Slashdot Mirror
MMOG Economies Examined
Overanalyzed.com has an interesting (short) piece up on the Economy of World of Warcraft, discussing the way that goods and money flow into and out of player's hands. Commentary is available at Terra Nova. From the article: "Let me preface this by saying that I personally approach MMOs in a different way than most people. While most play for personal enjoyment, I come to them looking to make money. Obviously, while I do still enjoy the time I spend playing the games, I'm much more interested in crossing the boundary and selling my expertise and services in game for real life money."
...he's admitting to violating the WoW terms of service by selling items/gold for money?
Highly interesting though. I do agree that WoW needs some more high-end entertaining money sinks, but since I'm only lv25 I don't need to worry that much :P
The Terms of Service for the World of Warcraft indicate that all items in game are property of Blizzard (lame, yes.) They also ban accounts of users caught selling items for real money. I disagree with the policy, but thats how it is for now.
Of course, you can't sell an item that belongs to blizzard.
You are merely charging them a fee for transfering the item to their player.
It doesn't violate the TOS, and it doesn't infringe on Blizzards claim of item ownership.
The end result of all this is that I stopped trading because fraud was too prevalent and made the practicality of making a living off of it impossible.
So what to do
How about getting a REAL job.
A 22-year-old gamer has spent $26,500 (£13,700) on an island that exists only in a computer role-playing game (RPG.)
BBC News
He plans on making the money back through selling mining rights and taxing the hunting and mining operations of other players on the land.
Oh, and selling beachfront property.
This makes my head hurt.
And this is why no one likes Final Fantasy XI players. Sheesh.
So after having failed as a day trader this guy wants to make a living on selling items / trading currency guy on the latest MMPORG. He is pissed because Blizzard are aggressively shutting down the Ebay auctions.
Ignoring the IP/Ownership issues, I have little sympathy for him. First and foremost it is meant to be a game, not a method for you to make a living. Why doesn't he go grind Lineage II or FF where this seems to be tolerated by the devs? (Though I understand FF has been cracking down on this a bit lately - maybe due to the arrival of WoW?)
I think you can go ahead and argue the legalities of who owns what and whether they have the right to sell it all you want but if I was paying to play this game, the last thing I would want in it is a legion of professional grinders/sellers spamming the chat channels.
Lastly, there have been a number of informative posts in games.slashdot over the last month or two describing what what effect the "gil sellers" in FF have had - camping items 24/7 basically monopolising level advancement to a certain point in the game. Fuck that.
You agree to a certain number of very specific rules in order to play games like this. One is no selling of in game stuff for real money. If you violate this rule they can and will ban you very quickly. He doesn't have to play the game if he doesn't want to, and it is not designed to provide a source of income to the player.
The player does NOT own their character. They are basically renting space and time from the blizzard servers for the benefit of entertaining themselves. Thats basically all it boils down to. At any time in the contract Blizzard may ban the user and terminate the user paying Blizzard. The user really can't do anything except open a new account.
During the beta, high level characters were saying the game was bad because they had a net LOSS from doing raids and high level instances and were making requests to blizzard to increase cash flow from these monsters. This type of economy would actually increase ebay demand, rather than create a situation where high level characters are running around with 1000g
I equate people like this to spam. It's annoying and affects many. But like spam they flourish because there are a few morons who pay for this. Simply stunning.
I'm all about making a profit. But not at someone else's expense.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Wow not only are you an ignorant racist fucktard, but you are even so ignorant you don't know the correct racial slur to use.
Blizzard should be making the money from the transfers, not ebay, ebayers etc. Then they would have to charge a subscription. That's what RedBedlam's doing with Roma Victor
It's kind of an inside joke, if you ever played FFXI at any point. For the past, say, 10 months, every FFXI board has had at least one and usually many active threads bitching about "gook gilfarmers" and how the "Chinese are ruining the game" at any given time. You'd log in and there'd be some random idiot shouting (zone-wide chat channel) about how the gooks were destorying the game. Constantly. For the past ten months or more.
Other funny thing is that anything that could possibly be considered in any way, shape, or form to be related to "nigger" would get players banned. If you had "nig" in your name, your character would get deleted or if they were in a nice mood instead they'd force you to change your name. Freaking asses.
This is a great idea, except for one thing: People going into the game for the sole purpose of "farming" the game's currency in order to sell it outside of the game ARE "fundamentally" throwing the economy out of whack.
For example, I played EQ a few years back. My little 52nd level halfling warrior was lucky when he had a few thousand platinum to throw around because he actually participated in the game. The money sinks provided (in his case, fletching the nicest possible arrows) were more than enough to use up whatever loot he happened upon. But, when people played the game simply to hoard the most platinum (such as by finding a frequently spawning creature type which dropped something that in-game merchants found valuable), they could skip the money sinks and then sell their largesse for real-world money. This was only possible because, of course, their character didn't have to pay in-game rent, buy food or clothing, etc. (you know, the real-world money sinks).
In short, developers CAN'T hope to completely balance their economies unless they can stop people from hoarding their loot and selling it in the real world. When they try to balance the economy in-game, they tend to mess things up for people actually trying to play the game straight-up - all for the sake of trying to ameliorate the effects of jerks like this one who, apparently, can't make it in the "real world" and instead want to capitalize on a virtual one.
Yeah I played FFXI. Wasn't funny then and isn't funny now.
Blizzard has done a lot of work to prevent selling in-game content. Most equipment earned in instances (dungeons) can't be traded to other players. All equiptment earned from quests can't be traded once they've been equipped. This leaves you with equipment you win but don't want to sell, gold, and stuff crafted with a tradeskill. Also all items have a min. level, so if a low-level character buys an item, they won't be able to use it.
