Gold Farmers/Economy Thought

Quick thought about gold farming and economy issues... Maybe this has been brought up, maybe not, maybe its insane...

Why not do away completely with having monsters drop gold?

If they do that, it will seriously diminish gold farming bots (which are basically Guild Wars counterparts to real life money counterfeiters) or at least make them completely change how they do business. Thats a fact.

Make it so people have to sell items dropped to other players or to merchants to get gold.

If they do that, there will be no more money introduced into the economy of the game unless ANet decides to put it there.

They should make merchants run out of money in poor cities and have lots in wealthy cities (a la Sid Meier's Pirates!). Have ANet insert exactly how much gold into circulation as they want and they can control inflation.

People can still farm since the typical monsters drop weapons/items worth 50-150g and rare weapons and materials will retain their high value to other players. It would just mean you wouldn't instantly get gold -- you'd have to sell it to players or merchants for cold cash.

Any thoughts?

How is this a question? This doesn't belong here, but it does belong here.

Won't work. Nothing stops them selling the whites or unid golds for 1k each. It's how they've usually operated in the past.

the probem is not the monsters dropping gold. Usualy bots will collect everything and then sell it. that way they will always get gold.
At least that's what I do when I'm farming. get everything that drops and sell it. I imagine that is not so different for a bot.

Monsters not always drop golds you know.

first of all:

I hate this idea. Thats all there is too it. Others will hate it. There is no point to it. Since when did gold farming bots work. More to the point, who cares, I want my damn gold.

lol
12chars

Yes pointless. It hurts us more lmao!

The most money bots get is from selling white/blue/purp items and keep Gold Unidentify of course.!

That fixes nothing. Bots get most gold from white items, that currenlty already drop much less due to the loot scalling.

But it's not something bots woul care about, they just farm and farm and farm endlessly, so time is nothing for them.

Even if you make it so along with no gold drops, items are sold for 1 gold until identified, bots would just start identifiying items.

Lolwut? Who buys whites for 1k each?

For the people who say "Not all monsters drop golds!" or anything resembling that, he's talking about GOLD, like cash, not gold weapons.

But, it's a bad idea, unless they give us unlimited inventory space, which is not going to happen, but if that was the case, I'd be all for this idea.

No gold...
How are we suppose to get money besides farming stupid weapons?

Nice editing skills. You must use Photoshop like a pro.

This equals more fail than failure itself.

Can we please focus on getting them out instead of catering to fix their presence?

The solution is easy.

Remove loot scaling.

Suddenly the bots cash skyrockets... but so do the human farmers' funds. Hence, the temptation to buy gold dies out when you can finally make the amounts you want/need by solo farming.

heres an idea

i agree with remove loot scale, i find it insulting that if i kill 30 foes on my own i only get avg 10 items say, but if a full party kills em we get double maybe more! wheres the logic in this?, i think you shld return to multiple map entry, the singles out deliberate farmers instantly and i somewhat agree with only large outposts having most gold, this will slow down the rate of farming or you can have the merchant spawn in random locations!

I think the best solution would be to remove the hotkeys for selecting items (this includes gold) on the ground. Make it so you have to mouse click on an item to pick it up. Much harder for a bot then a person. How many people actually use ';' right now anyway? I actually do but I could cope if they took it out.

I linked my to the B key instead the ; one and I use it quite a lot. I could say that it's the item I use most, but even removing the 'select nearest item' hotkey we have the 'autoselect' feature, just by hitting Space.

Many people other than bots find those quite useful, so removing them is not an option.

It seems that the only possible option would be to add a limit on how much gold you can get per day and account by selling to merchants.

Even UN-ID-rare bot selles would be limited, since they can fit only a limited amount of items at the same time and bots get most cash from selling to merchants.

Easiest way to fix botting (and upset some players): randomize the mobs.
Placement and profession.
A human player can see if there is a mesmer / necro in the team and either avoid it or make sure the important enchantments are covered.
A bot can't.

Second, in the heavy farmed areas, randomize the placement of the NPC's. Human players should be able to find the merchant (or just zone to another place) and sell, bots can't.

However, I doubt the 'economy' is really bad atm and I even more doubt it's caused by botters /E-bayers.

