Some people are using bot accounts to collect skins from drops

[Letifer]

There is a private steam group which as of now has 286 members. Nearly all of the group's members have same profile pictures, almost same names and all of them play Don't Starve Together. There is a password locked server in game named 'doogworl' which belongs to them, and 20 of group's members play on it. It has an auto gift opener mod enabled, and this allows for easy skin farming behind which there is most likely a single person. Can something be done about this?

[minespatch]

That's some Albert Temple/ Richard Katellis  level dedication there.

[Well-met]

9 minutes ago, minespatch said:

That's some Albert Temple/ Richard Katellis  level dedication there.

As long as stuff can be sold for money on the Steam Market and there are no drop limits, people will set this up no matter the game.

 

[Toros]

I strongly feel like if their goal is to make money they're making a pretty substantial mistake.  The amount of time it would take to make back what you'd spend on 40 copies of DST via skins is... pretty considerable.  Plus the hardware and electricity required, it seems like a losing preposition.

[Starlogy]

honestly, if he wants to waste his life away selling dst skins that cost like 5 cents, let him.

[Well-met]

6 minutes ago, Starlogy said:

honestly, if he wants to waste his life away selling dst skins that cost like 5 cents, let him.

Strongly doubt it's just one individual. Entire societies run off this sort of behavior and farming drops on a massive scale can be extremely profitable on popular titles such as first person shooters. Oddly enough it's usually russians or koreans into this. I suppose they're testing the grounds for DST markets.

[. . .]

I mean they bought the game, let them collect their pleated shirts and profile icons!

[imsomony]

Skins are cosmetic, they don't add anything to the player/character using them. So who cares?

 

If the argument is "marketplace sales", well, don't buy them from the marketplace. You too can play the game and/or idle and get the same things.

 

[4 Da LOLs]

another thing is most new items use spolls rather than the market meaning that their potential profits will be next to nothing in worth that can be transferred to other accounts

[ButterStuffed]

So bear with me I'm not totally sure I am calculating this correctly so if somebody notices something wrong please tell me. I am not an economist or mathematician in any way at all.

So, selling a single common item at .01 USD (The minimum they could reasonably profit from selling a DST common item in US currency) converts to about .54 Rubles (Russian Currency) according to a quick google search.

A single account can get 15 items a week which at a very low estimate could net around .15 USD or the equivalent to 8.13 Rubles a week if they managed to not get any non-tradable items. If we were to multiply this by 60 (A very low estimate of the amount of accounts this person might have) then this person is making at a really rough low estimate of 9 USD or the equivalent to about 490 Rubles a week.

For reference a single pound of chicken costs about 120 Rubles.

[Maxposting]

18 minutes ago, ButterStuffed said:

So bear with me I'm not totally sure I am calculating this correctly so if somebody notices something wrong please tell me. I am not an economist or mathematician in any way at all.

So, selling a single common item at .01 USD (The minimum they could reasonably profit from selling a DST common item in US currency) converts to about .54 Rubles (Russian Currency) according to a quick google search.

A single account can get 15 items a week which at a very low estimate could net around .15 USD or the equivalent to 8.13 Rubles a week if they managed to not get any non-tradable items. If we were to multiply this by 60 (A very low estimate of the amount of accounts this person might have) then this person is making at the very minimum 9 USD or the equivalent to about 490 Rubles a week.

For reference a single pound of chicken costs about 120 Rubles. This person is making enough money at a likely extremely underestimated minimum rate to purchase about 4 pounds of chicken a week.

wowie!

I can not starve in real life by skin afking in Don't Starve Together!

also you helped me realize that moving to russia is much more cheaper than living in czechia.

[ButterStuffed]

Ahh~~

I'm trying to find better examples of how idling in games for items and selling them on the internet is surprisingly profitable for people that live in countries with heavily inflated currency but no matter what I search up I can only find those sketchy websites selling Runescape GP for cash.

It's really quite interesting but I don't have the knowledge to explain it correctly.

[darkhero]

50 minutes ago, ButterStuffed said:

So bear with me I'm not totally sure I am calculating this correctly so if somebody notices something wrong please tell me. I am not an economist or mathematician in any way at all.

So, selling a single common item at .01 USD (The minimum they could reasonably profit from selling a DST common item in US currency) converts to about .54 Rubles (Russian Currency) according to a quick google search.

A single account can get 15 items a week which at a very low estimate could net around .15 USD or the equivalent to 8.13 Rubles a week if they managed to not get any non-tradable items. If we were to multiply this by 60 (A very low estimate of the amount of accounts this person might have) then this person is making at a really rough low estimate of 9 USD or the equivalent to about 490 Rubles a week.

For reference a single pound of chicken costs about 120 Rubles.

yes i wanted to say something like that

peope buy game in russia region cuz games are cheaper. even me that im in middle east due to worthless currency (a dollar cost x15 here) its better to buy games i russia region.

but. the market items are not effected by region change. so if i buy 5 DST which i get 10. and i idle for 150 skin in a week (600 in month). i can tell you if i be lucky i almost make money as a man work in factory here..

[Leonardo Cox]

15 hours ago, Letifer said:

Can something be done about this?

Klei has mentioned before that they couldn't realistically do anything about idlers without hurting it for everyone else, even if they did there are some people who could work around it (supposedly). So no, not really.

