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

dude don’t drag ravir like that. you have no idea what could be happening in his life to cause him to be less active.

 

Dropping such a huge change to trading in an MMO game without prior community feedback is baffling to me.

 

Eish I really didn't want to get involved in royals again but this one was inevitable.

To begin, I believe this rule is much "needed" in royals as it deals with intentional abusers who knowingly make massive profits from the illegal gang of cheaters in the game.

However... simply too little information of every individual player is disclosed in current royals.

To state the main issues,

Is creating a forums acc mandatory? Nope

Are players forced by an official rule to provide their legitimate info (char creation date, other info on the list of recommended back search procedure) when questioned by a non-GM character? I wish, my life would have been so much easier if this was valid

Will rwters ever tell the truth about their own info? Only the dumb ones but I believe they mostly went extinct with Black Rhinos after 2017

Will staff be available 24/7 to validate the suspicion on a deal before the seller, who is impatient and in a hurry, gets tired of waiting and decides to sell to a different guy, but later turns out legit? Staff have real lives too, this is realistically impossible

The one real difference this rule will make is that it'll force people to stop using low level characters, be it a dayfly rwt char or legitimate storage mules, for high value trades. I guess this change will contribute substantially toward the prevention of rwt trades as rwt sellers always make a fresh, unrelated new accs with low lvl chars for any rwt trade - to prevent the exposure of their legitimate accs.

Buuuut, it won't help as much when we are dealing with non-expert RWTers who actually play the game with heavy time investment but also waste their wages on pixels for short-cuts.

This rule CAN work ONLY IF more information is provided to everyone with proper tools to easily access them. For now, only staff can access the data that discloses pretty much all the information about a character and its owner.

- Acc creation date
- Number of related accs and the lvl/number of characters within those accounts
- stats of equips worn by characters
- hours played by each account/char (logged in?)

Let's simulate a scenario

Spoiler: Scenario

A fairly new player, lvl 162 bishop who spent months selling endless hours of leech, finally saved 20b to buy his dream perf wand. He uses a smega "B> perf wand 5 or 6 plz offer" and immediately receives an ingame whisper from a random guy.

Random: "Hey I have perf wand 5 for sale, 15b if we trade now in b coins"

Bishop: 'Oh shit, this guy is selling for 5b cheaper than what I heard!!! There's no one else selling it too!!!!

But.. I heard I need to check if I'm not buying from a RWTer else I can get banned...yet if I ask why he's selling for cheap, he's obviously gonna raise the price damnit '

Bishop: "I wanna buy it but.. do you have a forum acc bro"

Random: "nah I never joined forum too lazy for that shit"

Bishop types /find random*** and walks to ch19-fm3 to find the random player and double clicks on the char to find out it's a lvl 145 f/p.

Bishop: "Is this your main char?"

Random: "yeah, I played for 3 years but never grinded much, just voted and gached at shrine once every while"

Bishop: "Are you quitting tho? If you are selling your wep"

Random: "Nah, I'm gonna fund my new NL, tired of playing this mage"

Bishop: 'it's gonna be awkward af if I ask his nl's IGN now...ughh this already feels like an interrogation session'
"Oh, what lvl is your NL?

Random: "I haven't made it yet, still saving ap resets"

Bishop: 'I think I asked enough questions and he made sense... I guess?'

Trade is done

[Random guy joined only 3 weeks ago and the perf wand was previously bought from a rwt seller]

Solution

In KMS, every account info is disclosed to public. If one searches a single IGN on the special search tool of the main website, all their related IGNs within the same account as well as their stats and equips get displayed, ofc including the acc creation date etc.

Can royals implement a "Link" profile?
Upon new account creation, add an option to add whether this is one's first ever account or if they have one already. If another acc exists already, that account's id should be entered so those 2 accounts can be "linked" and so on for every additional accs. Provide a search tool on forum or royals website so searching a single IGN will display all the related chars and their IGNs as well as their creation date - better if equips and their stats can be shown as well. If we find isolated accounts with stagnant lvl 50 mules, it'll also be easy to report them for vote abuse suspicion. Linking should become a mandatory step to prove individual's ingame credibility.

One can then simply type in the IGN of the dealer's char before a trade to check the char's creation date, related accs etc for basic filtration. This process is simple enough even for a newbie to follow.

For the existing accounts, add a pop-up alarm upon first login after the patch to remind them to go and manually link all their existing account IDs on control panel for a handsome reward like a fancy new chair.

