Will there be Idiot Control in PS?

[zinder]

Beside the problems with legit behavior, your low-give-away protection is easy circumvented. Its enough to make two trades. First the seller buys some normal things overpriced from the buyer and then sells the ebayed item for the overcharge.

[AgentZ]

I think some people are blowing the issue a bit out of proportion.  Any and all resources/time placed into developing a program to catch harvesters and then warn/ban them can be placed into far better endeavors.  I would rather have new content/fixed bugs/real cheating issues adressed than us making sure to catch that guy who makes money off game items. Maybe someone would like to point out where the community actually gets hurt? Sure it creates competition for monster drops/quests but wouldn\'t there be some already. If a certain monster drops a good item, everyone out to make some currency is going to attempt to kill the monster if they can. And I don\'t think harvesting will be a real problem in a free game. People buy items because of one reason: They don\'t have alot of time to play so they buy the best of what they can instead of earning it so they can enjoy the game for their monthly fee. If there\'s no charge, there\'s no impetus to make sure you\'re moving quickly in the game to justify your monthly expenses. While I don\'t believe harvesting is right, I really believe attention is better spent elsewhere.

[Zeraph]

Exactly, infact, I really do not think minor cheating is much of a threat @ this stage, I\'d rather have more fetures then less cheaters, I\'d only wory about the cheaters who violate others acounts...

but anyway, there\'s a famly matter I have to go....

[Seytra]

@ zinder: This is true, and I hadn\'t thought of that. However, I suppose that we can detect this as well if we track items of value and the flow of money. It\'d only need to track substantial amounts of money, because if an item is worth 1,000,000 tria, the buyer is going to not perform 500,000 transactions with only 2 tria overpricing. They are going to do, at most, around 20 transactions, which would be 50,000 tria overpricing on each transaction. Therefore, the item either has to be worth about at least 10,000 tria to not trigger the detection, which will still be a substantial value to effectively lose, or these sums alone will trigger the detection.

@ AgentZ: I believe I have listed the damage to the community in my earlier post:

Originally posted by Seytra
1) frequent public places to harvest, thereby ruining the experience of others

2) actively drive off others if these enter the harvesting zone, usually done by creating trains and driving them towards the player

3) clog the server for their own selfish interests, thereby stealing other\'s resources, just like SPAMmers.

As always, one single harvester will not do much harm, but as I stated, they are becoming an entire industry in some MMORPGs already.
I however agree that the percieved value of game items will be lower due to the lack of fee involved, but the time factor can still create substantial percieved value.

@ Zeraph: Of course I\'m not saying that harvesting will be a problem at the current stage of PS, but if the problem is being known and being thought about, design decisions and program hooks can be made that later on facilitate easy addition of more powerful detection. Also, the earlier things are implemented, the longer they can be tested and improved, which will be a benefit once they need to work.

I agree that we will have bigger problems with bots and conventional cheating for the short-term future. However, I think cheaters are a really bad thing regardless of the state of the game. Just look at what the crystal hunt mods have  caused, and the crystals are totally useless! If we \"let slip\" immoral behaviour of any kind, the impression is created that it is tolerable, thus lowering the inhibition barrier, leading to a generally low standard of morale, which will eventually drive off players.

More features are nice, certainly, but I do not want them if the cost is ethical behaviour, and thus an enjoyable atmosphere.

[AgentZ]

Thanks, I must have missed them.

In response to your reasons:

1. Public places are exactly that. With your logic, anyone  out to kill monsters will ruin your experience despite whether or not they harvest the items to sell.

2. As far as I am aware, there\'s no harvester credo which commands they drive off other plays and monster-kill with trains. In fact, in every mmorpg I\'ve played, trains were caused not by harvesters, but by assholes in places you can\'t get anything of value.

3. Everybody has a personal interest. You\'re not playing this game for your mother are you? Maybe you\'re playing it for your best friend who doesn\'t have a computer? The fact is, we all have personal interest in the game. And there\'s no shortage of people who play games just to screw with other people in the game and cause grief.

Also, who says harvesting is \'unethical\'? There\'s no universal ethics or we\'d all be slaves. Your reasoning holds almost no weight and the benefits of focusing on other aspects of the game clearly should take precedence. Every effort should be made to thwart mods or unfair play but killing monsters like a normal player for a different reason isn\'t as much of a crime. I\'d compare it to arresting pot-heads. We have much bigger fish to fry and places to allot our resources.

edit: Just so you know, I say this out of the assumption gil farming is as small a problem as I saw in FFXI or less so which I believe it will be. However if it grew where they took over entire maps...I\'d agree there would be a problem.

[zinder]

It is nearly impossible to stop them with ingame observation of money flow. There are so many ways, in essence most which works in RL to wash money can work ingame too.
For those who go as open as you stated in your list, you dont need  special ingame observation. They have so much effect on others expierence, they reveal themselves and you can ban them.
But small ops need to be addressed otherwise. They are not as easy to see, but can have a similiar effect en mass.
For them you need ebay and the likes to add planeshift items to their restricted/forbidden lists and enforce it.

