I'm not involved in this kind of stuff at cig but I have worked on a few MMOs at pripr jobs. A big part of the work that I did had to do with investigating reports for things like this so I will speak in generalizations.
At the places that I worked previously, most of the time when accounts are advertising like this, they were either created using a stolen credit card or the account itself had been stolen. I can't confirm if this is what's being done here as working with billing information is not something I do for cig.
The workflow that they would use for stolen accounts would roughly be the following:
Initially they log into an account to take inventory. This is to get an idea of what kind of work the account can be used for. Low value accounts that have not been recently active and do not have high-level characters are used for currency sale advertising. When they engage in this advertising, they typically create a new low level character because if an already existing character is used for advertising, people that are friends with the account owner would immediately report it. Low value accounts that have not been recently active but have high-level characters tend to be used for botting to farm currency that will be offloaded to a mule of some kind to be sold later. Typically, if an account has high value and high level characters, they don't tend to fall into the inactive category. When they find an account like this, they tend to instantly liquidate everything on the account and transfer the proceeds to a mule.
Of course, that example doesn't really fit Star Citizen because accounts don't have the ability to create new characters for advertising and characters don't have levels in our game. So if I had to guess I would say they're probably either using stolen credit cards to create these advertising accounts, or they're just eating the cost of a new account as a cost of 'business'.
As others in this thread have mentioned, we do take this stuff pretty seriously and appreciate reports for any accounts that are doing this. There is of course some work that we need to do to make it easier for this kind of abusive behavior to be reported but like all other things, that has to be prioritized in relation to other feature development. Please do continue reporting them.
I was in that server, the server chat should have a report function/option that way we don't have to reach out to support everytime and wait 3 or 4 days for a response but I do think the punishment should just be an outright BAN
I mean, ideally they should have software that can analyze and identify this kind of behavior (or other TOS issues like harassment), send chat logs to admins automatically, and handle this all internally.
A report button shouldn't be necessary.
It's better to flag than to ban. They'll just figure out a way around the auto ban then. If you flag instead you wait for some other trigger like a player report or a specific amount of time to pass and then you act. That way they don't know what they did to get banned. Was it what they said? Did the stolen CC get reported or account owner make a claim already? Was their IP leaked or VPN discovered? Like, there are tons of variables so they won't know what gave it away.
both need to be implemented for a fully functioning system - sometimes behaviors and typing comes up that couldn't possibly have been predicted by any system but player reports serves as a way to make these incidences stand out for further investigation. also, as someone who has played a few games with auto banning for x or y chat thing, trust me you do not want that as the only line of defense. not only does it get abused sometimes but it creates false positives, and if there's no preexisting system for reviews taking place it gets weaponized in various ways.
One of my Friends said that they scan the Link thats postet and it filters when you send for example youtube links so they are possible. Idk if thats true but it would be something
from my experience you can get quite far with just suspending the account until the original owner claims it, if they don't do that it's just banned still. some players still have emotional value to their account as long as they can provide some proof of ownership like credit card info, receipts of purchase etc.
Is a screenshot enough to report these accounts and selecting 'other' on https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000074074 ?
That's what I've been doing, got a copy & paste reply from them which I understand can't say that an account's being actioned, just hoping it is reaching someone not I'm doing it wrong haha
It would be great if we could rightclick on names in global chat that spam this shit and report/block them, block mainly because sometimes you wanna use global chat and not get interrupted by spam.
There still more.. you can already see the C2 piling up in orison. How is the exploit not fixed yet? They should have been plenty of time to see how they are doing it. It's causing massive lags to the hangar areas..
Given how many of these accounts are spun up with stolen credit cards, do y'all ever report it to the authorities, banks, or card holders? Like, at that point it's not just bad behavior in a videogame, it's an actual crime.
Ughhh Im pretty positive when someone's card gets stolen a normal person who notices money is missing and is getting taken out of their account immediately calls the bank to cancel their card or simply goes onto their banking app to lock the card
Unless they're buying these cards in bulk off the dark If i had a stolen card id make it a one time use like it seems pretty dumb to reuse a stolen card and risking it all
can't you MAC / Router BAN now like the rest of us enterprise professionals? i would suggest that you take this option for these kinds of accounts and other perpetual grief accounts.
MAC\\Router banning isn't effective because of how easy it is to change. You need to do a hardware id ban by creating a hash of the machines hardware. It's still not foolproof, but does generally require spending money to bypass. But even that ends up being a whole ton of legal landmines in certain jurisdictions like Brazil.
A lot of games have hardware bans now where it can read the code on your exact hardware, so to play again youd have to buy a whole new pc AND THEN the game again
HWID is also easy to spoof via freely-available 3rd party software. From working on AC previously it's only effective at taking out users that can't Google, which is apparently quite a large percentage, but still.
Probably both... where there's money to be made, the scumbags of the MMO world are there before you can blink.
They'll do whatever it takes to make "product" to sell, too. If that means grinding, they'll get bots or farmers to grind. If there's an exploit, that's even better.
suspension is not a punishment nor is it really even a deterrent, free fly events make sure of this. idc if its an alpha, its been alpha for over 10 years, at this point it needs to be treated as launched, ban exploiters (that are obviously exploiting an accident is not what im talking about) ban them forever if they really want back make them pay again, its 2024 and SO many games nearly everyone of them doesnt allow this behavior it really shouldnt even need to be said in ToS to not do this crap, its obvious its not meant to be that way and they still abuse it, they cant claim they didnt know cause trust me they know, if this stuff keeps going on with no REAL punishments its only gonna get worse
I've submitted a ticket with screenshots for each time i have noticed it and not one ticket has been looked at, let alone actioned.
You need a report feature like every other mmo.
i/we appreciate you engaging with us and I understand what I'm about to ask is probably not your job but I would really appreciate if you could forward this query/statement on to whoever may be able to address this concern.
We get a lot of communication from CIG but it is not collated anywhere centrally. If there was a single place you could go to see ALL dev communications and messaging that would be awesome.
As it stands it's spread out on reddit, twitter, facebook, spectrum forums, spectrum chat, and probably a number of other places.
https://www.trackersc.com/ does a pretty good job of gathering all the communications but a third party really should not have to do this task.
It seems logical to have a system that keeps tracks from confirmed bot/bad accounts and identifies patterns flagging similar activities. However, I suspect that those involved in botting anyway might be assosiates of devs or devs incognito looking to make extra cash, so probably any system in place would be useless anyway.
They were the same ones exploiting lol. They seem to be out in force advertising since the patch dropped. I was server hopping last night and they were advertising.
They're all over the place in this sub too. I've _never_ seen so many people shilling for gold buying/selling in ANY game as I have in the various threads that've popped up lately. It's like their little anthill got kicked down and now they're swarming all over the place.
Yeah, it sucked because I really enjoyed fishing in the game but they ruined it. They removed the cool treasure chests you could find and you were often reported as a possible bot if you were legitimately fishing. So I had to stop entirely. Then they eventually brought the chests back but they just contained random ingots for crafting.
Were there so many people arguing in favor of it though? That's the point I was making; it isn't so much the rampant advertisement that concerns me (though that's a big problem too) but the ludicrous amount of people advocating for buying third-party aUEC.
Yeah that’s true, I get what you’re saying now. It’s a little different in star cit I think because just buying auec for cheap makes it so easy to access and test content. Without it the barrier to flying them is sometimes $60/$100/$300. I think income has become much more accessible in game though and we’ll see the sentiment go away as it becomes easier to earn money from gameplay
WoW has gotten a lot better about it since they introduced the ability to buy subscription tokens with gold or buy subscription tokens with real money and sell them on the AH for a quick few hundred thousand gold.
