Unexpected drop on the item prices

Runescape is trash, it doesn't matter if the player base plummets. Like, if the player base needs to have an easy time, then they're the ones that can leave.

Botting is just automation, and if you limit the economy to what can be achieved in 8 hours a day. Which is in the realm of acceptable.

A bot, that can trade once to a player, still creates a bottleneck. So even if that provided a nice boost. The impact on the wider community/economy would be limited. As players could still be self sufficient, and the pressure to min/max limited.

The only people that suffer in Toram, are the legitimate players who have their time discounted by botters. Making them leave the game or become disenfranchised by inflation, and hope for the market to collapse.

 

I think that with some adjustments it could help.

But, ultimately people bot, because there is clear advantage. If you remove the ability to farm infinite resources. Then, they are forced to compete with the average legit player. They have two options, find a game that fills their kink, or participate like normal players.

I consider myself a veteran player. And RMT only really appeared a year after the Boss Roga update. Before, the economy was steady and definitely player based. The first bots begans to farm mats in the Ruins by Rugio and sell at the vendor in Rugio. By release of Twilight dragon, RMT was advertised and we had learnt that the botters were generally from Indonesia and China. A few players, took advantage of their poor understanding of the market, and brought their xtals directly to sell on the CB.

The next upset was the friend-bots and people generating free orbs to provide 2s services. This was during 2017 and it impacted RMT. This caused a huge demand for spina as 2s services were selling at a premium (100m for 2s additional, at the peak). This issue continued after they patched the shards for friends emblems. And forced bot farms to sell their bots to give people 200 free orbs.

Now, this is still going on. But has died off a lot. The biggest dent for RMT came during the rollback. When buyers lost all their spina, and RMTers didn't want to refund/couldn't compensate transactions.

Currently, deflation is due to less spina in circulation and established android RMT botters moving to other MMOs.

We already can see less players online. Most congregate on Int1. Global is a meme, and English server is full of weebs, and Int2/3 is where the bots live.

The only real losers of the deflation are those that hoarded items / mats over spina. A lot of the youtubers that stream Toram usually quit and move to more popular games for viewers. And every soon forgets about old farming locations.

I made a lot of Spina at the end of 2019 (Sept-Nov) farming hero scarf and Vio xtal. Which I thought was hilarious, considering how long that mini-boss has been around. I was averaging 5-7m a day, for about 8 hours of work but typically less, I'd fall asleep or get bored. It was selling faster than I could keep up.

There is always a resource that's worth a lot. Even magic oil occasionally.

I'm expecting [Book of Dancer] to increase in demand after the event ends, I'd say in 6 months it would be at around 800-900k.

 

I read your post, I think your completely underestimating the power of automation. Lets think of ways to break your anti botting mechanism that does not even stop botting.

Scenario 1) I can likely use AWS to rent out a single windows t3.medium for $0.06 an hour. 4 Gb of ram, I can probably run 4 instances of toram on bluestacks or potentially a modded version of toram. With these 4 accounts go farm a boss that has an xtal of at least 1m+ spina of value like volg, tuscog.

I assume that 1m spina is worth about 1 us dollar.

When, an account gets an xtal replace it with another account and have that account with the xtal go trade for spina. (1 trade on that account for that day). Finally, once the account obtains spina it either goes back to farming or attempts to sell the spina for IRL currency (1 trade on that account for another day).

Mind you, this is just an argument for 1 set of 4 accounts. Once it is profitable for a single instance, the only thing that is left is to come up with great innovative ways to scale the operation which people are amazingly great at doing. We know that they have a process for this because I have seen like 20+ beeXXX accounts running around before. Also, there are also plenty of software packages that handles work distribution on distributed systems. Scaling work is not as hard as it was 5-10 years ago.

Scenario 2) rent out an AWS machine to run 4 instances of toram on bluestacks. Go farm bubble and sell the metal points to guild store for spina. Repeat this process until all accounts contain a certain amount of spina. Once each account reaches a certain spina amount each account can be used to RMT to 4 different buyers.

