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Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers
Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."
In making an MMORPG you've either got to decide to have an economy that can work with a worldwide populace and economy openly (Eve and Secondlife), or you really need to do something about it and close it up.
When you think about it though, Goldfarming is simply someone forcing outsourcing of your leisure time for you. You don't want it to happen, they undercut you (as their time is nearly worthless) and they screw up the economy.
Best of luck to them on this. Blizzard has completely failed in this aspect and their economy and absurd quests at times show it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
I throw out the phrase "Better than WoW" after a long period of due consideration. It's not just hype - it's really that good.
The only problem I have with it is that there are a few glitches they haven't quite ironed out yet (animations getting stuck, occasionally a HUD window will vanish for no reason), so I would give it a month.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
You never understood how it could be difficult to ban people from making money by breaking the rules?
Man, you've never bought weed, have you?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
I picked it up, along with a bunch of friends, and we're all LOVING it. :)
They really hit this one out of the park IMHO, I've no doubt that they will do really well with this game.
I can't see myself ever going back to WoW.
Excellent game, Realm vs Realm combat and public quests are nicely done. I've been enjoying this mmorpg much more than WoW - and it's nice to have scenery and characters that are not cartoonish but rather grim and gritty. The world feels huge and cities and zones are implemented full size rather than a few representative buildings like WoW.
Things I liked:
The biggest reason for me quitting WoW was the time commitment in the end game raids. Warhammer doesn't seem to require the same solid block of time that WoW did, which for me, as someone with a family, is huge.
It's fun. A lot like WoW, but does a lot of things better/more fun, like how mana regenerates and how Public Quests work.
The GM is right though. Gold spam is starting already.
Doh. bloody filter choked on 'less than symbol' $30 and clipped off most my post...
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Then you haven't thought about it.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Well duh!
1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?
2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost less than $30 bucks and gets them a free month. If they make at least 100% markup (and they do) than all they need is to sell $60 worth of gold before getting banned to break even. That's exceedingly easy to do. Hell, even if they get 'stung' by an employee, as long as they set it up so that they log in and fulfill all their orders at once, by the time the employee identifies the account, a couple hundred bucks worth of gold will have been moved and the farmer is ahead of the game.
3) Even banning a credit card isn't effective. These guys all pay by prepaid game card at best, or have prepaid visa debit cards etc, which can be obtained en masse trivially, never mind the potential for using stolen card numbers.
4) What mythic is doing by banning the spammer accounts is just stopping in-game advertising, not gold farming, or gold-sales. To do THAT is much harder, and there is little they can do to stop THAT, without very careful game design with that as a goal.
5) The gold farmers also are known to use hacked accounts. (where they've guessed or stolen user names and passwords of a legitimate customer, and use those accounts to move gold between farmer accounts and seller accounts, part of an in-game 'laundering' scheme). The 'victim' never even knows he's been hacked, because they just login for a few seconds to move THEIR gold around and don't otherwise interfere with the account at all.
This makes it difficult for the game-devs to act, because when they ban people suspected of being part of the gold-trade, they have to deal with the 'collateral damage'.
6) Of course, gold sellers also use hacked accounts for spamming sales.
Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.
Its FAR harder than it sounds.
I like it, I played wow for a few years but got tired of the arena-or-raid focus (I like BGs, but it is pointless after a while because of people afking to get honor to buy gear to do arena) and decided to give war a try and I am glad I did.
It does seem very casual friendly for now at least, you can queue up for bgs from anywhere (yay) and it will port you back wherever you were afterwards (not at the battlemaster, yay). PQs are nice, and in general it seems to be the type of game that does not have intentional timesinks thrown in for no good reason (like wow, all the reputations etc.). Gear seems also much much much less the focus than wow, which works well. I also like how quests give you 'hints' on the map about where to go, and the whole tome of knowledge is nice.
If they can manage to keep a critical mass of subscribers for a few months they definitely have a good chance, the real test will be when wotlk or 3.0.2 come out, will people stick with WAR or not? I am sure blizz is going to release 3.0.2 ASAP just to get people back to play with all the new talents.
In terms of annoyances I can list not being able to activate AA (some jaggies, even at 1920), having to sit through the cinematic logos every time, having to accept the TOC every time, having to give UAC permission every time, but that's about it.
I am also pleasantly surprised by how 'well sorted' the UI feels, considering how I had 100+ add-ons in WOW and haven't felt the need of most of them in WAR (save for Grid and for being able to customize the chat window a bit more)
-- the cake is a lie
I played EQ, WoW, and beta tested SWG.
I have to say, I am most pleased with this game.
I fucking HATE gear grinds for end game content. I am notorious for soloing and not joining guilds because games shouldn't be scheduled work. I quit EQ early on because of it, I never saw endgame in WoW because of it, and well SWG just sucked. That having been said, I really enjoy the public quests, Scenario, and open RvR elements of WAR.
