New RMT exploit or gimmick?

[Midnightjade]

Jade, are they at least really cute?

They kind of are at first, but then you notice they all look the same and have similar names and it all gets a bit creepy.

ARMY OF ZOMBIE RMT TARUS ZOMG GET IN THE CAR!

[Kipling]

They kind of are at first, but then you notice they all look the same and have similar names and it all gets a bit creepy.

ARMY OF ZOMBIE RMT TARUS ZOMG GET IN THE CAR!

Rofl.

[Zorax]

They don't discriminate on Fenrir. While I was there I saw 2 taru, a mithra and a hume male. And one at a time. But in the same rotation.

[Kyreth]

Easy fix: You can't garden for the first 14 days of a character.

But yeah, not surprising.

[Gergall]

Easy fix: You can't garden for the first 14 days of a character.

But yeah, not surprising.

Too simple. SE would instead implement something like "Gardening fatigue"

[fndragon]

Too simple. SE would instead implement something like "Gardening fatigue"

Or simply take Wildgrass away from the NPC vendor.

[WyldFyre]

Or simply take Wildgrass away from the NPC vendor.

What they should do to fix it all is simply prevent trial accounts from being able to interact with paid accounts via trade or d.box, then set up a process to scan auction house transactions for suspicious activities.

Knowing SE though, they'd find a way to screw that up too.

[loial]

What they should do to fix it all is simply prevent trial accounts from being able to interact with paid accounts via trade or d.box

I forget exactly what other MMOs do, but EQ2, LOTRO, WOW all have the "X-day free trial" business. But, all of those accounts are limited in various ways:
- can't send more than 1 tell every 30 seconds (greatly limits gilseller spam)
- can't use delivery box (mail system, etc)
- can't use auction house (or can use, but can't pick up gil till they register with a CC)
- can't trade anybody

While I won't say those games are by any stretch of the imagination "RMT-free" but they were able to offer the free trial without RMT taking advantage over it.

[evilpaul]

Could they be spamming this quest? It would be pretty pathetic and all, but RMT fit that profile.

[Rajwa]

Noticed this few months ago and posted in the fishbot location thread because I didn't want to start a new thread about it (http://www.bluegartr.com/forum/43241...cations-2.html).

I spammed trade on them and one nearly handed me 750~K, and one did trade me grass seeds. I'm still in game so I think even SE was smart enough to not flag me as RMT (or they were BS'ing about that whole system).

[sruon]

(or they were BS'ing about that whole system).

It was just a major joke they came up with.

Shit isn't real.

[Ziero]

they should leave the 14 day trial but leave it on a trial only server, when they activate give people a option to move to a server of their choice after paying for a subscription

The simplest way to fix this, assuming it is Gardening then NPCing the crap, is to just limit gardening for free accounts. Hell, they don't even have to completely prevent new accounts from being able to garden, just make it so you can only have 1 pot in your MH for the first 14 days. It would kill freebie RMT accounts from spamming this and still allow new players to try it out.

Could they be spamming this quest? It would be pretty pathetic and all, but RMT fit that profile.

Seeing as they would have to go to Selbina to do that, and that it has nothing to do with grass, water crystals, seeds, RSE NPCs and so many other things people have mentioned in this topic, no, no they are not spamming that.

[shaddix]

Btw nice how one clueless person goes "2k per mule per week in npc-ables gardening!" and everyone thinks this is accurate and repeats it.

nice how several clueless people tell everyone the real value thus encouraging everyone to do it and increasing the chance of a nerf.

[Ruuz]

You'd have to have a TON of mules to make lots of money at Wildgrass farming. 30k per week per character is like 1.5mil a week for 50 characters. That is like 45$ a week for 50 characters? Seriously? That is pathetic money unless they are also fish botting up moats or something (what is the under 20 fish fatigue now?).

I think what someone said earlier is more likely. I think they are having issues finding buyers (hence the mass of /tells that started a few months ago), due to SE's new money tracking software. Maybe they are trying to mess with the detection or maybe they really are just so desperate they are wildgrass gardening for money.

[nibu]

Alrighty, though I would throw what little information I have into the pot.

A few days before this thread popped up, I noticed some suspicious activity in Bastok Mines. Anon, /away, funny-named humes popping out of the mog house, apparently "trading" another single "hub" hume, who would occasionally run back and forth between the merchant Galka and the Mog House.

I decided to play a little "Whack-a-RMT," trading the people who popped out of the Mog House as fast as I could before the "hub" could trade them. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have, as I might show up on the RMTPwner thingy now, but here's what I got.

http://img245.imageshack.us/img245/1310/trade1.jpg

After several tries, one of the RMT peoples successfully traded me an onion sword (not pictures), an adventurer's coupon, and some tokopekko grass. I'm not sure whether this was traded on purpose (perhaps as a "bribe" to stop interfering), or if it was a mistake. If it was an honest mistake, then they may actually be using the coupon and onion equipment for money making purposes. Otherwise, I don't know why they would trade it.

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/6540/trade7.jpg

Ended up getting a few other grasses as well. I'm fairly sure these were given to me intentionally, as they weren't worth quite as much as the toko. I say that these were probably given to me on purpose because in exchange, I gave the RMT some fireworks ;x

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/6993/trade4.jpg

http://img17.imageshack.us/img17/8193/trade3.jpg



Because he was a good sport, I *did* try to trade him back the items he had given me, though I think he believed I was still trying to disrupt their trading actions. Sort of felt bad that I couldn't communicate with him that I did want to return the items, but I couldn't get through.

Lastly, this is me just trying to blend in
http://img411.imageshack.us/img411/7269/trade5.jpg


So in short, yeah, they are NPCing greens. Not quite sure if they are actually using the adv. coupon and onion sword for any purpose, or if they were just trying to give me junk items.