In short i think education of players and work of GMs are more usefull against this problem than a software solution.

[Adeli]

I think a constant supervision of transactions is a gross waste of resources. I also don\'t find it necessary.
I agree entirely with AgentZ on this one, you make very valid points.
Seytra: I for one, would willing give away a highly powerful item if I had no need for it, nor desire to sell it. I\'d give it to friends, guildmembers, anyone I knew who could benefit from it.
An example: Tyralus has slain a ferocious beast that was guarding the \'Red Staff of Uber Doom +5\', Tyralus is not adept at any way of magic, so would not benefit at all from posession on this object. I would willlingly give the item away if I knew someone who could benefit from it, just to help them, not charge them some obscene amount of \'circa*\' for said item. This is my way of playing and I would hate to be flagged as a cheater if I were to procure three of these staves for three magic using friends.

circa: I have a thread stating my preference of this term.
\'Why not circa?\'

[Bobkat]

I think i know where seytra is coming from, when i played eq and was lvl21 dru i was over in East Karana (huge zone with lots and lots of mobs) hunting crag spiders, well for those that don\'t know crag spiders drop lots of spider silks which were pretty valuable to high lvl crafters, well I was having a good time and then this one lvl 57 druid comes running by me with the whole zone trained behind her, after getting stomped by the train and getting back i saw that she dropped everything in the train and was just gathering the goods, well i let it go that time and the next two, but finally i asked her to stop, she replied by saying that I needed to go find a different zone because she was harvesting things to sell and if I stayed she would be happy to keep killing me with trains until i couldn\'t hunt in that zone,  this really burned me because she wasn\'t getting any xp and she was going to make me go find another good place to play which could take hours due to all the running and binding and hoping you don\'t die out in the middle of nowhere where you won\'t find your body again, so I ended up just logging out for several days and didn\'t see her on when I tried again

what seytra said about driving people away from what should be public places (like newbie hunting grounds or a good thick spawn spot) is very possible, if the area spawns a certain mob that the drop is usefull then a harvester wants that mob all to themselves as to lessen the likelyhood they will miss the spawn, the best way to get it all to themselves is to be a prick to anyone in the area (i.e. training people, kill stealing, and constant verbal abuse) , of course we can\'t hope that there will be mods and devs on very often and if these things occur the people being affected will report the offensive prat and not be driven away from the game

just some thoughts

[RonHiler]

Seytra is absolutly right.  Harvesters are a very real and dangerous threat, and should be dealt with in every way possible.  They CAN and DO destroy games.  If you don\'t believe this, you have never played a game with this problem.  It is a fatal mistake to dismiss the issue as harmless.

The very biggest problem game I know of with regards to harvesters is Lineage II (for reasons due to certain aspects of the mechanics of the game which I wont bother to go into, and the developers absolute refusal to acknowledge and deal with the problem).  This game is essentially dead now, due in large part to harvesters (though certainly the game has other core problem issues).

Don\'t kid yourselves.  For harvesters, collecting resources and selling them on ebay (or where ever) is their JOB, not something they do for extra cash or as some kind of minor hobby. This is how they make their living, they work at it all day long, and they take it very seriously.  They care nothing for the community, roleplaying, the economy, your enjoyment, or any other aspect of the game except how it affects their ability to collect as much resource as possible as quickly as possible and turn it over for real world money.

The developers, IMO, should do everything possible in their power to discourage harvesting/ebaying.  And yes, this will require them taking time out from coding other aspects of the game to deal with the issue.  It\'s too bad, but that\'s the way of it just the same.  It hardly makes any difference if the coders add in an awesome feature if no one ever sees it because they\'ve all been driven away by harvesters.

To some extent, it might be possible to handle harvesters through GMs, but I wouldn\'t rely on it solely (especially in a game that\'s free, and in which the harvester players can create a new account the minute they first feel threatened). It should also be possible to catch them through database data mining.  Harvesters *should* stand out in the database via the amount of resources they collect (presuming the database keeps a running total of these values, which I dunno if it does or not), which would be an order of magnitude higher than most other player\'s values, I would think.

Ron

[acraig]

Data mining is something that I have always had in the back of my mind to do.  There is a pretty good article on gamasutra on this that explains a pretty good system on how to do this.  So at some point we will have a data mining system to make sure that people play fair and the game is balanced out in terms of skills/spells and equipment.

[Zeraph]

If by \"killing by trains\" you mean running around collecting monsters behind you until you have 10+ then they all start attacking ppl behind you? if there is no PvP in public places then a good way of harvesters killing other players is by trains, why not just make trains unforgeable.

Such as were can be no more then 3 to 5 monsters fallowing a char without them starting to fight each-other over the player.

