Pro's and Con's of a RMT servers?

[AshraZL]

Just wanna know. Since i have a plan of opening a server. And i don't know if i'm gonna allow rmt or not. and how it's gonna effect my server.

 

[travistytrav]

If you're not prepared to handle the bots and exploits, then it comes at a big tradeoff. If you allow it and your server has an active player base buying and selling, you’ll constantly be dealing with sellers trying to automate and exploit ways to farm currency. This is something you’d have to handle even if you banned RMT, but it’s likely to be on a smaller scale if you actively target RMT itself. And if you do nothing about the automation / exploiting, then your inflation is just going to be ridiculous to the point where the server dies anyway.

For a lot of these sellers, they can earn more through RMT than from a full-time job in their country. So, of course, they’ll do everything they can to take as much profit as they can from your server.

I've also thought of this question, and thought of implementing a method of being the middle-man where I'd know players wouldn't get scammed. But it's just too much of a headache to deal with.

 

[zOmbie]

It's a headache, stay away.

 

[AshraZL]

It's a headache, stay away.

Can you elaborate? LoL

 

[Linebeck]

I personally would not allow RMT but i would also not go for perma bans if people got hit doing RMT, it has positive and negative aspects for sure. RMT will cause a lot of scams and people will flood you with "bro he scammed me, pls ban, pls solution, pls refund" and you won't be able to handle that unless there are 10000% safe proofs, which is not possible, there is always a way to trick you.
However with RMT you push the market and stuff on your server might become valuable at some point and trading is happening way more than without RMT.
To counter this, just don't allow RMT and make DPS available in the game as items(like vouchers), so those are tradable and this is the only way of RMT'ing. This would also prevent scams from people selling DPS by buying items for the customer and the customer just jumps away - would not happen with DPS vouchers or similar.
People could still do RMT shit with that for sure but its a bit different and since you didn't allow RMTing, you wont handle any scam case. Keep in mind no matter what you do, there were servers that died cause RMT scam went boom and many people left the server cause of that. Better go like the top servers and forbid RMT.
If your server is something really special and fun to play, even when you got scammed, then people might not leave your server.

As already mentioned by travistytrav above, in any way you would need to prevent botters from doing their automation job since this gives RMT a big boost. You can do this by having some kind of bot detection and active staff roaming around to look for botters(a combination of both is the key).
It's also really important to have common "security" fixes, as well as adding logs to things that raise suspicion, such as having a ton of specific items like perins. A few servers have good automated bot detection that is kind of enough to detect them. Try to do the same.

Your biggest risk at the end is not only RMT, but exploits, abusing and botters. Do your best to "fix" those aspects and your server has a lower chance of being dead after short time.
I dont know how much time you are into the pserver scene, but for the past 6+ years, no NEW server really could survive for long and the reasons for that always contain at least one of my mentioned aspects, besides other factors like too less content, bad balancing, too less communication, bad decisions, not fixing bad bugs, missing common systems, too heavy custom, etc.

"Good" servers nowadays need a lot of effort and planning/thinking to get a long-term project. This is why there are fckers dropping one server after another just to grab that good cash.

 

[Fliperworld]

I agree with the previous responses: allowing RMT will be a major headache because of bots.

I am not, nor have I ever been, involved with any Flyff private server, but I deal with bot-related situations on both sides—avoiding them and, in the past, creating bots as requested several years ago.

In some cases, by monitoring and controlling bots effectively, I often did what we call here in Brazil "fazer vista grossa" (turning a blind eye), allowing some bots that contributed positively to the game’s activity to operate unnoticed.

The key to good control over these situations has already been mentioned in previous posts:

1. Have an efficient logging system: It doesn’t necessarily need to log everything but should focus on key points, which I can’t publicly disclose (to avoid compromising your system). This logging system should trigger alerts or flags for your staff to take the appropriate actions.
2. Maintain an active staff: Not only to review alerts but also to provide security and reassurance for players, which motivates them to stay in the game.

Other measures I usually adopt include thoroughly vetting your staff (whether based on personal trust or contractual clauses) to prevent your security system from being exposed. It’s good practice to separate the development/security team from the team responsible for analyzing the “automatic report” generated for potential bot detections. I don’t think it’s ideal for many people on the team to know the exact methods used for detection.

Stay vigilant with bot-related communities: get close to them, purchase bots if necessary, analyze them, infiltrate those communities, and follow their developments to better understand your game’s vulnerabilities and address them more quickly.

Avoid client-side bot detection systems entirely.—they’re a headache for regular users and easily bypassed by bot developers. All security should be focused on the server, from bot/hack detection to choosing who has access to the server’s security measures, as most errors come from human security failures.

 

[AshraZL]

I see. From what i can gather from all your response is RMT is not bad. But can be controlled. How about releasing a certain type of untradeable coin/currency which players can buy and redeem from you. You can charge a fee if they redeem that currency from you. It will be different currency from donate points and you can put an exchange system from that currency to donate points. Then you can just ban rmt outside of the game. But you can rmt in-game using that currency. From a buyer stand point. They buy a certain amount of untradeable coin from you. Buy an item or equipment from the market system. From a seller point. Put your item or equipment on sale by that currency. If they wanna redeem that coin to irl money there will be a fee.

And for this also to be successful. You need to have rules, logs and securities like you all said.