That's terrible logic. Anybody who was playing long enough pre-loot scalling knows that gold farming bots were way more common pre-loot scaling. Loot scaling pushed a lot of the small time bot shops out of buisness because they couldn't compete with the bigger ones.

So? If loot scaling is gone and I can make decent money I can buy the armour I want with far more ease. Many people are like me in this.

Just for the record, I don't give a shit about the high-end economy, it can crash for all I care.

Well, nothing has been done about botters yet... in the history of Guild Wars, which is approaching 3 years. I guess you could make a case for loot scaling and farming code, but that hurt the actual players more than the farmers.

I've never heard of any mass account bannings like in WoW or other big-name MMORPG's. We must face the truth.

Any botter discussion can pretty much be left at this:

Nothing ever has been done, and nothing ever will be done

The problem must be taken from how do bots work.

What do they do? They repeat sequences. So, how do you stop them?

- Preventing the sequence to start at all. This would be cutting the new botting accounts, the bot programs... something impossible.

- Breaking the sequence. This is a hard one. Most changes would bother a lot of players.

- Making the sequence useless. This would basically would be to make human farming work and bot farming never work:
** Do bot sequences identify items? If bots can't identify, then the key is making all unidentified items have value 0 or 1.
** Bot sequences can identify? Then what we need is a market to enforce player trading and making players get much more cash by selling to others than selling to merchants. Xunlai Market is not a definite solution, but a good help.
** Bot sequences cannot effectively salvage. Weapon upgrade traders and increased prices for savaged upgrades. That would really bring a bing.
** Bots sequences cannot recognize item types? Each merchant would buy the kind of items they sell for wise prices, and pay 1g for anything else. Players would be a ble to sell weapons to weapons crafters for 1..500g, armors for 5..400 to armor crafters, dyes for 50g..9k to dye traders, and items without appropiate traders would be paid with fair prices only by merchants (Alcohol, keys, lockpicks, etc) merchants would pay then 1g for anything that has its trader. That would KILL bots. A bit annoying, yes, but we already do for many dyes, scrolls, runes and materials, why not for weapons and armors too?

- Making the sequence impossible. This would be one of the best working methonds. Putting anti-bot creatures in every single farmed spot that players can easily avoid but bots can't, since and automated input sequence can't see the game. Like a creature that appear and starts activating and interruptable AoE skill that after 10 seconds kills every player withing earshot, players can see them and run away, but bots can't, even if they try to make sequences to 'run away' in certain spots, such spawns would be random.
You could call them 'Wandering Revenants'. They could have the 'passive spirit' model appearance, but with purplish skin instead of greenish. They would try to stay out of nearby range and could be easily killed with a single Holy wand and a couple of wandings in hard mode.

Here you are. The 'kill-da-bot Compendium'.
Let's make it bigger.

You mentioned all these possible flaws the bot script can have, you know it won't take long before botters realize this and change the scripts?

Loot scaling and farming code hit part of the actual players indeed and for very good reason.
While as a side effect it reduced the income of bots, bots were never the main problem with the Guild Wars economy. But I doubt A-net will ever acknowledge that in public.

Sure, bots can farm 24/7, however, they have the risk of being cought before selling. And they probably don't sell 24/7.
Remember, bots can farm as many gold as they want, unless they sell their items/gold items there is no extra gold in the economy.

Now to the human players.
Human players could cause a problem, since the moment they farm they will bring extra gold in the economy. They don't need to sell on e-bay and don't have a ban-risk (I know some accidental bans happened).
How much gold did regular farming players introduce to the game compared to farming bots on daily basis? Even if the total number of players would bring in only 10 times more gold than bots daily (and that's a very low estimate) nerfing bots would not help the economy.

The value of an item can be roughly calculated by the amount of time it takes to obtain the item compared to the amount of gold that can be farmed in the same amount of time. If item is hard to sell, lower price with the amount of gold that could be obtained farming in that time. If item is hard to farm add premium.