Or make them disperse when they are clumped together & not attack other players immediately.

Wouldn\'t this be a better way of controlling this sort of thing?

Also, did I miss something or isn\'t PS going to be RP oriented, many of the the stuff you are talking about would benefit powerlevels & make them \"leet\", however this will not help them get better @ RP. aren\'t the GMs going to be looking out for powerlevels & discourage newbies who think they are l33t? So aren\'t a lot of the games you are talking about with these problems mostly non-RP oriented?

I just know I\'ll probably get flamed for this but whatever...

[Seytra]

@ Zeraph: Yes, this is what I mean.
Your suggestions might be an option to limit indirect PK, but the harvesters might just overrun the area to keep killing every MOB until no player bothers to come there anymore, which will have the same effect, only take longer.
Also, they could group and have several small trains instead of one large one.
Furthermore, if this was implemented, ppl. could just get a train of three harmless monsters and simply walk the dungeons of doom without fear of ever being attacked by anythign of serious size... However, if the MOBs in the train would start killing each other, that might be realistic, but only dependant on the \"cooperation level\" of the MOBs, and also can be abused by players to let the MOBs kill themselves, so that they then can take the loot without any danger. If, however, there would be no loot if a MOB was killed by another MOB, that would not be usable for anyone but griefers.

And yes, PS is trying to be RP oriented, but the problem is that you still need fights and public spawn points, mainly to provide for questless danger and recources for the economy.

@ AgentZ: As Bobkat and RonHiler have already answered your objections to my reasons, there isn\'t much for me to add. However, I\'d like to see how some universal ethics would make everyone be a slave? It is my opinion that there is no objective, universal ethics, but there is a subjective universal one, which will be the same for everyone, regardless if they act on it or not. This, however, is OT so I\'ll just shut up about it.

@ Acraig: it\'s good to read that the issue is being thought of and going to be adressed.

@ Adeli: You wouldn\'t be flagged as a cheater, because, contrary to the harvesters, you\'d spend considerably more time doing other things. As with everything, the system, however it will be implemented, needs to be fine-tuned and also will generate false positives as well as false negatives. However, just as with the conventional anti-cheat systems, the false positives can be addressed if the system is tuned well so that there will be very few of them.

[AgentZ]

Their objections have alot to do with MPKers (Monster-Player killers, or indirect PKing) not harvesters. I have suffered quite a few deaths in other MMORPGs because of this and I\'m 100% against it and GMs taking action against it. I believe MPKing is a /real/ threat against the community and takes the enjoyment from the game. However people farming for items/money or to sell on ebay isn\'t nearly as serious a problem. I guess I can\'t sum up my opinion anymore and that\'s all I have to say. Focus on the crimes that hurt the community.

[Seytra]

Well, so harvesting is like grinding (hurts the economy and relation / realism), with additional side-effects of (at least occasional) MPK and griefing (because the ppl. doing the MPK were harvesters, and did it to secure their turf). Doesn\'t make it any better IMO.

[RonHiler]

Originally posted by AgentZ
Their objections have alot to do with MPKers (Monster-Player killers, or indirect PKing) not harvesters. I have suffered quite a few deaths in other MMORPGs because of this and I\'m 100% against it and GMs taking action against it. I believe MPKing is a /real/ threat against the community and takes the enjoyment from the game. However people farming for items/money or to sell on ebay isn\'t nearly as serious a problem. I guess I can\'t sum up my opinion anymore and that\'s all I have to say. Focus on the crimes that hurt the community.

Hey AgentZ.  I\'m not sure I really am getting your objection.  Do you mean that other players lead high level trains to your bystanding character, thus putting him in danger?

That is a grief issue, you are right (presuming it\'s done intentionally).  I wouldn\'t say it\'s a bigger issue than harvesters, but that\'s a matter of opinion, hehe.

However, that\'s a relatively easily solved problem.  Trains are caused by an AI that doesn\'t know when to give up, and transfer of aggro is caused by poorly thought out  AI routines.  In Asheron\'s Call (for instance), a MOB will chase the player, but ONLY the player they first aggroed (unless attacked by someone else, at which point they might transfer aggro to the attacker, or they may not).  After some amount of time (if they don\'t catch their prey), they give up and begin to run back to their spawn point.  During this run back period, they won\'t aggro another player (unless attacked).  Once back at thier spawn point, they return to a normal idle state where they aggro based on distance (or being attacked, of course).

This has the effect of you never being engaged in combat unless you want to be (or you wander too close to an idling MOB).

I have seen trains that transfer aggro to bystanders (Lineage II and EQ just to name two).  This is just poor design, IMO.  The AC system always seemed to me to work the best, and it\'s the system I have always intended to use in my game.  Not sure what the plan is for PS, maybe one of the devs will illuminate us

So I think your problem is easily solvable, it\'s all a matter of how you program your AI.

Ron