[Mizango]

Man they are really desperate lol. Ban the buyers and problem solved.

Ok maybe not, but it would be hilarious nonetheless.

[Spekkio]

i'm surprised they still have people manning the chars. it seems like it would be simple enough to automate and you could have 1 even mediocre computer sustain several game instances at once rather than 1 person, 1 account at a time. i don't doubt that this is a profitable venture once they get the ball rolling. if you assume that they're processing say 4 mules per minute (4 people w/ pots, with 1 hub feeding them wildgrass) throughout the full 24 hrs in a day, that's 4*60*24 mules processed per day or 5,760 mules. this is not impractical considering the free trial (is there a limit on the number of chars per acct for the free trial?) allowing them to create as many chars as they like. assuming the figure above at 1.5m per 50 chars processed is correct, that's 172.8 million gil per 24 hr period. when you consider that 5 peoples labor in china at say a good wage of 50 cents an hour would cost 60 dollars, you can see how this could be exceptionally profitable.

[Ruuz]

Nice work Spekkio. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the RMT are nowhere near that automated/efficient. I think they still actually have people manning the characters as has been shown by the interactions above. Still, 172 million new gil into circulation everyday would be hilarious. Still, it would just prompt emergency "cannot garden on trial account" update. Btw, are RMT using IP routers to fake being in the US or does SE not ban Chinese IPs?

[Spekkio]

Nice work Spekkio. Unfortunately, I get the feeling that the RMT are nowhere near that automated/efficient. I think they still actually have people manning the characters as has been shown by the interactions above. Still, 172 million new gil into circulation everyday would be hilarious. Still, it would just prompt emergency "cannot garden on trial account" update. Btw, are RMT using IP routers to fake being in the US or does SE not ban Chinese IPs?

i doubt if they need to route to the US or anywhere else to log in to SE's servers. i know several of my friends play from china (they're not cgf, you can skip the joke) and to my knowledge they need no special tricks to prevent SE from going crazy on them. besides, i would think you could just bounce thru a proxy network like TOR and you're golden, no?

i think it's a given that the CGF are using real players to handle the transactions, considering at least the group showcased above actually used the fireworks provided. my figures weren't based on using automated programs, just using 5 people. in retrospect though my 4 transactions a minute processing window is rather over the top (plus it's based on an estimate above i'm not sure if it's accurate) since they have to create a new account, replant, etc as well as what you see them do outside the MH. still, this is assuming only 5 people are playing 4 gardening chars and a hub char at once.

scale this up to 25 people playing 24 mules and 1 hub and your operation gets much bigger. there's no volume limiting factor involved in this, making it entirely practical to scale this ad infinitum. even if you assume my 1 minute reset timer to go from ready to harvest to replanted is wildly inaccurate (let's say it takes 3x as long) their overhead costs are still incredibly low. they just need to scale up the operation to say 25 people at a cost of 300 dollars a day and they can produce 344 million gil on a server per day. assuming the value of gil is 20 bucks a million to CGF (i have NO clue if that's accurate, i'm just trying to prove there's going to be a motivation for CGF to continue their efforts) you're still looking at 6,880-300=$6,480 in cash PER DAY, PER SERVER before hardware, internet, etc costs are covered. that's a lot of money to a shopowner in china.

please don't misconstrue this post as an endorsement of RMT, as that is not my intent. my only goal in making this post is to demonstrate that while 30k a week isn't a lot to real players, RMT can abuse this method to great result to make themselves money. i would not be surprised if the 10 day trial accounts are limited to only 2 plants at a time instead of 10. by reducing the efficiency of the operation down by 80%, the value of this avenue to RMT will fall dramatically w/o significantly impacting honest players of the game.

[fndragon]

i doubt if they need to route to the US or anywhere else to log in to SE's servers. i know several of my friends play from china (they're not cgf, you can skip the joke) and to my knowledge they need no special tricks to prevent SE from going crazy on them. besides, i would think you could just bounce thru a proxy network like TOR and you're golden, no?

i think it's a given that the CGF are using real players to handle the transactions, considering at least the group showcased above actually used the fireworks provided. my figures weren't based on using automated programs, just using 5 people. in retrospect though my 4 transactions a minute processing window is rather over the top (plus it's based on an estimate above i'm not sure if it's accurate) since they have to create a new account, replant, etc as well as what you see them do outside the MH. still, this is assuming only 5 people are playing 4 gardening chars and a hub char at once.

scale this up to 25 people playing 24 mules and 1 hub and your operation gets much bigger. there's no volume limiting factor involved in this, making it entirely practical to scale this ad infinitum. even if you assume my 1 minute reset timer to go from ready to harvest to replanted is wildly inaccurate (let's say it takes 3x as long) their overhead costs are still incredibly low. they just need to scale up the operation to say 25 people at a cost of 300 dollars a day and they can produce 344 million gil on a server per day. assuming the value of gil is 20 bucks a million to CGF (i have NO clue if that's accurate, i'm just trying to prove there's going to be a motivation for CGF to continue their efforts) you're still looking at 6,880-300=$6,480 in cash PER DAY, PER SERVER before hardware, internet, etc costs are covered. that's a lot of money to a shopowner in china.

please don't misconstrue this post as an endorsement of RMT, as that is not my intent. my only goal in making this post is to demonstrate that while 30k a week isn't a lot to real players, RMT can abuse this method to great result to make themselves money. i would not be surprised if the 10 day trial accounts are limited to only 2 plants at a time instead of 10. by reducing the efficiency of the operation down by 80%, the value of this avenue to RMT will fall dramatically w/o significantly impacting honest players of the game.

tl;dr: Gardening is about to get nerfed for everybody?