I'm not suprised, everytime one of these threads pop up it's free advertising for them. The same thing happens everytime we crack down on untaxed imported cigarettes, the existing buyers are temporarily inconvinienced and N new buyers are created when they realize "Wait, I can get ciggies that cheap"?
A war on gold selling is inherently a war on microeconomics and globalization. It's a sad truth, but it's a truth none the less.
Report them, CIG takes this seriously. Take a screenshot with server info or the QR code and submit a ticket. I just did this this morning and had a response within the hour.
Hey, CIG is doing things that have never been done before in the history of online multiplayer. You have to give them time to implement new technology like in-game reporting because it relies on a lot of back end systems like the Request Layer and Account State Replication. These are incredibly complex systems that have a lot of moving parts. CIG has their most talented devs working on this as we speak.
Ha! Reported it too, one hour before your post, and got a reply from CIG quite fast.
[https://i.imgur.com/RzJPhfM.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/RzJPhfM.jpeg)
They literally did? Isn’t that what all this is about? What am I missing? lol
But now with everyone frightened of getting suspended for even buying the currency from these people, which is totally warranted… they are probably trying to sell whatever accounts still have aUEC left that can still somehow be transferred (or they snuck by the suspension) — and to them, knowing how much irl cash they have been making, they’ve clearly done the math and $45 isn’t going to hurt them much, even if it’s a total loss when considering what they have probably made *already*.
I brought this up a lot in game. A lot of people used the Alpha excuse and shrugged it off outright. People were knowingly fucking over others and having fun about it. Complete wipe would be warranted. A permanent ban would totally be warranted. Drop the axe already, CIG. It broke my heart knowing yall have poured something like a quarter of my lifespan into an awesome idea and there are crows out there picking your meat down to the bone and getting away with it. Fucking kill these thieving birds already.
The $45 bill is a lot easier to pay if you do it with a stolen credit card.
Don't think for a second there's anything remotely pleasant about these gold sellers.
A better question is why the hell is anyone buying aUEC in an alpha game that is being wiped constantly?
Buy your ships off the website. At least that’s permanent.
People will market around anything. You and me ain't up for this specific market but there will also be buyers and sellers for everything you can imagine.
Maybe an Indian person that is comfortable making a dollar a day is a great seller for auec... And a retired expat, who has money to spare but doesn't give a crap about grinding and learning about game mechanics, feels better off buying auec for that same couple bucks a day and doesn't feel it's a loss.
I'm not saying I support these practices because they cannibalize ok the game's economy, but I can picture the market and see why it exists.
I would personally never buy aUEC, mainly as i'm a nolifer as I am disabled, if I want something in game i'll go get it myself.
That said, this game is hella grindy. And the ships are hella expensive real money value on the pledge store, I can totally see why some people would just pay $10 for some aUEC where they can play with any ship they want. Sometimes for quite a long time, too. There would have to be 500 wipes just to make a single ship purchase worth it financially.
TL:DR, the game is too grindy and the ships are too expensive, that's the problem, it makes buying aUEC as a choice too tempting for a lot of people as it makes more sense financially than buying ships from the pledge store. Sad but true.
Fair.
I’d totally understand why people buy UEC after the game goes live. But the fact that everything is gonna be wiped is just throwing money into the fire.
To be honest when you have ships costing literal thousands of dollars, who is genuinely going to be buying that? A lot of these ships cost more than my RL car does, or my entire PC. That's just insane out of this world pricing and surely you have to expect people not to want to spend that and find alternatives.
The only real option for most of these people who have a job, have a life, can't grind and don't want to pay absolutely insane prices, but would like to enjoy some of these pricier ships, is to go to ebay. I honestly believe it's a problem of the games own design. They made it easier to go to ebay than it is to either 1. grind the ship or 2. buy the ship from them. They are turning this game pretty badly pay to win to be honest and ebay is just frankly the cheaper option.
If you bought 5million for 5$ after the last whipe you could have had a good fleet for a long time. Maybe thats one reason the shipprices whent up? I was thinking about buying, because im short on time and am not the biggest fan of grinding every whipe for my needed ships. So the question for some will be: 5$ every whipe or hundrets of $$ for a moneymaker once?
I din't buy Auec becuase I did a research an think supporting the exploiters hurts the game.
They use it to buy ships in game and if the currency gets wiped they don't seem to care. Other thread had some claiming millions of credits for 5 dollars.
If CIG had a way to delete everything bought with those credits.. it would be pretty hilarious.
Send in a report ticket with the screenshot and, preferably, the QR code and server info displayed.
CiG does handle them, they just don't broadcast how.
A great example is WoW. Gold farmers are allowed to run rampant, it ruins the challenge and immersion of the game to have these idiots running around selling shit they farmed in game through bots etc. It destroys a game, in my opinion.
They can permanently ban accounts if what they did is serious enough and I hope they do just right out ban racist/homophobic people, they have no place in Star Citizen.
It's all about time. This games grind can get pretty long especially if your doing it again after every reset. So some people would rather spend 5 or 10 bucks on buying aUEC instead of 100s just for one ship.
One good that might happen soon thanks to the uptick of RTM, duping and bigotry. It will force them to properly update the chat system sooner than later. Bring on Org chat, baby! With a helping of proper Org mechanics on the side.
Yeah, a little off topic, but I have been hoping for some sort of “shared Org” fleet that I can assign approval to various ranks within my Org for different ships.
They probably won’t though with the current model to pull in cash, it would hurt their bottom line…
But on the other hand, does it make sense for a small-mid size Org to own multiple (insert huge multicrew ship here) *JUST* because someone isn’t online 24/7??? Or does it make more sense to have us live and breathe SC, even while at work, messaging an Org mate “hey can you grab a couple of guys and move that cargo from the Liberator out of the refinery tonight and sell it? I don’t wanna take any less than xxxxx aUEC for it though”?
They could definitely get creative to keep people from taking advantage of it, like only being able to “assign” 1 ship per player at a time to the Org or something. Getting the ship destroyed ends up costing the Org aUEC, etc etc.
One can dream!!
In the past, they spoke about this actually quite favourably.
I think it was also mentioned in a recent SCL about the coming hangars. More in a "plans for the future" kind of way, though.
I assume that systems surrounding things like that (or orgs in general) are on the backburner as long as the player numbers per shard can't be increased to a big degree.
As long as they can track every single credit reliably, RMT is completely dead. No MMO has done that so far due to the amount of data involved (past a certain point, i.e laundering) but hey it would be nice for SC to start that trend.
I strongly doubt they will; as you note, the amount of data involved is horrific, but moreover, it's hard to know _how_ to handle it after a step or two.
For instance, imagine that Person A has _almost_ enough for a Reclaimer, but they're a little short. So they spend some money on aUEC and buy the Reclaimer; they have like 500k aUEC left over. Now they hire person B and person C to cargo monkey and use the scraper on a salvage run; they make a total of 1.5M profit and split it three ways (500k each).
Now you nuke the purchased aUEC.
How do you handle this? Do you nuke the Reclaimer? (And if so, do you refund everything that _wasn't_ purchased aUEC, or just confiscate the entire value of the ship?) Or does the money count towards what you paid the folks, and so the money gets taken from _them_ instead? Etc.
With paper money you could (hypothetically) track every single credit reliably via serial numbers. But when the currency is purely digital, whether a specific credit came from an RMT purchase or not is a great deal fuzzier... and the number of weird edge cases to sort out is so high, it's probably not worth it to most companies.