I always shied away from PvP because it was always seemed a gear and lvl based system trying to placate people who wanted large scale combat. I have to say that so far in WAR even a casual player can enjoy RvR.
The scenarios level balance when you enter them. Now, you don't get new abilities that you don't have - but you can at least compete. The higher levels of a tier do seem to have an easier time of it, but crappy tactics can't be made up for with l33t g34r.
The public quests sometimes suck when there aren't enough people to overcome the second and third stages, but they reset after a short time (read minutes) and you can play the low events over and over again for the point rewards.
The open RvR areas are really boss. Just running out to an area and fighting others is an awesome visceral experience. There is no corpse runs, so getting back into the game is simple. There is a brief "death debuff", but that is easily dealt with by paying a healer to remove when you respawn. BTW, you respawn right next to a healer.
The only true way to kill a parasite is to kill its host
I truly hope you are not a doctor.
Just so you kno, a lot of those "WoW conventions" were pretty much invented by other games. World of Warcraft is simply the latest (and most successful to date) in a line of MMO titles that have evolved from common ancestry. Everquest used to be the game of choice. In Asian markets, Lineage had WoW-like numbers far before Blizzard had an MMO offering. And the first large-scale commercial MMO of significance here in the US was Ultima Online. And of course, all these games borrowed liberally from online text-only MUDs.
In a somewhat humorous twist, Blizzard is somewhat notorious for.. shall we say.. liberally borrowing concepts from the Warhammer universe. Not slamming Blizzard, they make awesome stuff, but please be aware the genre did not start with WoW.
Penny Arcade summed it up best, of course: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Well, I've played it for a couple of days, since I'm bored to tears with WoW by now. It's certainly not a horrible game, and there isn's even much "bad" about it, but it's certainly not half as polished as WoW. There's probably some gem in there, but unfortunately nobody tried much to separate it from the rock, much less give it a shine. In other words, it's yet another half-arsed, me-too attempt at milking the MMO market.
In fact, probably the best thing that can be said about it, is that it copied WoW shamelessly. It's a good thing, really. WoW did figure out the righ gameplay by now. And yes, I really mean clone. E.g., Witch Elves and Witch Hunters work _exactly_ like WoW Rogues. They build up combo points, then spend them on finisher moves. In fact, they may even be renamed "bloodlust points" and "accusation points" respectively, but at least one tooltip still calls them "combo points." E.g., Ironbreakers (dwarf tanks) work almost exactly like WoW warriors, with 0 to 100 "grudge points" that build up as you hit or are hit. Are you thinking "rage points" too, Pinky? Only dumbly enough, they didn't understand the role of that mechanic on WoW, like the difference between burst damage and sustained damage, so as a warrior you're _also_ stuck with a mana bar. Etc.
The downside isn't that it's a clone, that it's yet another half-arsed, shove-me-out-the-door-patch-me-later clone.
To understand what I'm talking about, just look at the web site. Two days after release, it was still talking about preordering, and it was telling me things like that I don't need to register my preorder code again. When in fact, I was registering the game key for the first time. They didn't even bother updating the web site. Now I'm certainly not playing the web site, so it's not a vital issue, but it serves to illustrate the half-arsed attitude I was talking about. Rest assured that it's reflected in the actual game too.
Ok, to the game itself. The first thing that happens, is that promptly at the list of servers the game informs me that server X needs more players. Do I accept? Well, ok. Good thing I decide to double-check that choice, because it turns out to be an open PvP server. (Ok, ok, RvR.) Normally the game seems to ask, basically, "do you really want that?" when you choose such a server. But IIRC if I'm goaded via such a dialog, it didn't. Though maybe that was still one step too early, because when I see "Open RvR", I'm out of there. Way to make friends with your potential customers by trying to shaft them out of choosing a type of server they like.
I pick a new server and start by creating a character. As it happens, on the Destruction side. I play with it for a bit, and, being the altaholic that I am, figure out I'll see if there's an equivalent on the Order side. I need to go to another server for that, though, and honestly I have no problem with that. I like to keep my characters sorted like that anyway.
Again comes a dialog asking me to join realm Y, 'cause it needs more players. I'm weary, but say "OK." Immediately comes a prompt saying that the realm is full and I'd face queues if I play there. What. The. Fuck? It just told me they need more players on a full server?
Ok, I pick another one, toy with character creation for a bit, want to go back to my first one on the other server. But, as it happens, the server names say nothing to me (I'm not a tabletop buff or anything), so I forgot its name. But that's ok, because it has a column in the server list which says how many characters you have on a server. And an option to sort by it. So finding the server should be a two second affair, right? Wrong, because it's non-functional and says 0 for all servers.
After a brief scare that it lost my character, I resolve to do it by brute force and perseverence, by joining and leaving each bloody server in the list, until one has my character in the list. Yep, that's some time lost just because they can't even finish the very first list you'll see, before they release the game. The impressio
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
To pick an only slightly contrived example, an account playing from out-of-region for 36 solid hours starting at its activation is damn well a gold farmer. Oh, and there are other excessively long playtimes coming out of that same building, and the accounts travel the same paths and trade with each other? That's even MORE out of the range of legitimate normal players.