The best example of this market mechanism would be the Factions green items and the crash of the market for some items after Hard Mode + exemption list.
The factions green items were a good example of overpriced items compared to the effort to get them and the price of their Tyrian counterparts.
Why? Because people could afford them at those high prices, since farming allowed them to gain their gold fast.
The crash of the market after Hard Mode + exemption can be seen with gold Dead Bows for example. The change made them drop 3x as often and exemption made sure they kept dropping even when Lootscaling was in place.
The reason? Higher supply and people had less cash to spend.

Now why was this change important?
The main reason is that players were forced to (solo)farm whenever they wanted to obtain anything besides merchant stuff.
The moment I got here on guru and said 'those prices on xxx feel a bit high', I was told 'STFU and go farm!'.
So people were 'punished' for playing the game with a team, because that would give them only roughly 1/8 of the gold they could gain by playing solo.
And prices on the market/traders were more or less targeted at players with 8/8 buying power.

This is also the reason why I said "However, I doubt the 'economy' is really bad atm" earlier in this thread.
Things improved a lot for the majority of players, specially that 80% that has less than 20k in storage.

Sure, the current income will attract some players to the dark side (e-bay).
The question is why? Did they not adapt to their new income?
Or would they have used e-bay in the first place because they want what they see, regardless of their game income? Zomg, I want that mini-panda, don't have time to farm but have $100 on bank. Let's buy one....

Bots can be nerfed, however, I doubt it's a high priority issue.
People can see bots running around a lot, but they can't see the impact of bots and e-bayers on the economy. How much do they farm, how much do they sell? And if A-net changes something, will it only hurt botters or also cause problems for regular players?

It is impossbile to make a script for there unless they make a code to read the server output (Numbers in panels, position of enemies, etc)

Can't be done just with input copy scripts that currently bots use.

I got my account suspended after a guildie gave me 20k to buy a Hall for our smurf guild, and I had a 72 hour suspension for buying gold. I have never bought gold in my life, and that instance had happened the day before, and I figured that had to be what it was. Although the person who gave me the 20k wasn't suspended....

It didn't seem so accidental, but, it's the first time I've ever heard of someone getting suspended for gold transactions.

You failed Econ in High School didn't you? If the high end market crashes so does the low end market.

Bots = money for NC-Soft

It would be funny if it wasn't true. But since it is true, it's not funny.

They may mean 'money' but they also mean 'unsatisfied clients' and losing clients due to having bots it's worse than losing the cash from the bots.

Why? Because if clients get upset enough and leave, bots have no one to sell gold to, and you end up without clients, bots and anything else.

This is from a tread in 2006, must have been a settlement since I have not been able to find anything more about the lawsuit.
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...hlight=Bot%27s

Scary stuff

Stockholm, so that is saying, NC is not banning bots, but they will ban me for paying for their services?

That was about Lineage or about Guild Wars...?

Hm...

Things may not have been done about bots, but we now know that if there is enough QQing it will happen.

All we need is to get a brigaide of noobs on the forums and have them make whine posts in the wrong forums so Arenanet will finally do something.

Hasn't that been done already a lot of times so far?

Yes, but they were mostly in the right forums. We need to get them to post in the Campfire and Game Bugs.

It was about the company that OWNS both the games and their policy regarding Bot's.

However, you are forgetting one thing.
Lineage is a game that requires a monthly fee, so disabling a bot would result in less income.
On the other hand, Guild Wars is a game without a monthly fee, shutting down bots and force them to buy an extra key would generate more income.

Unless NC operates the bots or generates income from them, in the case of Guild Wars shutting them down would be profitable, keeping them would only cost resources.

Same with sold copies.
If A-net closes down bots and the botters buy a new access key, it wil result in more copies sold.

Every way you can look at the issue in Guild Wars from a economic point of view there is almost no way you can think of a situation where keeping bots in the game would result in more profit for NC.

Thats why they ban X amount of bot accounts every now and then but don't try to really fix the problem. How to do it have been argued back and forth here on Guru for as long as I can remember, so I'm not going in to it, but there was simple solutions.
Lets just say that people botting is profitable for NC-Soft both ways.

oh! oh! I have an idea!

To pick up anything a monster drop you must first type in a code that is given to you by a NC soft employer that will answer you calling to the phone number written under that item.

ROFL XD

Btw, there is no way to stop bots, this should be something that everyone should understand. Should.