I just thought about a possible solution facing these meso sellers. Overall, I see it as a deterrent measure. I recently see several players, on my BL and guild, getting ton of mesos via different ways. Then some buying loaded amount of mesos from meso sites! Mainly for StarForce on the way to 20-22 stars!!! I have seen Nexon doing some big ban waves and it's really good they are doing it. But it doesn't seem to affect botters that much, but the company should do it even more and also more manual patrolling. People still buying their mesos from illegal sites, NOTE that every meso sites are illegals, also be aware of ppl claiming to be legit and selling mesos! Who knows. Althought if this person is really legal, he should sell mesos for maple points like some F2P players do, some of you guys know a famous one as collector also making dmg calculator apps.
Now, knowing that we see more botters to sell more mesos, how many competitors are there?? I am thinking that Nexon should actually sell mesos. Now I feel like someone replying that we already have cash - mesos rate called Meso market... From what I notice, I personnally don't know that many players converting NX to maple points to sell them for mesos in Meso Market as there is a limit of transactions we can do daily... I don't include players selling the maple pts earned from in-game event in this section. These botters can also buy maple points to do ads of their sites via smega (possibly???). So this system is not that great for us in GMS.
There is a possible deterrent measure if we put effort banning even more botters, especially manually to not affect any more legit players. Thinking of a way for Nexon to sell mesos and it should be sold in CashShop!!! You know these meso bags in CS?? They give low and ramdom amount of mesos... of course no one is gonna buy these bags due to botters fixing a $$$ - meso rate for a ridiculous amount, mostly varying between 1 and 1.5B mesos for $1 US compared to highest amount of mesos possible you can luckily get from Unique meso bag at a cost of 3k NX ($3 US). Unless a very few newbies knowing nothing about bot situation nor meso selling, they may buy some bags, but it's a very low amount of players. So why can't Nexon simply increase amount of mesos from these Meso bags to about same amount as $$$ - meso rate fixed by botters?? Only p2w players who own credit card can actually buy of botters, but can we actually trust them due to possible fraud with credit card? who knows eventually. Buying mesos directly from CashShop is way more secure as you need NX prepaid/credit (which price can be affected by reward points! (or not necessarely, up to Nexon) or maple points.
***YOU guys may think that it's gonna deflate meso value even more doing this?? Think about it, as long as botters still exist, the situation can't get worse as they ''kinda'' have infinite amount of mesos.
Ok so, now we have changed Meso bags from CS, what next? Can we do further more to deter and ban botter accounts? Now taking a look at Auction House, mainly looking for most desired usable/etc items here. Look at these huges quantities of Clean Slate scrolls, cubic blades, Arcane River Droplet and Stone Origin Droplet, mainly in Bera. I might miss couple more items here. Can we do something about that? More investigation should be done here, seeing illegal trade, illegal as with botter account, stocking loots from them then selling in AH to then sell mesos. Then what about protection scroll? Can we just reduce price of these Shielding/Superior Shielding wards by half?? So some players may start to prime items again by buying from CS and reward shop. Giving even more mob Droplets from Lucid and Damien not just boss droplet so this change will also affect Reboot players so they can finally have arcane items a bit faster. Same for some items like CSS and more, make them drop in a reasonable drop rate from some daily/weekly bosses.
Then once we can control these botters, if things are better, then on Nexon discretion they may slightly change NX : meso rate like these botters do, of course.
To finish this, we can possibly neutralize botters with many ways:
-Keep mass banning via manual and automatic modes but ESPECIALLY manually (patrolling), investigating Auction House further more and those meso sites to possibly arrest these ppl for profiting making money via gaming.
-Having Nexon as meso seller by increasing these amount of mesos from Rare/Epic/Unique Meso Bags from CashShop to match the rate given by botters, which can be changed on their discretion (should be mentioned on item description in CS too).
-Increasing availability of certain items, mainly sold in AH in huge quantity via daily/weekly bosses.