Both of these scenarios still allows the botter to conduct RMT. If you truly want to stop botters with your method, you literally just have to ban all trading. At this point, you might as well play a RPG.

Yes, these arbitrary restrictions on trading/economy is terrible for game play and are a punishment for players when they are introduced after the game has been running for 5 years. These ideas fundamentally restrict player actions and free will, which are both needed for an mmorpg. People complain all the time how boring mmorpgs are because of lack of player interaction. Yet to solve the botting issue we restrict players ability to make deals with other players?

Solve the bot problem. Algorithmic/mechanical botting can be detect using algorithms but ASO literally does not care. Toram is a 5 year old game on a decline.

 

Unfortunately, you cannot. MAC addresses can be easily changed, because, unlike IP addresses, MAC addresses are (mostly) controlled by the client, the enduser. Even if you could, it would be a huge privacy violation.

 

Dang the only thing that they can do is make an ingame code rhat detects ppl who have repeating action for certain time and identify it as a bot.
With mod fast time in high diff boss or normal boss that would be impossible to get 1hit is better. Hopefully they do it that way

 

But farming is essentially

• Storm
• Storm
• Storm
• Storm
• MP charge
• Maximizer
• Repeat

So lots of non botters might get caught too.

 

Nope, you didn't read it.

I said you couldn't trade spina. You can only trade one item a day, and a player can only accept one trade a day. You can only trade items.

Spina can only be used on the user end, to buy from the consignment board. That's the only way to transfer spina between players.

Secondly, you're now competing to sell xtals or rare mats/items with the market, and the demand from other sellers. So now your regular income from RMT is based in RNG. And the more you supply the market, the demand decreases resulting in attrition of your market.

In addition the normal player base are already restricted by trades, so now it's a strategy for the player. Do I advance my crafting, equipment or receive a rare item for actual money. This is where you're now competing with Gems/cash shop users, who will use this system to optimize their own efforts legitimately.

In the meantime, you invested all this time and effort to sell items anyone can acquire with time. But the average player needs to make spina to purchase items from the CB? Will they just wait once a day and buy them from your bot farm, or get on with the game and do gem runs/trade/barter etc.

I'd suspect that you'd move on to another game, RMT prefer regular incomes. Otherwise scaling just increases risk, hence why they prefer games with free market systems like WoW and Runescape.

In Toram atm, RMT have two reliable sources. Spina from selling to vendors, which is getting attention now. And spina from selling rares on the CB, by bot farming bosses. Which in some cases uses hacks/mods getting them banned.

I know for a fact, that I barely do direct trading with items and spina. I typically use the consignment board. The only time I don't, is if I'm selling 2s gear trying to avoid tax. Plus, as someone that played since 2015, and have all 2s gear, over 2500+ hours, it's clear that RMT are just convenient for small pp gamers.

We don't want small pp, Toram is big PP territory.

[Other controls]

I only agree on using algorithms to track abnormal behaviors. That is easy to implement, it doesn't have to be real time. They can do batched data, and use different metrics to catch outliers.

The average player isn't playing for three days straight, so time would be a variable.

In addition, repeated behavior is the downfall of most bots, as their programming is pretty bad. Outside of their basic bitch coding, if they're pushed to think about something novel and new, they typically move to another game.

Hence why they're botting, they failed to get a proper job with their computer science degree.

If you just make the game an issue to get buyers reliably. They move on.

I know for a fact, that I barely do direct trading with items and spina. I typically use the consignment board. The only time I don't, is if I'm selling 2s gear trying to avoid tax. So ban

 

Yes I did read your post, but I guess I have to explain my point a bit more clearly.

RMT can be used with spina or other material goods. The RMTer just has to sell OP armor,materials,drops(xtals) for real money and trade it to the buyer for garbage. My original point still stand. I just used spina to make this point easier to understand. Simply, any item in game worth of value can be a place holder for in game currency to be traded for IRL money.

