The Fight against RMT, Bots and Cheaters [Lost Ark and really all mmos] 

Dude I reallly really really liked this vid. It was informative with a purpose, and also brought multiple points/different trains of thought into the mix with your counter arguments and possible solutions. I’ve noticed you do this very well in all your vids. It doesn’t seem shallow, it’s well thought out and has a lot of substance.💪🏻

It's over. They couldn't do anything in 2 years, they won't ever do anything significant. Btw gratz with 1k subs. You should still try tekken, no rmt there

Dude, your videos are laser sharp focused on the points. They are the rock that when thrown into the pond generate ripples of discussion among the community. Big fan.

as a dolphin, after whaling a +20 before brel, it made me realized, honing will never stop. u bought a +20 today, there will be +25 tmr. you bought +25, there will be advanced honing next. u maxed out? now do elixir, maxed out? now do transcendent. these upgrades will just change a name and keep coming. you max out one thing and then they will make this thing super easy to max out to attract new players. you will be just throwing your money at a blackhole. "endless moneypit" or "endless grind" for you. you need to pay big for this game, time or money, either way.

i know a couple of rmters both small and medium one of them has been actively chaos dungeon botting for close to an year now none of them were even 3 day banned

The amount of bots I saw at honing over multiple regions is ridiculous. I’ve only saw that about a year ago. Also, doing deskaluda and weekly guardians only got me into lobbies full with artilerist bots. In Korea rmt is crazy and no one gets banned from it because you buy from real people, not bots. You can’t totally get rid of bots and rmt, just look at wow that has been in the “market” for almost two decades. Tbh, I also rmt but small amounts and just for skins. Paying 20€ for a skin that you have to use just for a specific class is ridiculous, not to talk about the pack with costume, weapon skin and mount/pet Tip: If you vote to quit the raid, they will always vote yes

The only way is to have the same crystal to gold value cheaper than rmters. For example, if exchange has 10k per 238 crystals instead 3000 that would have make difference. 12,000 (110$) will be equivalent or more as buying to rmters. As per research, rmters get 300k gold for 100usd while in exchange via 3k value pero 238 is just 150k. The thing is AGS is getting greedy and that greediness made players rmt.

Here is my take on rmt this is copy pasted from another comment of mine. the only way SG can ever stop the community rmt is if they make their rmt more worth it to purchase lmao. the battle between the rmt methods. but no I seriously dont understand why people are against rmt. there are 3 types of players in loa, the F2P, the Whale, and the RMT'er. no matter what the f2p player will always be pissed when they're weaker than someone that spends money. the whale on the other hand that buys through the loa store is just stupid for feeding into SG's greed and they complain about rmters the most. people that rmt are just people that want to spend money on their favourite game without getting bent over and railed by SG. The only people that the community rmt works against is actually SG themselves because they dont make money from it. I dont understand why someone would be mad and say oh this guy rmts but then bats a blind eye to the same guy that spent twice as much to give to smilegate. The reason i am calling it the "community rmt" is because buying through the loa store is still REAL MONEY TRANSACTIONS, just youre paying SG to get ripped off. The way i see it SG is just the greedy overlords and the community rmt is robin hood. community rmt isnt cheating. think about it this way. You can get medical care in USA, its expensive as fk. OR you can fly to dubai and get medical care there and its cheaper INCLUDING the plane ticket. Which would you choose as a someone that is hard working in society. FLY TO DUBAI AND POINT MIDDLE FINGER TO USA RIGHT!??!!? its a no brainer. point is rmt exists because of the greed of SG. F2p will always be unhappy about whales whether they buy through LOA store or community RMT. Ive calculated most of the bundles and how much gold you would get if you bought through SG or Community. You get about 2x+ more gold if you rmt through community and buy real gold (not bot farmed) So those people complaining about people having multi characters +25 full level 10, THEY WOULD STILL HAVE ALL THAT IF COMMUNITY RMT DIDNT EXIST. they woulda whaled their asses anyways regardless. just woulda costed 2x more money which if they already spent thousands on a video game then its probably safe to say they aint stopping anytime soon. I understand that bots can inflate the market very easily and this causes problems for f2p players so im fully supporting the removal of bots, however if people want to build their rosters and farm weekly gold then sell that gold then they should be allowed to do so. I myself have always bought hand farmed gold from legit plays not bots, its harder to track that way because that gold came originally from an actual high lvl roster. Edit: after watching some of your points, Devalueing gold requires SG to make gold cheaper to buy from the royal crystal store. which you know damn well these greedy basterds will never do. like i mentioned above thats why rmt exists in the first place. a way to spend money on the game without abusolutely getting ripped tf off. and if you are going to hand out harsher punishments and just start perma banning people that buy gold then im sorry this game will die. there is a good chunk of the player base especially the higher roster level you go that rmts. you ban them? the game loses a massive chunk of its veterans. lost ark unironically would be dying if not dead right now if it wasnt for rmt. people will keep trying to find ways around the system to still rmt because of the prices SG puts up. and if you start perma banning accounts then guess what every account you ban is -1 player that will touch the game. you ban the thousands of players that rmt? suddenly youre say 5 thousand players down and i would say a giant chunk are once again high roster accs. gl to those end game whales that spent twice as much to get their gear just to not be able to find a raid.