You guys can freely post about other possible solutions or constructive debate! Share this!!!
EDIT: Fixing these issues may even lead to a lower Star Force costs, closer to KMS costs !!!!
Comments
Also being at a minimum level + having account created after many days before actually selling in Auction House.
EDIT (Jan. 1st, 2019) New idea : If one person cumulates so many droplets in one day, should send an alarm to Nexon saying this char has got some number of droplet daily, then manually checking on immediate moment if the person is legit.
Honestly it wouldn't change so much the cenario of star forcing to 20*, all it would change is more deflation and your work in the game is more worth than today compared to buying meso from the meso sellers, in fact if meso sellers couldn't sell as much mesos and made less viable to buy mesos as today, more people would suffer since most who are strong today depend on hackers to get mesos or anything else, so they would either complain or you would start to get a cenario of real effort ingame to get strong and maybe some divided effort in buying nx like in KMS, where pros usually are better in control than here in GMS, at least bosses like Hilla and Will are pushing people a bit further, not that much.
Like imagine if I had a 2b budget to get from 10 to 15 and the chances of getting there took at average of what I had. If I didn't get it with 2b and I had no other way of getting mesos than from meso sites I'd resort to that (but I don't, I just suffer until I spend nx on an event that has good prizes like marvel), but if the average cost was lower I would more likely reach that with my 2b budget and have change left over and would be more likely to ignore the meso sites that would have tempted me otherwise.
GMS considerably increases Star Force costs for a huge meso sink.
What I really want is to Nexon compete with botter for meso as they keep mass banning them with manual patrolling. Also putting a cap of meso getting from monster loots per account might help a lot. Either that or if one person cumulates so many droplets in one day, should send an alarm to Nexon saying this char has got some number of droplet daily. Tbh, idk how many of them a legit player, training with FZ totem, can get from all this moment of training and how long he actually trains.
A Meso cap would hurt Reboot so dang much, since we rely on mesos for just about everything. It would need to be pretty high of a cap. So I'm gonna say no on this part of the idea.
Botters always adapt. I still would say Nexon would need to take out the distributors of the hacks (I won't say names here) but that would be a lot of legal work on their part, and I can't say it would be a solution that fixes everything. All it takes is one Programmer who wants to make their Maple life easy to make a new hack and the problem will proliferate again. I wish Nexon had more manual GMs (seriously, look at the ban waves that seem to crop up a lot more often), but that is not my decision to make. One last idea would be to make the game just downright not work if you are using a bypass on Security (I.E. if Nexon Game Security is not running, get some sort of message) but that could hurt legit players (I know a friend who had to bypass because their anti-virus caught NGS as a "virus") although a small minority.
Woops, I forgot to mention adding cap meso farmed from monster drops in Regular server, my bad lol. Funny, because i have thought to precise regular server in official GMS discord lol. Not like anyone in regular server is willing getting %meso obtained and actually farming like in reboot, only botters do lol. Imma edit this part.
Also agree having manual GMs.
and that right there is why people buy mesos with real currency from meso sites. With nexon penny pinching me everytime I try to go beyond 12 stars (and in some cases even 5 stars), I'm going broke for almost no reward unless I spend mesos in bulk. And I wouldn't have meso to spend in bulk unless I had accumulated my wealth over time or bought it from a meso site. And after spending that bulk and spending your life savings or just $10 on mesos what would you do next if you really wanted to get those stars? To me it's not even worth going past 12 stars because of how much I'm losing for a mere bonus of +3 stats or +5 to +7 attack for those early stars from 10-15. I'd rather buy maple points with my mesos because at least I'm guaranteed to get what I'm paying for with a chance of getting even more if the current price is less than my asking price.
I'd like to see them also remove the price when you get that 100% chance to go up a star if you fail twice in a row, or reduce the previous star enhancement cost by 50% when you fail to go up but not boom your item or stay at current SF.
Can you elaborate why they are terrible?