I can already imagine the uproar regarding privacy but this won't really hurt legitimate players. If you are a heavy defamer holding tons of unrelated accs or a douchbag using unrelated accs to sack innocent ppl in town, it'll be a heavy penalty I guess. Only real concern is that people will most likely use this function to search for every random boss runner's stats to judge them.

 

this is how north kroean people feels like

 

I have already been doing this for a long time.
Just give a rough search on the forum and get their main ign or forum name.
And just use your own judgment to report it.
It's like 1~3 mins

 

Gotta be honest… I like this change.
It’s not that difficult to ask a few questions and go on your merry way.

 

Hard agree with @SoAquarius here. It's not fair to try and drag someone down like that when you have no clue what's going on in their life. I've known Ravir for a while, and while I don't want to share his personal life on his behalf, I know for a fact he's a very busy person with a very active life. It's not his fault if he joined staff and suddenly had important life things to deal with. Please be more considerate before trying to tarnish someone's name, thanks.

 

dayumn nyanko be dropping the harshest bomb

 

After consideration I apologize for singling out a single staff member and have deleted related content about that individual.

That being said, a 2/3-factor authentication being implemented towards the community is an extreme change and expect some more accountability from the staff as I doubt this new rule will change very much from what Tim just posted.

This new form of policy will in my opinion lower player retention so it would be nice to have more ideas focused to improve quality of life and relations with staff. Heck make a GM role specifically aimed at player retention for all I care, GM Human Resources. As we have seen in this most recent September-November how weird the market gets with low playerbase (TLDR CS/WS 380m while perf weps/high wa gear prices don’t adjust accordingly)

My thoughts combined:

These rules are gonna deincentivize new players from staying, make more effort to promote players from staying besides the repeat events.

We need more staff but really what do GM Interns do to help the flow of ban appeals and especially RWT related ones?

• Think we should give active GMs such as Becca and Dong more power such as logs to voting, trade, and chat but not source code if possible as I understand the security risk.
• If it is only possible by giving them the whole package then still consider one of those two as an Admin.
• I see Bacon and Pure already promoted to full GMs, I think they do some solid stuff, especially Pure when he tried to salvage the Kerning Perfect item situation. Potentially think about hiring more Interns to find some new potential long term staff members.

Once again apologies towards singling out a specific staff member as that this is just a stupid game, and they should definitely prioritize real life responsibilities than dealing with us ungrateful bunch.

 

As a leech seller that usually goes for 6-10h/day this is awkward, while most of my trades are below 1b i do still have trades that surpass that amount very often, now 2b or more is not really a thing probably can only refer to two-three instances during the two years i've sold leech at skeles where i have gotten more than 2b to schedule multiple leech sessions for a person.
So now in addition to smega, arrange the party, discuss payment i gotta ask them for forum names and their mains? That feels so improper and out of place for 1b.

Ah and people should remember that there are folks that do not speak english at all and they do not have forum accounts.

 

There is a big difference between voluntarily doing so vs feeling compelled to do so every single trade and potentially having very real consequences of failure to comply.

 

when i buy cs i always ask whats your forum name how long have you been playing list all your characters whats your main
and then i cancel and report if they fail the test

 

I think the due diligence rule should at least exclude payments for leech services as they're not particularly benefiting from the trade, they're also putting in an equivalent amount of effort/ hours in exchange for the mesos that they earned fair and square

 

Does linking up Account information more publicly and making them more transparent also make it much more easier for hackers to identify targets and get more valuable information about the potential targets?

 

Displayed info upon web search should only disclose the IGN of the characters within the account, not the account ID it self. If one of the account was going to get hacked, knowing the existence of extra accounts owned by the same person shouldn't really help the hacker unless ppl name their characters identical to their account ID which...sounds dumb.

 

Since I hardly post much stuff on the forums, I'm not sure if I will receive any backlash from the community for voicing my honest opinion. But is this really just another attempt to get honest, hard working players to quit the game? Or even worse, get them wrongfully banned like many others? Or is this just the GM's excuse to be lazy, for not thoroughly checking people's trade logs / accounts info / source of Mesos income and their own account history. I see appeals taking forever to be replied to, then all of a sudden this rule comes out of nowhere. Someone was just let go of a ban within 5 days of getting banned, meanwhile another player just got their ban lifted after being banned for almost a year? Ok.
Another thing to add, how is this going to help any new player at all?

 

Keep your usernames secret, use proper passwords, and use a PIN and PIC, and do not use the same information on multiple private servers. That's probably far more effect for security than trying to hide your wealth on "secret" accounts...