This is mainly about the issue of gold farmers really. We have these countries where 1 dollar a day is the average wage, places in Asia are like this for example. For these people it's very good money to come into western games and farm currency/items and then sell them to us. When someone spends like 30-40 dollars on something, the company who made the sale is getting a whole month of wages in 1 sale and they get dozens of these sales a day. This is big money for them.

All this is only happening because of differences in the value of money in different regions basically.

RMT will never go away because of this, not unless you can stop outside regions accessing servers that they were not meant to play on.

Also i'm not suggesting that RMT never existed before many eastern countries found out about it, because it did, but it was on a much smaller scale. Yeah you yourself may have sold a real estate in ultima online, and there may have been a couple of places to buy gold or everquest items for example, but it wasn't the norm to expect to see farmers everywhere, and spammers, ever since it got big in the east, this whole thing got out of control.

So, do you think there could ever be a way to block unwanted regions from accessing servers that they were not supposed to play on? We already have region blocks for some games but people always get around the blocks.

Also the majority of hacking that goes on, that's only worth the while for the people doing the hacking because an mmorpg account or it's contents can net them up to several times their monthly wage in a single go. But this would be worthless to them if they were actually blocked from accessing western game servers. They'd have to live in the correct region to access it and if they did live in the correct region then hacking would suddenly no longer be such a viable cash cow because their expenses just went up 50 fold.

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

Yes I know with current technology they can get around it. But what about future technology? Or is it impossible to block no matter what?

Originally posted by evemaster00

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

Yes I know with current technology they can get around it. But what about future technology? Or is it impossible to block no matter what?

Technologically it is "thinkable". You could measure the ping for example (using proxies yields a high ping), but that would also punish those, who have a bad (albeit legit) connection.

With the use of Proxies, there will never be a 100% sure way to prevent out of region people.

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

This is a common mispercepetion. 99% of the farmers are labeled Chinese gold farmers, but aren't. There are still a handful of actual chinese gold farmers, but most are stopped from China itself as they are way more harsh on laws to prevent the sales of digital currencey and items.

Originally posted by DeeK3

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

This is a common mispercepetion. 99% of the farmers are labeled Chinese gold farmers, but aren't. There are still a handful of actual chinese gold farmers, but most are stopped from China itself as they are way more harsh on laws to prevent the sales of digital currencey and items.

That might be true. But those I met were definitely Chinese, since they were unable to talk in English, but I was able to communicate with them in Chinese (I know a little bit), nothing serious, just "how are you" and "do you have fun" and the like

Originally posted by evemaster00

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

Yes I know with current technology they can get around it. But what about future technology? Or is it impossible to block no matter what?

If future technology ever goes to having shared central processing systems as seen in sci-fi where a large community basically shares a single hyper-advanced computer for all their needs ( I believe most sci-fi ship computers in things like Star Trek follow this system. There's a single computer keeping track of everything on the ship from life-support to weapon systems and while users have some private files on the hard drive they don't have seperate operating systems. )

In such a case it would be possible. The amounts of actual computers would dramatically decrease ( instead of 1 computer for every person you'd go to 1 computer for every 1.000 people. ) and every such computer would probably have much the same operating system. It would become possible to track down signals since you only have to ask a few computers max and they would always respond in the expected manner ( instead of having to account for the possibility that one of the proxies is using a 10 year old linux OS. )

But I'd say things like that are some ways off. Though if Moore's Law continues to hold then it could be sooner then expected.

Not all gold farmers are chinese.  I've seen gold farmers from Eastern Europe, Asia and even South America.

Blocking IP's is the weakest way to stop people from accessing anything on the net as it is so easy to get around it if you put in a little effort.

Originally posted by DeeK3

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

This is a common mispercepetion. 99% of the farmers are labeled Chinese gold farmers, but aren't. There are still a handful of actual chinese gold farmers, but most are stopped from China itself as they are way more harsh on laws to prevent the sales of digital currencey and items.

This is rubbish. There is hundreds of thousands of farmers employed in China today. Yeah not all farmers are chinese, but the majority of them do come from asian and other eastern countries.

BTW the ban on goldfarming in china that was big news around a year ago, that lasted about 2 days. It turned out they didn't ban it afterall.

I think its reasonable to presume that the people behind goldfarming which often involves hacked accounts and credit cards will have no problem with regional restrictions.

Also the problem isn't the farmers, its the buyers. As long as there is a market, there will be people to serve it.

Originally posted by evemaster00

Originally posted by Teiraa

People can just use proxies to circumvent any IP block.

Codemasters has banned all Chinese IP from their LOTRO servers and it works quite well. But even after the ban, I still have occasionally seen Chinese gold farmers.

Yes I know with current technology they can get around it. But what about future technology? Or is it impossible to block no matter what?

   Just remember that for every measure put in place to stop something, there are going to be inventive people working quickly to circumvent it.  Why do you think governments and companies like Microsoft actively recruit these people :D!

Yes.  It's called "unplugging the power cord".

Oh, you want to block one region without blocking all regions?  Hmm... that's harder.

The problem, as others have said, is proxy servers that can make it look like you're in whatever region you want.