Pvl I agree because,
S3 is expensive in Turkey and no one can pay this money. I sold the TC money and got back the S3 money I paid. I even bought a keyboard for my computer. TC money enables both LFS and TC to be activated. Without TC money there wouldn't be many players or S3 buyers.
I am sorry but what?.. There's a handful of players misusing a system and making their own alternative thing but now it's the whole system that's bad? I thought the subject was renting/rented accounts.
I genuinely think you're blowing things out of proportions.
We're talking about roleplay servers you usually frequent after a day at school or at work to have fun, play with friends, have some kind of progression to keep everything interesting, etc.. Not a political warfare.
A handful of people misusing something shouldn't warrant accusing a whole community by itself.
Please take action only on the "baddies", not your everyday people.
This is an official response to the questions and points raised in this thread, in relation to the current account rental-related issues.
Do [TC] allow users to exchange real money for [TC] in-game money? Why do people do it?
Our current stance is neutral. While we do not officially encourage this activity, we allow people to advertise these services on our platforms, including our forum. However, any exchange is at the risk of both parties.
Despite the easy ways to earn in-game money, the buyer wants to quickly gain without putting in the hours. Meanwhile, the seller chooses to make a few real-life £€ by selling some of their in-game savings, which should have been legitimately gained in the first place.
We have an economy where things can be traded, mostly cars. A common car is about 40k, however hyper-cars may have an in-game value of 200k. Based on past trading, the average exchange rate is about 1€ real money per 10,000 € in-game money.
Will [TC] stop the transfer of in-game money between users?
We cannot do this, as there are many legitimate reasons for the movement of money between users. Including:
Trading vehicles / property
Event participation, including money pot management, entry fees and prize distribution
Payment for collisions or incidents e.g., as an apology or courtesy
Personal favours, such as skin-making
Helping out a friend who is new to the server
We believe that outright preventing players from sending money to each other would result in different, more significant problems for us.
It is also quite likely that desperate players would find ways to circumvent the system, with the honest players left in a worse position.
This is what we are doing to help alleviate the issue of account rentals:
It can be difficult for us to identify cases of account rental. However we now take a more stringent approach to these cases. If an account is clearly a rental account, we will disable it on our end meaning it can no longer play on [TC]. Furthermore:
We have identified cases where users have felt the need to use illegitimate methods to earn in-game money (i.e., abusing the InSim). This is possibly the actions of users renting an account and needing to pay the account owner. We take all cases of ill-gotten gains very seriously. Our usual course of action is money removal and a ban.
We have a long-standing policy where we do not unban accounts which were banned and then allegedly passed to a different owner. Our unban-related policies can be viewed in full on our forum.
We continue to detect and action cases of ban evasion.
Chuck is looking into a few possible internal logging changes which may help flag suspicious money transfers.
We are happy to hear more specific ideas in the interest of reducing the ongoing account rental issues.
BP on behalf of [TC] CityDriving Management
-
(TKGX)
DELETED
by Scawen : really too much rubbish and false speculation
Should also be noted that if a website does need to authenticate that you are who your LFS Username is, LFS does offer itself as an OAuth 2 provider to authenticate with and should integrate with that rather than asking for your direct credentials.
Let's not forget the features of TC worked fine for many many years. Then a select group of people starts doing illegal things, which CANNOT be TC's money system fault, considering it wasn't always a problem. Find and eliminate the real problem, instead of just removing a big chunk of what a community in LFS is about.
It's like removing all cars in the world because there are bad drivers. Yes it stops the problem, but it's a bit silly isn't it?
It would not be the same gameplay experience. The interesting thing is that players can do business with eacher, in whatever ways they please. It is not limited to a handful of scripted fixed options.
Such economics naturally develop in many multiplayer games.
Here is a video about a famous example:
Elite is an multiplayer space simulation. Players can be traders, pirates, explorers, fight each other or form alliances and so on. Importantly, you can run out of fuel and be stranded in some empty corner of the galaxy. So some players formed a guild named "Fuel Rats" whose service is to rescue such stranded pilots by bringing them fuel. Over time things got much more complex, for example even the most "evil" space pirates do not shot at the ships of Fuel Rats because they became so respected.
Such system was never intended by the developers, it developed naturally through player interaction. I think it is an interesting video about such ingame economics and what fascinates players about it.
On the other hand, trading ingame-money for real-money is always a bad thing. It is bad for the gameplay and people.
Often you have people in poorer countries "farming" ingame-items that are bought by richer gamers.
It is also impossible to prevent and it has some edge cases.
However, it should be possible to prevent account-sharing through technical means.
(ip-logging and so on)
I doubt that many people eventually buy new licenses.
Most people likely share accounts simply they can play for free.
Maybe someone can do the math:
How many hours do you need to play until you have enough TC-money to buy a LFS license?
How does that compare to working a normal average job?
How does LFS license price relate to all the other stuff needed to play? (computer, internet, controller hardware)
If you're not a fan of OAuth you can have people specify their LFS username when they sign up on the site, give them a token, and then have an insim command to use the token to activate the account if the username matches.
Im not 100% sure on this, but id imagine the person renting out the accounts would keep the profit for themselves instead of buying an LFS account for the renter. Makes more sense for the person renting out the accs to keep profiting from the renters indefinitely
No matter what precautions you take, I don't think anyone will solve the rental situation.
I know that TC INSIM is a special INSIM. I don't know if it pulls the internet IP address like Lapper or the PC IP address. They can solve this problem by detecting a different IP entry. If it's like lapper, that's impossible. Thus, the rent problem cannot be solved. Someone rents their account for 5,000TC per day. 150,000TC money in 1 month will be able to buy one S3 license in two and a half months. It is not an issue that concerns me, but if this issue is being discussed here, I think it is being discussed to take precautions. LFS says it wants to end the illegal licensing issue.
