Is there any work being done on a system to prevent scams?

It seems like scams in game are on the uptake right now, I'm hearing more and more about trust scams as well as ones due to faulty game systems. Is there a team working on any solutions to make scams obsolete? I've heard many good ideas from the player base, including a recall function like with vehicles, a system similar to deeds for big value items, a checkbox of some sort to "lock" or "bind" items to the owner, or others. Surely there has to be a way to keep our items more secure and prevent the ongoing problem of theft in EU, is anybody doing anything in an official capacity to make it harder for the unscrupulous ones, or easier for honest avatars to protect their assets?

As an it manager, the one rule I have is never build a complex process around a training issue. Scams will never be obsolete. In most cases, people just need to use their brain. Don't loan items on trust that have significant monetary value. This is beyond common sense.

I see a need for a rental system but mindark said they won't do that.l and further more those are development hours being wasted on it. If you want it, I'm sure if you FUND the work then they will find a resource to build it. MA isn't blizzard. Their ability to generate capital is limited and thus development hours are fixed per sprint. They don't have the ability or funds without issuing deeds or having a larger player base to have a larger decay rake to ramp up for all the bells and whistles we would like to have.

A rental system wouldn't stop scams. However it would destroy the game. So hopefully they have the good sense to never implement one.

They could help a lot if they just enforced the EULA.

Well, Yes... MindArk's resources are very limited in contrast to what some of the giant gaming companies have, which is why it's critically important that MindArk implements a simple but very restricted lending system immediately.

We aren't players, we aren't users, we aren't colonists... We are customers and with any business it's substantially cheaper to keep an existing customer versus attracting a new customer.

Now with that in mind, let's envision a customer who decides to make the commitment to their game play and make a large deposit, $5000 to buy a CalyTrek TEN for 40k PED and then have a nice stack of ped for ammo. After demolishing a bunch of big creatures the idea of better armor comes to mind, maybe a set of Dune or Sand Stormer... That will have to wait until next month.

Weeks go by and then finally that customer decides to loan his new $4,000 USD gun to his best friend in game for a few days... But then something feels off... His friend seems to be logging off every time he logs on. Soon it becomes clear that he was a scammed by his best friend. So now this customer sends a support case to MindArk pleading for help only to have MindArk tell him that all trades are final. Then our customer comes to the forum seeking help from the community... And then the trolls swarm and point out all the reasons why he is an idiot.. So stupid to trust a friend.

Well now with insult added to injury, completely gutted and disillusioned, all faith in the game as well as humanity shattered, his wife freaking out about the $5,000 spent and lost in a video game, the additional deposit for better armor is obviously no longer an option. After a month of inactivity, he logs back on and begins the process of stripping out his skills and selling out... A month later he withdraws and never plays EU again.

All of that could be prevented with a simple secure lending system that limits how many simultaneous items can be loaned out at anytime in order to preserve economic balance and prevent item barons from running wild.

Oleg said:

A rental system wouldn't stop scams. However it would destroy the game. So hopefully they have the good sense to never implement one.

They could help a lot if they just enforced the EULA.

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If implemented with the proper restrictions, it would not destroy the game.

All you have to do is limit the amount of items that can be rented simultaneously.

atomicstorm said:

As an it manager, the one rule I have is never build a complex process around a training issue. Scams will never be obsolete. In most cases, people just need to use their brain. Don't loan items on trust that have significant monetary value. This is beyond common sense.

I see a need for a rental system but mindark said they won't do that.l and further more those are development hours being wasted on it. If you want it, I'm sure if you FUND the work then they will find a resource to build it. MA isn't blizzard. Their ability to generate capital is limited and thus development hours are fixed per sprint. They don't have the ability or funds without issuing deeds or having a larger player base to have a larger decay rake to ramp up for all the bells and whistles we would like to have.

Click to expand...

Ahem, I DO fund the work, and so does everybody else that cycles ped in this game. Ofc common sense is paramount, but I don't think it's too much to ask for a few in game safeguards. We're not talking about any huge amount of resource or expenditure here, just some simple stop gaps so that people can more easily keep their stuff safe.

