Not necessarily, there is no profit for AGS when a stolen credit card is used to get an account, or any other fraudulent means. It actually would cost them more to deal with that than the actual cost of the account.
Also no profit from it when it done using a hacked account, which when the actual owner realizes their account is hacked and the support teams have to repair any damage and get the account back for them.
For some cases, there could be legit purchased accounts where the player sees a way to try to make a few bucks and takes the risk with their account, but I doubt it is the majority.
And in some cases losing more than their account. Gold sellers have been known to use customer credit card information for nefarious purposes as well. There is also the risk that the gold sellers are using the revenues that customers provide them with for not so nice purposes (organized crime, etc.), so those buying gold could very well unwittingly be supporting and funding some very questionable activities.
It might be an extreme example, but not out of the realm of possibilities.
Long time WOW player here too. I bought tokens on the auction house to pay for my subscription and expansions from the time the tokens were introduced, never spent a real world dollar on the game since that time.
Yes, they have the token, but you are very misinformed about how the prices are controlled. They are not player controlled. The players cannot set the price in gold on the auction house. They accept the price as it is at the time they post it, they cannot ask less or more. If they do not like the price at the time and want more, then they hold onto it and wait and hope it goes to where they are happy with it.
You also cannot compare the “real world equivalent value” of gold in this game and gold in another game. At least not without comparing in game costs to all “equivalent” items/services. Example: Players in WOW can pay other players so much gold for dungeon or raid runs, I haven’t but friends have, and the cost of those runs made the cost of expedition runs in NW look like pennies in comparison. And even then you have to look at what you get out of a mythic+ in WOW to what you get out of an expedition run in NW, they are not the same value.
When my storage starts getting full like that I start selling, I post sell orders. If the raw material is netting a higher profit then the refined material (after considering the cost of mats) then I sell the raw material. otherwise I refine it to a higher profit product and sell that. I do not sell by filling buy orders, unless the buy order price is higher than my sell price minus the tax and listing fees on a per unit basis. If too low either way then I sell something else. I only keep what I will need for daily CD’s or what I have specific plans for. I will keep single stack items, such as craft mods, that are low priced until I have a stack big enough to make it worth selling after taxes and fees.
For high end legendary materials that I will need for high end gear crafting down the road, I keep that is a separate town, one that I might only visit now and then. I separate items to different town storage based on category. My cooking/fishing related all go to one specific town where I do all my cooking, for example.
Yes, I have two houses right now, on top tier and one that is the tier below, each has max number of chests (though not the top end chests). I find it easy enough to make plenty of coin to pay taxes by simply selling my overstock materials and refined products. I don;t bother selling gear, until you are crafting 600 GS legendaries and such it really isn’t much worth it, unless it is specific crafting bonus gear maybe.
Adding storage space is not as simple as just moving a slider. Every item in your storage is tied to a data base. The larger the storage, the more unique items in storage, the larger the database files to hold the information, the more information to sort through the longer it takes for the servers to queue the database and search it and find the information… it is a lot easier said than done. It took WOW years to finally upgrade the size of the starting backpack, and even then it only increased by 4 slots from 16 to 20 slots, not even close tot he size of other bags in the game which can be as large as 32 slots. Even then the amount of material you can store there on one character is not even close to how much storage one character in NW can store with the tools available in the game.
It really is a game of planning and logistics in some ways. Maybe that is one of the reasons I enjoy it. I enjoy analyzing a situation and finding a working solution.
For every one of you, there are 3 or more people who have everything in the game maxed out and the best houses completely furnished. The best weapons and armor.
They did it by buying gold.
The people in this thread saying that buying gold is okay have ruined the integrity of this game. This game is now useless to anyone who doesn’t want to fund gold sellers.
Also, these gold sellers aren’t Chinese like people state. It takes nothing to spell a couple of words wrong to make people assume that they are.
Before I say anything else, let me be clear, I do not condone buying gold. I am against it and everything I obtain in game is legitimate. It is a point of ethics and morals with me.
