Trade Limits in "Free Trade" System

Hey all,

As we all know, Free Trade is on its way in the coming weeks. I have seen a thread posted here outlining some behind the scenes plans to prohibit bots in the Free Trade system. What seemed to be commonly mentioned was the current rollback system, as well as a mass ban to those with regular botting patterns. This is certainly the right way to handle those botting on their main accounts, but this does nothing to prevent those botting on throwaway accounts in order to farm GP. This will undoubtedly be one of Jagex's main challenges with the new update.

Since Free Trade was removed, Jagex fixed a tricky little problem with Runescape. In the past, people would bot on useless characters for profit. By earning GP on these throwaway characters, people could actually make a good amount of money on Runescape. With the trade limits, low level characters had virtually no easy way to transfer. In Bounty Hunter days, you needed to be fairly high level to effectively transfer in the craters. Furthermore, the majority of transfers took place in the Medium / High Level Craters (50+ Combat F2P). This made low level botting unprofitable, and actually served as a great fix to the problem.

When Bounty Hunter was removed, transferring became even more complicated. Eventually, people found ways to manipulate the Grand Exchange to transfer. However, along with the complexity of these Grand Exchange methods, they also required substantial start cash on the sellers (as much as 10 Billion). Once again, this meant that low level botting was not a viable way to earn an income. Despite people botting on their main accounts, Jagex had indeed repaired the issue of creating profit from throwaway characters.

Flash forward to the present, and the problem seems to be right back on the forefront. Jagex is no stranger to it, these low level bots which used to saturate Yew Trees and Essence mines caused a great deal of issues for the company. They would often be paid for with subscriptions from fraudulent sources, which was the true underlying concern at the time. So what has changed now that Jagex feels this problem can be stopped (or at least lessened)?

I believe there will have to be several "tweaks" on the old Free Trade system. Complete freedom does seem to corrupt in-game, and Jagex surely must have done a great deal of research into preventing the use of throwaway bots for profit. I have spent a lot of time wondering about what these might be, and here is what I think Jagex will do:

Limiting New Players' Trade Limits - This focuses around the idea that Jagex will have trade limits in place for newly created characters. This restriction will likely be for a time period of 3-6 months, during which time these new chars will have the usual 5k limit we have today. They actually toyed with this idea at the very end of 2007, and implemented it. If they are able to quickly ban bots, any newly created ones will be useless. They will never be able to get the gold off the account. Jagex has also made some changes to prevent people from creating massive amounts of characters. By forcing attachment of your character to an email address, it becomes much more difficult to simply create mass chars. This will combat the issue of people creating a ton of characters and just waiting for the trade limit to expire.

I think this is the most realistic option so far. Recently, Jagex had a poll on Runescape.com asking how many accounts the average user has. I believe they used this data to create restrictions for how many characters could be created by the same person as well. Other game companies, such as Blizzard, have also been regulating players' account creation. In the game Starcraft 2, players are now forced to play with one account only. In previous Real Time Strategies by Blizzard, such as Warcraft III, players could create as many accounts as they wanted. Because this would interrupt the ladder system, the company took a new approach and restricted players to one account per game copy.

If any of you guys have other ideas, please share them here. I think this was the most pressing issue in Free Trade; many old schoolers remember the old level 3 bots which cheapened the game in the old Free Trade system.

 

Whatever does happen when it finally comes back, i know they will have a way to deal with it. Your idea of these accounts requiring 3-6 months seems like the most possible solution because by that time like you said they will probably be caught botting.

If they only limit it to free trade all youll have to do is die to somebody in the wilderness/drop trade/ stake it over. Do you think these will be limited too? It wouldnt really be fair to the new players that actually plan to play legitly.

 

Nice post, I wouldn't mind seeing limits on newly created accounts.

 

I can only agree with you; when the email adress thing instead of usernames I though the same thigh. Unfortunately for jagex hidemyass.com makes me as many emails as I want at once.

 

I would, and i know many others would. Many pkers aren't fit for the old school wilderness and never will be with the new changes, forcing them to make new accounts. Same with stakers, they'll need to make completely new accounts.

Or people just returning to the game, since all they want is free trade.

Obviously they would be limited also, that came along with the trade limit..


And lets just face it. Jagex is a company and they'll never make the same amount they used to when free trade was out. They tried and tried to fix it and get the same amount of paying players without free trade, but being frank, its almost impossible.

 

I agree with you. But say an account has been active for say 6 months, do you think that mass GP trades will be monitored?

 

Honestly, I figured it would be mainly due to them starting to take botting companies to court.

RSbots.org had a hostile take over of the name,
They managed to get an out of court settlement for its second owner,
They've managed to shut down Kbot,
They've attempted to take Nexus to court

That's just my opinion though, because if there's less bots around, less people have them, meaning less throwaway accounts ect, you get the picture.

They may also start doing more than the odd color change to prevent bots such as nexus from working, as well as various non anti bot methods such as the emails which you stated above, maybe they even plan on selling gold themselves? I have read around that people think Runescape is dieing and not bringing as much revenue, probably not this idea though, but hey, you never know!

 

That seems like something they would do. The majority of players would not mind since their accounts have been around for a while. I also remember that player poll, nice catch

 

I like limiting new accounts is a great idea. This would eliminate the throwaway botting approach, but not effect me being able to RWT too much ^-^

 

I think they should make it so you need to purchase members to be able to trade freely. I know a lot of botters make their accounts members anyways but at least Jagex will make some money out of it.

 

This. If they do make a waiting period for trading, then something will have to be done about wilderness drops also.

 

That's also a decent idea, but also a majority of those would probably purchase membership by a stolen card number, or their parents without permission in a result of a possible chargeback.

 

Yes, but if they don't chargeback, Jagex still gets the payment. And if they do chargeback, the account gets locked until they purchase membership again I believe.

 

They will probably moniter trades and get notified if someone gets 500M plus gain and then ban them :S

 

I'm not sure if thats exactly what they will do but I'm sure there will be some system or another along with the free trade update to help combat these issues. Id rather this didn't happen but if it means free trade coming back I'd be willing to put up with anything without complaint.

 

Nice concept, but making an email adress isn't that hard it doesn't take longer than doing the tutorial island for sure. So there seems to be a hole in that plan.

 

OK, Well walking through mines and such and seeing all these botters.. If we have to wait like 6 months to trade I'm going to lawl in all their faces.

 

I just want everything like it was in 06...

 

They will probably moniter trades and get notified if someone gets a huge gain and then ban them...

 

Is it just me or is everyone forgetting the introduction of the wildy again? If you couldn't transfer cash to your pking account then it would be stupid.

Back in the good old days that's what everyone did. Get rich on their main then fund heaps of pures for fun.