I've never been scammed, in fact I managed to avoid it once and I was able to stay out of the dragnet of locked accounts that followed, but you're response is akin to saying that if you have a house built that's all fine and dandy, but don't expect locks on any of the doors. Well, I don't think locks on my doors is all that big of a request, and certainly doesn't qualify as "bells and whistles".

lending system is another way to keep the value of the item out of reach of the most of the players another way to raise the item price

this will futur put the the top players making more money and the player playing for fun to pay for them

the scam are the problem of the lender that pretty simple if i can trust my brother whit money why would i give it to a stranger

if it the way the game is going

might as well have a real bank hay i need 10 k peds well sir show me what you have well you got 15k in tt i will take that as colateral agains that 10k peds if you dont pay we repo what you put again the loan you can sell them item o any one till the the loan is paid


dont lend out what you not willing to loose no need for leanding stuff

anyone want to lend me a mod fab probly i could get one but would you leand me 100k peds it all the same

when im out in town even i know the people i dont lend them 100 to 1000 dollars the bank is there for that or go get a credit card

I understand the balancing issues with an unrestricted lending system.

The ability to monetize items through rental fees will increase demand... Prices will go up... MA will compensate with an increased drop rate... Everyone will be happy for awhile.

As time passes, a consolidation of items will take place with a small group eventually owning the majority of them. Then the market will shift because there is no sense in buying (L) when you can just rent an amazing gun that's tiered. Soon it won't even make sense to buy an unlimited gun for personal use... Just rent what you need. Because of that the whole game economy would crash.

An unrestricted lending system will not work... That's clear.

Restricting the amount of simultaneous items an avatar can lend out to 3 would prevent all of these issues. A new problem would come from armor being 7 different parts so a way to bind them all together as 1 item rental would be needed... See below..

Ideas about Rental Tokens have been proposed, and whether looted, crafted, or purchased from a NPC, those one-time-use Tokens combined with restricting the amount of simultaneous rentals would give MindArk a balancing mechanism because they can always control how many tokens are circulating in game. At any point they could constrict or end the supply of new tokens and kill the rental system if unforeseen balance issues arise.

Rental Tokens could be created for different types of things.. Guns, Armor, Tools, etc. Putting those Rental Tokens in the Combat Token trader for purchase at an affordable price would give all kinds of benefits.

beying just one its too much poeple will make alot of alts just to rent out items

if you can afford to give colateral for it or buy it you shouldnt have it

the question poeple got to ask is would you lend out 1000 dollar to any one you talk to on the internet most of the people wont unless your a multimillionaire and dont care of loosing money

this is the same thing

it not like the stole it from you whit out seying it you gave them the item

Many scams center around impersonation or pretending to be someone they're not, and those are relatively easy to prevent.

Allow us to see avatar stats, accessible from a button right there in the trade window: previous names, avatar age, presence on your friend list, profession levels, and list of dates you previously traded with them.

HardWrath said:

All of that could be prevented with a simple secure lending system that limits how many simultaneous items can be loaned out at anytime in order to preserve economic balance and prevent item barons from running wild.

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Im not sure how this could be done. Say I rented one of the many unlimited guns you have. And the tt when i rented it was say 300 ped. I then put 1000 ped tt on it.. since im planning on having it a week, but lose internet at my house for 4 days and can only burn off 300 of the 1000 ped i put on. When it goes back to you what happens to the rest of the tt the customer repaired. Or the other way around.. You loan a gun that has 1000 ped tt.. the customer uses 900 ped of it.. but when comes time to return they have 0 ped on card and can't be repaired? Not sure of a way this could be worked around... maybe you already have an idea?


