EconGuard

A shared economy audit ledger and anti-abuse / RMT-detection core for Paper.

EconGuard doesn't move money and has no player-facing features. It's the piece your other economy plugins report to — one unified ledger, one place to investigate, one audit trail for a ban or rollback. RoyalBank, RoyalAuctions, and RoyalBazaar all report to it automatically, and its public API lets any plugin do the same.

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The problem it solves

Every economy plugin grows its own half-blind anti-abuse layer. The bank sees deposits, the auction house sees sales, the shop sees purchases — and none of them see each other. So the one pattern that actually matters stays invisible to all of them:

A three-day-old account receives 500M through an auction "sale" of a dirt block, immediately banks it, and withdraws it over the next week.

The auction house sees a weird sale. The bank sees a big deposit. Neither sees RMT. EconGuard does — because every plugin reports into one ledger, and detection runs across sources, not within a single one.

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Detection signals

EconGuard runs four signals over the unified ledger:

• Large transaction — logs any unusually large single movement (informational).
• Young incoming transfer — flags a new account receiving a large lump sum in one go.
• Velocity — flags a new account gaining wealth abnormally fast within a rolling window.
• Counterparty correlation — flags the same payer repeatedly funding the same receiver across different channels (bank, auction, pay). This is the one that catches RMT rings, and the one a per-plugin detector structurally cannot replicate.

The young-account gate is the core idea. Two of the signals only fire on new accounts — because wealth arriving with no time invested is the real RMT fingerprint, while a veteran selling a lucky drop is not suspicious. Flagging the veteran is exactly how an anti-abuse system trains staff to ignore it.

Flags, not punishments

EconGuard surfaces abuse; it never auto-punishes. The in-game half of an RMT deal looks identical to a legitimate gift, so nothing on your server can block it with certainty. A false ban costs far more than a missed flag — so EconGuard flags for a human to review and leaves the decision to you.

Alerts and flags surface to the console, to online staff with the econguard.alerts permission, and to an optional Discord webhook.

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Reviewing a suspect

A single command surface for investigation, instead of cross-referencing each plugin's separate logs:

Command	Action
/eg flags	List accounts flagged for review
/eg flags clear [player]	Clear all flags, or one player's
/eg history <player> [limit]	Unified money history across every source, newest first
/eg stats	Ledger size, flag count, and detection status
/eg reload	Reload the config

/eg history is where you see the chain — value arriving via an auction sale, then leaving via a bank withdrawal — that no single plugin could show you.

Tuning

The default thresholds are deliberately high, sized for a large-currency-supply server, and on a smaller economy they may never fire. Calibrate them against your own numbers, run for a week, then read /eg flags. A detector that flags twenty accounts a day gets ignored — fewer, higher-confidence flags are the goal.

To actually cap the damage of RMT (rather than just detect it), pair EconGuard with a currency maximum and friction — limits, cooldowns, or tax — on player-to-player transfers.

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For the whole suite

Install EconGuard once and every Royal* plugin feeds it — no configuration required on either side:

Plugin	Reports
RoyalBank	deposits, withdrawals, transfers, upgrade payments, interest
RoyalAuctions	auction and buy-it-now sales (buyer and seller)
RoyalBazaar	market buys and sells

Each of those plugins runs perfectly well without EconGuard — the integration is a single optional lookup, so nothing breaks when it's absent. With it installed, you get cross-plugin correlation and one audit trail.

For developers

EconGuard exposes a small, generic public API. Reporting a money movement from your own plugin is one statement, and it's a no-op when EconGuard isn't installed — so you don't need a hard dependency:

EconGuard.get().ifPresent(api -> api.record(
    MoneyEvent.builder(player.getUniqueId(), player.getName())
              .source(Sources.SHOP)
              .action("purchase")
              .amount(price)
              .incoming(false)   // money leaving the player
              .build()));

Run a custom shop, a /pay bridge, or a crate/reward plugin? Report those movements too and pull them into the same ledger. The more sources report, the sharper the correlation. Full API reference — the MoneyEvent builder, Sources, Flag, and the two things to get right — is on the wiki.

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Storage

SQLite by default, MySQL for a network. SQLite (econguard.db) needs no setup and is ideal for a single server; point it at MySQL instead and every server on your network reports into one shared ledger — which is exactly what makes cross-server correlation possible. Either way the ledger and flag list are bounded by a configurable per-player row cap that's pruned on startup, and writes are asynchronous so they never block gameplay. JDBC drivers are downloaded at runtime by Paper's library loader — nothing is bundled into the jar.

Requirements

• Paper 1.21+ (tested on Paper 26.2)
• No hard dependencies — EconGuard installs and runs on its own (it just has nothing to record until a reporting plugin is present)
• Optional: a Discord webhook for alert mirroring

Installation

1. Drop EconGuard.jar into your plugins/ folder.
2. Start the server — config.yml generates under plugins/EconGuard/.
3. Any suite plugin already installed begins reporting automatically.
4. Tune config.yml to your economy and run /eg reload.

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Part of the suite

EconGuard is the audit core for RoyalBank, RoyalAuctions, and RoyalBazaar — but it's optional for all of them, and any plugin can feed it. Full documentation is on the GitHub wiki.