In this case I don't think murker could be considered a scammer because there was no agreed upon transaction. This is a better example of how innocent people feel when they are accused of being scammers when there was just a misunderstanding. Fion trusted that she would get her scg back, murker had full intentions of returning it but after doing and being accused prematurely, he decided to do something rash and provoked because his reputation was ruined. This is why there must be absolute proof, but at the same time if Fion had a SS of murker claiming that he was going to keep the scg or not answering pm's. Then there is a clear reason for the ban. After this encounter, Murker left the server on a break and no more "scams" came from him. the underlying point being that if it were an actual scam, then a ban and perhaps exposure is the way to go.
So in the other thread, since Kat is talking about bringing up NPCs, as regarding to trades over max mesos, why not make an NPC to exchange mesos for a gold leaf? And the person who turns in the mesos gets back x amount minus taxes? It of course won't get rid of all scams, cause the arrows are part of evading taxes. But if you don't trust them, don't buy arrows and make trades with gold leafs. If they're not willing to take gold leafs, don't trade with them.
This directly contradicts the rule itself, it clearly says scamming isn't bannable yet if a case is provided with enough evidence, it could lead to a ban, so which is it? Over the past few months, there's been numerous scam reports all of them with more than sufficient evidence and all it takes is a gm to look into the logs to confirm it. We know gms snoop around sketchy people behind the scenes, how else do you guys catch meso-buyers and exploiters. All that's needed is enough suspicion to start investigating certain players. To answer the Haul case, there are proper evidence pointing him as being guilty, multiple ones. They're the best a person is able to grab unless you expect a screenshot of Haul explicitly saying the words "I scammed so and so" but even that's meaningless (referring to Murker's case where he admitted stealing Fion's scg). What do you do with items and mesos on permanently banned accounts? Nothing, it just sits there forever. That's no excuse if you consider the severity of scamming versus some of the other rules that's governed around here. This just speaks laziness or apathy, or no, you do care but not enough to do anything about it. If you really cared about the players and feel bad for their losses, you'd do something about it instead of saying "too bad for you". Most servers do regulate scamming and if they can do it why can't you guys? I'll use extalia as an example as this is the perfect opportunity. In extalia, most "end-game" scrolls (Shield Scroll, Chaos Scroll of Goodness, Miraculous Chaos Scroll of Goodness, just to name a few) are untradable, so what people do on that server is they provide "scrolling service". What a scrolling service is, is you trade the equipment you want to be scrolled to the player selling these untradable scrolls and let them scroll for you. Some people request screen-sharing on skype to insure the seller isn't using say a 10% shoes of speed scroll over a chaos scroll. A miraculous chaos scroll of goodness (mcs for short) can alter the stats of an equipment from anywhere between -10 to +10 so people could easily use a regular chaos in place of a mcs. I'd argue that scrolling services are much riskier transaction than anything on this server (aside from godly end-game gear but people who have those are for the most part, reputable people so the likely-hood of them scamming is very low anyways) and they happen way more frequently than some of the stuff that goes on around here. You can imagine it requires a lot of work yet they still enforce it. Extalia also has a much larger playerbase than royals and I want to say they have relatively the same gm-players ratio as here, so the "it takes forever" excuse doesn't cut. Even if it was a lot of work, that's still no excuse because that's your jobs as gms. I did say earlier that I don't believe scammers should be banned and I still stick to that, however, seeing the same scammers get away with blatant frauds repeatedly over and over again does bug me a little. But what bugs me even more is the gms' stance on the whole scamming matter. You say you're sorry for what happened and wish you could do something to help but take no initiative to make a change, only pretty words to please people. You leave it to the community to fix it themselves but you and I both know the community blacklist will only do so much in preventing scams, most people find it after being scammed which by then, they'll either be wary of it or it's useless. @Katsuruka brought up a neat idea but that's both unnecessary and unrealistic, what's honestly needed is to make it a strict rule (if there's even a shred of care in you guys). You don't even need to enforce it, just by having the rule alone will prevent people from scamming or at least make them think twice before committing it. The only con I can think of by making scamming a bannable offence is, people might file fake reports in an attempt to ban someone they don't like. But I can give you a few reasons why that won't be an issue: 1. Right now even with no consequences on scamming, people are still reporting them. 2. A quick check into the logs can easily conclude whether it's real or not. 3. Punish players that try to intentionally get others banned. 4. It's easy to apologize and revert a wrongful ban. 5. Nobody will fucking do that. You're right that some of the solutions provided by the community are far from perfect, including mine, but doing something is better than nothing. By doing nothing, you're inadvertently supporting the problem.
Items like Gold Leafs worth more as currency standards open the door to yet another target for dupes and exploits and will thus likely never be adopted. Just wanted to address that amidst conversation to anyone who wss curious.