SpikE

I have to say, I really like the idea of a renting system, but it's outright wrong if you think about it. First of all, if renting is allowed, prices of UL will skyrocket with value of items PLUS the possible revenue generated. An item with 10kped MU will be valued double (example) with the potential long term revenue from renting. Aside from this, hoarding is another real issue. Even if you limit the amount of items you can rent, after a while, all the hoarders will demand a larger rental list from MA because they have X number of items not being used. At the end of the day, the 'smart' players will just create alt after alt after alt avatars just to expand their renting limit and create a monopoly on items. Bad idea...just bad.

A lending system will kill the "value" of items. Because if everyone just lends out his item to one other guy, demand will drop by 50%...

Never lend, never rent without collateral. Its not mindarks job to clean up after we misplaced some trust in the wrong person. True friends will understand this.

I dislike the idea of a renting system, very good points against it was mentioned here already and in former treads about this topic.

If mindark will start to meddle with trust scams and "all trades are final" arn't that final anymore we will see every joe and his gardener lending out high value items and the trust scam rate will explode, creating a mountain of extra work for mindark.

I learned my lession early in a game where you had to hardcore grind close to a year for that über weapon , i lended it from a friend and lended it another friend for 5 minutes because he really wanted to try it out. That day i lost 2 friends , got my fair share of hate on the forums and after i managed to pay the ex friend back that lended me the weapon in the first place i quit that game and never looked back. Maybe everyone must taste that bitter expirience at least once to understand what friendship in a video game really means. You dont know the person behind the screen, he can lie about everything. If you know for a long time , meet each other on a soc RL meeting and know each others adress you can start thinking about lending out the good stuff. Not earlyer.

Why is it expected that Mindark must develop a system to prevent trust-scams?
The options to prevent trust scams already lies in the players hand. But it's sad some players don't use it.
It's easy to rent out gear/peds without colleteral. When its returned, the game is so super awsome.
When someone takes advantage of it and someone gets scammed, all of a sudden MindArks system is so bad and is lacking of security.

HardWrath said:

I understand the balancing issues with an unrestricted lending system.

The ability to monetize items through rental fees will increase demand... Prices will go up... MA will compensate with an increased drop rate... Everyone will be happy for awhile.

As time passes, a consolidation of items will take place with a small group eventually owning the majority of them. Then the market will shift because there is no sense in buying (L) when you can just rent an amazing gun that's tiered. Soon it won't even make sense to buy an unlimited gun for personal use... Just rent what you need. Because of that the whole game economy would crash.

An unrestricted lending system will not work... That's clear.

Restricting the amount of simultaneous items an avatar can lend out to 3 would prevent all of these issues. A new problem would come from armor being 7 different parts so a way to bind them all together as 1 item rental would be needed... See below..

Ideas about Rental Tokens have been proposed, and whether looted, crafted, or purchased from a NPC, those one-time-use Tokens combined with restricting the amount of simultaneous rentals would give MindArk a balancing mechanism because they can always control how many tokens are circulating in game. At any point they could constrict or end the supply of new tokens and kill the rental system if unforeseen balance issues arise.

Rental Tokens could be created for different types of things.. Guns, Armor, Tools, etc. Putting those Rental Tokens in the Combat Token trader for purchase at an affordable price would give all kinds of benefits.

Click to expand...

It is not as simple as that. It will only lead to multiple ava creations to bypass the item lending limit.

Divinity said:

It is not as simple as that. It will only lead to multiple ava creations to bypass the item lending limit.

Click to expand...

Not if the process of lending requires a P2P transaction like a private trade.

It would be impossible to keep the alt avatars a secret and a lot of the community would be up in arms... It would be like villagers with pitchforks, and as a result, those alt avatars would end up locked.

There is a difference between a commercialized rental system and a personal lending system meant to accommodate only the needs of the individual.

HardWrath said:

Not if the process of lending requires a P2P transaction like a private trade.

It would be impossible to keep the alt avatars a secret and a lot of the community would be up in arms... It would be like villagers with pitchforks, and as a result, those alt avatars would end up locked.

There is a difference between a commercialized rental system and a personal lending system meant to accommodate only the needs of the individual.