[TheOwl]

However, you have to buy the 60 copies first, which means they'd need a bit over 20 weeks to start making profit. And that's if your estimation of the money they make is correct. You say it's even underestimated, but I do not believe so. Given that most of the items aren't marketable or tradable, that you can't weave marketable items or trade unmarketable items at the trade inn, and that people like this will completely flood the market, eventually making all rarities cheaper, I don't think it's worth doing.

I idle on my account, getting all 15 weekly skins. If I sold all the skins I got since the update, I'd get $1.01. I'm not completely done for this week (got all 8 drops, but can't really get the daily ones, can I?) so I'll count it as a half week. That's 7.5 weeks since the drop system was updated. Which means 13.5 cents per week on average.

You'd make profit, eventually, but it would take a really long time, and that's without even counting the power you use for it.

[Cpt. KatKit]

Same thing in every single game with trading. People who have no interest in the games beside trying to make a quick profit. *cough* Artifact. 

[ShadowDuelist]

6 hours ago, ButterStuffed said:

This person is making at a really rough low estimate of 9 USD or the equivalent to about 490 Rubles a week.

For reference a single pound of chicken costs about 120 Rubles.

If we ever find someone around reddit posting "help pls how to survive on 400 rubles a week?" then we found the right person.

[CarlZalph]

@ImDaMisterL Hey, not sure if this forum can merge topics, but this topic was brought up here before:

 

[Viktor234]

3 hours ago, TheOwl said:

However, you have to buy the 60 copies first, which means they'd need a bit over 20 weeks to start making profit. And that's if your estimation of the money they make is correct. You say it's even underestimated, but I do not believe so. Given that most of the items aren't marketable or tradable, that you can't weave marketable items or trade unmarketable items at the trade inn, and that people like this will completely flood the market, eventually making all rarities cheaper, I don't think it's worth doing.

I idle on my account, getting all 15 weekly skins. If I sold all the skins I got since the update, I'd get $1.01. I'm not completely done for this week (got all 8 drops, but can't really get the daily ones, can I?) so I'll count it as a half week. That's 7.5 weeks since the drop system was updated. Which means 13.5 cents per week on average.

You'd make profit, eventually, but it would take a really long time, and that's without even counting the power you use for it.

• According to https://steamdb.info/app/322330/: The lowest recorded price for DST was less than $2 for 2 games.
  • Less than $1 for each game
• You can get all the 8 weekly skins in 9-10 hours.
  • 8 skins per week for every account you have
• With Family Sharing you can share DST with 5 other members
  • 40 skins per week for every game you bought

60 copies cost less than $60 and grant you 2,400 skins per week.

According to this, it might be profitable from the 1st week.

[ImDaMisterL]

1 hour ago, CarlZalph said:

@ImDaMisterL Hey, not sure if this forum can merge topics, but this topic was brought up here before:

 

It can, but I tend not to do it because it can get messy and hard to understand. Let's just leave the link to it here so people can see this other thread.

[Maxposting]

2 hours ago, Viktor234 said:

•  
• With Family Sharing you can share DST with 5 other members
  • 40 skins per week for every game you bought

That was nerfed with the new skin drops and you can't get more than 15 skins even if you share.

[Viktor234]

8 minutes ago, __IvoCZE__ said:

That was nerfed with the new skin drops and you can't get more than 15 skins even if you share.

Only Daily Drops were nerfed, you can still get 8 Weekly Drops with Family Sharing. You can get more than 15 skins if you have a family account (7 Daily, 8 on your account, 8 on your family account). Don't think I did not consider this,

So actually you can get 47 Skins per week with 1 Account + 4 Family Accounts, but if you manage to change your Family Sharing whenever the previous accounts already got 8 drops, you might get ~17 drops every day (7,140 skins per week) for each game you got!

[seffard]

20 hours ago, Viktor234 said:

Only Daily Drops were nerfed, you can still get 8 Weekly Drops with Family Sharing. You can get more than 15 skins if you have a family account (7 Daily, 8 on your account, 8 on your family account). Don't think I did not consider this,

So actually you can get 47 Skins per week with 1 Account + 4 Family Accounts, but if you manage to change your Family Sharing whenever the previous accounts already got 8 drops, you might get ~17 drops every day (7,140 skins per week) for each game you got!

You get at max 8 additional drops(per shared copy) no matter how many shared accounts you have.

Quote

I strongly feel like if their goal is to make money they're making a pretty substantial mistake.  The amount of time it would take to make back what you'd spend on 40 copies of DST via skins is... pretty considerable.  Plus the hardware and electricity required, it seems like a losing preposition.

If someone is spending a good time on this and you think it's not worth it, it's more likely you are missing something.

[Gagarin-ace]

21 hours ago, Viktor234 said:

• According to https://steamdb.info/app/322330/: The lowest recorded price for DST was less than $2 for 2 games.
  • Less than $1 for each game
• You can get all the 8 weekly skins in 9-10 hours.
  • 8 skins per week for every account you have
• With Family Sharing you can share DST with 5 other members
  • 40 skins per week for every game you bought

60 copies cost less than $60 and grant you 2,400 skins per week.

According to this, it might be profitable from the 1st week.

u cant get skins on family sharing anymore

p.s. looks like u still can, i was wrong