Doesn't a new source written entirely from scratch do that in itself? And if the answer to that is that all of the proper testing will be done, couldn't the same be said about a newly implemented currency system? The idea's use goes further than just the scamming issues at hand as well.
Don't get me wrong here, I am not defending scamming, but this is my honest opinion on the recent scamming outbreaks. You are responsible for everything you do with your items and mesos. When you buy leech, you are willingly giving up your mesos to a person you have never seen before. When you click "accept" in that trade window, or when you pay 70m for an etc. item from a shop, that's on you. Whether you receive a leech or not is up to the random stranger in whom you decided to place your trust. Now, speaking as someone who has never once purchased a leech in his entire maple career, I do not know much about the logistics of how it works. But nevertheless, you gave that person your money of your own free will, and you can't be surprised that people won't flake out once they've got the money; they were just handed 70m, and they are under no obligation to spend an hour of their time leveling you up. Leeching is weird; it is and isn't a part of the game. By that, I will elaborate - it is a part of the game because it is the result of a built-in EXP-sharing function for those who choose to party together. On the flip-side, it isn't a part of the game in the sense that you are receiving levels by sitting idle in a map. You are not "playing" the game when you are receiving a leech, but you are still leveling up. My point is, you are giving someone money with no possible way of ensuring that your services will be provided, and frankly, that falls on the ones who gave up their money, just so they could avoid "playing" the game. Now, speaking to the recent events of the 2.5b cape or whatever Haul's asking price was - that's nearly identical to the leech scam, just on a much larger scale. You're willingly buying billions of mesos-worth of arrows from some dude with a cool cape. You are not entitled to restitution when that person accepts the money that you voluntarily gave to them. And honestly, this outbreak irks me even more than the leeching one because there actually IS a way to ensure that you can receive your cape. You see, chaos scrolls and white scrolls exist. These are worth approximately 300m each, depending on the economy and/or one's own interpretation of their value. The fact that these are not used as currency is very bothersome. Yes, I am more than well-aware that they fluctuate in value. But the amount is very negligible, and I'd rather lose out on a few million mesos if it meant total security in the reception of my item. Again, I am not supporting scamming. But I am also worried that there is a lot of victimization going on here. While I do feel bad for those who got scammed by Haul (or any other similar item scammer/leech scammer), I do not consider them to be victims. When you get scammed in one of these manners, you have nobody to blame but yourself. You don't want to grind out the monotonous levels? Tough. Either play the game or prepare for the possibility of getting scammed. You want to purchase an item that is worth more than 2.1b? Use other expensive items as currency. It's not that difficult. While I do stand behind the idea of banning those scams that have "irrefutable" evidence against the scammer, I seriously urge people to consider that this is an anonymous, online game. You interact with strangers. You don't know who is on the other side of that character's computer. It's your job to stop and think about the ramifications of your actions when you willingly hand over 2.5b to someone you've never seen before.
Theoretically speaking it is free will, but technically when u click the "accept" in that trade window, it is an agreement that you made with your partner. In real life if you go order food pays the money to cashier, are they not under obligation to give the food that you paid for? Your logic just seems flawed. while this is a plausible solution, it's another thing for the community to all accept this method. This does not provide exception on how we should just ignore the issue of scamming.
The trade window does not know what's happening outside the window itself. As far as the trade window is concerned, you are handing over money to another person. That's all that matters to the trade window. And I feel obligated to add that this is not real life. This is a game. Real life cashiers at restaurants have more checks and systems in place than does a private server of an old video game. The whole community doesn't have to accept it. It's not being forced on anyone. It's just a suggestion. If people are really comfortable handing over 2.5b for literally nothing, that's fine. I can't stop them from doing that, and neither can the GMs. But if it's me personally, I'm making sure I get what I'm paying for, even if said security costs me a little more.
The logical solution is to figure out a way to let people trade over max. IDC what it is, just some way to get that done. The Gm seems to think the dev's couldn't get the leaf idea working without it being used for duping. I just refuse to believe there isn't some way possible to allow people to trade over the current max.
Using the "Haul" scamming cases as an example, the players could have easily traded max meso + a white scroll or two for the cape. The reason they had the potential to get scammed is that they tried to avoid the extra 25m in taxes, by buying arrows from someone's store.
I'm not trying to bring in real life to over complicated things, but seriously that statement just seems to imply that it doesn't matter since it is just a game. Then may i ask you why do the staff members even bother crafting the T&C.
Haul wouldn't accept WS's. I was about to do a trade with him too, but he wanted pure mesos, so I was kinda iffy about it and just said naaaah.
