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Originally Posted by lyra_song
Countess:
Are you volunteering to be the intern?  lol
I've thought about such an idea before.
However, wont the credit cards be quickly blacklisted?
Its really interesting kind of "sting operation" but seems a bit too large of a thing for Anet to do with just 1-2 interns.
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If i don't have to move to washington, sure, I'll be one of the interns.
Blacklisted:
Credit cards: Well, the seller doesn't necessarily know which buyer reported him for banning so blacklisting would take a while. If the card gets blacklisted from a site, use a new card for that site and take the blacklisted oen to another competeing site. Repeat as needed.
Accounts: Again, sellers don't know exactly which buyer lead to the ban. Even if the got suspicious, A-Net can generate a whole pile of access keys to make new Sting accounts with. Doesn't cost them anything much to generate a new key, especially when they know what it's being used for.
On the question "Why do people want to get rid of professional retail gold farmers?"
Well, A-Net has stated many times that changes made to AI and drop rates are put implace to combat professional retailers. They have there reasons for wanting to put a stop to them. The measures they've been taking are from a "progamming" point of view - which is understandable because most of the people who work at A-Net are programmers. I was simply offering something that could be done that would not require alterations to the game's mechanics.
On the matter of "stolen" ad "hacked" accounts.
This measure would also serve to round up and remove these stolen accounts. People who have had accounts stolen are less likely to be duped again. The rest of us are smart enough to not get burned the first time. That means that the retailers would have to actually BUY new accounts if they wanted to continue to sell gold. At first they might consider this the cost of running their business. Later, when they see they are getting hit too frequently, they should realize that it isn't cost effective to sell GW gold, and just focus more attention into selling gold from other on-line games that are more profitable.
Is 1 or 2 interns enough? Probably not. But 100 might be too many. There is going to be a number of interns that would achieve maximum efficiency without running into redundancy. Without all the facts I can't say what that number is. But 1-3 interns isn't a bad place to start. If the problem is as big as some people think it is, maybe start with 10 interns. 10 interns, working with a little bit of co-ordination (so as to to overlap the targets) could potentially knock out 150 illagally used accounts in one four hour shift. If those accounts have to be replaced right away in order to keep up with sales requests, that's $4500 in sales from the GW store. The cost of running that "sting" would be about $1900. So sales minus cost is $2600 in new income.
Better still, as someone pointed out they have the "recent trade partners" feature. For everyone one "selling-gold dump" account they find, they can track it to numerous "farm-bot" accounts that do the harvesting. If we assume 3 farmers for every 1 trader, that's four accounts banned for a cost of $12.50 ($10 for setting up the sale and $10/4 for the wage time of the intern). Four replacement accounts being purchased are $120. Well if that actually works, the profits from running the program are almost 8x the cost. Making use of the recent trades feature can reduce the cost impact of running the program dramatically - even if half the accounts used to replace banned ones are stolen there is still a profit to A-Net from account sales.
This idea just keeps getting better. Hey A-Net, if you use this could you maybe thank me by naming an NPC in the next game after me? Just a thought.