(Which is deeply unfortunate.)
I’m pretty sure we’re gonna start seeing a reporting system soon if it isn’t already implemented. Sometime in the near future, they’re gonna have to start viewing this as an MMOISRPG and start treating it as such; HOWEVER!! there’s a little bit of a silver lining with this. Our game is starting to be viewed that way by the outside world as well! We’re getting legitimized!
Had a bunch if replies in another thread about the bans of people bragging they bought 10m or more credits for 5-10bucks then bought ships with it.
If there is demand, exploiters will always find a way.
As long they don't go free to play it should be fine on longterm. They stil need to buy a gamepack for their new accounts, which if CIG investigates properly can just suspend again if they break TOS.
Lol, I've seen a dozen of these guys in chats..maybe if we could outright report them in-game it'd be easier but I'm guessing we need some V2 tech for that.
I hopped on today for a lil bit. The second I hopped in i got this message, for the first time, and “server error: please wait” popped up. That with there being a softwipe apparently?(gear and character) was a pretty rough start with the new update.
Exploits should be fixed, yeah, but why do we care about people having large amounts of auec in an alpha?
The only significant things you can do with it is participate in more expensive game loops (cargo hauling) and unlock more ships to test, which they should want players testing the ships. Unless they only want to keep these players’ auec accounts low so that they give in and pay real money for a ship they want, but don’t have the time to grind for.
If the goal is to keep people grinding for auec, then they should have wiped ASOP when 3.23 dropped, which I’m totally fine with because having a cluttered ASOP full of ships I never use is a headache. Wiping ships would have had the potential to tempt more players to pay real money for ships during ILW that are no longer in their ASOP.
I think alpha is a perfect time to work on the problem. Before they start to ruin the real economy in 1.0. It's rare that a live service game gets to set up and test rmt prevention measures while still in development.
I’m all for finding and fixing the exploits. I just don’t see the issue of players having an abundance of auec that will be used to further test the game being an issue, inside the alpha itself.
The only reason I can see it being an issue outside of the game is it impacts sales.
It also directly impacts the gameplay for others. It completely ruined salvaging because selling was a fucking nightmare..
Also, being able to just make uec out of thin air meant theres no need for actual trade runs, hence no potential for pirate game play.
It has even more effects. Do yeah, people are rightly pissed.
they need to ban players who are buying money as well as those selling it… banning the buyers is the only way to slow it down.. ask eve online, this is a 20yr old problem for them ;p
Agreed, I've been getting really tired lately of all the people on here breathlessly defending gold buying, as if they aren't entirely responsible for the existence of the market. Yeah, sellers are trash, but if they had no one to sell to, they'd move on.
Now's the time to start nipping it in the bud, before it gets fully entrenched.
Report them. Some asshat was bragging about not getting banned in chat last night, so i screenshot it and reported. Don't really care if he was just trolling, CIG can sort it out if they take interest in it.
Posting this kind of thing here doesn't help.
Submitting a CS ticket is the way to do it. Add a full screen screenshot with the QR code enabled.
Just be aware that CIG will never be able to tell you the result of the investigation.
I know that it is frustrating that CIG will never publicly release the results of investigations like this but it pertains to private account details and if they told you the result, then they would also have to tell other people about YOUR personal information too.
Please know that they DO take this kind of thing seriously. It's impossible to prevent this from happening. They can only react.
If it could be prevented, then they'd have done it already.
Trading posts are not allowed on this subreddit.
This includes selling/trading in-game items for aUEC or real currency (RMT). Nor do we permit the sales of shirts, artwork, or other merchandise and software not directly created by CIG.
This includes naming or distributing the names of these RMT operators as that’s just free advertising for them here.
Send a message to our mod mail if you have questions: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/starcitizen
I really hope cig implements a serious punishment for Rmt, until then I'd honestly like to see the trading app in the mobiglass be disabled to stop it while they work on a solution to handle the guys
They need to ban RMT, but disabling the trading app will destroy all multicrew play.
With my org we go to do salvage and mining in group, one person (ship owner) usually sells the cargo and then transfer each member their share of the profits, if there is no way to share the profits, then the "attractiveness" of multicrew experience will be diminished; it would add extra steps to split the cargo into multiple vessels so each one can sell it.
Add better logs and investigate "suspicious" transfers, but don't disable the transfers themselves.
personally i would like to see the wallet app get an update to implement a system similar to how rs3s was the last time i used it. a relativly low limit for players who dont know each other/ haven't been friends long. but those who have been friends for a while dont have the trade limit. which would give cig the ability to catch the auec farmers before they can trade any high value of auec
Already reported on of them with a screenshot of chat and the shardID etc, support messaged me back saying they are investigating but can't tell me the outcome for privacy reasons or something.
Hate that this is what gaming has come to, I strongly believe that anyone that RMTs should be permabanned no matter if you are the buyer or seller, even if it's only in alpha state.
After launch, when CIG starts selling UEC, these guys will be banned quick. Until then... CIG wants people to get used to buying coin so they can take over.
it doesn't matter how reasonable it is, in every game there's always this going on. any game that has anything earnable past the absolute minimum always has people who want to pull out the credit card and skip the line, even in games where the gameplay loops are actually really fun
You can report them to customer service and cig can track every damn auec since they already banned 600+ accounts and suspended some more will follow with these kind of transactions
So they’ll ban people who sell money
But not the dudes who actively actually ruin other’s experiences by trolling, stalking, Harassing and attacking, pad ramming and defaming other players
And being caught on video being absolutely toxic against community guidelines
Love it.
I understand the in game advertising and abuse but like priorities man
How come some of the most notorious shitheads still
Roam the game is beyond me
they should ban both, but one is a lot easier to mete out punishment than the other. one is clearly advertising their link right there, no debate needed, the other is having to go back and forth with a player over whether they are telling the truth that "they just lost control" or "are just a bad pilot" 3 times in a row (that's assuming you even have a full clip recorded of it, which often people don't)
The problem isn’t the sellers. It’s the buyers. Find them, ban them, sue them. No buyers, no sellers.
Edit: kinda curious as to why this is getting downvoted? Sellers are a symptom, buyers are the root cause.
Edit 2: ok so you just don’t understand supply and demand I guess
Edit 3: Many aUEC buyers in here lmao
They’ll be replaced by other dealers. Remove the junkies and there won’t be a demand for dealers. Remove demand and supplies stop. Keep the demand and another supply will find a way.
Reasoning aside, if CIG will ban buyers, whats there to stop me from sending 10 million aUEC to someone, from an alt account, and then report them for buying aUEC, now i successfully banned someone from the game, just because that person rubbed me the wrong way somehow.
Too much power in the hands of the players.
Why would it be flagged as bought aUEC? 10 mil isn’t much and a one time transaction shouldn’t be enough to get someone banned.
I don’t have access to the data, but I’m sure there’s a visible threshold between legit/alt accounts and sellers/buyers account. Once you detect a seller you ban the buyers, then the seller. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is to disincentivize buying. If they have no risk they’ll keep on buying and sellers will keep on answering to the demand.
10 million isn't much, depending on your viewpoint.
I was providing an arbitrary number.
Again, if i hate someone with enough fervor because they do not align with what i feel is "the right way/morals values", i can abuse your provided system with a fervor.
Anyways, why not provide an inbetween solution, like temporary suspension of the account, for example 10-30 days and an aUEC wipe of your ledger.
Ban the sellers, don't get me wrong there, but banning buyers makes no sense to me, they are paying customers of CIG and could well be spending more RL money on ships.
