Ashes of Creation will have Pay To Win

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But that's the thing though. At which point does a definition become completely false? If any form of rmt is considered p2w, then even getting another account for the game would be p2w because it allows you to do more stuff than someone who only has their own account (that's if we don't even consider having the game in the first place as p2w, cause some people can't afford it and "lose" as the result). Do we now have to forbid having more than one account?

P2W has always meant "devs are officially selling smth that gives you an in-game advantage". And rmt has always been "an illegal trade of real money for in-game smth". But somehow those two are now equal? To me that sounds a bit crazy.

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All that Intrepid need to is track repetitive player activity in the same region with relation to the amount of certificates/materials on the character's person. Flag anyone who spends too much time farming the same mobs or gathering the same mats (if that's gonna be even possible) and then have a GM check that player for "botness".

Mobs won't be dropping gold and instead will drop certificates that must be traded for gold in a node. You just track any big amounts of certs exchanges (on top of tracking big amounts on players), flag the player who made the exchange and then look at his trading logs before and after the exchange. And this way you'll most likely catch quite a few bot networks (including the final buyers).

There's a few ways of going around that kind of process, but at least the ones I can come up with would require a ton of accounts, a ton of manual labor and a ton of risk on top of all that. All of which would increase the price of rmt gold drastically, which would already cut down the amount of potential rmters in the game. And if you then track sudden changes in gold amounts on players, you'd make all the buyers work way harder to "launder" the money properly, which kinda defeats the point of "I pay money and I get what I want".

Alternatively rmters could go down the route of trading pure pieces of gear for real money, but this could be tracked by linking market prices of gear to that gear's value and then tracking sudden changes in character evaluations (i.e. got too much expensive gear out of nowhere).

In other words, you just need a proper AI algorithm and active GMs that have great tools. Obviously you won't stop 100% of rmt, but you'll decrease it by so damn much that it'll just be unnoticeable.