Article: SEGA Cracking Down on RMT and Cheaters in PSO2 (JP)

[Tomeeboy]

In a post on the official Phantasy Star Online 2 players site Friday, SEGA reminded players about Article 10 Section 14 of the PSO2 Terms of Use, which prohibits the buying or selling of in-game items in exchange for real world currency, commonly known as Real Money Transactions (RMT). The post goes on to say that SEGA will take strict actions, such as account suspensions, against any accounts that participate in these transactions, regardless of the circumstances or reason.

With reports of suspicious characters and potential gold farming exploiters becoming somewhat common, it is probably safe to assume that some of the recent economic changes, made during the the 10/10 content update, will also serve a dual purpose of hindering common practices used when farming in-game currency for RMT sale. While not noted in the official patch notes, SEGA did also implement a new cheat detection system during Tuesday's update. This new system, revealed by PSO2 producer Sakai in a supplemental update to yesterday's emergency maintenance, will help SEGA better detect cheaters and suspend their accounts.

These problems are certainly nothing new to online games, but it is good to see SEGA taking an active and early approach to dealing with them. Players can help, too, by reporting suspicious activity through a special form on the official Japanese player site. Have any thoughts on how SEGA is handling things so far? Feel free to share them in the comments section, or over in the PSO2 forums!

[Chik'Tikka]

Hopefully, it won't get out of hand and they end up banning innocents in the process+^_^+ it happened during July's hacks???

[silva9]

Yes that's likely to happen at some point though I hope not as well, but keep in mind this is a PC only game which can be bad in the sense as its much easier to hack! that's what killed PSU on the PC so many hacks and crashings of the servers each time it happen we lost many people in the process so I for one am glad to see Sega do something about it this go around, and I hope they will set fourth a policy and enforce it to the T, for the length of the games life! and hopefully it being PC only, will make the updating process/DLC much easier to implement on Segas part (NO LAZY MONTHS AFTER JAPAN LIKE PSU) and save em money so the game will thrive longer heres hoping

[Finalzone]

To be precise, PSU is a Microsoft Windows game plagued with security issue. The inclusion of Gameguard did not help either because of backdoor showing that
security through obscurity never worked at all. Possible solution is the use of OpenSSL, SHA1 or SHA256.

[metatime]

security through obscurity and security through open source have their benefits and negatives. Nothing is perfect and security isn't meant to stop all hacks like how banks can be broken in but is it worth it?