You're right it does open the door for more dupes and exploits. We have an Open Beta to help discover these dupes and exploits, but ask yourself this; who would actually go and try to find these on a beta server? Mostly people who would are ones who intend to not report them and hope they're still around when the new source goes live to use them for their own gain. Why introduce not only the possibility for more dupes and exploits, but something nice and juicy to use them on? Doesn't make much sense to me. You're also right that it would potentially help some things beyond scamming, however I believe at the moment, we hold the opinion that there isn't enough benefit to justify how catastrophic something like this could be if it got out of hand. It's also not the topic of this thread, so unless you can justify some sort of change to the meso system we have now being made to end scamming outright or at the very least drastically cut the number of scams down, I'll ask that you make a separate thread for this train of thought as it doesn't exactly pertain to this thread in particular.
The contrary question I'd like to ask, if most of the players are 20 years old, how can they STILL BE STUPID ENOUGH to get SCAMMED? IMO, it is on you and you alone to not get scammed. As someone already pointed out above me, there are ways of playing the game and trading over max mesos without risking getting scammed. If this server is truly played by mostly adults, then I expect that adults are able to evaluate the risk and the consequences of their actions. I just want to ask the people who got scammed. When you are buying leech and are handing over hundreds of millions of mesos to some random guy you don't even know (at best you only know from "forum" and by "online reputation", which in reality doesn't mean shit), did you ever consider the possibility that maybe the so called leecher is a scammer? Did you think about how you can convince yourself the leecher is not a scammer? If you thought that way, maybe you would've went on the forums, and looked around to see if he has any reputation, then not get scammed. What has the scammer done or prove to you to deserve your trust with so much money? Did you think about that, or did you just mindlessly hand over your money? The case with trading over max mesos and getting scammed is honestly retarded beyond belief to me. Like people said before, you can trade white scrolls instead of relying on trust. As 20+ years olds, I'd like to think that people are intelligent enough to realize you can't trust people online (unless you know them in real life), and that it is extremely hard to tell if someone is trustyworthy or not. As a result, one should've always been on the cautious side. In the case of white scrolls, I'd expect 20+ years old to evaluate the risk and reward of paying a bit more money in taxes to do a safe 10 bil trade, and handing the 10 bil over without any though. As adults, I expect that you understand the first option is obviously better, paying a tiny bit more to eliminate any risk of scamming. -_- I really think that people getting scammed just need to use their brains more, and think twice before they act. I also think that it's good they got scammed. You need to learn this lesson anyways. I just thought that parents taught their children about how to avoid getting scammed before they were 20 years old, guess not. TLR - Use your brain, don't be retarded, think twice and you won't get scammed. Simple as that. If everyone does that, there is no need for this big discussion about how to deal with scammers cuz scammers won't succeed.
Depends how badly someone wants the source i guess, im only new to this server but i'm looking forward to the new source soley for the fact i want to play a buccaneer, and i was told it is quite buggy. Im sure many people who have been around since server release who really love this server are helping you on the open beta. I know if i had been here and still enjoyed the server since release i would be on the beta trying to find dupes/exploits ONLY for you to fix them so you could push the beta into release quicker. Not everyone uses exploits for their benefit remember, their is a reason we have game testers in this day and age.
I'm not sure if you are trolling or being serious with this, you do realize the amount of work the GM's and admins are already doing right? We are in the middle of huge changes for Royals, new source is a massive project that takes quite some effort, on top of that there is already a huge amount of work that has to be done every day, sure after the new source and when a lot of the daily issues are fixed, where staff attention can be used for other things than warps, character issues, character deletions etc... then I can see a point in a thread where scamming becomes a more realistic problem to deal with. Are you seriously complaining that the staff doesn't take on more work? I mean fine bringing up the point about scamming and talking about solutions and try to get a dialogue about how can we do something against it All I see from you see is being quite disrespectful, and I mean it's quite something that you are complaining that other people should work harder and spend more time on a free to play server, non profit, where the GM's and admins only doing this for the community.
My only wish is to make the community blacklist more accessible for players. It took me a while before i even knew we had one. Id like to add to the thread but currently i think most of what id day has been said Im sorry to the victims of scammers like zico and haul. I feel bad i cant do anything other than complain about them
Why would you trust a consultant with thousands of dollars in real life? Why would you trust a random stranger will sell you a zhelm? Both because of their reputation. As a 20+ I'd like to think that you know that reputation is EVERYTHING. In real life and in the game. The difference is, in real life, if an investment banker is caught swindling or using unethical methods for personal gain, they are punishable by the law. There are people who get away with scamming millions in real life sure, but its still punishable. Certain transactions such as buying leech / zhelm REQUIRES trust just like how in real life any service transaction requires trust. I strongly believe that an individual should also be banned given sufficient evidence. In the case of Haul, players have provided beyond reasonable doubt that he is a scammer based on the screenshots, testimonies, threads of him creating a new character, ect. This person is scum and should be banned. GMs are incredibly busy I understand. They can not investigate every single ban report. We as a community needs to make sure to only report serious / large scams and provide as much evidence as possible in a clear, effective manner. Just like how a lawyer needs to prove a suspect is guilty, we need to help GMs by doing OUR PART. As Nerfarious said, as of now, he has the ability to scam multiple players of leech AND get away with it. I have the ability to join a Zakum run, loot everything several times with different people, log off, take a break and get away with it. John mentioned that refunds makes things complex. Refunds should not be implemented, just the simple act of banning scammers will discourage scamming all together. Even a simple rule change would drastically improve the server's community. Scammers KNOW they can abuse the system. They are thinking "HAHA I can act like a scumbag and take advantage of people's honesty in an online game that requires trust and get away with it!" We now respond with "No, you cannot. There will be consequences."
