[MUD-Dev] BIZ: Ban selling of in-game items for real cash?

[John Arras]

On Fri, 11 Jun 2004, Peter Keeler wrote:

> There's also the "if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have
> guns" problem: if you ban eBaying outright, people will just get
> more sneaky about it. It may be better to provide an in game means
> for selling items so you can skim off the top for each transaction
> rather than eBay. My personal opinion is that I'd rather know
> about it and be annoyed by it than to be completely in the dark
> about it.

Do MMO's try to attack this problem with data mining? I recently
took a machine learning course, and was impressed with the kinds of
results you can get with classification and clustering algorithms
applied to "messy" data. I assume most companies keep good track of
how items are moved around between characters, so they could keep
track of good and bad trades and the network flow of bad trades and
so forth.

It seems like the kind of problem those algorithms can currently
solve, although I assume the algorithm would have to be tweaked
quite a bit to find the correct set of attributes to care about. It
should be possible to tell if a person is a seller (or part of a
seller network [farmer -> (intermediates) -> final seller]) and from
there use IP's and credit cards and following the item flows and
such to delete the seller networks.

Do companies do this? Or is it a secret? :) Or is it done and it's
really hard to get it to work well so nobody talks about it? Or, is
it done and it works well, but companies can't afford to delete the
seller networks for fear of losing their players?

John
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