Notice Introduction of new game rule: Handling real world trade goods

I'd still like clarifications on what's too suspicious. What's the minimum age or level someone can be and have 5b? What if they merched hard for that money and don't care about exp? Merchers generally don't want to share what they make profit off of since it can give more competition. What happens when, since this rule is still highly subjective, someone thinks the person they traded with checked out but the admins/GMs disagree? They get banned even though they followed the rule is what happens.

 

On the principle of holding both staff and community responsible, this is a useful rule to keep Royals server healthy and sustainable. Players who worked hard for their gear shouldnt be shortchanged by people taking the easy way out (that is spending money then typing an elaborate/simple story on the forum)

Without giving more affirmation to the wiseness behind this new rule, i commend the staff for taking on this difficult position to keep the server healthy. people say hindsight is 20/20 but foresight requires wisdom (which some may not appreciate because their life is made more difficult)

Kudos to the staff for thinking about the server in the long run and elevating the standard for Royals.

 

This isn't like removing the FM button- something original maple never had. This is removing/punishing a core function of the game to combat an issue which staff has on record said isn't the biggest issue (by saying something else is a bigger issue, Matt said it about hacking it's on the forums somewhere honestly don't give a crap enough to find the post). It doesn't matter how much you pad the rule or raise the price limit. Imagine if I had to interview the lady selling me a chair at the store to make sure the 600$ armchair wasn't being sold by someone who stole it or something. The real world just punishes the rule breaker and parties if they KNOW they were bad. If I buy stolen property and I didn't know guess what you do? You turn it over and help them catch the bad guy. You don't arrest them, throw them in jail for 2 weeks, then go "ayy yup thanks m8". lol Caveat emptor means it's my fault if I get scammed, it doesn't mean I go to jail because the other party is a criminal and I didn't bother to ask for the guys medical history.

There are very real examples of what happens to games when you restrict free trade. It never goes well. Jagex announced removal of the wilderness and the stopping of free trade and it went into started in December of 2010. I fully admitting player counts fluctuate during the day and I have little control over what I can access via the waybackmachine but anyone who played back then saw a dramatic drop in players. The only thing that killed the game harder was EoC lmao. When they saw the writing on the wall they polled if it should come back and over a million people voted and >90% said free trade should return and the wildy should as well. There's no point in combating RWT if you kill the game in the process. You can see the player count jump again after it was reverted- and again- when EoC came out and RS2 died, they made OSRS which now has a higher player count. It's the same story over and over again.

I am legitimately shocked this was actually discussed and posted-- in the past really bad ideas of this level never made it out of the discord. You guys doubled down on the LHC stuff too and had to eventually backtrack quite a bit to fix a manufactured problem. I implore you- just hire more staff don't make rules that threaten players with a ban for not doing your job for you.

Rule one of MMOs, you never hurt the casual player or threaten them for playing the game as its designed. We have come full circle again. Nexon destroyed maple --> PS popularity takes off --> PS start to eat themselves. You guys have a winning thing here just update the game with new stuff as you have for like a decade and catch hackers and people will play. This stuff- this is the sort of stuff that drives players away.

Spoiler: RS3 wayback machine screenshots

 

Exactly, but since this server works on the guilty until proven innocent model, this seems justified to them. The free trade is what made original GMS so popular because it was like a real life economy, but I think the staff underestimate how much damage this will actually do to the economy, they think its just a simple addition to stop RWT, no...

And when I made another post on here simply giving the definition of fascism, not accusing staff of being that at all, just giving a definition, they deleted my post.

Oh the irony

Can I simply not mention the word fascism, or my post must be deleted? How about totalitarianism, dictatorship, oligarchy?

 

We're talking 5bil here. The average player never even hits 5bil net worth. There's real life examples of financial institutions working with governments to prevent fraud. I'm about to go full nerd mode here, and recognize that this is just a game, but urge anyone saying there's no real life example of similar rules to reconsider that opinion. Here's why:

Take the most capitalist, freeest economy in the world: the United States. Let's look at two rules that are similar to this royals rule.

1: foreign Account Tax Compliance Act
ref: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/corporations/foreign-account-tax-compliance-act-fatca

In short, foreign financial institutions are required to do DD on US citizens to help the US prevent tax fraud if you have foreign assets over $50000 USD. The individual is also required to file additional forms on their tax return disclosing these assets.

2. FinCEN's Currency Transaction Report
ref: https://www.fincen.gov/frequently-asked-questions-regarding-fincen-currency-transaction-report-ctr

In short, US financial institutions are required to fill out a CTR form to the government when making transactions exceeding $10000. Again, this is to prevent fraud, mostly money laundering.


