(EDIT:
Love the conversation you guys are having here! Where has this community been all my gaming life...)
Let's say Sally Sell-A-Lot scores herself one sweet riven. I mean, this riven? It makes a Godroll look like moist ass. We're talkin' like +500% damage on a Lanka or something. This is the riven you
need. So, of course, she's gonna sell that shit, and she's gonna sell it for a lot - which is good, since she's tapped out of plat right now. This will help her a lot. Sally busts her butt at this, you see, because she cannot buy platinum. (We won't go into why. This is an example, not character development for a novel, after all.)
So she lists on Trading channel, and before long, a guy by the name of TotallyLegitGamer comes along, offering to buy. No haggle. Sally's thrilled, does her due diligence as a saleswoman, and makes the sale. Riding that capitalistic high, she decides to give some of that back to DE so she can get some sweet Fashionframe goodies. After yakking a bit on Region and enjoying her night, she logs off and drags herself to bed. It was a long day, but hey - she was successful. She did
good today, and she's happy about that.
Until she wakes up next morning and finds she can't log in.
~ ~ ~
We all know the rest of Sally's story by now. TotallyLegitGamer wasn't totally legit. He used fraudulent plat - in this case, plat he bought with a credit card, then charged back - and DE caught wind of it. Under current guidelines, Sally (who didn't do anything wrong and, quite frankly, never has) is ass out. She's gonna have to pay plat to get back to her game and her friends... and if you'll remember, in this example, she can't buy plat.
So we've lost a good player trying to get rid of a bad player, who's just going to come right back with a new account because F2P. But it CAN be different.
This is how pretty much every other game company who allows trading to occur between players handles the above example:
- The Game Company has what is called a "transaction server". This server records the interactions of players with other players, esp. regarding trades and finance. That's all it does. (It could be fancier but that usually requires a much larger budget than most indies can afford.) With some basic scripting the likes of which CodexBot has, said server kicks out "red flag" transactions - Sally's being one of them - to our loss prevention guy. (In this case, the specific scripting is a cross-check with Accounting's transaction records to see if anyone's bought plat, traded with it and then did a chargeback. This is just one of many ways such a system can work.)
- Our loss prevention person at The Game Company (we'll call him Lorenzo Lamas because that guy really needs work) sees this and is able to verify that, yeah, scummy TotallyLegitGamer is trying to get something for nothing.
- Lorenzo then shuts down TotallyLegitGamer's account first thing. He can try logging TLG's IP, but anyone who's ever worked IS can tell you it's probably not going to matter. Still, it's something he does, just in case.
- With TLG's account shut down, Lorenzo can work in peace to undo the scammer's actions. Working to a hot early 90s steel-guitar montage song, Mr. Lamas finds TLG's trade VICTIM (treating victims like accomplices is very very bad, DE!) and undoes the trade.
- Noticing this leaves Sally with a negative trade balance, he then undoes Sally's purchases, being careful to send an email to Sally's account to explain she was the victim of sales fraud and that everything has been set back to the way it was.
- Now when Sally logs back in, she'll see the trade has been undone. And she's probably gonna be sad. She might not even check her email (though she really should and it's not Lorenzo's nor TGC's fault that she didn't!), but the point is she can still log in.
The victim wasn't locked up with the criminal. Justice - true justice - was served.
Look, DE, I appreciate your situation. For five years, you've been The Little Indie That Could. Well, you're not that anymore. You're The Little Indie That DID. You're officially A Big Deal Now™.
It's time to act like it. Hire a good PR person, and hire a good IS person. More if you need it.
But it's time to grow into those AAA developer shoes. It's time to do right by the victims of your own internal processes.