Any item can be used as a substitute for SPINA. RMTer just has to put up items on the board to sell for spina. Also, if the buyer wants to buy spina from a RMT seller, the buyer just has to put a random item up for a specific amount that is agreed upon using guild only option in the CB with the guild only consisting of the RMTer and the buyer.

When you can farm 56 volga xtals (check the image in the attachments), I doubt RNG is really a problem with bots. Especially if you can kill the boss in 6 seconds... The problem here is the bots crash the xtal price then they move onto another xtal to farm and sell. Rinse and repeat. Automation will always gather material wealth better than that of human effort.

This is full of no. There is no strategy to this. Your just slowing down the economy to a crawl because of the threat of RMTers while introducing a F2P hindering mechanic. Because of the threat of bots, you are willing to slow down player progression to crawl. It is already plenty hard enough to reach "late" game in toram. This may actually completely backfire and encourage RMTing.

Will people pay IRL money to have an advantage over other players? um of course! Will they buy the item from a bot farm? of course! Why? Because the bot farm can sell the item a hell of a cheaper price than human players. This is because the bot farm does not spend a ton of effort to acquire the item in the first place and can continuously farm the item which human players can not! A good example of this is the prices of anti-deg. I am sure almost everyone in the forums have bought cheap anti-deg, and likely from a bot account. The current price of anti-deg is not profitable enough for humans to farm it. But bots, will still farm the hell out of it because it will always sell even if it is cheap.

As long as it is profitable monetarily people will provide RMT services.

As long as botters can create a fresh account, use that account to obtain a profit before they are banned RMTing will still exist. Wow has a major issue with this.

I do a lot of in person trading -_- because tax = theft (kidding).... Though recently, I do sell most things on cb now adays, because I want to boss more than shout.

Any way, I will apologize for my grammar. I am really exhausted right now and waiting for my experiment to kick off and start so I can sleep.

Honestly, all of this boils down to this. My argument, As long as you have any trade between players with out good bot detection, RMTing and botting will always exist and always be profitable. Your argument seems to be, By restricting player trade to an arbitrary point ( your new trade restrictions and any other restriction that you may want to add ), botting will no longer exist because selling items/spina will be too slow and not profitable.

Good bot detection, is a banning mechanism that bans bots before they become profitable.

honestly, after thinking this through... I kinda feel like I potentially may have provided a rough blue print on how to bot in toram for profit.... um whoops.

 

Actually, there's a way to get around this, if a player repeat certain action for a while, lets say 30min, a box would pop up with a text that requires the player to type the text within the next minute, if the player failed to do it then they're kicked from the server (just kicked, not banned), the text is randomized, and the time for the box to appear the next time is also randomized, sure it could cause a minor inconvenience for normal players, but it would cause a HUGE trouble for botters.

Implementing this is easier said than done, combine that with existing bugs, server issues, huge content updates (like the last MQ which is the best chapter so far IMO) that asobimo have to deal with, that is... if asobimo even knows about this suggestion, which bring us to my next point.

Probably because we're giving suggestion here, in the UNOFFICIAL forum, if we really want to suggest something then we should contact them via e-mail

 

Actually, there are other ways to go about identifying bot behavior without infuriating the player base (how fun would it be to be kicked for going afk?):

1. Coordinate patterns. No human can click on the same coordinates twice.
2. Color patterns. This is the “basic bitch coding” HoboOnline was speaking of. It’s essentially using the color of objects as markers for the bot.
3. Erratic mouse movement.
4. Instantaneous movement.
5. Useless actions. A bot unable to register its bag is full will continue to grind.

These are relatively painless to implement.

 

Actually this stuff is implemented in another game that I used to play. It is called Rise of Kingdom. I believe it works. Every certain minutes, the game will pop up a puzzle for player to solve and get small reward. If player cannot solve it in 5 mins, their account won't be able to do anything in the game until it is solved. Why do I not remember about this stuff haha? Someone should tell aso staff about this solution

 

my suggestion has nothing to do with kicking afk player, i already said that the system will do the job only if a player repeat the same action for a while (like killing the same mobs for 30 min and stuff like that), it wouldn't even work if you're afk.

also "pattern recognizing" algorithm is way harder to implement, hell it could also be inaccurate, the skill button is not that large and the chance of people pressing the same coordinate twice, is not that small tbh considering like thousands of player are farming everyday.

and for useless action one, some people used the "98-proc-trick" (you name it, that's the simplest way i can describe it) which make them farm mostly with a full-bag, so yea most legit farmers would also get kicked.

beside we already have an afk-kicking system on toram, it will kick you for 30 minutes of inactivity.