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MA cannot do anything if there are mother/father/brother/wife/kids etc etc accounts. All you need is to have valid documents and there is nothing that can be done.

Add to that old school items like mod fap/imp fap etc which cannot be dropped including SGA/ TEN edition items would then become a dream to get for most people. (better chance now)

Divinity said:

MA cannot do anything if there are mother/father/brother/wife/kids etc etc accounts. All you need is to have valid documents and there is nothing that can be done.

Add to that old school items like mod fap/imp fap etc which cannot be dropped including SGA/ TEN edition items would then become a dream to get for most people. (better chance now)

Click to expand...

MA can't do anything about accounts of family members however pushback from the community would destroy that person's ability to make any worthwhile ROI. If the earning opportunity isn't there then there is no point in doing it and as a result it wouldn't happen, at least not on a scale large enough to effect balance.

HardWrath said:

MA can't do anything about accounts of family members however pushback from the community would destroy that person's ability to make any worthwhile ROI. If the earning opportunity isn't there then there is no point in doing it and as a result it wouldn't happen, at least not on a scale large enough to effect balance.

Click to expand...

That is an assumption which i do not think will hold true. Imagine a couple people holding all mod faps/ifaps hostage. There will be no choice left and its a situation MA probably think can happen. The balancing cannot be managed with item lending, which is why imo they have not bothered with the implementation of such a system.

KyrismaStarsong said:

Ahem, I DO fund the work, and so does everybody else that cycles ped in this game. Ofc common sense is paramount, but I don't think it's too much to ask for a few in game safeguards. We're not talking about any huge amount of resource or expenditure here, just some simple stop gaps so that people can more easily keep their stuff safe.

I've never been scammed, in fact I managed to avoid it once and I was able to stay out of the dragnet of locked accounts that followed, but you're response is akin to saying that if you have a house built that's all fine and dandy, but don't expect locks on any of the doors. Well, I don't think locks on my doors is all that big of a request, and certainly doesn't qualify as "bells and whistles".

Click to expand...

Please provide examples of these simple stop gaps. A checkbox is only as good as the person using it. If they voluntarily trade, what good is this? Ah wait, that's not a scam. That's a mistake. A recall system works for a loan, and only from one person to another. It fails to take into account 3rd party trades. Really a flagging system would be needed. This is again for item rentals, though. Seems youre couching multiple issues into one big scary subject. So lets focus, shall we. Let's stick to scams, since that's the title of this thread.

As a programmer and a homeowner I think I have a pretty good idea that hours of programming code to compensate for inattentive humans is probably alot larger of an undertaking than going to Home Depot and picking up a Schlage deadbolt.

Then again I could be totally wrong. So if you would kindly provide examples of these simple stop gaps as well as some quick code solutions maybe you can solve this problem for everyone right here, and save MA some development capital in the process!

Divinity said:

That is an assumption which i do not think will hold true. Imagine a couple people holding all mod faps/ifaps hostage. There will be no choice left and its a situation MA probably think can happen. The balancing cannot be managed with item lending, which is why imo they have not bothered with the implementation of such a system.

Click to expand...

Well... If the whole lending system hinged on using consumable Rental Tokens then if someone decided to do that, aside from community outrage, MindArk could simply not provide more tokens, thus killing the entire Rental System until the Mod Faps changed hands.

Moreover, there is nothing that says a Mod Fap would use the same Rental Token as a Gyro FAP-14 Smuggler, nor should it... So if there was a hoarding problem with Mod Faps, MA could just nerf that specific token.

A Rental Token would have TT value and each item type could have it's own type of token, then within each item type, FAPs for example, could be different levels of Tokens each with a different TT value. If MA put a 300 PED TT value on the token needed for an Imp or Mod Fap, then it would substantially impede upon the profit opportunity of renting the Mod Fap because users are only willing to pay so much before it stops being worth it... The Tokens would capture enough of that amount thus removing the incentive to offer a commercialized rental service.

