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Fix merchant price scamming

Discussion in 'Suggestions' started by yurain, Mar 7, 2022.

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  1. yurain
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    yurain Windraider

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    YUrain
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    Recently there has been an increase in scam attempts on the FM involving selling of Power Elixir. The seller try to price 1PE to those of 100PE stacks, and mix them randomly in the merchant. Buyers often just quickly click down the list and end up buying PE at 100x the "normal" price, assuming that it is a stack of 100. It is true that we as a buyer/seller should take extra note when trading and accept the loss when we are careless. But what we are seeing here are active attempts, trying to scam people into buying over priced items.

    Also after talking to some players, the GMs are not able to concrete action to stop such merchants being put up despite numerous @gm reports. I think we need to improve the TOS to give the GMs a tool to thoroughly stamp out out such obvious and blatant ill-intented behaviour from the game. I suggest to improve the TOS clause 3.2.1 to include this loophole. In addition, we might want to have a lower major abuse threshold for this offence, since such merchant are normally setup on a mule account thus account ban would serve no punishment at all.

    Other than a TOS change (because bleh, ban hammer). I also suggest a possible client edit by making "1 for X" item display a different colour from "n for X". Both of them are the same colour now. This also can help the players to safeguard against such scams

    Edit:
    Some suggested to just remove the option to sell a bundle of items. I think this is a pretty good and simple idea, added here for visibility. Maybe just hardcode the quality input in the client to 1 or something.

    Below are some screenshots that I got from discord today wrt to such merchant behaviour.
    [​IMG]
    upload_2022-3-7_21-21-45.png
    upload_2022-3-7_21-22-0.png
     
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  2. UnknownCode
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    UnknownCode Wolfspider

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    I've seen this also happen with regular Elixirs.. even simple etc items too.
     
  3. Nightz
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    Nightz Supervisor Staff Member Supervisor Game Moderator

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    We do try to actually check if a person is using obvious mule accounts with malicious intent and the punishment will then be delivered to their main account. No guarantees we are always able to properly track this however.

    As for your example screenshots, the first image is very clearly person trying to deceive people using bundles and non bundled power elixirs mixed together.
    Punishment was also given.

    The other case where every single item is priced the same we generally don't act on as it will be harder to decide where to draw the line, are people no longer allowed to heavily overprice any items? There is much less deception going on and it'll be a lot harder for us to judge each of those cases individually. When is it done out of ill intent or not?

    While I fully agree that no one wants to see the Free-Market being used as a place to scam people, rules against this still need to be enforceable for staff.
    Buyers and sellers should both be cautious when using the free-market to not buy things that are overpriced or sell their own stuff for millions less than intended.
     
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  4. UnknownCode
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    UnknownCode Wolfspider

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    I feel like bundled items should have an entirely different text color to non-bundled so its easier to see, its also distressing to see that people would have the audacity to even consider doing that.
     
    • Agree Agree x 1
  5. OP
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    yurain
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    yurain Windraider

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    I just suggested that directly wrt to the clause 3.2.1 since it only suggest an account ban mostly. I appreciate and understand that GM actually do try their best to track down abusers from mules.

    Yes. The screenshots aren't really that clear, other than the first one. I just grabbed them all from this discord because there was a discussion on this PE thing today. There are multiple players expressed concerns on such ill behaviour in the FM right now so I just decided to port them onto the forum for a more "logged" discussion.

    The screenshots aren't the best, but I do hope to deliever the idea across. If the GMs decide to issue any statement on such merchanting behavious, the players then can capture higher quality screenshot (like the first) and report it accordingly.
     
  6. Nightz
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    Nightz Supervisor Staff Member Supervisor Game Moderator

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    Oh absolutely and we fully agree that we don't want such ill behavior in the FM.
    I tried to differentiate the two cases and explain why one gets punished right away (first image) and the other might not at all (second image).

    If there's any ideas how other cases should be handled while also thinking about the grand scheme of things such as the ability to really determine if something is done with ill intent.

    Here's another example of someone deceiving people in the Free-Market that we deem as scamming and will be punished.
    [​IMG][​IMG]

    Thank you for sharing the concerns, hope our side of it is also understood.
     
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  7. -ovv
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    -ovv Zakum

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    Just do what a normal bank would do and freeze the assets in that account.

    IMO, there should be an extension or a ToS guide on things people should be reporting like this with clear cut examples. The more aware the general population are about things like scamming, RWTing, etc. - and a step further, being aware enough to the point they are actively policing as well - the less power these scammers have in this server.

    Instead of just putting up a list of rules, teach people to be better.
     
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  8. akashsky
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    akashsky Zakum

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    We should just instead remove the ability to sell items in a bundle. Staff has already added commas and changed the color of the text depending on # of digits. There is only so much we can do to prevent stupid carelessness.

    Another safeguard is to not carry more than 5m on the character you are buying these consumables on, (put the rest of your mesos in storage).
     
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  9. Feeed
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    Feeed Mr. Anchor

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    +1, it's confusing, I still don't know how to read it when looking at an Owl
     
  10. lv1crook
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    lv1crook Mr. Anchor

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    I notice this sometimes when buying PEs.. very obnoxious, hope something can be done about it soon SlimePolice
     
  11. UnknownCode
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    UnknownCode Wolfspider

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    I don't think hell/shadow banning (removing the power to trade or use merchants/storage) should be a thing because like most things I've seen in this server people don't learn from observations of other ban notifications from in-game there would be RWT ban waves and more RWT ban waves just because "Oh, sorry I didn't read the ToS" and then get unbanned for it because "They didn't know" just to avoid punishments "as a joke" then laugh it off in conversations with friends.
     
  12. Ferluci
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    Ferluci Skelosaurus Retired Staff

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    good thing we deny people that ‘didn’t read our ToS’
    Hope you didnt mean as an example that happens in this server
     
  13. Thuglifer
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    Thuglifer Mr. Anchor

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  14. UnknownCode
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    UnknownCode Wolfspider

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    Of course not, this server is amazing.

    ILY Dami
     
  15. Kimmy
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    Kimmy Administrator Staff Member Administrator Game Moderator

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