In regards to rmt in ff14 you are right. Gil has no value fr. It’s v easy to make and the things you’d buy are cheap (food and tinctures). But bussing certainly does exist. You can buy raid clears as well as ultimate clears or pilots.

First, props for being the only content creator I've seen actually acknowledge that one of the best ways to reduce RMT is to devalue the currency in a game. Don't think I've ever heard another content creator say that. I've been preaching that on every MMO since Everquest. RMT has been around for 20+ years. I'm tired of hearing the same drivel from new people coming into the MMO scene being like "oh, just ban" ... dudes ... if it was that easy, RMT would have died decades ago and not steadily gained popularity like it has. I do think you missed 1 very very important thing, which you sort of touched on with the genre discussion. Particularly with Eastern MMO's, their entire game philosophy is grind or pay to progress. Slapped on a F2P game. This makes this whole process even worse. They design the game down to its core to abuse the most basic human interaction, which is creating habits and psychological hooks. These create a 'need' to sign in every day. The friends you have that pay or win or win and pay ... progress faster. So not only is the game pressuring you, the game design also sets up a good amount of peer pressure also. This is a massive cooking pot. Peer pressure. Design pressure. Progression pressure. Layered on a massive time investment for grinding. It's taking advantage of human psychology down to its core design. This leads me into what I think you missed. The gaming industry itself is starting to notice how massively profitable this model is. And even though people say, on the surface they hate it, it's become the most profitable form of gaming. Aggressive monetization tied to progression, specifically, creates all of that. And as time goes on, game companies will see more and more games be developed to abuse this. Ultimately, what I'm trying to get at ... is that RMT itself is a small portion that bites into the profit of a game. If players want to stop this. Players need to take a stand and stop buying into this model of gaming. Otherwise, the entire industry is going to inevitably become this. And I really don't believe that companies care that RMT exists because their balance sheets are so green, that the small percentage of RMT will never matter to them. Not until it eats their profits enough that it turns their books red. Maybe I am a doomer? But I've watched RMT become what it is today over the last 20 years.

Not all, there are mmos with system employed that doesn't allow you to trade gold/items between players but allows you to sell stuff. And items on the marketplace are hardcapped by the ingame pricing system (that allows differential up to 15-20%) which means you are not allowed to place 10k worth item for over a mil. Never have i ever in my history of gaming (~20+ years) met such high ammount of bots as lost ark had. Maybe silkroad would be comperable - but that's how the game was designed - you literally had to no life or use bot to level up your character due to how draining permafarming spot was (inlcuding sp multiplier -> meaning even less xp)

To preface the statement I'm about to make, I'd like to mention that I DO NOT condone RMT or botting, but would like to explain the huge issue with this approach from an economic standpoint. The problem with stopping this kind of stuff is a few things. They've allowed bots to run rampant for two straight years now, and the markets are completely destroyed and heavily skewed. On top of that, the cost of what they sell you in game is literally laughable for what you get compared to what you pay. Amazon even taking this a step further by providing NA players with less rewards for identical events that our KR counterparts have. You can't really completely fuck your player base on repeat, allow to market to be destroyed, and then finally jump in after two years and say "Hey, even though we STILL don't have a solution for bots skewing the market, destroying your guardian raids and other events on literally fucking repeat, and consistently demolishing prices for items that would otherwise be worth something when you farm them". and then yell "BUT YOU'LL BE PUNISHED IF YOU BUY GOLD AT A REASONABLE PRICE FOR THE MARKET WE ALLOWED TO GET FUCKED". It's INSANELY difficult to earn a reasonable amount of gold within the game BECAUSE there's such an abundance of everything from the botting, that nothing you ever receive is worth anything to sell. Before they put their focus on the players, they should've made a REAL fucking effort to combat the bots. And it's not like they're difficult to find, you can go to any decent fishing area and find easily 30-50 bots in a 30 minute period, which alternate with other ones when their action energy runs out. ANY employee could create just ONE new character, play it through to max ilvl, and see easily over 500 bots within that period of time which they can hardware or IP ban. Instead they do nothing to combat the problem, and take it out on the players just trying to find a reasonably priced way to keep up with the fucked economy.