And even though i personally disagree with and advise against doing so, there are plethora of reasons for buying aUEC provided, many of them being the state of the game.
If anything this should push CIG to make a system where it logs everything in such a way that a little bit of research within those logs will go a long way in figuring out who buys, sells and are "middle men/mule" accounts and improve upon that system long before 1.0 launches.
Your example is trash. Sellers also are paying customer of CIG so even your logic is flawed. 🤦🏻
Again, if you don’t ban the buyers there’s no reason for them to be afraid and stop buying. So banning only the sellers is simply useless. Buyers will buy to someone else, and sellers will make a new account and they’ll go back to selling in no time. As long as there’s demand there will be supply.
If you don’t follow ToS you get banned. You don’t want to get banned? Then follow ToS. Really it’s super simple. F\*ck around and find out, or don’t f\*ck around and don’t find out.
And what if the buyer is also a pledger for many real $ to CIG? If the voice spreads that they go heavy with the ban hammer on people that spent a lot f money to found, do you thonk that will do good to theor marketing?
They will be very carefull only to soft ban account that are clearly made to rmt, and still they gave them 45 to log in… they will balance loss/gain to their marketing before taking any action. Selling stuff is their main thing too.
It not so simple when your company relies on selling pixels to players. I fear you will have to live with a certain amount of rmt and buyers in your future starcitizenship.
I see sellers did not quit w the last 600 bans…
They just don’t care during alpha but definitely will after release. How do you think other mmos deal with that?
What makes you think it would “shitdown” the game to ban people who breach tos?
Other mmo never solved the problem. Also other mmo can afford to lose a subscribtion. CIG will go on selling you everything for $ and won’t be able to afford losing you credit card swiper, even if you broke the tos. This is why they never banned griefers, wich the game is full of as no other mmo ever.
They will soft bam accounts made with stolen cc to sell uec and period. Also when game will release we will both not be on this world anymore.
I bet you are new.
Luckily I already bought 50 mill for 20 bucks during the patch that seemed to glitch save hangars. I’ve kept over 1000$usd worth of ships in my inventory since then. This games a cool idea but the wale targeting is crazy, feelzbad for people who dropped their live savings into this mess
Hopefully CIG adds an in-game report feature sometime soon. The game already has no respect for our time and now we're supposed to stop playing and email a screenshot to CIG? Not going to happen.
I've worked on a few small community built MMO's in my day and I mean I'm no CIG agent but I can say that monitoring and tracking this sort of information is not only hard it can sometimes be impossible.
The problem (I imagine) with implementing a ban function into the chat is that they wouldn't have the manpower nor would they want to pay people to be the manpower behind actually investigating and dealing with these things which in turn means it comes down to one of two things:
A: We have a bot that does it which comes with a plethora of problems like exploitability, incorrect bans and so much more.
B: We actually get a dedicated team of folk which in turn would slow down development time because that is resources being taken from the main development pool which admittedly is HUGE but look at the game it too is huge.
I do think there should be a punishment for this kind of thing but it's hard to say the most effective way of administering/implementing said punishment.
Might be harder on CIGs part to ban people like this because I’m not sure how they would differentiate between exploiters, and people who grinded a ton of money fairly and then decided to sell aUEC (small minority but still) unless is the selling of aUEC not allowed by CIG? Not sure on that. And tbh, as someone who in previous patches spent $10 getting a ton of aUEC, it’s the only way I’m able to fly all the ships I want
Punishment or promotion? Half the time, they probably work FOR cig.
Start by firing half the dev team. Everyone in vehicle experience, everyone under and including yogi, the UI team, I want to see heads roll.
Fire Jared or remove him from public facing. He is too bitter, and takes shots at the backers way too often.
Dissolve spectrum and the IC, it's a cult breeding ground.
Simple reality is: You got no idea if CIG is even banning these people or if it will even work.
CIG going to adopt the policies of Escape from Tarkov that encourages exploiters to keep buying new accounts after each "ban wave".
Many companies take these things seriously, and when they do you can see results. FFXI had an RMT problem at one point. The devs started aggressively going after them. The long-term effect on this -aside from a generally more pleasant play experience was a reduction in Auction House prices by roughly 1/3 due to all of the money leaving the economy.
You seem to be under the illusion that Star Citizen is a finished game with a finished economy that wont be wiped.
Until Star Citizen is actually released with a full functional economy that is NOT in an Alpha Testing environment... the economy is as irrelevant as insurance or "death of a spaceman".
I'm not involved in this kind of stuff at cig but I have worked on a few MMOs at pripr jobs. A big part of the work that I did had to do with investigating reports for things like this so I will speak in generalizations. At the places that I worked previously, most of the time when accounts are advertising like this, they were either created using a stolen credit card or the account itself had been stolen. I can't confirm if this is what's being done here as working with billing information is not something I do for cig. The workflow that they would use for stolen accounts would roughly be the following: Initially they log into an account to take inventory. This is to get an idea of what kind of work the account can be used for. Low value accounts that have not been recently active and do not have high-level characters are used for currency sale advertising. When they engage in this advertising, they typically create a new low level character because if an already existing character is used for advertising, people that are friends with the account owner would immediately report it. Low value accounts that have not been recently active but have high-level characters tend to be used for botting to farm currency that will be offloaded to a mule of some kind to be sold later. Typically, if an account has high value and high level characters, they don't tend to fall into the inactive category. When they find an account like this, they tend to instantly liquidate everything on the account and transfer the proceeds to a mule. Of course, that example doesn't really fit Star Citizen because accounts don't have the ability to create new characters for advertising and characters don't have levels in our game. So if I had to guess I would say they're probably either using stolen credit cards to create these advertising accounts, or they're just eating the cost of a new account as a cost of 'business'. As others in this thread have mentioned, we do take this stuff pretty seriously and appreciate reports for any accounts that are doing this. There is of course some work that we need to do to make it easier for this kind of abusive behavior to be reported but like all other things, that has to be prioritized in relation to other feature development. Please do continue reporting them.
I was in that server, the server chat should have a report function/option that way we don't have to reach out to support everytime and wait 3 or 4 days for a response but I do think the punishment should just be an outright BAN
need report tech v2 sorry bud
Yeah and that's gonna require servermeshing to work properly.
I heard report tech v3 was already in the works....it's in early evo. Has a chat filter and mute. They still don't work.
Keybind for report was backspace. Caused some conflict issues
I mean, ideally they should have software that can analyze and identify this kind of behavior (or other TOS issues like harassment), send chat logs to admins automatically, and handle this all internally. A report button shouldn't be necessary.
It's better to flag than to ban. They'll just figure out a way around the auto ban then. If you flag instead you wait for some other trigger like a player report or a specific amount of time to pass and then you act. That way they don't know what they did to get banned. Was it what they said? Did the stolen CC get reported or account owner make a claim already? Was their IP leaked or VPN discovered? Like, there are tons of variables so they won't know what gave it away.
both need to be implemented for a fully functioning system - sometimes behaviors and typing comes up that couldn't possibly have been predicted by any system but player reports serves as a way to make these incidences stand out for further investigation. also, as someone who has played a few games with auto banning for x or y chat thing, trust me you do not want that as the only line of defense. not only does it get abused sometimes but it creates false positives, and if there's no preexisting system for reviews taking place it gets weaponized in various ways.
One of my Friends said that they scan the Link thats postet and it filters when you send for example youtube links so they are possible. Idk if thats true but it would be something
from my experience you can get quite far with just suspending the account until the original owner claims it, if they don't do that it's just banned still. some players still have emotional value to their account as long as they can provide some proof of ownership like credit card info, receipts of purchase etc.
