it myself completely. However, please restrain yourself from saying things such as "Royals is killing the game." It's not constructive or helping, I want this server to thrive for another 10 years and saying such things does the opposite. ============================================================= I've been wanting to make a feedback post about a couple of things that I have been prorastinating for a while. Now with the recent update to the rules, and reading the announcement post its comments, I feel like its time to have a discussion about the of Royals' Policies on RWT. Or at least give my thoughts on the matter. Here is a tl;dr-list of my thoughts on the situation in general. -There are too many false positives in the ban-appeals. -Royals' Policies are very aggressively targeting consumers compared to other MMO's, instead of improving systems to prevent offending of these policies. -Royals is spending too much valuable, volunteered, resources fighting RWT. (assumption) -Royals' policies are increasingly negatively affecting the consumer-experience of 'legit' players. -The perceived value of the excecution of these policies is increasingly negatively affecting Royals' consumer-relationships. -Honestly, I don't care about RWT on this server, it barely affects my consumer-experience. -RWT is not my problem to solve. -Someone buying under market price in meso is not engaging in RWT. -I am very thankful for the hard and thankless work done by the Royals' Staff. First of all a short summary of the new updated rules for RWT. In my opinion, it's going to be near impossible to have a good excecution of these new rules. I am not too worried about "Royals becoming a Tyrany". I think it's fair that all parties involved are at least partially responsible for their transactions. Allthough, the new list of requirements imposed on the consumer is going to be too much to take seriously for a vast majority of players. Good luck with determining if my background check was good enough. I speak dutch with other dutchies, good luck with that. Good luck with my badly recorded phone call in dutch, good luck with the promises of this new sensitive information being save with you. Good luck with the other end of that phone call not agreeing with you having their personal information. Good luck with the grievers trying to get back on you when holding this new sensitive inforation. I would dump my proofs in my ban-appeal and likely never return. Wasting everybody's time. Luckily, I will never make an effort to do this background check or collecting other proofs of all legal trades I do. That's just not worth my time and if that is required to play this game. I'll just have my fingers crossed each time I try to log in. In my opinion, it would be nice of someone to make notice if someone is selling large quantities of white scrolls for 50m each. But in no world do I think they should be required, let alone be punished for making a trade. Sure, if these items are proven to be obtained illegaly by a dupe-glitch or massive vote abuse, then if this person is returned the items traded for these illegal items, sure delete those from the game. This game is basically Laissez-Faire Capitalism Simulator. People should be able to sell and buy for whatever price they want. If items are obtained legally then buying them is not RWT. If someone sells a perfect KC for 50m, sure suspicious, but if someone pays 50m and 0 USD than it is still completely fair game. I gave billions of gear away for free to friends. I have 0 screenshots and I do not care. Giving items to friends appearently completely fine, or lending it out and never asking it back, but objectively it's equally unfair to others when someone would pay idk how many dollars for it. ========================================================================= My personal take on RWT and its respective policies. tl;dr list -I don't care about RWT. -I am not willing to make an effort preventing it. -I care about me and people I play with becoming false positives. -I am not willing to make an effort of preventing to become a false positive. -Someone buying under market price in meso is not engaging in RWT. Last summer I returned after a long break right after, appearently, some big crack down on RWT was done. Seemingly this has lead to lasting trauma of the community. This might also be one of the reasons I might feel very indifferent compared to others about this. I am already rarely taking screenshots and I will not do a background check for every trade I make. Given that I am nearing the 'end-game', and very poor inflation control, the 1b treshold is just too low for me to care or keep caring about. My gains for the effort spend by these new requirements, would be simply too low. I take screenshots for agreements made on 'Pay me x later' and 'drop apr -> trade cs -> drop apr' for obvious reasons. In the rare case I think of it, I am willing to take the effort to a screenshot of a high value trade for the chance I'll be the next false positive in the ban appeals. But that's about how much extra effort I, as a consumer of a game I am playing for fun, am willing to make in order to for it to be fair too all. Not that I care, but Royals has no