Don't crush RMT, keeping it alive and healthy is a positive, not a negative. Disclaimer - might be TLDR XD ( Not a complaint :D )

July 21, 2022

RMT can be a detriment to any multiplayer game community, however, Tarkov is far different than other MMOs or multiplayer games. Since BSG are not providing P2W to players, RMT will always be present. The difference between Tarkov and other multiplayer games is that Tarkov and the general playerbase does not suffer as a result of RMT, on the contrary, they oddly have the potential to prosper.

Players who use RMT to get gear and items do have a minor advantage in limited situations and can unlock traders, gear, hideout, etc. faster but once they enter a raid, all it takes is a lucky scav shot or a player with a large round shooting them in the head for them to lose all of that gear and money spent on it. A part of those players will then spend more money on RMT which will fuel RMT farmers, which can be a great source of income for BSG. Players winning RMT'd gear will eventually take that gear into raids themselves or sell it for RUB and buy something else, eventually losing that gear to someone else. The RMT items and value gets spread around the whole community over a period of time and the small percentage of players who do spend money on RMT is extremely small in % compared to the non-RMT playerbase. Once that RMT value is spread around, I believe it becomes negligible.

Cheating, on the other hand can be a problem for Tarkov and most(if not all) RMTers are cheating in order to make a profit. The sad reality is that cheaters can never be completely removed and they don't need to. Cheaters are a problem when they use cheats to kill other players and run about in the game, unchecked. If cheaters use cheats for RMT then they become a much smaller issue. To my knowledge, because of the trouble BSG has gone through to punish them, they refrain from killing players and focus on gathering loot from maps in order to sell it. There will be the occasional regular player who buys cheats to kill others but they are eventually dealt with.

The cheaters who RMT are people who purchase multiple accounts and once they are banned, they purchase accounts again to keep making money. This in turn brings BSG money from new accounts. If RMT cheaters would be completely dealt with or RMT would not become profitable, then all that revenue BSG gets from them would be lost. In my opinion, that revenue is important to BSG because it provides them with a kind of "subscription" income to their game and brings in steady and consistent numbers monthly.

These RMT-ers and occasional regular cheaters can be controlled with employees who solely focus on banning accounts and verifying reports. I believe BSG has virtual warehouses of data on cheaters and RMTers like, % of raids they are in, % of playerbase who cheats, impact of restrictions on RMT and cheats, players who use RMT services, etc. with this data, BSG can even create estimates of how much money RMTers are making and can use that to their advantage. I believe that hiring people who will focus solely on banning cheater & RMT accounts will cause an increase in income for BSG because of the increase in accounts being bought again for RMT. There will be a tipping point there and that's where the balance needs to be struck. Actively banning accounts and relying less on Anti-Chat software will cause less regular players to cheat, or will at least get them banned much faster while causing RMT cheaters to purchase more accounts monthly to keep RMT-ing.

Hiring people to actively ban accounts does bring a cost to the developers and that is where data on RMT accounts can come in handy. If an employee can ban enough accounts to cover their wages and causes RMTers to purchase even more accounts, then BSG can actually make a profit while addressing the issue and building up a massive deterrent to the use of cheats like Aimbots, invisibility and the like, which are the only real problem.

Edited July 21, 2022 by Vladone1

July 21, 2022

You must be trolling

1.2k · July 21, 2022

RMT (selling and buying ingame items on a gray/black market for real world money) is just as bad as any aimbot, wallhack, or whatever other cheat.

The way BSG has gone about it (restricting what items and quantities of said items can be sold, dropped, and picked up) hurts the average player just as much as the cheater or RMT-er.
If an anti-cheat/anti-RMT feature hurts the average player, then it's not a worthwhile feature. Figure out some other way to deal with the problem, or don't do anything at all.

July 21, 2022

Thats a pretty funny joke you made there op.

It was a joke right?

July 22, 2022

DESTROY RMT PLEASE. infact i want you to go after the rmt traders who post rare items for items on the flea market and if they do it a lot ban them. they don't need the money.

1.5k · July 22, 2022

op please refrain from making any suggestions on cheater and rmt topics at all. your point of view is purly guided on "potential gain of $". while yes 99,9% of games intents to make money an uncontrolled 3rd party using your service usually never brings much positives to the community/game as an whole. trying to controll that and making it one of your marketing fields also only is faced with a alot of negative feedback of large portions of your community (good example is wow).

your goal should always be baning cheaters/bugabusers and preventing rmt if u run any form of mmo

Edited July 22, 2022 by Flolelan

July 22, 2022

There is no possible, affordable way to deal with RMT and cheaters that will not completely change the user experience in a game like this. The most successful MMOs like WoW had the massive amounts of RMTers in it's prime and were kept in check by employees who had a single job, and that job was to ban them. Once the company began to employ anti cheat and automatization in that area, that was when things began to fall apart. That and offering RMT services themselves.

Cheating and RMT are there to stay and the more successful a game is, the stronger those communities will get. The wish that a great online multiplayer game will not have RMT or cheaters, will be successful and be developed for years and years to come is not an achievable reality. The only way RMT will go away is if there is no player interaction at all in the game or the game servers will be completely empty, and even then RMTers will still sell accounts.