 

BOT are real business for Asobimo.
1. BOT farmers farm mat,
2. Sell them to store,
3. Trade this spina for real money,
4. Buy Orbs with that real money,
5. Buy Chest having piercer ,
6. Sell them in game.

So with 4 bots, can farm around 16m spina, in RMT that would be roughly $10. As for orbs , around +15. And if somehow get lucky then and gets legendary piercer, which sell for 35m. So , rough profit of around 20m.

Seriously, don't we see a limited number of people selling these high priced items in Int1 !! How come they are able to buy these chest continuously and supply same to the market !!

Everyone is happy !! .
Player who wants to quick and easy solution for gears can rmt for spina.
BOT makers can make real money ,
And lastly Asobimo earns money via BOT farmers buying Orbs.

And as for why there is deflation in market....COVID19. Occam's Razor.

 

no we don't, legit farmers earn way less because of those extreme botters, most of those botter doesn't even buy orb.

for the deflation, it's also caused by some nasty RMT spina seller who hold like a lot of spina so they can sell it at a higher price (I've explained this before), not just because of the pandemic.

 

^ found the bot/troll account. 1 post for this account supporting botting. ignore with SAGE in all fields.

 

Imagine playing a game where objective is to grind and then you pay others to grind for you. Why are you even play the game at all?

 

Ummm.

No, bot farmers aren't buying orbs. You'd have to spend over $500 USD, to hopefully buy enough chests to guarantee a L.Silk or L. Ornament. That's 500m Spina.

Selling them at 35m each is difficult enough, I've sold some, and it's a nightmare.

Secondly, Bot farmers just increase the amount of spina in the market, and materials on the CB.

Unfortunately the legit player base, can only farm a limited amount of materials, and earn spina gradually. This is often not matched by inflation of prices, and when they do finally buy an expensive item, it's suddenly devalued at an update or when the market deflates due to mass bot banning or events.

Bots fuck the community for selfish reasons. They make up excuses to justify their behaviour, but in reality they're just neck beards funding their next virtual gf experience. If you bot, you're a simp.

 

I will assume you’re not an internet troll, but a relatively new forumer making quite the entrance.

1. Neither benefits Asobimo. Not only will they need to hire additional customer service staff to address complaints from regular players, but many RMTers also commit credit card fraud.
2. Deflation has many causes, and in this case, productivity has increased at a higher rate than demand. As such, everyone is forced to lower their prices to remain competitive. Until the demand increases, prices will continue trending downward.
3. Players certainly aren’t pleased. Botting and RMTing hampers the fantasy atmosphere of the game. Game developers design a game based on a set of boundaries and assume players will act within those boundaries. When they don’t, the game play suffers significantly.

I understand your stance, despite how much I oppose it. Deflation does benefit buyers, as previously expensive items are now inexpensive. However, it is also directly proportional to making less spina in a certain period of time. Essentially, you have to grind more to make up for the regression of value.

 

How do botters get around monster hunting bonus and the fact that bags fill up after a few minutes of farming?

Can't we like, make the drop rate drop by 1000% if you kill more than 'x' amount of monsters in an area, or stay longer than 'x' minutes in that area, and have to leave and re enter to reset the drop rate? Won't that remove the vast majority of weak bots?

 

Hahah.. I have more number of BS in my account than you. I single handily farmed those damn gorillas at elf mountain for 5 hour straight to raise my BS prof , and no auto XD.
I actually like the grind , it's kind of fun with some good bgm mixed, it's actually kind of relaxing.
So , better not judge others before actually knowing someone.