rights to ask for my personal conversations I have outside its respective platforms. Traceable records of agreements made on lending, lending out, give away stuff on discord, whatsapp, in person or whatever should not be mandatory for players be able to play this game without worrying about being a false-negative. RWT is simply not my problem to solve. Honestly, I do not even care if others are engaging with it or not. This game, like most MMO's, is about progress and archievements. I don't think I would have any lasting feelings of fullfilment if I spend my IRL meso on this game. I have a level 60 Islander, not even 'legit' in-game meso affects my progress or archievements on that character. If you'd ask me to choose 1 character to keep. Without a second though I would instantly delete, with all gear and items, my other characters and mules. That character is the only thing gives me lasting fullfilment and would be the only cause of any willingness to fight for, if I'd risk a perma-ban for whatever reason. Without that character I would simply give up very fast and play another game. Even if, after a few weeks, I would get unbanned for being a false positive. If I'd lose my Islander, I am done and will never return to Royals. The few things of RWT that are really affecting me, is the tax-evasion. Slightly affecting the effectiveness of the already very poor inflation control. And that potentially a random zakum run is 1 minute faster. I simply do not care if this one guy in my Zakum run spend 1 hour of minimum wage for his gear or not. I will not care if the value of perfect end-game gear is being manipulated. It's going to take a long time before that is going significantly affect me enough to care. ========================================================================= Some things I do care about. The excecution of Royals' policies has lead to a "Guilty until proven innocence" situation, a likely cause of the increasing "Royals = Dictatorship"-comments. Often players are required to wait for very long before their case is being resolved. Luckily, often false positive are very active players that are understanding. As far as I know they do not have received significant damage to their image. Nonetheless, false positives are very detrimental. I think most on this forum are part of the vocal minority, a fairly small group of very active and vocal players. If someone is thought of as a false positive by only a few players, as often seen, they are and will be actively negatively promoting Royals and its Staff, in-game, on the forums and presumably on other platforms as well. I care about the longevity of this server. I think efforts made on retainment of new players is severely lacking. New players that recently started out reading smega's about how dead the game is and how faulty the staff is, is not improving that. If they stay for long enough to make an account on the forum they are again often met by a wall of negative comments. It does not take long to figure out the "guilty until proven innocence" policies and I think a vast majority of people will not be willing to engage in anything that has this policy. Don't get me wrong on this. Players should have all the rights to say whatever they want in game. -In no way do I support the slightest form of censorship- (Obviously, don't be a dick, racist, etc.) I care about the limited, volunteered, resources of Royals. The endless list of ban-appeals is seemingly manually evaluated case-by-case. It seems to be very inefficient and taking up a lot of resources. I want to be able to play a game that is properly managed and give me the content I enjoy. This requires resourses like time and skill of its Staff. When this is being comprimised due to a big part of these resources are being spend on things that are not affecting me and I also don't care about. I will move on to another game that will give me what I am looking for. Also as a side effect of this is that its Staff faces quite a lot of hostility increasing the us vs them mentality of its players and making it less likely for Royals' Staff to keep their positions and for new volunteers to join. Depletion of Royals' resources will negatively affect all of us. I find this very worrying. Royals is still competing with all other MMO's that do have budgets of millions of IRL meso. One of the reasons back that I was very happy to pay 10 euro per month when WoW launched, was that if I had a problem I could make a ticket (in game). Withing minutes a GM would contact me and solve my problem. Royals is free, I love this game, I love the people I play with. But in the end we are all consumers that want to play a properly managed game. As I am seeing it now, it is seemingly becoming increasingly unsustainable to maintain and improve the quality of this product. I find this very worrying ======================================================================== Some examples of other game's policies and its execution. OSRS has been plagued by RWT since its launch, and still is. OSRS is comparable to Royals that your financial status quo is a leading factor in one's progress. Therefor RWT is very detrimental to its consumer-experience. I could write another essay about