Many of those people have been playing this game much longer than I have, I didn’t even start playing until around mid December or so. And I only have 2 houses because I haven’t decided where I want my third yet to increase my standing high enough for the top tier house. I have the coin to buy it easily. But I also farm everything, refine and sell, I see ironwood, I just have to gather it, I see a fishing hot spot, even if I have no plan to fish that day I end up fishing it, when I use the TP I analyze prices, cost of goods, profit margins, taxes, fees, etc.
Without logs and hard evidence, your assumptions are just that, assumptions. Your conclusion is the same as seeing someone with an expensive high end car and a huge immaculate house and saying because they have that and you and most of your friends don’t, then they had to get it by doing something wrong. Are some of them guilty, maybe, but that does not mean a majority are to the point that you are implying.
It would be the same as if I made the claim that all the people that can’t afford the house taxes are too lazy to earn the coin to pay it. I would be wrong to make a statement like that. Are there some that are? Sure there are, but not all of them are, probably only a minority. I am able to understand and accept that there are those that just do not have the time available to devote to it like some others do. There are some that may have difficulty learning strategies and intricacies of the game economy and how to play the TP. There could be a variety of reasons.
Maybe, but do you honestly think it is the majority as you seem to imply? Have you seen the logs of their game play and all their in game trades? Have you investigated to find out how much they play the game?
Maybe they are disabled and spend a lot more time in the game. Maybe they are just really savvy at playing the market on the TP. Maybe they are very single minded and determined and farm constantly, or run every chest run and expedition they can every day. Maybe they have friends that help them out, or teach them how to be successful.
Note that I am not making claims about them, I am asking questions without accusation. There are always going to be bad actors, but to assume they represent the vast majority is not accurate either.
Yes RMT coin selling is bad. Removing it from a game is not exactly going to be an easy task. WOW has been battling the problem for years and it is still an issue there. Many operate outside of jurisdictions so it can be almost impossible to shut down a website, for example. If they use bot software, shutting it down is not as simple as banning as soon as it is reported.
To ban it without learning how it works only gives the bot maker a heads up so they can make adjustments to the programs on the fly to be less detectable. Learning how the bot works so that it can be broken such that a simple code change will not fix it and such that the bot maker cannot figure out how it was detected and then banning the botters is much more effective. It takes the bot maker longer to write a new one as they have to figure out how it was detected in order to avoid that detection system. Sadly it then starts anew all over again and the cycle repeats itself. This is something that will and does happen in every MMO I have ever played, and I do not think it will ever be eradicated completely.
Yes there are people that buy coin, but we really do not know who is and who isn’t, unless they specifically tell us they did (and even then there are those that would do that just to troll anyway) or if we have access to information that would only be accessible by the devs, the specific player, or the bot maker/coin seller. Without that information we are only assuming.
Unless there is some specific reason you are keeping materials in their raw state instead of refining them, I see a ton of raw materials that could be refined to drop the “weight” down, such as rawhide (at least it looks like a stack of over 1400 rawhide to me) for example, it takes no refining agents to do that. Refining that rawhide into coarse leather would drop about 100 weight alone. Looks like there is unrefined ore that could easily be refined as well. And now that the crafting from storage is supposedly fixed it would not be much to do.
Is there a specific reason that you are not refining that material right away? If it is so you can just do it all at once, would it not alleviate some headaches if you broke it down and refined the lower materials as you farmed them, thus not being as stressed about the space?
You also seem to have way more charcoal in your bags than what you could possibly use up even if you refined everything you had in storage currently. I realized it was easier to only make as much charcoal as needed for the refining jobs at hand as needed as it only ends up taking unnecessary space and can cause these storage issues. Personally on my server the cost of green wood or aged wood is cheap enough to buy it to make charcoal as I need it. Sometimes even the charcoal was cheaper to buy than the raw wood (in those cases I would buy the charcoal and sell the wood I had = profit).
I am not trying to be a jerk or anything, just trying to help you find some solution, and offer some suggestions. If I am coming across in a negative way, I apologize. (ASD and being on the analytical side sometimes impacts my approach)
I have to admit that I don’t know what this gold buying thing is all about. On my server, Gold ore is .02. Yes, .02, it’s like one of the cheapest things in the game. Silver ore is about 6x that expensive and salt is 10 gold. So salt is 250x more than gold, lol. How is it possible to make any money on gold when it is .02 gold?