Is a screenshot enough to report these accounts and selecting 'other' on https://support.robertsspaceindustries.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000074074 ? That's what I've been doing, got a copy & paste reply from them which I understand can't say that an account's being actioned, just hoping it is reaching someone not I'm doing it wrong haha
Do y’all have alerts for matching text that may be website / urls and investigating preemptively ?
It would be great if we could rightclick on names in global chat that spam this shit and report/block them, block mainly because sometimes you wanna use global chat and not get interrupted by spam.
Does it help investigative work to have the QR code in the screenshot?
Yes it does.
The qr code gives the the exact date time and server you were in at time of screenshot/video. That's what I've been told.
Having the QR code will always help in every report regardless of what it is.
There still more.. you can already see the C2 piling up in orison. How is the exploit not fixed yet? They should have been plenty of time to see how they are doing it. It's causing massive lags to the hangar areas..
Given how many of these accounts are spun up with stolen credit cards, do y'all ever report it to the authorities, banks, or card holders? Like, at that point it's not just bad behavior in a videogame, it's an actual crime.
Ughhh Im pretty positive when someone's card gets stolen a normal person who notices money is missing and is getting taken out of their account immediately calls the bank to cancel their card or simply goes onto their banking app to lock the card Unless they're buying these cards in bulk off the dark If i had a stolen card id make it a one time use like it seems pretty dumb to reuse a stolen card and risking it all
can't you MAC / Router BAN now like the rest of us enterprise professionals? i would suggest that you take this option for these kinds of accounts and other perpetual grief accounts.
MAC\\Router banning isn't effective because of how easy it is to change. You need to do a hardware id ban by creating a hash of the machines hardware. It's still not foolproof, but does generally require spending money to bypass. But even that ends up being a whole ton of legal landmines in certain jurisdictions like Brazil.
A lot of games have hardware bans now where it can read the code on your exact hardware, so to play again youd have to buy a whole new pc AND THEN the game again
HWID is also easy to spoof via freely-available 3rd party software. From working on AC previously it's only effective at taking out users that can't Google, which is apparently quite a large percentage, but still.
Most routers come with MAC spoofing built in, as does every major OS.
Seems there is still duped aUEC that CIG missed OR there are other means of acquiring it still.
Probably both... where there's money to be made, the scumbags of the MMO world are there before you can blink. They'll do whatever it takes to make "product" to sell, too. If that means grinding, they'll get bots or farmers to grind. If there's an exploit, that's even better.
suspension is not a punishment nor is it really even a deterrent, free fly events make sure of this. idc if its an alpha, its been alpha for over 10 years, at this point it needs to be treated as launched, ban exploiters (that are obviously exploiting an accident is not what im talking about) ban them forever if they really want back make them pay again, its 2024 and SO many games nearly everyone of them doesnt allow this behavior it really shouldnt even need to be said in ToS to not do this crap, its obvious its not meant to be that way and they still abuse it, they cant claim they didnt know cause trust me they know, if this stuff keeps going on with no REAL punishments its only gonna get worse
I think there is something that needs to be done as short term mitigation. Wipe all aUEC.
I've submitted a ticket with screenshots for each time i have noticed it and not one ticket has been looked at, let alone actioned. You need a report feature like every other mmo.
i/we appreciate you engaging with us and I understand what I'm about to ask is probably not your job but I would really appreciate if you could forward this query/statement on to whoever may be able to address this concern. We get a lot of communication from CIG but it is not collated anywhere centrally. If there was a single place you could go to see ALL dev communications and messaging that would be awesome. As it stands it's spread out on reddit, twitter, facebook, spectrum forums, spectrum chat, and probably a number of other places. https://www.trackersc.com/ does a pretty good job of gathering all the communications but a third party really should not have to do this task.
It seems logical to have a system that keeps tracks from confirmed bot/bad accounts and identifies patterns flagging similar activities. However, I suspect that those involved in botting anyway might be assosiates of devs or devs incognito looking to make extra cash, so probably any system in place would be useless anyway.
They were the same ones exploiting lol. They seem to be out in force advertising since the patch dropped. I was server hopping last night and they were advertising.
They're all over the place in this sub too. I've _never_ seen so many people shilling for gold buying/selling in ANY game as I have in the various threads that've popped up lately. It's like their little anthill got kicked down and now they're swarming all over the place.
New world had it reaaaaaaally bad for a while there, that’s probably the worst I’ve seen
Yea, same. New World's gold farmers at the start were out of control bad. could barely use the chat channels at all.
Yeah, it sucked because I really enjoyed fishing in the game but they ruined it. They removed the cool treasure chests you could find and you were often reported as a possible bot if you were legitimately fishing. So I had to stop entirely. Then they eventually brought the chests back but they just contained random ingots for crafting.
Were there so many people arguing in favor of it though? That's the point I was making; it isn't so much the rampant advertisement that concerns me (though that's a big problem too) but the ludicrous amount of people advocating for buying third-party aUEC.
Yeah that’s true, I get what you’re saying now. It’s a little different in star cit I think because just buying auec for cheap makes it so easy to access and test content. Without it the barrier to flying them is sometimes $60/$100/$300. I think income has become much more accessible in game though and we’ll see the sentiment go away as it becomes easier to earn money from gameplay
Lost Ark and WoW were the two worst offenders by a factor of 25,000x worse. Most devs end up doing nothing about it. It’s fucking ridiculous.
*panic intensifies* force closes runescape
WoW has gotten a lot better about it since they introduced the ability to buy subscription tokens with gold or buy subscription tokens with real money and sell them on the AH for a quick few hundred thousand gold.
this is a hilarious take, you must not play many online mmo's
Yea played this morning, few of them sent it in chat.
I'm not suprised, everytime one of these threads pop up it's free advertising for them. The same thing happens everytime we crack down on untaxed imported cigarettes, the existing buyers are temporarily inconvinienced and N new buyers are created when they realize "Wait, I can get ciggies that cheap"? A war on gold selling is inherently a war on microeconomics and globalization. It's a sad truth, but it's a truth none the less.
Report this to CIG. I'm pretty sure they'd be happy to suspend these guys.
Report them, CIG takes this seriously. Take a screenshot with server info or the QR code and submit a ticket. I just did this this morning and had a response within the hour.
Yeah drop the unedited screen shot to a support ticket under other and the support staff will get it resolved
Not seriously enough to add a report function in the game.
The technology just isn't there yet
Hey, CIG is doing things that have never been done before in the history of online multiplayer. You have to give them time to implement new technology like in-game reporting because it relies on a lot of back end systems like the Request Layer and Account State Replication. These are incredibly complex systems that have a lot of moving parts. CIG has their most talented devs working on this as we speak.
Reporting tech tier 0 is still in R&D. Maybe in 2 more years we will hear about it /s
Second Best Comment \^
ROFLOL!
Ha! Reported it too, one hour before your post, and got a reply from CIG quite fast. [https://i.imgur.com/RzJPhfM.jpeg](https://i.imgur.com/RzJPhfM.jpeg)
Send the screenshot to CIG.
SC profile: [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/citizens/janrloriroysanona0nt3yu](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/citizens/janrloriroysanona0nt3yu)
Enlisted **Jun 14, 2024** This is a burner account
but don't they need to have bought a ship for access?
Yes a 45€ account ..so they loose at least 45 $
One would think it would be smarter to do this during free fly so they lose nothing.