Hopefully this shows you that there are real life examples of similar rules, even in the freest econonomic system in the world.

Now, I'm not saying this rule was implemented or communicated well. I still stand by the belief that the GMs should be doing the brunt of the work, with sellers next doing a little, and buyers very little to none, and believe my proposed system in a previous post here is a better implementation of this rule that creates less headache for everyone.

 

1. I would argue that the average player certainly reaches 5b net worth. You can easily obtain that by a half a year of voting alone.

2. These are improper analogies, because you cannot compare financial institutions to individual consumers. International banks seeking to negotiate high-level cross-border investments are (and should be) subject to a much higher level of scrutiny than random people looking to buy a piece of furniture. The better analogy would be various state laws that criminalize the purchase or acquisition of stolen property. Although the specific elements of the crime vary by the state, the key core element to note is that the burden of proof rests on the prosecution seeking to punish the individual consumer. In other words, if we want to use real-life laws as the basis of this server's rules, we have to recognize that it is unreasonable to place the burden of determining legitimate trades on individual players. The logical solution would be to place the burden of determining illegitimate trades on staff. However, as we all know, the rules in a video game rarely closely reflect the laws of a capitalistic nation.

To satisfy your quest for legal nerdom, here is a basic crash course in criminal law (in the United States). In all courts of law, a party bearing the burden of proof must establish a particular standard of proof. There are three levels to establish a standard of proof:

1. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

• This is often described as showing that "no other reasonable explanation" could exist besides the particular allegation that occurred.​

2. Clear and Convincing Evidence

• This is often described as showing "a high probability" that the particular allegation occurred.​

3. Preponderance of the Evidence

• This is often described as showing that it's "more likely than not" that the particular allegation occurred.​

In all criminal trials, the prosecution (i.e. the government) always bears the burden of proof to establish the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual has committed a crime--the highest and strictest standard of proof. Based on my experience in staff and in this server, the primary form of evidence that staff will use in banning players for RWT is the discovery of suspicious items held by players based on internal investigations. Based on my experience in criminal law, I would contend that this form of evidence would satisfy the standard of proof ranging anywhere from just at the level of clear and convincing evidence to far below the level of preponderance of the evidence--depending on the case (e.g. a new player holding a perfect weapon on a fully washed character, or a veteran player holding six chaos scrolls on a bishop). In simpler terms, the way this server handles punishment of RWT falls extremely short in comparison to the way a common law nation handles punishment of crime. But these analogies do not affect the seemingly overwhelming viewpoint of the community that the current rule on committing RWT is reasonable, but that the current rule on trading goods linked to RWT is unreasonable.

All of this is to say: Broadly speaking, players should stop using real-life laws as examples to make arguments about how in-game rules should be implemented. Because more often than not, they don't even know what they're talking about. This isn't targeted to the player I'm quoting--this literally happens all the time in the forums with players citing random laws they dug up on google or asserting random political philosophies they learned in middle school. You are all capable of utilizing the common sense and rational thought required to argue why a rule should or should not be implemented without having to make random shit up.

 

I guarantee you if you lined every person who has ever played royals up, the person in the middle does not have 5 bil.theyre probably level 70. If you took the average of players currently playing, it could be higher, maybe level 140 with 2bil. But that's net worth. My level 16 mule is rank 456417. My level 46 character is rank 230619, or about half from level 16. Even accounting for mules, we're no where close to the average player having 5 bil. Also, People don't trade their net worth in a single transaction. Yes you would have 5bil from voting 6 months but the average player stays probably doesnt play 6 months, plus those funds go into things like pots, failing mw20 3 times like snowy, leech, etc, not purely tradeable assets.

2. Agreed, that is a flaw in the analogy with FATCA. With CTR the point I made still larglely stands, and you made a great call out to state laws that map on better to the royals rule, strengthening my point that the royals rule isn't some crazy out of the blue solution with no precedent.

Where I disagree is in the use of real world situations to map into game rules. It's not going to be a perfect 1:1comparison, but the same people living in real life play the video game. Games are designed by players who live in the real world under real systems. There's great value in relying on our past experiences to inform future decisions, even if those experiences are going from irl to in game. Take what applies to people in general irl, then tailor that rule to the game environment.

Also agreed that we this server manages rwt is way worse than how things are managed in common law. But that's okay. that's because irl it matters way more, and the people irl are trained professionals being paid, not random unpaid folks running a server probably just out of love for MapleStory. Here it's just a game for pixels. nobody is going to die because of a GM decision on rwt. That's why I doubt this rule, even if kept the way it is right now, will cause the server to die, but if there's things we can do to make it better, why not?

