I honestly don’t see why they don’t have a good script that can’t catch about 80-90% of them, and likely far better then a GM could though some GMs tasked with that and which jumped around servers would help.
However the behaviors are pretty much all the same, it would take very little to log scan once a week, realizing that realtime scanning would be prohibitively expensive in computing power. Where they could likely catch 80% or more. Getting these should point them directly to the accounts that they are trading with, and while I know there are ways they launder the gold that make it difficult, it should be possible at least to nail the first, maybe second levels.
This is really a perfect job for machine learning and AI.
Most of the bots pay very little and are run countries where the cost of playing is extremely low. So they likely bring very little to the bottom line on the grand scale.
I had 13 gold at level 15. I have no idea why but stringy? wolf meat was selling for like 50s a stack on Nightslayer a couple of days. I farmed those hounds for a few hours.
Just because people can afford a reasonably priced epic item (because it’s fresh) doesn’t mean people are buying gold.
I play to pvp, I am okay doing a couple raids a week as well.
No desire to play long-term if I am forced into hours of farming each week to actually do the things I want.
GDKPs made that possible.
At least I have era, all the gold-buying ‘classic’ and retail players can enjoy going manic in vanilla while denying themselves the only good pug loot system.
That I could actually see being harder to track, a bit depends on what actually is logged, but logging every movement in 3 dimensions then comparing that to a world map seems prohibitive from a performance standpoint. I do wonder how aware the client is if you are go outside of what’s considered valid areas, and if it could report suspicious activity.
I’m gonna assume that all players are tracked via XYZ coordinates.
It wouldn’t be that hard to put a check in for “Are they 50 feet above the ground and not on a flight path?” or “Are they below the collision hitbox of the ground floating”?
Hard to tell, when things go 3d things the amount of data being generated could be significant likely terabytes of data, and it might not be possible to tell what land really is versus being under/above simply looking at logs. While certainly you could implement something that would understand this server side, it might not be cost feasible especially building on the current code. I mean everything is doable, but this seems like something that would be overly complex.
Thats why I wonder how aware the client is, since if it could alert, that would eliminate a lot of the load, where a much smaller amount of data could be fed into the logs.
