I like this idea alot, but my concern is how do you differentiate sharing/borrowing equipment from actual RWT? Edit: I guess even borrowing or sharing equipment, it will show on the trend that the player's wealth goes back to normal after a short period of time. So I think it will work.
The only way I can think of to differentiate between borrowing/sharing and trading is the time factor. There are many ways in which you can improve the algorithm, like what you've suggested: search for different patterns and exclude items that are continuously borrowed from one account to another. However, that also opens a window for exploits of the system; two people can easily exploit the system (Not the same person though, we are using a player structure that collects all of the IPs a specific player logs from).
As far as I know, the staff members are already doing this. However, I believe most of the sales are going through large sellers. Maybe they could pretend to be buyers as well? I've never been involved in RWT, but I guess the transactions are done through PayPal (Or are they more sophisticated than that?) - Those transactions can be canceled later.
You know the general health of the servers' suffering like hell when it's literally come down to this.
I think you have it backwards. In speaking with Stunk after the whole Charlie and P Slime scandal, Stunk told me Charlie ended up banned for RWT after he was already banned for GM abuse because he had a friend hold a 20 att PGC or something and he was selling it on another forum. According to Stunk, Charlie's buyer was actually Yan and he was banned. I've brought up the point about staff posing as sellers in the past, and I was told that the owner wants to focus on taking down RWT supply, banning the sellers, instead of banning the buyers. I've been monitoring the RWT forums for... about half a year and I don't really recall reading any threads with pissed off customers who got banned because of the undercover staff seller. So this suggests that while we do have an undercover buyer program, we do not have an undercover seller program which I think would be helpful. Also @Bryanz, the entire point is to not gain any money from the buyers. The vast majority of time I understand, the seller goes first. As in, the give the buyer the item and then they exchange payment information. If you follow ban appeals, you'd know this is a practice sellers use because on at least two occasions off the top of my head, people were banned for RWT because their seller was recording the transaction and provided all the chatlogs from Discord or whatever other platform. They essentially committed suicide homicide because the buyer scammed them their money, so they took the buyer, and themselves, down in retaliation. So there's no dilemma about profiting real currency from such a program.
Good point! I believe they should not focus on one solution, but instead approach the problem with a few solutions to solve it for good.
First off, I had no idea anyone had set eyes on this server to RWT. I figured all these guys with perfect weapons were bossing and farming very long hours or perhaps they had played for a long time. On the other hand, I had assumed RWT only happened in big MMOs and stuff. Anyway, @Shiyui I like your ideas, they seem fresh and it feels like they would impact RWT greatly. However, I must say RWT is a hard thing to beat in any online game (I played Oldschool Runescape before coming back to Royals and man, RWT is really something back there, there's way too many bots its a mess). Regarding your ideas though, I ask: isn't MapleRoyals the one with the biggest community? I'm thinking there's perhaps two or three servers with a relatively medium/large sized community which would be attractive in a goldfarmer's eyes. That being said, will this added risk you're suggesting stop sellers from selling (considering the market may have very few options to sell somewhere else)? As for a buyer's POV, I think it would indeed be a great deal of a risk. Risking all your legit progress sounds scary so they're gonna think twice before engaging in RWT. Bottomline, we could say there's added risk on both buyers and sellers but I believe sellers wont really be truly demotivated to stop selling unless we come up a stronger solution to stop them. That brings us to the next question: who should we aim for? The ones who want to buy their way with real money to max DPS or sellers? I'd say sellers. If you make it hard for someone to sell items they will eventually move somewhere else. We'll make this "market" unattractive for them. Buyers may still buy smaller amounts of mesos from casual sellers and get banned for it, but I'm guessing without a seller's temptation RWT would be injured badly on both sides and it wont harm the economy as much. If you try to go for buyers, there will always be new buyers while we have sellers. Since sellers are the minority, I'd target them. Here's what I'd do (don't know if viable/possible/worth it/they are already doing it): There's a number of ways to build a huge stack of mesos in this server: Selling AP Resets (Voting) Selling Leech Farming items Bossing Gachapon (Voting) Merching (Not really too viable due to taxes but lets