Even if you’re not particularly disturbed by the idea of spending real money on in-game currency – especially given that so many MMOs have official systems for it now – you’re probably pretty sick of the side-effects of gold-sellers in MMOs. Fraud, spam, farming, it’s all obnoxious, especially when it impacts legitimate players.
Perfect World is working on that quite literally. In a message to both Neverwinter and Star Trek Online players today, the studio announced it’s tweaking lockboxes flagged by the fraud detection system such that what’s in them isn’t permanently bound to your account – meaning you can eventually trade them.
“In order to further reduce the impact of fraud and gold-seller behavior on game economies, we are refining detection systems that are currently in place in both Neverwinter and Star Trek Online. These systems identified potential problem cases and permanently bound tradeable items to the player account. For instance, if a lockbox key or a package with a collection of items was purchased, all contents of these items would also become account bound. To improve the player experience, we are implementing a change so that such binding will no longer be permanent. Instead, these items will be bound to account for a limited duration, shown by a countdown timer. After this, the items will become tradeable. If you do not see the countdown timer, the item is permanently bound to account by design.”