KyrismaStarsong said:

Ahem, I DO fund the work, and so does everybody else that cycles ped in this game. Ofc common sense is paramount, but I don't think it's too much to ask for a few in game safeguards. We're not talking about any huge amount of resource or expenditure here, just some simple stop gaps so that people can more easily keep their stuff safe.

I've never been scammed, in fact I managed to avoid it once and I was able to stay out of the dragnet of locked accounts that followed, but you're response is akin to saying that if you have a house built that's all fine and dandy, but don't expect locks on any of the doors. Well, I don't think locks on my doors is all that big of a request, and certainly doesn't qualify as "bells and whistles".

Click to expand...

You do not fund THIS work, the context of my post which is a rental system. You fund (through DECAY, not CYCLING) lights on/hardware costs/upkeep, maintenance work and facilitation with the planet partners, personnel required, support, and the frills they keep adding like creature control (which is an extension of a system already built), and bug fixes. PERIOD.

It appears you read my post but clearly failed to understand it.

The lock on your door is you not being dumb enough to lend an item WITH MONETARY VALUE to someone you really don't know or visit (usually) IRL for NOTHING (read: unsecured debt).

I hope they don't work on such existing system, they have plenty of things to do already, taming, CLD part 2, crouch/sit/lay, AI etc..
It would be a fucking waste of time and energy to a system which would only create a new opportunity for "investors" at the detriment of the whole player base.
While i applaud MA reactivity on two recent scam/attempts, I think they done it plain wrong. First they should ban involved avatar (the scammer and his alts). Second, and also a basic rule, they should stick to their damn EULA which was made by people who thought long term, not short sighted brain like they now appear to be : ALL TRADES ARE FINALS.
If players are scammed while lending items, the lend was done by a fucking trade. If you don't accept collateral fine, how noble of you, but don't except to have your ass covered while you are breaking a fucking rule.
All those who where scammed by "friend" describe friend pretty fucking please. You clearly don't understand what friendship is or are a fucking dreamer.
Damn, i so miss Marco.

I agree.. ALL TRADES ARE FINAL.. this is all we need.
If you are dumb enough to lend without collateral, that's your problem.
Both the recent "trust" scams would have never happened had sufficient collateral been provided.
From reading this thread it is clear the only people crying for a rental system are the hoarders of UL weapons/Faps.

ImUp2Mischief said:

I agree.. ALL TRADES ARE FINAL.. this is all we need.
If you are dumb enough to lend without collateral, that's your problem.
Both the recent "trust" scams would have never happened had sufficient collateral been provided.
From reading this thread it is clear the only people crying for a rental system are the hoarders of UL weapons/Faps.

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I'm sorry but I think your post is pure idiocy, ignorant, and completely ignores reality.

HardWrath said:

I'm sorry but I think your post is pure idiocy, ignorant, and completely ignores reality.

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aww did I hit a nerve

ImUp2Mischief said:

aww did I hit a nerve

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No not at all, I was pointing out that your post is way off base on numerous levels.

If you think that someone is "dumb" for trusting a friend then you might have some personal issues.

Additionally... You accuse people in this thread of being hoarders of unlimited weapons and that couldn't be further from the truth.

HardWrath said:

No not at all, I was pointing out that your post is way off base on numerous levels.

If you think that someone is "dumb" for trusting a friend then you might have some personal issues.

Additionally... You accuse people in this thread of being hoarders of unlimited weapons and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Click to expand...

I cant be bothered to argue with you, i don't really give a fuck. happy trolling

Imagine a lending system is born.

Imk.ii, mm, imp/mod fap, shadow armor, etc. Will never be offered for sale for less then 1M ped. (yes, I said 1 million) each.

Oh, I can only "rent out" 3 items at a time? No prob., my "friend" with no skills just happened to "buy" 3 of my good items just so he can rent them out. In fact, so did my other 7 non-skilled alts, um, I mean "friends".

Hell, if we could rent out items, I would never sell anything that's not stackable or (L). Ever. Why would I?

Rental system = items will never sell again = economy tanks = less players = game over

Am I exaggerating, or wrong? Show me where.