 

Also while I'm out here feeling my oats and typing up walls of text anyways, I now feel the need to ask: Why does there seem to be a sudden shift in tone from the community? Are most players now in general agreement with the rule, or have most players simply reached a point of burnout and defeat in advocating against this rule? Quite frankly I personally didn't feel particularly strongly about this rule given my low involvement in the game, but as someone who has observed the intense participation by everyone in hoping to clarify and change this rule I find this result to be highly disappointing. There has been an increasing pattern over some time now in which staff will evade addressing the core issues of community feedback, and so I am taking the time to once again reiterate some of these core issues that players have brought up time and time again:

1. The Burden: Repeatedly claiming that this rule will not place a burden on the community does not change the fact that it will in fact do so, especially given that staff has now openly acknowledged multiple times concepts such as "accountability" and "responsibility" they are placing on the community. I believe most players recognize that staff invest a commendable amount of workload in dealing with RWT, and I hope most players recognize that the new rule does not change that. However, the fact of the matter is, a rule that requires players to investigate and report trades under the threat of severe punishment is an undeniable shift of burden that has traditionally been held by staff to the community. So I would much rather staff be upfront and acknowledge the obvious impacts of the rule for what they are, because frankly all of this posturing is otherwise just an unpalatable level of either dishonesty or delusion that reflects poorly on their work. And although the framing of this argument has admittedly been unnecessarily aggressive at times, this is ultimately not a "bad faith interpretation" as the community has now been accused of. This is just simple fact, and this is not a point that can or should be disputed.

2. The Revision: The only substantive "revision" arising out of these pages of discussion has been raising the threshold from 1b to 5b. And if I'm being completely honest, this revision is a deceitful distraction tactic given that the appendix now specifically encompasses all broad areas that could be covered by "knowingly and repeatedly making suspicious trades" or "making a single extremely high-valued suspicious trade." So what you're telling us is... the threshold has been supposedly raised to 5b--but also now simultaneously adjusted to whatever staff feel is appropriate at the time of the ban? This feels especially disingenuous in light of all the "discretion" and "interpretation" that staff have now clarified that they wield in enforcing rule.

3. The Transparency: If the initial players who were "retroactively banned" under this rule were actually banned under the staff discretion rule, then what was the purpose of implementing this rule in the first place? As staff has clarified multiple times now, this rule seeks to address a gray area--but what about all these multitudes of new gray areas? So let's confront the elephant in the room: Staff have either negligently or intentionally implemented a rule in which many players will be negatively impacted throughout their gameplay experience. As it stands, it seems to be the latter. But since there does not seem to be any signs to honor the community's broader requests for removal or significant revisions to this rule, I would at least suggest firmly acknowledging this rule for what it is--and that could hopefully serve as a starting point for helping the community begin to understand this rule for what it could be. At this point, what the players might find helpful is clarity and transparency into the process. What are the types of trades that staff has specifically investigated that merit the necessity of this rule? What are the issues that staff has specifically discovered that only this rule could solve? What are some examples or data points that would support placing this undeniable burden on players?

Let's be real, the implementation of this rule was much more of a PR issue than it was a drafting issue. Just be clear, and just be upfront. I know players here can act like children someoftentimes, but they're mature enough to handle some straight-laced truth. And it certainly would have helped if the community had the notice and opportunity to comment on a proposal of a new rule like they had in the past.

 

Surely if the sample size is so small then staff could just investigate each player with a networth above that 5b mark making this entire exercise pointless. I have a feeling means wasn't the bottle neck with any of this.

 

My guess is that there's no system in place for staff to know who has a net worth above 5b easily and the staff for whatever reason doesn't want to create that system. That's why they're making sellers/buyers disclose information. It's so that they can track these transactions and its so they can ban buyers for profiting off of laundering money for RWT.

 

They literally said it was so players could have a defense if they got banned on suspicion of rwt. I don't know where you pulled that assumption from.

 

There is no assumption. As I said in the post, it's a guess based on the fact that they're doing all this rule making when, if they had a way of tracking these trades, RWT probably wouldn't exist because 5b trades likely occur so infrequently that they could manually filter it for RWT. The second part about banning buyers for profiting off of laundering money for RWT is a paraphrase of the original post, verbatim, here:

"This rule was added to make it more difficult for real world traders to launder their goods and to prevent players from profiting off of 'cheap' rwt deals."

If what you said is what the GMs said, then what you said is true too. Doesn't mean what I said is wrong.