If they just made the game accessible there wouldn’t be such a big RMT problem. Their shop prices and passes and the whole 9 is a complete definition of price gouging. Their anti cheat software is one of the worst programmed ones on the market as well. If you saw the videos back in the day of the dozen warriors wall hopping, teleporting, have 15 attacks per second. The game breaking bugs that were allowed for so long that set up this economy that you’re in now. It’s way worse than most people assume.

if they lower the rc to gold convertion to 100RC = whatever gold is. instead of 238 its good.

Let the rmt peeps run wild. Til they learn their lesson. I bought from rmt people cause i dont want to directly support this shit game. Too much rng even for a seasoned mmo player

A point on 'Name and Shaming'; I believe that there are laws in the west that prevent this. Privacy laws like PIPA/PIPEDA in Canada, for instance.

Got a friend to try the game with super express. They needed gold to hone so I helped them do some raids, told them to do trade skill as well. 2 days later they get banned for bot behaviour 😂? They never came back

yep they'll do a few bot wipes and come to the same realization every other company comes to...they just lost about 1/3rd - 1/2 of their profits and instead just introduce a currency for people to buy to "combat" real world trading when in fact it's just a method for them to profit off the bots. Any game with a premium currency or coin for membership that is tradeable is mostly bought by botting accs with in game currency which then drives up the in game price of it making a lot of the casual player base find using real money on the currency to now be " worth it "

Buying legit is way to expensive.... hell no. The most expensive pack is $170 for me, when i can get triple or more buying from others. Yeah il stick to that way :D

Remove Pheons, and make gold accessible by trading your silver to an NPC. There spending real money for gold is no more. but SG is the biggest RMT'r there is.

Smilegate itself trades in real money, they sell gold to players. You can't come up with a product and hope other businesses won't copy it, kekw. Especially when SG is so greedy and imbue every system in the game with harmful rng and absurd gold sinks, designed to make you swipe to keep up and play for long hours on multiple characters/accounts. Underneath the righeous facade, and fear of being banned themselves, everyone involved in the game, deep down, hates these systems and do take a lot of risk to be done with them. Justifying all the rmters. The only thing carrying lost ark is the combat. Period. Every other aspect of the game is there to milk the playerbase to oblivion, making it a joke and forcing people to rmt. Do you like it?

"their currency is" BOT 🤖 I kid you not, that's what my brain said to me although I know it's Thai Baht. 😅😅

Black desert online is another game with absolutely no rmt, or bots. also another factor to consider is bots and rmt have always been more prevalent in free to play titles as it is impossible to keep bots, rmt's out they can just make another free account when they get banned. people botting rmting use vpn's and virtual machines. saw a whole video on this crap and i lost all hope of ever seeing another game without rmt i just accept the fact that this is how it is and move on with life.

Bots still overrun in Lost Ark? Glad i stopped playing that trash lol.

You think that was bad? RMT and bots? Let me tell you something else that should already be widespread and known sadly, but this game is an actual dumpster fire piece of shit. People can literally edit everything in the game. AGS or the anticheat won't catch you unless you openly admit to them that you cheat. You guys should know about logs and DPS meters, right? Literally most of the highend players use that... but that is the least of the problems. You can edit so much -> Attack speed in animations, movement, animation cancelling (getting off all damage while having most of your animation cancelled for smoother gameplay), minimap hacks in guardians (no more flares needed) And let's not even mention PvP because that is a huge shitshow... with auto dodging editing everything. I once played Blade & Soul and thought the XML editing and modding is bad... yeah, you can edit so much more in Lost Ark and AGS will never know unless you're actual stupid and tell them straight in their face. This game has a huge problem and if AGS can't combat that, it will turn out very bad very soon and without cheating yourself to all the gear requirements, you won't possibly compete.