Apparently you've never been inside a university residence? ;)
Also, the ability to reliably ip trace to a building is really a feature of North America, there are places where nearly the entire country is NATed. Pro farmers set up operations there; they get a different IP address every couple days, and even that address is some 10.x thing behind their ISPs NAT. Blizzard can't block the ip or subnets; they'd block everyone in an entire city or even province.
There are a bunch of other damning statistics that would jump right out of the data too, I'm just naming a few for ease of conversation.
Yes, for what its worth I agree that logging usage patterns and profiling them for certain 'farming' patterns and login patterns could yield useful results. However, nothing jumps from the data all by itself, they would have to make a concerted effort to write tools to analyze logs and summarize the data.
A guild can look much like a farmer. Hell, they even power level, farm, dump piles of cash on 'bankers' and 'treasurers' and then from those treasures relay funds to members to make equipment purchases, fund their alts and 2nd box accounts, etc, etc, etc.
And a professional farming op, knowing that they were being profiled could relatively easily slip beneath the radar, by rotating accounts, mixing up farming areas, playing games with proxies, laundering the funds through the in game economy, etc. Running it like a 'terrorist' or spy network, using isolated cells, so if one cell is compromised it can't be traced to others, etc, etc, etc.
Consider this scenario: golf-farmers inc, operating in some place with dynamic dns where their ip changes every few days if not faster... they buy a few accounts, join random levelling guilds of which there are dozens in the game, power level like mad, then break away and farm with it. They rotate between multiple accounts doing the same thing. And transfer no gold), then one day they transfer all the accumulated gold directly to a bunch of other accounts, and then now that its transferred massive amounts of gold to people its never interacted with before, the farmer abandons it and gold-farmers inc uses it to spam ads into the chat-channels until Blizz shuts it down. The recipient accounts were all buyers. The farm account went from being beneath the radar to being practically discarded in 5 minutes flat. How do you profile that?
It would take more effort than you are willing to give credit for to develop tools to hunt them them down and filter them out without hassling a lot innocent players, many of whom power level, farm instances solo, and so on.
Cut my teeth on UO. Played a bunch of others. The ones I spent significant time in were AC, SWG, and EVE.
The game is good. He's not kidding with the RvR. You can literally create a character and click the enter scenario (battelground) button as your first action. Oh you're level one? So what? RvR is broken into tiers. T1 is levels 1-11. If you're below 8 you get buffed up to level 8. T2 buffs you to level 18 if you are below, etc. You don't have to be at the top of the bracket to compete.
You can join queues from anywhere. No running to town. Each area also has an open world RvR area with objectives to capture.
When you join a scenario you are auto added to a party.
One of my favorite mechanics is the open party system. It's like lfg/meeting stones except it works. You can set your party as open and anyone in the area can see you on the list and join. Also anyone in a party can "refer" someone to the party leader. You click them and select invite and the party leader gets a pop up saying Bob wants Alice invited y/n. Find a group is basically effortless.
The public quests are scripted outdoor events. For example the newb orc/gobbo one is as follows. Giant/Ogre thing is being chased by little annoying mobs. 30 of them must be killed. Then the giant sits down and complains about being thirsty so the group has to run around and grab 20 beer barrels. Then the giant gets up and knocks down the doors of a dwarf keep that this is happening outside. A dwarf leader comes out. He sends a couple waves at the group then he attacks with some henchmen. As you complete tasks you get influence which allow you to pick rewards in the town that quest is near. Also at the end of the quest a loot roll is made based on participation and persistance and you may get a loot bag. 2.5 minutes after the loot roll the quest resets and starts over. Also some stages are times and if not completed in time the whole quest will reset. This is mainly a mechanic to prevent them from advancing due to one person grinding for an extended period.
The scenarios are good. I've played capture and hold the CPs and a "flag runner" mechanic one. That one you have to grab the flag then interact with 3 land marks scattered around the instance. That one is a bit wonky because people never seem to know the rules. There's also a standard CTF but I've never made it into an instance on that.
The general pace of combat is a bit slower. Tanks are more tanky and healers heal more. I play a black orc (greenskin tank class) and I can soak sick amounts of damage. Put a healer on me and you have to take the healer out or put 6 or more people on me. I find myself switching targets a lot looking for the guy the healers aren't watching. Snares and roots are very effective killing tools because they allow you to cull someone from the pack. Bascially in RvR you have to work together. Two people just going toe to toe is often a sustained battle. Except for overwhelming forces 8-1 there are few quick kills.
This is getting long. I can talk more if you have questions. In summary: If you like RvR then give the game a try. If you don't like RvR but are a fan of the warhammer world I'd still say pick it up. They're very true to the world. My black orc has a skill called "Right in Da Jibblies."
I find being offended by me offensive.