I have a fairly decent idea regarding how to prevent tournament farming by 'marking' the tournament tc with a different bit to make it easier to find who has obtained tc from tournaments.

The idea is:

User A wins tc from tournament, the tc has a searchable 'mark', like an extra bit of information or something. When User A wins enough marked tc, an alarm system will be tripped, prompting a covert investigation into their account. That way, the limit set will not be revealed, and farmers will get caught if they do it, or they will be too afraid to farm.

E: or rather, the transaction of tc to the user from wherever the tournament sends it from gets a special mark, and you increment the amount of tournaments said user has won and multiply it by the number of tc the tournament awards. Something to track all tc distributed by tournaments

The system can count all the tc won that day by every particular ip that has won, rather than just the winning user, to prevent the multi-account loophole. Registration ips need not be used.

To prevent someone from using a VPN to do it, you can set a ping cap, and make another alarm triggered by tc a user from a particular country has won(to prevent someone from using nearby, fast proxies, thus raising the chance that they will not be using a stable proxy).

i.e. Ukranian users won a total of 300,000 tournament tc today. That makes it possible to realize that someone is farming, and a further investigation into the forum's ukranian based ips would reveal the farmer.

I'm certain that a system similar to this is probably already employed(otherwise it'd be very hard to catch farmers), but, I just want to throw this out there in case it hasn't been thought of.

I did make that similar system a while ago: http://oi49.tinypic.com/2zpmb0m.jpg

Could be modified to find people who have earned more than 5k in 1 day or something.

Even being able to look up who's been farming, you tend to find out sooner by people reporting it.

Scheduling the tourneys might also work. Keep the 10 different tourney rooms but only run two or three at a time, instead of 10 tourney servers running 24/7. Then you'd have more people playing in the same place, more people to report farmers and less opportunity to farm. Though the main reason I'm saying that is, it might even bring some activity back to the black belt, and maybe even the ultimate room, if everyone isn't flocking to tourneys. I miss those rooms. :<

Scheduling would be a simple yet effective option. If many people flocked to the tournaments while they are scheduled, farmers wouldn't really be able to farm because of the amount of people present.

Either I've noticed it more lately, or, the levels have actually increased, but, it seems that there have been a lot of farmers lately.

It seems as if you guys have got it completely under control, so, I have nothing left to say other than... good job on ninjaing me on the mark system :P

Another suggestion for this idea to make it easier for the staff instead of tracking all that tc.

If someone earns a lot of tc, an automated message would be sent to a staff member, and the staff would go into the room and check IP's.

Or the automated message could contain the IP's of the players and the staff could ban/warn/infract or whatever they need to do.

There is a system that is called 'Grey List' after account is under an investigation it assume his possibilities to acces market, shop, transfering toricredits or trading items.
Fish, nice idea about your system, it also show the IP and it makes farmer's life harder,
thank you fish but now i can't understand why tourneys are still down, system is ready easy to detect and ban farmers, why they're still down?