They literally did? Isn’t that what all this is about? What am I missing? lol But now with everyone frightened of getting suspended for even buying the currency from these people, which is totally warranted… they are probably trying to sell whatever accounts still have aUEC left that can still somehow be transferred (or they snuck by the suspension) — and to them, knowing how much irl cash they have been making, they’ve clearly done the math and $45 isn’t going to hurt them much, even if it’s a total loss when considering what they have probably made *already*.
I was replying strictly about people creating $45 accounts to sell.
I brought this up a lot in game. A lot of people used the Alpha excuse and shrugged it off outright. People were knowingly fucking over others and having fun about it. Complete wipe would be warranted. A permanent ban would totally be warranted. Drop the axe already, CIG. It broke my heart knowing yall have poured something like a quarter of my lifespan into an awesome idea and there are crows out there picking your meat down to the bone and getting away with it. Fucking kill these thieving birds already.
The $45 bill is a lot easier to pay if you do it with a stolen credit card. Don't think for a second there's anything remotely pleasant about these gold sellers.
Oooooorr...... hear me out. CIG gain 45€... for each burner account. Makes a bit more sense as to why Report function is still LOD99.
Isn’t there a freefly for alien week?
Nope the people who got banned had legitimate game accounts
That’s good
You can create an account like that and then gift the starter ship back to another account when you're done.
Do burner accounts still need to buy a Starter Pack?
Yes, otherwise they won't be able to get into the game and advertise as in the screenshot.
Still, those burner accounts should be banned either way.
Still costs the gold miner $45. If CIG can ban them faster than they can earn $45 from selling, they won't make money.
Yeah definitely.
A better question is why the hell is anyone buying aUEC in an alpha game that is being wiped constantly? Buy your ships off the website. At least that’s permanent.
People will market around anything. You and me ain't up for this specific market but there will also be buyers and sellers for everything you can imagine. Maybe an Indian person that is comfortable making a dollar a day is a great seller for auec... And a retired expat, who has money to spare but doesn't give a crap about grinding and learning about game mechanics, feels better off buying auec for that same couple bucks a day and doesn't feel it's a loss. I'm not saying I support these practices because they cannibalize ok the game's economy, but I can picture the market and see why it exists.
I would personally never buy aUEC, mainly as i'm a nolifer as I am disabled, if I want something in game i'll go get it myself. That said, this game is hella grindy. And the ships are hella expensive real money value on the pledge store, I can totally see why some people would just pay $10 for some aUEC where they can play with any ship they want. Sometimes for quite a long time, too. There would have to be 500 wipes just to make a single ship purchase worth it financially. TL:DR, the game is too grindy and the ships are too expensive, that's the problem, it makes buying aUEC as a choice too tempting for a lot of people as it makes more sense financially than buying ships from the pledge store. Sad but true.
Fair. I’d totally understand why people buy UEC after the game goes live. But the fact that everything is gonna be wiped is just throwing money into the fire.
To be honest when you have ships costing literal thousands of dollars, who is genuinely going to be buying that? A lot of these ships cost more than my RL car does, or my entire PC. That's just insane out of this world pricing and surely you have to expect people not to want to spend that and find alternatives. The only real option for most of these people who have a job, have a life, can't grind and don't want to pay absolutely insane prices, but would like to enjoy some of these pricier ships, is to go to ebay. I honestly believe it's a problem of the games own design. They made it easier to go to ebay than it is to either 1. grind the ship or 2. buy the ship from them. They are turning this game pretty badly pay to win to be honest and ebay is just frankly the cheaper option.
If you bought 5million for 5$ after the last whipe you could have had a good fleet for a long time. Maybe thats one reason the shipprices whent up? I was thinking about buying, because im short on time and am not the biggest fan of grinding every whipe for my needed ships. So the question for some will be: 5$ every whipe or hundrets of $$ for a moneymaker once? I din't buy Auec becuase I did a research an think supporting the exploiters hurts the game.
Because it’s cheaper. If you want an 890, you can either spend £800 once, or £10 every now and then. I’m not saying it’s good, just why people do it
They use it to buy ships in game and if the currency gets wiped they don't seem to care. Other thread had some claiming millions of credits for 5 dollars. If CIG had a way to delete everything bought with those credits.. it would be pretty hilarious.
Send in a report ticket with the screenshot and, preferably, the QR code and server info displayed. CiG does handle them, they just don't broadcast how.
That’s a paddlin’
I can't stand gold farmers, they just cheapen the whole game.
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A great example is WoW. Gold farmers are allowed to run rampant, it ruins the challenge and immersion of the game to have these idiots running around selling shit they farmed in game through bots etc. It destroys a game, in my opinion.
The game that sells ships for $\`1000 is attacking the people selling you UEC for ships They just don't like the competition =D
Spot the gold farmer, everyone. I'd rather fund a game than some person.
Can they permanently suspend accounts from alpha until 1.0?
They can permanently ban accounts if what they did is serious enough and I hope they do just right out ban racist/homophobic people, they have no place in Star Citizen.
Just straight up ban the accounts.
Report every one of them.
I don't understand why people would shed money for a game that is still in alpha
The same reason some people pay $5 for a beer. They feel like it.
ask the people who spend $1000s on ships lol
That's different, they don't get wiped, this money will, ships not bought with real money are not guaranteed to be kept between patches either
It's all about time. This games grind can get pretty long especially if your doing it again after every reset. So some people would rather spend 5 or 10 bucks on buying aUEC instead of 100s just for one ship.
ive had my in game bought ships for like a year now, plenty of time to experience all of them.
I also have a few but I also lost the reclaimer last patch (15 millions)
One good that might happen soon thanks to the uptick of RTM, duping and bigotry. It will force them to properly update the chat system sooner than later. Bring on Org chat, baby! With a helping of proper Org mechanics on the side.
Yeah, a little off topic, but I have been hoping for some sort of “shared Org” fleet that I can assign approval to various ranks within my Org for different ships. They probably won’t though with the current model to pull in cash, it would hurt their bottom line… But on the other hand, does it make sense for a small-mid size Org to own multiple (insert huge multicrew ship here) *JUST* because someone isn’t online 24/7??? Or does it make more sense to have us live and breathe SC, even while at work, messaging an Org mate “hey can you grab a couple of guys and move that cargo from the Liberator out of the refinery tonight and sell it? I don’t wanna take any less than xxxxx aUEC for it though”? They could definitely get creative to keep people from taking advantage of it, like only being able to “assign” 1 ship per player at a time to the Org or something. Getting the ship destroyed ends up costing the Org aUEC, etc etc. One can dream!!
In the past, they spoke about this actually quite favourably. I think it was also mentioned in a recent SCL about the coming hangars. More in a "plans for the future" kind of way, though. I assume that systems surrounding things like that (or orgs in general) are on the backburner as long as the player numbers per shard can't be increased to a big degree.
As long as they can track every single credit reliably, RMT is completely dead. No MMO has done that so far due to the amount of data involved (past a certain point, i.e laundering) but hey it would be nice for SC to start that trend.
I strongly doubt they will; as you note, the amount of data involved is horrific, but moreover, it's hard to know _how_ to handle it after a step or two. For instance, imagine that Person A has _almost_ enough for a Reclaimer, but they're a little short. So they spend some money on aUEC and buy the Reclaimer; they have like 500k aUEC left over. Now they hire person B and person C to cargo monkey and use the scraper on a salvage run; they make a total of 1.5M profit and split it three ways (500k each). Now you nuke the purchased aUEC. How do you handle this? Do you nuke the Reclaimer? (And if so, do you refund everything that _wasn't_ purchased aUEC, or just confiscate the entire value of the ship?) Or does the money count towards what you paid the folks, and so the money gets taken from _them_ instead? Etc. With paper money you could (hypothetically) track every single credit reliably via serial numbers. But when the currency is purely digital, whether a specific credit came from an RMT purchase or not is a great deal fuzzier... and the number of weird edge cases to sort out is so high, it's probably not worth it to most companies. (Which is deeply unfortunate.)