just say it is) This means there should be some correlation between these activities and the mesos/items on your bag. 100m mesos for a two day old account seems fishy. You'd think this person has a main and has transfered over some cash to their new accounts. They should have the same IP if that's the case. However, big trades with someone who doesn't share your IP could be one of three things: A giveaway (which is kinda problematic), a loan or a trade. How to deal with them? Giveaway: Those players who give away large sums of mesos or good items to randoms would be flagged as this is as close as RWT as it gets. Loans: You can track loans by checking for long how players X and Y have been friends and their IPs as I can have X loan me an item on my noob account and we don't have each other added in that character. Trade: It should be fair for both sides so I'd guess this one doesn't pose a threat and could be dismissed. As for selling leech, I'm not sure if you can check on it (perhaps exp gained after the trade took place, idk) or how long both players been in-game, whether they've been afk or active... I don't know. Regarding the last three ideas, anything that looks suspicious should be flagged automatically. A few flags on someone would mean an investigation. As for those who bot and make crazy amounts of mesos and levels by just botting, we could check if their inputs seem human or robotic (probably can't be done) or.. check their AFK times. Its hard to believe someone could grind nonstop for 16 hours a day without breaks. (Yes, I know they could turn off the bot and afk and then go back at it two hours later but tis measure would still cripple their Mesos/day ratio). GMs could also check on unusual behaviors while using hide. Back when I was a GM in another server, we used to that manually with some @hackers/cheaters command. If we had some software that could constantly monitor net worth, it would be easier to flag accounts automatically rather than manually: We're interested by those who randomly give out huge amounts of cash, those who buy/own a lot of items but never sell any. Overall, we're looking for those who have big fortunes and can't explain how they got their wealth (kinda like banks do). I'm aware this wont "fix" the issue but it would for sure target how sellers made their money. Anyway, just trying to help. Let me know what you think, or if anyone has any feedback.
Sounds simple but why not just have GM's approve every exchange of the top 1% type of equips (perf weapons, 20+ attack PGC's, etc...). Hire on a few more GM's just for this purpose. Maybe have the trade go into "pending status" until a GM approves with a randomly generated number? This would (hopefully) reveal a bevy of information on the players involved in the trade. You could even have a white-list for those legit players who frequently transfer items between approved characters?
My idea to bait the buyers won't affect the sellers much at all, I agree! But here's the thing. There's already a staff initiative to go undercover and ban the RWT sellers. They already pretend to be buyers for the guys selling all those WS, CS, AP Resets, att gear, perfect weapons. It's quite effective. Ex GM Charlie was caught by Yan for trying to sell a PGC to him. And he's just one example. And there's also players who act on their own and go undercover to get the RWT sellers banned. I know of a few people who contacted me in private with their evidence against RWT sellers, asking me to protect their identities and pass on their report to Tim and Yan. For instance, I received quite a lot of evidence against Hitta, forum name Shottamic, all from regular player investigations. So there's vigilantes here too that technically break the rules by "soliciting" the RWT sellers all to nab them in the end. Banning the sellers is great! I agree that it's more important to ban the sellers. But to my perception, there's no initiative to set up trap selling threads to ban the buyers too. It makes sense to me to make an effort to ban both, not just the sellers. It's my hope that the higher ups in the server leadership approve staff to set up sting operations against buyers too. Just from hearsay, because I've had quite a few discussions on combatting RWT and other types of cheating on Royals with staff and former staff alike, it's my understanding that decisionmakers here have not greenlighted staff to set up fake selling threads on RWT sites because they want to focus on the supply, not the demand. So I'm hoping this thread changes that decision and has the server take a comprehensive approach to banning RWTers. I venture to say that it's the RWT buyers who tend to make legit players here jaded and they negatively impact the community here more than the RWT sellers do. It's pretty BS when someone who joined half a year ago has a character that takes at least two years for a legit player to make. It's also pretty BS when you know someone is a RWTer and they're in your friend/acquaintance social circle. Eliminating the cheaters who take shortcuts to get out of dedicated work to get to endgame would be personally satisfying I feel, rewarding the rest of the legit players by making their effort far more meaningful.