 

tl;dr

But I guarantee that 90% of the people in this thread doomsaying about how this rule has eradicated joy from their lives have only made a 5b+ trade like 3 times ever.

 

I still don't like this rule really, but raising the cap to 5b was the right move and I am glad that decision was made.

 

Giving my unpopular opinion once more because there is a lot of valid discussion here, as I didn't give a lot of reasoning behind my original praise of the rule update.

The phrasing of the first post, the fact that it was introduced as a rule instead of a strongly suggested notice, and viewing the various ban appeals that appear on the forums sparked my initial outrage. While I'd prefer the rule not exist at all, I can empathize with the staff on it's intention now, which was outlined a little better with Nut's post.

I think many players looking at the low standard which trades/items were deemed suspicious or out of the norm enough to constitute a ban agree with this statement. This has been extremely apparent to me, a relatively low profile community member and inactive player. I care more about unjust bans and not having to fear that my progression is too far out of what staff deems normal. I would also like to add that GMS was NOTORIOUSLY bad at combating hacking (see blaze wizard farming in early days of reboot, or wild hunters in standard GMS),duping, and even had their own built-in "RWTing" system with the NX trade market, the only difference being that Nexon were the ones to rake in the cash.

That being said, I think this rule serves a better purpose to decrease bans on innocent players rather than strictly counteracting RWT. I'm doubtful staff has time to read every single player's chat logs that ever traded with a banned individual, or a fool-proof method in place to log trades and drops which are deemed high value. How would you create an algorithm to log every uneven trade given market fluctuations, long time friends lending a piece of gear, trading between your own alts, or end game players giving away their gear? Even if it was to simply filter and give alerts, these trades would require intervention from a real person to determine whether or not these were actionable offenses.

This rule gives a clearly defined way for players trading with other random players to prove and justify their innocence, rather than relying on the very flimsy "I got these items from a friend" defense. You can now easily give all relevant information to grant yourself a better defense in the event that your purchase or sale was with a RWTer and hopefully prevent an unwarranted ban from occurring in the first place. The increase from 1B to 5B also decreases the strain this rule causes on the market, as many commonly traded items fall well below the 5B range such as MW20 and mid-game gears. It also eliminates the silly loophole of just using a shop instead for your 2B items.

Of course, it would be far preferred that unlucky players in these situations were NOT immediately banned under mild to moderate suspicions, but I'm honestly not sure of the extent players have or would have used used the "grey area" to get away with RWTing. Staff is under the impression that it was so rampant, this was a necessary response and would not be taken seriously if just posted as a notice. I don't see an immediately better solution to this problem rather than revamping the trading system entirely, or forcing the average user's information relating to these questions to be publicly available, which I personally feel would be an even worse scenario.

I think I'd rather have to make a 10 minute inquiry every month when trading with large sums of mesos than risking a ban which could take weeks to come to a conclusion. This is still a far better policy than GMS's near non-extistent approach, where 27 ATT FS roam the market as the norm and not as a realistically impossible item for top players.

 

...you know those people aren't actually innocent, right?

Edit: to further elaborate, when I borrowed my first perfect weapon (and subsequently got banned for it) without doing any "due diligence" whatsoever I could've named you my friend's main, source of income, bishop, mages, secondary chars, new chars waiting to be leeched, birthday, mom's cat's name, dimensions of his jacuzzi, favorite card game, sleep schedule, various addictions to drugs...

And these guys can't even name one IGN?

You don't need a rule demanding due diligence for innocent players to prove their innocence. This rule strictly serves to create more false bans, not less.

 

I don't reject this premise at all, Bacon. I agree that 95% (or some metric close to) of bans are justified and that you guys are doing your best to protect this server.

Neither do I claim that any of this is intended in anyway to create false excuses to maliciously ban people from the staff team. I'm not arguing that, and I don't think anyone is.

What I am claiming is that it is inevitable that a rule that places onus on the players will inevitably lead too more false bans, because you're only human and mistakes happen, and I happen to think that those 5% is so, so, so much more important to protect than to ban that 95%. I have stated multiple times that 99% of the player base is not affected by the rwt problem, that it's just an anecdotal side note to most players journeying through this mushroom game, and you're burdening everyone to tackle this problem instead of, as stated many times, using your discretion to deal with malicious grey area abusers as you wish.

I would sooner see a thousand uglees and nan1s go free than see a single innocent player be banned for not doing a forum background check on another player, and I'm not the only one who thinks that.

 

One singular yike from me. Not sure why my post was deleted, but people deserve to know that false bans do happen..quite a bit (from what I've noticed IMO).