Pre-starforcing you'd need to spend money on protections scrolls/no booms to use AEEs. This is so much more expensive than a measly 5b. You're given an F2P option for obtaining additional stats but since progression needs to be gated somehow of course it's going to be expensive.
That doesn't mean the system is without flaws but let's break down your points real quick and address them.
1. Botters selling meso can always run more competitive pricing. They leave a few accounts with kishin to farm and boom, free money for them. Nexon can only offer so much meso for X amount of dollars before mesos become so inflated that they're worth less than they are now.
2. Kishin/Frenzy. KMS doesn't have these things, so there is an inherent meso advantage. Don't want to make a Kanna farmer (Reboot or otherwise) then that's your prerogative there are always other ways of making money. People are just too lazy/stupid to look up a meso guide.
3. Funny enough, botters keep the economy in dying worlds alive (and likely pad Nexon's active account numbers). Without bots - and there is no way to permanently patch out hacks from a game because that is the nature of programming - the value of those items would rise (although how far it rises has a cap since star force menu also has a 5%CSS and people can farm their own) as supply can no longer keep up with demand.
4. Botters are removed in droves but all it takes is an email to make a new account. There have been good suggestions to deal with botters (and supposedly Nexon is taking some unknown steps to curb the problem) but we won't know exactly what since announcing it is pretty much going to tell people how to get around it (not that they won't find out by themselves anyway eventually).
5. Star forcing is essentially a method of cycling all this excess meso out of the system. So it being a meso sink is kind of the point. Do you think if meso sacks become cheaper/give more that you can buy more with it? Funny thing about money is that if more of it is available, prices will rise accordingly. If you keep printing money then the equivalent value is worth less that it used to be. It's not like people are just using meso to star force and nothing else.
Along with Big Bang, meso and exp rates increased but so did shop prices. There's no easy fix for something like an in-game economy. Citing other games might provide suggestions but I guarantee the same effects won't be present here and those other games changed much more than one aspect of the economy. I don't see Nexon overhauling it anytime soon.
I never complained 15 stars being that expensive, most of my gears i got to 15* takes me average 1B, highest being around 1.5 or closer to 2B But my Arcane axe .... took me 6B+ .
1. Nexon has to be a good competitor as they should be able to adjust nx:meso rate. Also you won't have to deal with botter since you will get meso instantly. Nexon also has to be more rough with botters, a lot more manual bans. GM gets alert from us, legit players, look at this specific map in this ch and others, looking at every maps surrounding. Banning them to a point they might run out of meso a lil bit. As it is currently, I never heard botters running out of mesos?? So i don't think it's gonna change mesao value very much at some point
2. True that KMS doesn't have kishin/frenzy, but they have reinforced system, preventing botters making that many accounts and you may even go to jail if KMS catches you hacking. All because of these, of course, Starforce cost in KMS is a LOT lower, so this affects F2P a lot. I know perfectly how to get mesos from grinding. Grinding in mass for those daily intense crystals, mainly from chaos bosses, NPC those sunset dew and reindeer milk, npc everything you can loot. You can even extract equips you loot. Right now some bosses may drop a ton of equips to extract. CPB can drop over 30 equips with drop gears, hard hilla drops a lot too, around 20-25 extractable gears?
3. Players who desire farming for those droplets suffer a lot because of the drop rate being lower, might be due to botters? i can't say. Nexon should also allow us getting those e.boss drops from some daily/weekly bosses.
4. Adding such meso cap from looting from monster drops in ''Regular server'' should considerably slow down their meso gain. I am wondering if Nexon can detect a pc using more than 3-4 accounts, after hitting cap daily in each account?? So if they are able doing this, they may be able banning way more accounts. (unless botters can keep IP changing... )
5. Read point 1 and 2. Mesos being used for so many things I agree.
PS. Some players may not care, but if you see botters buying wolf underling or even frenzy totem for a crazy amount of mesos, don't sell them FZ totem ....... I heard someone mentioning a botters looked for a totem for 1.5T mesos ...... Thats like 50 characters with cap mesos...