I agree with you, its a really good initiative! Plus I believe setting traps for buyers is much simpler and less complicated to their counterpart, sellers. On a side note, reading all your posts regarding this topic, I feel like if you were a GM or at least held a position as someone who monitors suspicious activity (Underground Police as your forum title sounds sick! to me at least). It feels like you'd be suited for such a position as I remember your name from back when I joined a few years ago, which means you're dedicated and know most people from then. Also, you seem to at least have an idea of who earned their stuff legit and who didn't. That's a healthy sense of doubt. I'd also propose and encourage players that are familiar with the economy and social aspect in this server to apply as GM interns, perhaps they'll be able to spot suspicious activity other GMs can't. _________ Regarding RWT, I feel it sucks for the rest of us, I'm the type of guy who doesn't like to play any p2w games (and rwting kinda makes games p2w) so as soon as RWT is gone, the better. I'm fully onboard with any initiative to help bring it down.
This might create too much work and putting too big of inconvenience for the players if the legit players share or borrow gear for a boss fight. This happen pretty frequently in the community. Here is another idea that I have. Currently quest ETC item cannot be NPCed, traded, or dropped. How about making any item that was scrolled with WS/CS untradeable and will disappear if you drop it like a quest item. If you want to trade it, you have to buy a temporary item tag for 100 nx that you buy from cash shop to enable the trade but tagged with the seller's IGN. The item can only be in trade if the character's IGN that is holding the item matches with the IGN tagged onto the item. Make the tagged item unable to equip onto a character unless it's been untagged. After the trade, the buyer has to go to an NPC to take off the tag, and the system logs where the item came from and went to with the temporary item tag. Just another weird idea I have.
I've never been a GM on here or any other server hahaha! However, I'm involved in RWT investigations a bit more than most since I have several people who trust me to act as a liaison between them and staff when passing along information to protect their identities. And I do pursue personal investigations on suspicious people and routinely look for RWT advertisements on external sites, documenting them for reports, but any regular player can do those. There's quite a lot non staff members can do when combatting RWT! It's easier though if server management would just give clearance to staff to ensnare the buyers along with the sellers, hence my posts here. Spoiler On the topic about me personally though, I don't want to be a staff member here. I've been in a committed romantic relationship with Tim, an admin, for a couple of years now. I'm happiest without the power dynamic of superior-subordinate that would arise between us if I was a staff member here. I'm not sure if I'm dedicated anymore now, especially since I've lost motivation to play upon completing my longtime dream of perfecting mage gear to reach 1700 magic. But I'll probably never really leave here after these years yeah haha. I do know most people from then, and it makes me nostalgic to recall how I genuinely felt like I knew everyone at endgame. And I do tend to know who earned their stuff legit and who didn't; in fact, I have seen and shared pretty damning evidence against quite a few people. But on the last two points, other veteran players can tell when someone is a RWTer. I assure you we talk about several individuals in our own social circles. But it does take an agonizingly long time to get conclusive evidence against them and get them banned. I strongly encourage players who desire to be staff to apply for staff, and for those who wish to help the server but don't want to be staff, do what you can. But I'm quite confident in current staff, particularly Tim and Yan, in their competency to ban RWT in their currently somewhat limited capacity. Also, I reminded myself. Sila had read-only database access back in old source. On the topic of terminating RWT, I advocate for current GMs to have this same tool. Currently, GMs need an admin to verify database level information. Since RWT investigations require only read permissions on the database to compile evidence, I highly encourage staff to give read-only access to their non admin members. Naturally, if such a convenience is granted, please take great care to ensure non admin staff members do not have write permissions to the database. Accidental disasters with queries would cause quite the headache!
This would work I think, but I'm curious how the system logs all of that information (newbie question I guess) like with the OP talking about "item ID's", do these track instances of scrolling, trades, and original method of obtaining? Or is it just a number associated with an item? What I would love to know is the average wealth accumulated in correlation to time spent playing on this server regarding instances of each class. Kind of like what Ario was getting at.
Would've been cool to see you as a GM but I guess that's a no-go. I understand your pov though. As for staff-applicants: I'm uneasy about it. I've been a casual player for quite a long time on this server and I've met all kinds of people, some of which desire power and they must've written their application two days after joining the server. Those who apply solely for the Wizet Hat make me nervous (regarding recent events with ex-GMs) if they were to handle even read-only database privileges. I personally don't believe much in applications as employers only get what they want to hear. With those risks in play, I believe nominating or having the staff pick 'em by their own standards would definitely work better but hey, that's just me.
I'd like to just point out that most sellers, including myself, don't keep godly equips lying around on random low level mules, every customer request is on a made-to-order basis. Just some insight for you sparky
