even if it proves to be unfounded, I'm glad the question has been raised so +rep to OP.
I'm sure that MA will at least take notice, see the responses people have given and add them to research and study they have already done in order to stop the potential from happening.
It never hurts to have the participants do all your lateral thinking for you...something MA have become very good at in the past years.
Especially since you have to consider that every account has to have a new e-mail address and even if you ask MA to delete your avatar, you can't make a new account with the address you once used. Every account would need to have a new e-mail sign up as well, plus the wait for the confirmation e-mail...
dont the new noobs have to finish the quests before they can actually come to PA?
0.1ped. i hid mine for some plucky explorer to find when i left.
One Rookie Seismic Bomb has a TT of 0.10 PED. You get two batches of 5, i.e. 2 × 0.50 PED. You need to use at least 5 Rookie Bombs to complete the mining mission (if you care to do so). I like to have the left-overs for keepers as a nice souvenir.
No you dont have to do the quests,you can just tp straight over to Calypso if you want.
They could make it a part of the TP process out that they have to go through an NPC that disarms them before they leave Gateway.
But I think that allowing them to keep the items would be okay sinc they are so low in value. It is just the ammo I am concerned with.
I don't think it's 2 ped of ammo... but 20 pec that the guy gives...
if you keep all the bombs and free stuff you can get without completing another mission first... it's like 1.50 ped...
even if this would be conducive to a "farming center", wouldn't there be technology barriers at the present time?
Clearly you have never owned a domain name.
I can have 2 million separate email adresses if i want, 20 million, 200 million, on ONE domain.
As for ip adresses, the goldfarmers just renew their IP, rinse and repeat.
that is a very usual scenario in other games, such as d2, to avoid temporary bans.
tho MindArk did banned complete countries (complete ip ranges thus) because of fraud. It wont stop them for doing it again.Only after sending IDś you could get back in the game
when i left after i finished all the missions i had 3 peds more then what i started with (was a bit lucky with one loot of 1.6 peds though). That is a whole lot more then an hour of sweating so i can imagine some people creating avatar after avatar.
But with 3 peds per avatar, it would take like 300 avatars before it gets interesting. My guess is that MA would surely notice this and ban them all.
The people that do this farming don't need to make loads of money. They often live in countries where very little American Currency will go a very long ways.
As for how they could do 200 avatars.....maybe one person can't but a workplace designed to farm the peds could.
My first MMO I enjoyed a lot was ruined by farmers using programs to farm with multiple accounts on one computer and spam the sites in game that you could buy them from everywhere ruining the game.
The farmers would be banned and they would be back the same day.
If there is even the slightest possibility of this happening in EU I and all of you need to be worried.
It became a serious battle for that MMO and the values were about $100 US dollars a week for each farmer. The real money they made though was from selling the game currency and getting your Credit Card info from the website used to sell them.
edit: I know for a fact that a person with 0 level gets more than 2 PED from the ammo, bombs and mats
Ok, so, a new avatar can start in Calypso with roughly 1.5 PED. 200 avatars/day ~ 300 ped/day. 30$/day sounds already interesting.
But that's 200 avatars. 200 emails, 200 logins, many computers. And i bet a lot of red lights would start flashing at MA's office.
can they get more than 2 ped without spending some first?.
lmao @ this thread!
When I helped out as an ambassador for MA at the conventions we ran into a problem very fast. When more then 4-6 people tried to make an account on a computer it would be locked out and no more accounts could be made on that computer. We tried changing the IP address of the computers but it goes by the mac address of the network card I believe. You would have to change out your network card every 4-6 accounts created to make a ton of accounts. even then you might run into problems.
Besides the point that MA checks out your account before you can withdraw to make sure you haven't been cheating the system.
If this is done with a third world country family it could be 12 people working on it with plenty of time......or could be an actual business set up to do it with people doing one step and handing off the account for the next step. All done 24 hours a day.i made all 3 types of missions from Calypso gateway and i can say i made a bit more than 1.5 ped ( i got ammo left , weapons 2 and some lyst ) but it took me more than 15 minutes and i used a few times the TP chip .
now if security at MA is as should be , all this thread is just a scary story for children .
1.for a start 200 accounts even with different IPs take a while(more than the famous 15 minutes that can crash the economy) to be aproved .
Mac address and IP adress can be changed. Mac's with software that clones and IP with a router.2. as some players said before MA could also register the MAC of newtwork cards so 100 IPs from same newtowrk card would be useless .
If they are getting money for it rather then starving they will do it.3. for those worring about the poor slave farmers that live in poor countries : those missions are borring as hell !
imagine your self doing those missions 200 times ! i would go crazy , lol .
so manual is not the soltion . a bot would be required , and here MA's security will have another chance to prove useful in case IPs fitering failed .
No, there would be new farmer avatars made repeatedly and one or two main accounts outside of Gateway.4. if succesfull bots would be made , that past the IPs filters and other security measures , you think that the owner wolud keep them only inside gateway ?
Until there was more then a few farmers it would just look like new people arriving and leaving. After more start farming it would get to a point it would be obvious. I don't think MA monitors anything in here except special players they give the good loot to.5. let's say somebody made 200 bots . that person would make a lot easier money buy selling the method , so it would be multiple bot owners with hundreads of avatars . now imagine how Calypso Gateway would look like
you think nobody wouldn't notice ? i am sure players would report extremly fast .
The other MMO that this was a problem in they made random messed up names, often with numbers......MA doesn't have anything that monitors names made or there would not be names being banned until changed.6. in case point 5 would be possible , imagine the problem for the bot owners to find thousands of names that look beliveble not like john 1 , john 2 , john 3 etc or like qrqr , ytryrt , eh4r645 etc.
7. i play from time to time a MMO free , but that has Item Mall , and the game is full of bots . the game is pretty known so the programmers are not some beginners . but such games are infested loads of gold bots because the programmers of original game ALLOW that . there are antibot measures , but if you got a player botting they first give a warning , a temporary ban etc . that's not tough measures . if you want to stop botting make it like MA does now : trace ingame currency and all the items and if someone buys ingame currency or items from guy who bots ban all persons involved in trade . but as i said, the MMOs have gold bots because creators tolerate such actions from players , because extremly tough security measures would make the game unpopular and they would lose some part of their player base , and they don't want that .
If this is done with a third world country family it could be 12 people working on it with plenty of time......or could be an actual business set up to do it with people doing one step and handing off the account for the next step. All done 24 hours a day.