No I already said it in my previous post, you don't know Haul IRL, you only know him by "online reputation", which is completely BS anyways because it really is just some random stranger online saying another random stranger online is trustworthy. You don't really know what "Haul" looks like, what his personalities are, and what type of person he is because you NEVER MET HIM IRL. How then, can you make the assumption that he is trustworthy? Just cuz another faceless stranger online said so? How can you make the assumption that the people who said "Haul" is trustworthy are trustworthy then? For those who convinced you Haul is trustworthy, did they conduct 10 bil mesos trade like that with him before? Just cuz Haul appears "nice" doesn't mean you should drop your guard, especially when doing trust trades with ONLINE STRANGERS, no matter who they are and what people said about them. I thought this is common sense? I also expect people to realize that they need to err on the side of caution online, because again, you don't know who are the people behind those computer screens. Again like I said, as adults I expect people to know this already. Apparently they still don't and starts crying when they get scammed. In reality, they are just lamb to the slaughter. They need to get scammed once, twice and multiple times until they learn their lessons, because in reality, scammers exist IRL just like here regardless whether there is law enforcement and its better that they get scammed here anyways. IRL, you won't just trust any random consultants off the streets. You probably would do some research into what consultants are, and what customers have this consultant that you are about to trust served before just giving him thousands of dollars. In Haul's case, did the guy getting scammed do some research into whether Haul's done massive trust trades like that successfully? Was there another 2bil+ trust trade he did that he didn't scam? It's even more important to be careful online because IRL you can go to jail for scamming, and online even if GM starts banning, they can easily make another account. There is almost no consequences for scamming regardless of whether you ban. Buying zhelm and leech requires trust. But at the same time, I expected that people already know that there is a certain threshold for each player that when enough money present, they will scam and throw their so-called "reputation" away because they deem it not worth the money presented to them. For Haul, he might value his reputation at 2 bil. This means that he will not scam zhelm buyers, leech buyers because they are 200 mil trades at most and his reputation is worth more than that. When he's presented with a 10 bil trade, he will scam without hesitation and start a new account. His reputation on Haul is worth less than 10 bil, it's like he sold his main acc to start a new one for 10 bil mesos. I'd say it's worth.
The word trolling gets thrown around here so loosely that it no longer has its meaning, any opinion people don't like they'll label as trolling and scoff it off. Unless you can sit here and tell me that every single one of the 17 gms we have on board are constantly doing work, whether it's testing the open beta, handling character issues, doing rewarps or whatever, then everything you just said is pointless. You don't need to answer that because I know just from observing that you guys are short on staff members and are probably in search for new gms. If being under-staffed is the problem then the immediate solution that comes to my mind is to bring in more... but wait no, John said earlier that scamming isn't bannable because it's "impossible" to confirm whether someone is a scammer or not; so which is it, being under-staffed or it being "impossible" to prove? Maybe you should read my post before jumping to any conclusions. If I see that there's a problem with something, I'm going to be vocal about it regardless if it's something people choose to do on their free time or not. It's the way I want others to treat me so I'm gonna be no different. I used to be a SBT (super beta tester) on another game years back and we always got criticized for doing a shit job, and let me tell you if you think I'm being disrespectful then you have no idea how fortunate you are to be blessed with a such friendly community. Despite the toxicness of that community, we took every complaint seriously, at least I did, because I believe there's merit in everything people say. On top of the criticisms, we had a tight schedule we had to meet (x amount of matches/hours you had to play every week) and if you couldn't meet that requirement, they'd strip your title away. I suppose you could say we were under-staffed as well so that put more burden on us. We didn't get paid either and most of us went out of our ways, some sacrificing real life commitments, to help test upcoming content for the community (at least that's what I like to think but I know some people were glory hunters.) So to hear a staff member say "it's too much work", especially over here at Royals, where it doesn't seem that rigorous and staff members are given lots of free space, is unacceptable to me. I'll say one more thing before I leave, people can always work harder and never work hard enough.
