Difference between revisions of "Inf Transfer"

Revision as of 06:08, 20 March 2007

Template:Issue9 Totally a stub/wip at this point, but trying to assemble information about the potential for cross-server influence transfers with the Issue 9 consignment house.

Warnings

All of this is speculative at this point. We know that the consignment houses are cross server. And a post by Positron implied (without out-right stating) that they will not be blocking the buying and selling of an item by the same account. If this ends up blocked, this entire page is invalidated. The rest of this page will assume that it is allowed. And, as with all Issue 9 stuff, it is totally subject to change before it hits live.

Basics

The idea here is that, while the consignment houses are not designed to allow for influence transfers, they do not disallow it. The basic idea for a transfer is to have a poor character on one server offer for sale a cheap item, and then have a rich character on the same or different sever purchase the item for a large amount of Inf, effectively transferring the Inf to the poor character.

Hazards

Given how the consignment houses are understood to function, the above basic transfer method is subject to a couple of different versions of interception, where a different character than the intended recipient ends up receiving the transfer. Both involve the interceptor happening to be at the auction house during the time it takes to swap over from one toon to the other to complete the transfer. This may seem like a small chance of occurrence, except that there are likely to be people specifically waiting around the consignment houses specifically to try to make these intercepts in order to make a bunch of Inf for little effort.

Buy/resell interception

This one is actually the easier of the two to defend against. It involves the interceptor seeing the odd, low level item placed up for auction, buying it himself, and immediately relisting it in order to be the one to receive the transfer. This scheme relies on the fact that items can be bought for much larger amounts than they are actually listed for. For example, player A wants to transfer 10 million Inf from character A2 to character A1. Character A1 only has 10,000 Inf on hand. Because of the 10% listing fee, the most A1 can list the item for is 100,000 Inf. The player wants to transfer much more than that, and so goes ahead and doesn't bother listing it for even that much, instead listing it for a relatively small amount, say 100 Inf. He intends to then swap over to A2 and go ahead and buy it for 10 million Inf. But while he is changing characters, player B purchases the cheep item and immediately relists it. A2 gets logged in, and goes to purchase the item. But since he cannot see who he is purchasing from, he ends up sending his 10 mil to player B instead of character A1.

This one has a simple solution: do not try to transfer more Inf at one time than you are able to list items for. This means that, if you want to transfer 10 million to a character who is starting with only 10,000, you will need to do it in a couple of stages, getting the poor character first to 100,000, then 1 million, and finally 10 million. This protects because at each step the item cannot be purchased for less than the amount that is intended to transfer. The only way to buy/resell will effectively give the poor character the desired amount of money anyway.

Same item interception

This one is harder to protect against, and the strategy designed to protect against the buy/resell interception actually works against defending against this one.

This one is based on the Interceptor seeing the transfer being listed, and happening to have a copy of the same item already in their inventory. While there are a huge number of potential transfer items, it is still a finite list. And some types of items are much more likely to be in the hands of random Inf-poor alts. Low level TOs of various types, for instance. The interceptor watches the consignment listings, watching for a listing that happens to match an item he already has. The moment he sees such a listing pop up, he immediately lists his own copy for sale at a minimum price. According to Positron, the low offers sell first, so when the transferring player logs back in with his rich alt and goes to buy the item, it will most likely be the interceptor's version that gets sold, not the transferer's poor alt's version. Listing high to avoid the buy/resell problem just makes it harder to avoid this one.

Strategies to avoid interception

A couple of strategies have been proposed on the boards to try to avoid having transfers intercepted. None of these have been tested, and so they are all, at this point, theoretical.

Using Buy-orders

This one works on the major assumption that buy-orders are invisible. That there is no listing of outstanding buy-orders that the players can access. If there is such a listing, then this method is even more dangerous than the basic "sell-listing then buy" strategy.

But assuming that buy-orders are not visibly listed, there is a fairly simple way to be fairly safe with transfers.

1. Figure out an item that the low level possesses that is not currently up for sale.
2. Swap to the rich toon and place a buy-order for the item at the desired transfer amount.
3. Swap back to the low level toon and list the item cheaply.

This method is not 100% safe. But with no listing of the buy orders there is nothing for deliberate interceptors to see to act upon. The only danger to this is the possibility that someone else randomly lists the same item for sale between the time of the buy-order and the time that the player can place the item up for sale to complete the buy-order. Not a large chance of this happening, but still not 100% safe.

Flood the market plan

Proposed by user Zombie_Man on the game boards:

1. Rich toon on ServerA makes bids on Level 5 ToHitDebuff TOs offering 10 influence each until they're all bought out (at that low price). So, there are no more Level 5 ToHitDebuffs in WWs that are 10 inf or less.
2. Switch to poor toon on ServerB and flood WW's with 10 Level 5 ToHitDebuffs for the asking price of 1 inf* each. Wait and see if anyone's going to buy and resell in order to intercept**. If I get no buys in 10 minutes, then...
3. Switch to rich toon on ServerA and put in three buy orders for Level 5 ToHitDebuffs for 2 inf each.
4. Switch to poor toon and see if I just sold three Level 5 ToHitDebuffs. If yes...
5. Switch to rich toon and put in a buy order for a Level 5 ToHitDebuff for 10 million inf. Since I had seven Level 5 ToHitDebuffs in WWs queue, all at the lowest possible price, no one can sneak another Level 5 ToHitDebuff ahead of me. If someone were to use the buy and resell intercept method, they'd have to know to do it at least seven times in a row in order to intercept. And if they are online and buying up all sorts of lowballed TOs, see.

*(Adjust the 1 influence to minimum order amount.)

**(And if there are interceptors online, I'll just screw around with them by continually dumping all types of Level 5 enhancements on the market with multiple toons making them mad.)

Transaction log/protective buy-order plan

Proposed by user Stonewash on the game boards:

1. Find an item noone else is selling.
2. Offer to sell it at a random value slightly higher than what it's valued to. For an item valued at 10K inf, offer it for 10,632 inf.
3. Examine the last 10 transactions and remember what it said.
4. Swap characters.
5. Examine the last 10 transactions to make sure noone's bought your item.
6. Put in a buy order for 10,631 inf.
7. Buy the item for 5M inf.