What mechanic in in place, to prevent them from spamming channels, or reaching out through mail or /tells?

They have been a disease, in all the games that I've have played so far. Please find us a cure..

Thanks!

I don;t think farming in Eso is going to be as easy as in other MMO's, but you will likely find the same crap none the less.

The only sure way to combat this is to offer in-game currency via the ingame store at a reasonable price. But again, there are financial legalities involved that make this problematic internationally (or so I understand).

I dont think Zenimax is going to tell you what mechanics are in place to prevent gold sellers lol

The only sure fire way to get rid of gold sellers is make gold worthless.

The monthy fee might keep some out, but i think as long as the cash shop doesnt sell anything you can resell in game it should be fine

Gold sellers will have to buy accounts, that will cut down on a lot of it, otherwise just cowboy up and just put them on ignore when they appear. There is nothing to worry about, gold sellers are only a problem for oversensitive people who need something to whine about.

In LotRO we could invite people to join our families or something similar, so we would find the gold spammers (usually at the south gate of Bree) and invite them, somehow this interacted with their spam script and broke it, that was fun.

This is a pay to play game, I highly doubt Gold sellers will be able to spam chat with websites seeming it'd be costly to make accounts simple for the use of advertising their website that will inienvitabley get banned. If you're talking about Gold Sellers in general well all games have this problem with robust econmies but companies have figured out ways to determine behaviours they deem suspicious like for instance if an account were to recieve 100k gold out of absolutely nowhere from an account that isn't a friendof that account they determine that as suspicious activity and may lock both accounts and put them under investigation.

But any person can use the defense of "Oh my friend was just sending me some gold" I mean that's a valid excuse and there is really nothing ESO support can do about it. But if it were to come to powerleveling accounts that behaviour is a lot easier to pick up on because that account logs on multiple IP's that is very suspicious behaviour and most accounts that switch IP's randomly may be restricted or locked. The resources that are available to network anolysts is vast these days and there are tools they have to determine certain unfavourable behaviours.

Yep that and don't buy from them, if they can't make any money they will not stay around.. Not only do they sell gold, they steal account information credit card info, just bad all around..

It doesn't matter if a game is PTP.

Goldsellers usually make enough profit to underwrite the cost of a few subscriptions, and often pass along their items/cash to other characters that have not used bots. So what they earned in game is still there, therefore they can still sell it.

The only sure method is using the game store to counter them.

Vanguard seemed to have a handle on gold sellers. And before someone starts joking about the low population of VG, no thats not it. They had a massive problem at one point and then implemented some kind of AI filter that caught them and banned them. What was a very bad problem suddenly almost completely vanished. It is not impossible.

Unfortunately the only cure is to stop their customers. If there wasn't a market for them, they wouldn't be doing it.

im sure there will be lots of guilds setup to sell gold, probably most of the big trading guilds will be ran by farmers

I haven't played a recent MMO that had a paywall. Does it help much?

It helps a lot, You rarely get exploiters in pay to play games but yeah if they can't do it in public it goes to private and that behaviour is a lot harder to pick up on.

Basically you have a network of gold sellers and they have a distributing website, How that works is the gold farmer isn't the gold seller, They're two different people the gold farmer, Farms the gold and then the gold seller will look within their network for a gold farmer who has that much gold they'll order it from the gold farmer and the gold seller will give some of the profit back to the gold farmer and they'll keep a percentage of it. The websites you visit are the gold sellers they don't really know the gold farmers they have 100's of gold farmers doing the hard work for them, So gold farmers will never be stopped because there is nothing wrong with grinding gold that's acceptable behaviour, So really how can you prevent someone who only has to send you the gold through their account as a middleman?

If there are gold spammers in Path of Exile (which have no guaranteed currency drops), they will most likely find a way into ESO.

Wont work, look at diablo 2 for instance. Gold has no value other then maby a rapair here and there. But they would just offer rare items online.

I think youre right. But i hope your wrong. And Path of Exile is free to play. So not a good comparrisone. With a good account security system, you come a long way i think.

Gold sellers don't have to pay the monthly fee. If gold sellers work ESO like other mmos, WoW being the prime example before they added the authenticator, the gold sellers will use stolen accounts to farm gold. Selling gear and weapons in volume will be harder for them because they can't just list items in an auction house.

I hope ESO launches with an authenticator like the Google authenticator that GW uses. Or they can do a hardware solution like WoW does with their Vasco token. Make the use of the authenticator optional so those who like to live dangerously don't have to use it.

Some info on gold sellers:

1. Most gold sellers these days use hacked accounts to supply their gold supply as well as a way to get around buying the game or paying its sub.

2. Gold sellers in some games have learned secret exploits and farm massive amount of gold this way. One such recent MMO was FF ARR.

3. Most MMO's tries to go after the seller which is important but they tend to ignore the buyers which are causing the problem.

There are some easy ways to fix the above though it can cause issues for players.

1. Security Tokens are very important to obtain and use. Unfortunately they do not offer 100% protection anymore. Another layer of security I would like to see is to block and lock my account if any unfamiliar computer trys to access my account. This will greatly reduce hacked accounts.

2. Finding and fixing all exploits is common sense as well as having good security. I do not want to see speed hacks or hacks of any kind.

3. Go after sellers but more important go after buyers. I am a fan of baiting those who break the law then throwing the book at them. Zenimax needs to have a way to monitor all major gold transactions. If a gold seller is discovered instead of banning them immediately monitor everything they do and everyone they trade with. Get as many buyers and bots as possible and ban them all.

That has been my experience. It's a relatively small investment compared to what they can make.


Yeah, it'll be a bit cloak and dagger.

There are database query techniques you could use to track suspicious trades. That's not difficult. But the more detail you make public about the specifics the easier it would be for gold sellers to avoid detection.

I got to steal gold back in WoW a few years ago. I hadn't played in a year or so and decided to go back. I found that my account had been hacked but the excellent customer service (at the time, no idea about the current state of it) recovered my account and restored deleted characters. One of my characters had something like 15000 gold on her, which I happily spent.

A game like Rift has a system of locking your account so that anything you do in-game will not count (cannot use inventory or anything) when they detect a different IP address using the account.

They also send an email with a verification code (which you enter into the game) to enable the account properly again.

It works a treat, although if you ISP cycles your IP address automatically everyday, it can be a pain in the [censored]. but stilll its worth it I think to safeguard your account.

SOE has never had a real problem with gold sellers not sure how they do it but they manage quite nicely, in 8 years I have been playing eq2 and 16 years I have been playing their games VERY rarely have I ever been bothered by a gold seller

Good point. But a single currency system that also guarantees a flow of cash makes things a whole lot easier to farm gold. Given they get to the other side of the security wall, of course.

True.