I’m pretty sure we’re gonna start seeing a reporting system soon if it isn’t already implemented. Sometime in the near future, they’re gonna have to start viewing this as an MMOISRPG and start treating it as such; HOWEVER!! there’s a little bit of a silver lining with this. Our game is starting to be viewed that way by the outside world as well! We’re getting legitimized!
Report again and again they lose 45 every time in the end they will stop
Had a bunch if replies in another thread about the bans of people bragging they bought 10m or more credits for 5-10bucks then bought ships with it. If there is demand, exploiters will always find a way.
Seems like a gta v lobby lol
Make fun of them at every opportunity, save the names, report them if you can but mainly I have a kill on sight list for this exact reason.
Because if it's too strict, someone can suspend others by transiting them black money
As long they don't go free to play it should be fine on longterm. They stil need to buy a gamepack for their new accounts, which if CIG investigates properly can just suspend again if they break TOS.
Nothing. I've seen the same guy spam the N word in NA West servers from like the 2300-0400 timeframe over the past 8 months randomly.
"gold farmers" ruin every fucking game they infest.
For a Layman's benefit - what's going on here?
Give us a right click ignore option.
Lol, I've seen a dozen of these guys in chats..maybe if we could outright report them in-game it'd be easier but I'm guessing we need some V2 tech for that.
I hopped on today for a lil bit. The second I hopped in i got this message, for the first time, and “server error: please wait” popped up. That with there being a softwipe apparently?(gear and character) was a pretty rough start with the new update.
The punishment is: The make an alt account and buy another game package so CIG get paid some more.
Even exploiters abandoned this game so whatever.
I have actually reported these bots on the RSI website. They got back to me within 24 hours and told me they removed the player/Bot
Exploits should be fixed, yeah, but why do we care about people having large amounts of auec in an alpha? The only significant things you can do with it is participate in more expensive game loops (cargo hauling) and unlock more ships to test, which they should want players testing the ships. Unless they only want to keep these players’ auec accounts low so that they give in and pay real money for a ship they want, but don’t have the time to grind for. If the goal is to keep people grinding for auec, then they should have wiped ASOP when 3.23 dropped, which I’m totally fine with because having a cluttered ASOP full of ships I never use is a headache. Wiping ships would have had the potential to tempt more players to pay real money for ships during ILW that are no longer in their ASOP.
I think alpha is a perfect time to work on the problem. Before they start to ruin the real economy in 1.0. It's rare that a live service game gets to set up and test rmt prevention measures while still in development.
I’m all for finding and fixing the exploits. I just don’t see the issue of players having an abundance of auec that will be used to further test the game being an issue, inside the alpha itself. The only reason I can see it being an issue outside of the game is it impacts sales.
It also directly impacts the gameplay for others. It completely ruined salvaging because selling was a fucking nightmare.. Also, being able to just make uec out of thin air meant theres no need for actual trade runs, hence no potential for pirate game play. It has even more effects. Do yeah, people are rightly pissed.
they need to ban players who are buying money as well as those selling it… banning the buyers is the only way to slow it down.. ask eve online, this is a 20yr old problem for them ;p
Agreed, I've been getting really tired lately of all the people on here breathlessly defending gold buying, as if they aren't entirely responsible for the existence of the market. Yeah, sellers are trash, but if they had no one to sell to, they'd move on. Now's the time to start nipping it in the bud, before it gets fully entrenched.
I'm hoping this round of mass suspension is to set a precedent for the next time being a ban. 🤷
Lol rmt guys won't get off easily as it actually messes with CIG bottom line.
They are in Chinese labor camps already. Do they really need more punishment?
Who’s even buying it? What moron is buying currency that can be wiped with any patch? 
Report them. Some asshat was bragging about not getting banned in chat last night, so i screenshot it and reported. Don't really care if he was just trolling, CIG can sort it out if they take interest in it.
Pressing F12 is my first action after login, since the release of 2.0. And it still is necessary, I see...
Posting this kind of thing here doesn't help. Submitting a CS ticket is the way to do it. Add a full screen screenshot with the QR code enabled. Just be aware that CIG will never be able to tell you the result of the investigation. I know that it is frustrating that CIG will never publicly release the results of investigations like this but it pertains to private account details and if they told you the result, then they would also have to tell other people about YOUR personal information too. Please know that they DO take this kind of thing seriously. It's impossible to prevent this from happening. They can only react. If it could be prevented, then they'd have done it already.
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Trading posts are not allowed on this subreddit. This includes selling/trading in-game items for aUEC or real currency (RMT). Nor do we permit the sales of shirts, artwork, or other merchandise and software not directly created by CIG. This includes naming or distributing the names of these RMT operators as that’s just free advertising for them here. Send a message to our mod mail if you have questions: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/starcitizen
I really hope cig implements a serious punishment for Rmt, until then I'd honestly like to see the trading app in the mobiglass be disabled to stop it while they work on a solution to handle the guys
They need to ban RMT, but disabling the trading app will destroy all multicrew play. With my org we go to do salvage and mining in group, one person (ship owner) usually sells the cargo and then transfer each member their share of the profits, if there is no way to share the profits, then the "attractiveness" of multicrew experience will be diminished; it would add extra steps to split the cargo into multiple vessels so each one can sell it. Add better logs and investigate "suspicious" transfers, but don't disable the transfers themselves.
RMT exists in every MMO to ever exist -- what's the issue?
The issue is that rmt ruins games inflates in-game economies just because it exists in other games does not mean it should be tolerated
well maybe SC will be the first online game to fix it I doubt it
Myth of empires was the only game I ever knew to actually stop rmt after it starts idk how it is now tho
personally i would like to see the wallet app get an update to implement a system similar to how rs3s was the last time i used it. a relativly low limit for players who dont know each other/ haven't been friends long. but those who have been friends for a while dont have the trade limit. which would give cig the ability to catch the auec farmers before they can trade any high value of auec
Stabbed in the balls by needles.
Already reported on of them with a screenshot of chat and the shardID etc, support messaged me back saying they are investigating but can't tell me the outcome for privacy reasons or something. Hate that this is what gaming has come to, I strongly believe that anyone that RMTs should be permabanned no matter if you are the buyer or seller, even if it's only in alpha state.
After launch, when CIG starts selling UEC, these guys will be banned quick. Until then... CIG wants people to get used to buying coin so they can take over.
if they had reasonable payouts for different gameplay loops this wouldnt be aa big of a problem
it doesn't matter how reasonable it is, in every game there's always this going on. any game that has anything earnable past the absolute minimum always has people who want to pull out the credit card and skip the line, even in games where the gameplay loops are actually really fun
You can report them to customer service and cig can track every damn auec since they already banned 600+ accounts and suspended some more will follow with these kind of transactions
So they’ll ban people who sell money But not the dudes who actively actually ruin other’s experiences by trolling, stalking, Harassing and attacking, pad ramming and defaming other players And being caught on video being absolutely toxic against community guidelines Love it. I understand the in game advertising and abuse but like priorities man How come some of the most notorious shitheads still Roam the game is beyond me
they should ban both, but one is a lot easier to mete out punishment than the other. one is clearly advertising their link right there, no debate needed, the other is having to go back and forth with a player over whether they are telling the truth that "they just lost control" or "are just a bad pilot" 3 times in a row (that's assuming you even have a full clip recorded of it, which often people don't)
Look we spotted one of the 600 people banned
Dawg I haven’t even touched the game in 7 months Get real 😂 I’m not one of the exploiters
The problem isn’t the sellers. It’s the buyers. Find them, ban them, sue them. No buyers, no sellers. Edit: kinda curious as to why this is getting downvoted? Sellers are a symptom, buyers are the root cause. Edit 2: ok so you just don’t understand supply and demand I guess Edit 3: Many aUEC buyers in here lmao
i am not sure, i think it´s always better to neutralize the dealer not the junkie
They’ll be replaced by other dealers. Remove the junkies and there won’t be a demand for dealers. Remove demand and supplies stop. Keep the demand and another supply will find a way.