The solution is to dampen RMT and cheating, not expunge them. I'm sure that making RMTers unnoticeable is perfectly achievable.

43 minutes ago, Flolelan said:

op please refrain from making any suggestions on cheater and rmt topics at all. your point of view is purly guided on "potential gain of $". while yes 99,9% of games intents to make money an uncontrolled 3rd party using your service usually never brings much positives to the community/game as an whole. trying to controll that and making it one of your marketing fields also only is faced with a alot of negative feedback of large portions of your community (good example is wow).

your goal should always be baning cheaters/bugabusers and preventing rmt if u run any form of mmo

The summary of my suggestion is the same. Instead of changing the game to make it harder for RMTers and Cheaters, hiring people to actively ban them could be a better solution that could also carry a potential income gain as a result.

Edited July 22, 2022 by Vladone1

July 22, 2022

Defeats whole purpose of the game, shut up

July 22, 2022

Incentivizing more cheaters to join the game will make the game worse (not better). What the OP has suggested has highlighted their immoral character. Worst suggestion I have seen on the forums pretty much ever.

July 24, 2022

On 7/22/2022 at 4:50 PM, Datvivar said:

Incentivizing more cheaters to join the game will make the game worse (not better). What the OP has suggested has highlighted their immoral character. Worst suggestion I have seen on the forums pretty much ever.

How have I suggested incentivizing cheaters to join. Please explain? I'm genuinely curious how you came to understand this

July 25, 2022

On 7/23/2022 at 9:09 PM, Vladone1 said:

How have I suggested incentivizing cheaters to join. Please explain? I'm genuinely curious how you came to understand this

On 7/21/2022 at 9:14 AM, Vladone1 said:

Tarkov and other multiplayer games is that Tarkov and the general playerbase does not suffer as a result of RMT, on the contrary, they oddly have the potential to prosper.

On 7/21/2022 at 9:14 AM, Vladone1 said:

and most(if not all) RMTers are cheating in order to make a profit.

July 26, 2022

Context, my friend. Context.

Facts: Cheaters and RMTers can't be completely dealt with unless you play single player and there's no kind of competitiveness to the game.

As long as there's potential gain on a competitive level or monetary gain, there will always be cheaters just like in every PC game, console game, sports competition that ever was and will be.

The more popular a game is, the more interest hackers will have to exploit it for monetary gain by making cheats.

If people aren't interested in cheating in a game, sport, e sport, etc... that means there's no interest in that product and that product vanishes. Tarkov being a competitive PVP game falls into that category. The more RMT sites you see that peddle Tarkov products, the more popular the game is becoming, which is a positive thing for the health of the game.

My suggestion was to BAN these cheaters by employing people to do it actively and aggressively while offering a point of view in which the cost of hiring these employees could potentially be covered by RMTers who will keep on purchasing accounts because the gain outweighs the cost of buying a new account. While banning these RMTers, regular players who cheat will be banned more aggressively as well, resulting in a far better experience for the non cheating players. Regular cheaters are far less inclined to keep purchasing new accounts and cheats after they've been banned. This means that players will get killed far less by cheaters, or even RMTers as they will want to conceal their cheats as best they can in order not to get banned. Currently, there's no such system in place and cheaters get banned in waves which does absolutely nothing for the new-player experience. On the contrary, it's a detriment to it because there's a much higher chance of losing players when a few games are plagued by a cheater on a daily basis during someone's playthrough.

July 28, 2022

On 7/26/2022 at 1:12 PM, Vladone1 said:

Facts: Cheaters and RMTers can't be completely dealt with unless you play single player and there's no kind of competitiveness to the game.

cheaters can be handled, what you need to do is deploy a patch with a new .exe each hour or two, with a total different memory layout modifying the structs and possible offsets cheaters use, you can do a very simple search and you find all of the info they need in a couple cheaters forum.

when they do anything that hurts cheaters, no matter what, is a good thing.. and trust me, I'm positive their team wouldn't be thrilled to hear the only good thing on their work is that "its a good game to cheat and make a buck on the side" - it's humiliating really, to any professional.

and don't say no one can do anything on cheating.. they have to decide if they want to eliminate or allow, the current position is to allow, as they know bans + new accounts make a stream for them.

1.4k · July 28, 2022

in the case of you being serious:

*insert every single insult that would get me banned on this forum

...like seriously wtf?

May 10

On 7/28/2022 at 5:25 PM, whoiz said:

cheaters can be handled, what you need to do is deploy a patch with a new .exe each hour or two, with a total different memory layout modifying the structs and possible offsets cheaters use, you can do a very simple search and you find all of the info they need in a couple cheaters forum.

when they do anything that hurts cheaters, no matter what, is a good thing.. and trust me, I'm positive their team wouldn't be thrilled to hear the only good thing on their work is that "its a good game to cheat and make a buck on the side" - it's humiliating really, to any professional.

and don't say no one can do anything on cheating.. they have to decide if they want to eliminate or allow, the current position is to allow, as they know bans + new accounts make a stream for them.

So everyone's just supposed to update their game every hour or 2? Yeah, I'm sure that won't get any backlash, regardless of the reason.

It's not that cheaters can't be handled, it's just an arms race that smaller companies don't have the resources to combat, and bigger companies don't want to dump the money into it anymore.