this, but this post is already way to long. In general what they succesfully do is the automation of the process. A lot of the RWT is intertwined with Botting and they have systems in place to partially relief their resources being pressured by RWT and Botting. While botting can be detected, 'legit' players RWT is a lot harder. Sadly, Venzualan families farming GP to pay rent is not a meme. For those not familiar with OSRS and its Wilderness. These RWTraders would hire clans to protect them in specific, very profitable, locations in the wilderness. This wilderness is a place where players can attack each other. In OSRS, on death you lose almost all your items. Any player that would come close enough to that location would be nuked by a group of people. In addition to the players farming GP for rent. Also often these clans conducted RWT. One of the reasons why, at least in some, countries are not generally completely lead by criminal organisations is due to a massive difference in resources. For many publishers of games, this is not the case. OSRS has tried many different approaches to this. In the end changing content was the what has lifted this place out of a maffia-controled zoned, inaccesible by those not paying USD. It was a location that was very well designed for the 'really legit' players. But in the end they had to take multiple L's before they found a manageable solution. Another side-note for Botting in OSRS is also accepting the situation, this does not mean giving up or turning a blind eye. Many farmable resources are being botted. As a result, prices of these resources have crashed since. These prices being rock bottom also allows new players to be able to afford them and progress their accounts. Botted resources have a place in the economy and if all bots were banned today. Many new players would find themself in a situation were they would have a very hard time progressing. Many players do not enjoy mining or woodcutting and are very happy that they can do content they do enjoy, killing shit, to be able to pay for that. Again, not meaning they should or are ignoring the issue. But premature banning of suspected offenders of rules is not on the top of their list of problems to solve. WoW, and also Warcraft 3, has been plagued by uncontrollable advertising on these platforms. RWT, Porn, Scam website, you name it, it has been posted. I have not played WoW enough to really know the ins and outs of this but I know that at some point they changed their general Trade and Looking-For-Group chat channels so that people would not be able to advertise so openly and easily as they did before. WC3 has a very active custom game-community. DotA, LegionTD, Battleships, Footies have been very popular since the launch of these maps. However the competitive scenes for these maps were being hosted by bots. This made it possible for these communities to enforce rules, maintain banlist, accounts for these maps, have ranking, record elo. These bots were the backbone of these communities. To play these games on high level, you require filtering by elo. Imagine trying to get to diamond league in LoL without any matchmaking. However at the amazing launch of WC3 Reforged they banned all hosting bots. Effectively making it unplayable for a large part of the consumers of this product, called WC3 Reforged. Beside many other reasons, this was another big L to take, nonetheless while very damaged, most the communities survived and continued with discord and there are no more free porn-games being advertised in the Cusom Game chats. Say what you want, pick your poison, it worked. Also OSRS has had a comparable issue with adverstisments by bots advertising (in-game) player-owned housing. To be able to allow others inside your PoH, you'd need to be in your house. Effectively preventing you from telling others that they can use yours. Banning all bots would negatively affect the consumer-experience. Since this allowed it for other players to quickly find a house that had the thing built they were looking for. In exchange players with fully completed housed could receive a compensation by donations. Again they had to take an L to resolve this. Obviously, macroing is not allowed. However they have compensated that with adding a piece of content that allowed for people to advertise their PoH without the need for these bots. I have been playing Ironman at OSRS and have not played WoW since MoP, so I do not know what exactly is the situation with this now, I might have some thing incorrect. My point of this section is to say that changing the content, accepting to take an L, is often a better solution than to keep throwing limited man-power on a problem. As long as its impossible to trade over 9 apr for a cs. People will get scammed for it. As long as you can have more than 1 account and nothing changes to how voting works. There will be vote-abuse. Lastly, for now, I want to note a very unpopular system in place in about all modern MMO's. Wich RWT from the developers themself. Beside all the obvious reasons such like that 90% of all gaming revenue is made by micro-transactions and that this is the new normal for the new generation of gamers. I am sorry to to be the one to tell