How accurate is it to legitimize the sale of in-game currency? I think this problem will not go away if the sale of money is not banned.
Tighter control of LFS license unlocks maybe? Sounds like accounts can be unlocked much more frequently than I thought. I wouldn't know, I have only a PC and a laptop which LFS is installed to and I barely use the laptop.
3.3 of the T&C's says you get a spare unlock every week. Perhaps extend that period or remove it?
I frankly doubt that the renting thing is really such a big issue. There have mostly been rumours, but how big is the actual thing? 5 accounts? 10 accounts? Hardly worth the hassle.
But if you think something needs to be done, then I would suggest something like a machine limit, similar to Spotify or Amazon etc, where you can only authorise a certain number of devices at the same time. Maybe 2, or maybe just one. This would only affect the online mode, the offline unlock mechanism can stay as it is.
Example:
- Player wants to access in-game online services -> Check if PC is listed as authorised device? -> Yes -> Allow access -> No -> Check if free licence available? -> Yes -> Register this PC as authorised device -> Allow access -> No -> Error message in-game -> Account owner has to logon to lfs.net and remove an old device from the list of authorised devices -> Player can try again
But we didn't invent PayPal or real money. Even in Monopoly, there is nothing that prevents one player giving the other real money in exchange for some in-game asset. You're kinda asking us to remove the money, then people will use other assets, like cars. So we gonna remove them too? It's like removing the money from Monopoly and then the houses and hotels. But what is left on the board without money, houses and hotels? Nothing. An empty board
You're asking who wins. I'm asking who loses. Who is losing anything here? Cause I really don't see anyone.
well, TC created a server where u have to drive to get money to buy new cars.
Now realize that the simple fact of being able to get that TC money in exchange of something else, "assets" as u write it (hmm, here too, think about it for a second lol that word), literally kills the spirit of the server.
There are other ways to give new drivers some starting bonus.
Atm, if u have friends or real money, u get an unfair advantage (cheating, yes) on other players who dont. This recreate the breeding grounds for the IRL world capitalistic perversions to emerge, when u could have taken advantage of having control on a virgin virtual world and use some imagination to create and experiment new ways, new mechanics, that allows to keep things out of the "monetization of anything" craze.
Fail.
Well what you have, by allowing people to buy game credits, is several things.
Off the top of my head:
1) The ability for people to get 'rich' in game without actually doing the work which I believe you intended as the 'game' of TC. Basically they get the reward without actually playing. I guess that wasn't the original plan, but correct me if I'm wrong.
2) Richer people can buy credits so now they can dish them out and look very generous, compared with the poorer people who actually have to work for it. Here you recreate real-world inequality, oddly as a direct mirror to the real world.
3) This system is supporting and unintentionally encouraging the rental server system where rental ringmasters buy licenses which poorer people use to generate money for the ringmaster. It reminds me of some pretty bad things in the real world. Also it is against our license agreement, but you are basically OK with that.
So after all the support I've given to cruise servers and TC, now the result is you are recreating many ugly aspects of capitalism in a game world and supporting a license rental trade in direct contravention of our license agreement.
I read that this real world money purchase of game credits is a problem for many game developers, and it's a problem that is going to grow for you and us. We receive emails about the problems and contravention of the license agreement from people who have bought their license legitimately, so it is now a distraction for us and hinders development.
So yeah, it's not good. It creates bad feeling as you have allowed a fun game to shift towards real world earning instead of staying on the fun side.
You realise the concept of in game currency within [TC] isn’t new, right? Seems like you’re making us out to be the root cause of a newly discovered problem when it really isn’t us.
I'm sorry but that is completely blown out of proportion. The server has been operating like this for I can't count on my fingers how many years, and now suddenly it's unethical and promoting inequality?
By that logic, how is it equal or fair that I play with a 10 dollar office mouse, but someone else is using a 2000 dollar simulator setup with clear advantage on LFS? How is it equal that rich people who can afford S3 get to enjoy it and benefit from all the cool things it gets, but poor people who are stuck in S2 cannot?
At the end of the day, the TC cruise server is a relaxing server with a compact community (excluding the people abusing the rental system)who enjoy the multitude of mechanics and progression systems available thanks to Chuck. And are we really comparing real inequality and actually serious real world issues to a video game server where maybe the biggest inequality difference is around 100 dollars at most?
The whole "In-Game Currency Trading" is just another way of making more issues for the developer and the game itself.
Instead of using a in-game currency, there should be a rental system instead, wich is a "win-win" for everybody.
Player drive to earn a currency that is not tradeable, but instead you're able to use it for what you want. Either rent a car for X amount of time, or buy the car.
Making people eligible to trade in-game currency, just enables RMT or in this case rental system, there is a reason why most game company don't allow this.
And honestly, if in-game currency trading is the only thing that keep people playing on TC, then i wouldnt really say you got a loyal community.
It is very discouraging and demotivating to read these comments. As a team, [TC] put in a lot of effort to provide a fun atmosphere for everyone. A lot of people enjoy our community which is reflected in the player numbers and the fact we have many loyal, excellent members of the community. I understand that LFS developers also put a lot of effort. I thought we were meant to be on the same side.
I am personally very sad to read this post which is blaming [TC] instead of opening constructive dialog to try to resolve the problem of account sharing.
This post is just from me, not a response from TC as a whole.
Fact of the matter is, if the LFS developers wish to enforce their ToS/EULA (or whatever they like to call it), perhaps the onus should be on them to implement mechanisms to enforce those terms (i.e don’t share accounts etc).