My point is, regulating mesos themselves won't help. Capping meso looting kinda encourages people to buy them after they hit their cap. I really don't like the idea of Nexon regulating the economy manually and telling me how much I can make per day. GMs can only do so much as well across all these worlds. Especially with them using multi-client. Dead worlds are even harder since bots can go undetected for longer. Whenever they release ban lists it does seem like many get banned but with names like 45hgfudisgh534 there's infinite possibilities.
I do like this kind of conversation though, nice to see people care. Also I'd kill for a frenzy why tf would I sell it to a bot lmao
Who in a regular server would loot more than 100M daily from looting monsters meso bags and per account?? I mostly hear ppl farming mesos from Reboot, with Kanna and getting so much in an hour. While in Regular server, I never saw anyone aiming for %meso obtained. Maybe in KMS, but surely not here in GMS.
Making mobs drop way less meso but making those npc prices for some stuff way higher and making the crystals from bosses give more meso. there's so much stuff npc priced as 1 meso... that results in problems since if npc price is 1, only way to really profit from some stuff is to sell it to other players. Well basically 80% of in game meso is from mobs (very bad thing) and botters use that in their advantage. If some stuff like EH, novas and tyrants from magnus would be worth 10/25/100m ea. ppl would get some decent amount of meso daily/weekly and if meso drops from mobs were reduced to something like 20% of the current, botters would lose quite much of their profit with that.
in Luna arcane droplets prices quadrupled after some bans. Well the prices will drop to something reasonable soon enough since hlucid squads get the items quite much cheaper. But that shows how much damage botters do to economy. Botters sell for 75% discount and they control 90% of the stuff so they can freely drop the prices. Nexon succeeded in banning the botters from arcane river higher end so prices jumped damn high. Next problem are the botters in haven.
Faint stigma stones in fallen world tree cost like 10x in comparison to A cores from haven. From my own experience i can tell that grinding whole day in either of those areas don't yield more than 10 core/stigma. with drop gear and frenzy maby 50 from 8h grind. but since A cores are used for cape,shoe,glove and wep it's quite ridiculous that they cost tenth of the stigmas which are used only on shoulders. And why those even drop from mobs anyways? there's the daily quests so you could get enough cores for 1 item in 1 week. Worth it since absos are quite much the end game and it takes a week to get the S cores from lotus for 1 item. AU is the heavy endgame but cost so much more in comparison for absolab.
For some reason the haven is full of botters and AH has more bot cores than anyone could ever make abso items.
Tried one thing a while ago and bought the AH empty from those cores, i guess the reasonable and legit players put their cores for decent prices. but after 1 day passed the AH had twice the original amount of those cores i bought for ridiculous prices. and that's just one flaw of AH
1. you can't offer on anything or even contact the seller so it's hard to find end game gear from there.
2. too few sale slots and only 24h so with some rarer stuff you're stuck with those for damn long.
3. accessible for everyone so bots can take over the markets of every monster drop there is. Some requirements would be nice so bots wouldn't be able to use it so much. fame req, quest req, or accessed after month of playing, coupon in rew point store or something.
4. you can't relist stuff if you have full slots so you have to take one item back to your inv, relist others and put the one item back as a new item.
So plz nexon do these things things:
1. Ban bots.
2. Change the cores and stigmas to be only from daily quests so it would take the same time to clear the boss and get the fragments for abso items. (with the droprates it's not really legit players idea to farm those by hunting)
3. Maby adjust those boss drops npc prices. (most of the stuff are 1 meso each and atm those just provide openings for botted meso)
4. AH needs some adjustments since it's now too good for bots.
Now that I think of it, why doesn't Nexon give us daily quests to get Arcane River and Stone Origin Droplets? ... Maybe up to 5 or 10 daily? And have a few from Lucid and Will as well.