you, but we are all the vocal minority boomers being disgusted by this. The vast majority of gamers do not mind Mircotransactions and are happy to have the possibilty to pay some money to skip content in a game. So they can actually play it. Nobody cares what these few boomers, still going to forums, have to say about "back in my day you needed to work in a game before it became fun." People play games for fun now. Beside the point that Royals' would be farming for a Cease and Desist and would face massive backlash for this. The WoW-Token and OSRS-Bonds allows for these games to directly compete with RWT and have influence over the price of their respective currencies. In the end, if faced by the descision of spending 8 hours in-game farming that someone might not enjoy, or budget 1 hour of their work from their job to archieve the same, is actually a very easy, and rational, descision to make. Trying to prevent all RWT would be similar to preventing all Leeching in Royals. As long as people receive party exp there will be leeching. Good luck with all the ban-appeals of people claiming the reasons for their afk was because their mom called them. This rule might be enforcable but the amount of work required to maintain this AND resolve the false positives is just not looking to be viable. As long as people can skip to end-game content with a simple decision of not going out for drinks today, RWT will remain. ============================================================== Why are people doing RWT? Generally, because grinding in-game for the same outcome is boring. Or that the content to archieve that point people RWT for is too boring. I am Looking at you, dead pq's and early-game content, leeching, hp-washing, and very poor inflation control. Yes, many took massive risks, worked very long and hard to archieve where they are now in this game. But the reality is that when a increasingly larger part of a player-base is wearing this 69b gear. This is the new normal, this is what you need to to be wanted for the content that actually is being played. While that last statement is very faulty, as I have been invited to krex as a no-zerk, warrior elixir, 35 int Zhelm, 20 int bathrobe, Omega Spear-DK. But appearently I have enough social skills and speak english well enough to be able to find myself surrounded by amazing people. If you are new to this server you are being gatekept by the inability to do meaningful content with others. I don't want to go zakum with level 85 unfunded attackers. As with many other things, Royals focus seems to be on resolving symptoms instead of solving the root of the issue. With these new rules, Royals is not taking responsibility of RWT, its trying to move the burden to its consumers, very inefficiently. In my opinion its a big mistake and signing for a deathwish. Potentially flooding themselfs with false negatives and as a result potential severe damage to its sustainability. I'll just try to read through the smega's for the time to come. Just like many in OSRS are very happy with rock-bottom prices of many items, so that doing content they do enjoy is sufficient enough to be able to throw their GP on Smithing, Firemaking or (Rune)Crafting. Seemingly, a group of players of Royals are happy enough to pay their IRL Meso to skip a large part of the game, so they can actually have fun while playing a game. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk. <3
Let me make it short, i stopped voting for royals, i am byond disappointed that royals put the responsibility on the players, it will kill the game slowly and surely, i better not play at all than get banned for sething isn't my responsibility, the game devs seemingly don't undestand they are gonna kill the game, while some one else will make a better server...
Exactly, like imagine how many legit players royals would have if they didn't have soo many crazy strict rules, all these casual people who've been banned because they didn't bother to read through an essay on rules on the forums before deciding to play a 20 year old 2D side scroller private server for a couple hours a day with their buds. When i try to tell my real life friends that used to play GMS back in the day about all the rules on the server before joining they laugh at me like I am joking. That's how ridiculous this shit sounds to your average person with a life outside of this game. I get that to the staff and GM's royals represents a big aspect of their life but to most its literally just a simple game to hop on every once in a while. plz see the forest through the trees's that this game is not that serious for most people. And if you have the mindset of, " oh if its not that serious and you can't follow the rules just dont play it", well you might not have your big fan base to keep the server alive for many years to come with that mindset. U guys got a big spike after covid and thats cool, but how long before loyal people start quitting or moving to different servers? Isn't that something you should value and care about???? I've NEVER played a video game, whether it be MMO, privately owned or what have you that have been this strict and uptight about everything like its life or death or real life shit lmao