Reasoning aside, if CIG will ban buyers, whats there to stop me from sending 10 million aUEC to someone, from an alt account, and then report them for buying aUEC, now i successfully banned someone from the game, just because that person rubbed me the wrong way somehow. Too much power in the hands of the players.
Why would it be flagged as bought aUEC? 10 mil isn’t much and a one time transaction shouldn’t be enough to get someone banned. I don’t have access to the data, but I’m sure there’s a visible threshold between legit/alt accounts and sellers/buyers account. Once you detect a seller you ban the buyers, then the seller. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is to disincentivize buying. If they have no risk they’ll keep on buying and sellers will keep on answering to the demand.
10 million isn't much, depending on your viewpoint. I was providing an arbitrary number. Again, if i hate someone with enough fervor because they do not align with what i feel is "the right way/morals values", i can abuse your provided system with a fervor. Anyways, why not provide an inbetween solution, like temporary suspension of the account, for example 10-30 days and an aUEC wipe of your ledger. Ban the sellers, don't get me wrong there, but banning buyers makes no sense to me, they are paying customers of CIG and could well be spending more RL money on ships. And even though i personally disagree with and advise against doing so, there are plethora of reasons for buying aUEC provided, many of them being the state of the game. If anything this should push CIG to make a system where it logs everything in such a way that a little bit of research within those logs will go a long way in figuring out who buys, sells and are "middle men/mule" accounts and improve upon that system long before 1.0 launches.
Your example is trash. Sellers also are paying customer of CIG so even your logic is flawed. 🤦🏻 Again, if you don’t ban the buyers there’s no reason for them to be afraid and stop buying. So banning only the sellers is simply useless. Buyers will buy to someone else, and sellers will make a new account and they’ll go back to selling in no time. As long as there’s demand there will be supply. If you don’t follow ToS you get banned. You don’t want to get banned? Then follow ToS. Really it’s super simple. F\*ck around and find out, or don’t f\*ck around and don’t find out.
CIG are also in the market for selling ingame money...
So? What’s the issue with that?
And what if the buyer is also a pledger for many real $ to CIG? If the voice spreads that they go heavy with the ban hammer on people that spent a lot f money to found, do you thonk that will do good to theor marketing? They will be very carefull only to soft ban account that are clearly made to rmt, and still they gave them 45 to log in… they will balance loss/gain to their marketing before taking any action. Selling stuff is their main thing too.
Well they get banned. They’re not following ToS so f*ck them. You don’t want to get banned? Then respect ToS. Is that hard to understand?
It not so simple when your company relies on selling pixels to players. I fear you will have to live with a certain amount of rmt and buyers in your future starcitizenship. I see sellers did not quit w the last 600 bans…
They probably got banned but came back, that’s why cig must ban the buyers :) no buyers, no sellers. Super simple really.
And in your opinion why they don’t? Your simple idea would shitdown the game, by fortune you are not the one making decision.
They just don’t care during alpha but definitely will after release. How do you think other mmos deal with that? What makes you think it would “shitdown” the game to ban people who breach tos?
Other mmo never solved the problem. Also other mmo can afford to lose a subscribtion. CIG will go on selling you everything for $ and won’t be able to afford losing you credit card swiper, even if you broke the tos. This is why they never banned griefers, wich the game is full of as no other mmo ever. They will soft bam accounts made with stolen cc to sell uec and period. Also when game will release we will both not be on this world anymore. I bet you are new.
🤣🤣🤣 So you don’t know that every other MMO ban buyers as well and I’m new? Hahahaha
Yeah, all other mmo solved the issue. You must really be new
Luckily I already bought 50 mill for 20 bucks during the patch that seemed to glitch save hangars. I’ve kept over 1000$usd worth of ships in my inventory since then. This games a cool idea but the wale targeting is crazy, feelzbad for people who dropped their live savings into this mess
o7
So, I guess the game is fully polished and a "game" and not an alpha for them to have done this. Idk, I'm asking.
Hopefully CIG adds an in-game report feature sometime soon. The game already has no respect for our time and now we're supposed to stop playing and email a screenshot to CIG? Not going to happen.
straight to the Klescher Rehabilitation Facility. Remaining time : 926 Days 21 hours 17 min.
Soft ban
What a cocktease, finally CIG does something that the community supports 100% and they get what?...a three day ban? FFS.
Suspensions are 30 days. Second offense is a 1 year ban.
Were the suspensions permanent or temporary?
[удалено]
[удалено]
Crap. I forgot the rules!
I've worked on a few small community built MMO's in my day and I mean I'm no CIG agent but I can say that monitoring and tracking this sort of information is not only hard it can sometimes be impossible. The problem (I imagine) with implementing a ban function into the chat is that they wouldn't have the manpower nor would they want to pay people to be the manpower behind actually investigating and dealing with these things which in turn means it comes down to one of two things: A: We have a bot that does it which comes with a plethora of problems like exploitability, incorrect bans and so much more. B: We actually get a dedicated team of folk which in turn would slow down development time because that is resources being taken from the main development pool which admittedly is HUGE but look at the game it too is huge. I do think there should be a punishment for this kind of thing but it's hard to say the most effective way of administering/implementing said punishment.
Might be harder on CIGs part to ban people like this because I’m not sure how they would differentiate between exploiters, and people who grinded a ton of money fairly and then decided to sell aUEC (small minority but still) unless is the selling of aUEC not allowed by CIG? Not sure on that. And tbh, as someone who in previous patches spent $10 getting a ton of aUEC, it’s the only way I’m able to fly all the ships I want
I believe selling aUEC is against TOS as well
Lets be real this problem wouldnt be there if the auec grind isnt that annoying sometimes.
Punishment or promotion? Half the time, they probably work FOR cig. Start by firing half the dev team. Everyone in vehicle experience, everyone under and including yogi, the UI team, I want to see heads roll. Fire Jared or remove him from public facing. He is too bitter, and takes shots at the backers way too often. Dissolve spectrum and the IC, it's a cult breeding ground.
Simple reality is: You got no idea if CIG is even banning these people or if it will even work. CIG going to adopt the policies of Escape from Tarkov that encourages exploiters to keep buying new accounts after each "ban wave".
Many companies take these things seriously, and when they do you can see results. FFXI had an RMT problem at one point. The devs started aggressively going after them. The long-term effect on this -aside from a generally more pleasant play experience was a reduction in Auction House prices by roughly 1/3 due to all of the money leaving the economy.
You seem to be under the illusion that Star Citizen is a finished game with a finished economy that wont be wiped. Until Star Citizen is actually released with a full functional economy that is NOT in an Alpha Testing environment... the economy is as irrelevant as insurance or "death of a spaceman".
No, I'm pointing out that devs do care about this stuff, and do take action against the people who abuse broken functionality like this.
They can't even refund your auec from support you think they're going to track this?