I pick up a stack of feathers at the stables for 84 gil.
I walk a few meters to the Auction House and put them on for 150.
Some fletching-making crafter standing a few meters from me keeps buying them for 500.
He doesn't try to bid lower, just pays the going rate he sees in the price history.
He's too lazy to walk next door and buy them for 84.
It was so sad that I stopped doing it after a while.
What I've found out from all the online games I've been on?
Many people don't care what it costs, as long as they can afford it.
I am an attorney.
The EULA is a contract. Contracts are binding. If you agree not to trade currency to play the game, that commitment is enforceable. Therefore, companies have the right to block trading of their currency because it violates a legally enforceable agreement.
Contracts are flexible, and can change due to current legal conditions. Saying Contracts are like cement and never change is incorrect, they can be changed due to outside factors, missing conditions, or even if the contract was forced without consent.
Also, EULA's have not been proven to be a binding contacts, since its one side saying you agree without your consent. A contract is mulitple parties agreeing, an EULA is forced consent.
And before you say "Well you can walk away", No, you bought a product, then the contract comes into existence after the sale. There are lots of ways to get out of EULA's and forced contracts using this pay first, agree later contract. Paying for the product means you already had a binding agreement.
The whole IP copyright fiasco and copyright limits is a bundle of crap that is hurting everyone.
The article brings up some excellent points. While I understand the antipathy that many MMOG players feel for purchasing in-game items for real-life money, the author of the article makes some striking observations about WoW's economy. I am interested to see if gold becomes so readily available during the higher levels of the game.
A more subtle point in this article is that MMOG economies are command economies, like the economy of the U.S.S.R. These game economies are not truly driven supply and demand. The easiest solution, but the author does not touch on this idea, is to limit the amount of currency in the MMOG world. If new currency is constantly being created, then inflation is the inevitable result.
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/12/da y_trader_anal.html
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
From the WoW EULA "You may not exploit World of Warcraft for any commercial purpose".
It's not rocket science, DON'T DO IT, and don't encorage or tacitly condone it with articles like this. What next, posts from lusers along the lines of 'I keep trying to steal from my work but I find it's not profitable' and hints on 'How to get rich stealing office supplies'?
Contrary to what this luser is claming, Blizzard have said NOT to do it from the outset (and do note, this guy WAS selling things on eBay, this is NOT just 'research into economic theory'). To quote from his web site "Some of you may know at one time I tried my hand as a professional day-trader." - a day trader, GTG, does his greed and stupidity know no bounds?
He appears to be a useless article that's unable to find a job that he enjoys and that pays reasonbly well and that actually contributes something to society. Apparently unable to compete in a legitimate market (e.g. in a game like Entropy or There.com where it's perfectly acceptible to sell virtual items for real world money) he's left trying to eek out a living by illegally selling items in other games under the counter, with no regard for the cost to others of his own actions.
I would note that you can easily obtain information about the real world value of a curreny from eBay and the various sites that also illicitly sell in game currency.
There is some interesting information in the article but the truth is you don't need to actually break a legally binding contract (which is exactly what this guy has done) in order to do this level of research.
What's laughable is it's not even in depth nor even that accurate. He states 'I personally believe that the next big thing in MMOs will be tighter integration of real-life cash with in-game property. Game like Second Life, Roma Victor, and Project Entropia are just a few that are paving the way.And while each has significant flaws, I believe the first to get it right (or more realistically, right enough) will be the first to break into the mass market.'. Good Fucking Greif - if that's likely, why then has WoW (which has taken the hardest line yet of any recent MMO on the enforcing it's ban on reselling) just spanked their subscription figures into the next decade?
People don't want micropayments for items in a fantasy game, most people don't want to be constantly reminded of their already huge credit card bill and people are already tetchy enough about spending money on subscribing to games as it is (just look at the gap Guild Wars has been made to fill).
While I do there still exists an excellent oppertunity for a Virtual World that isn't a badly implimented pile of crap (like Second Life of there.com - both of which are stunnlingly retarded and apparently written by someone who's never written any software for humans, just in case you've not tried either of them) and that in such an environment I think you could conceiveably have micropayment system, that sort of system is more social activity (where most of the goods being bought are mere 'virtual bling' and the rest unlock specific features and sub games for a given length of time) and is a very distinct from a fantasy game people play to have fun in (like WoW or CoH) where the items themselves are tools (and rewards) for fun, not usually 'fun' in themselves.
In fantasy games (from SWG to WoW to L2) items such as weapons and armour represent something very different. They represent dedication to the game and a certain level of knowledge of, and achivement within the framework of the game , as opposed to say to there.com which is for virtual Chavs with little money but who like to spend what they do have on virtual clothing and bling to make people think they are not the hoop-earring wearing, council house dwelling virtual chavscum they so clearly are.
In short, it's clear people don't want to play fantasy games and pay for items in them with real world money. They have made that patently clear, it's mind boggling that the evidence for this seems to have eluded some people.
"I just want to talk to all the ****** out here. So, you spend real money in order to get pretend money (or items) in your online games. Then, for the privilege of spending (or using) that pretend money (or item) in a pretend world on pretend things (or trading for other pretend items), you pay more real money, every month.
What a bunch of ******* brain surgeons."
I don't have a problem with a guy selling virtual items (though it'd most certainly give him problems with the company hosting the game server), but that he has a market of people willing to buy him scares me.
Oh my gods in heaven READ THE ARTICLE BEFORE YOU COMMENT ON IT! The summary text on /. is misleading in that it features the quote he made about being a MMO item/char trader. That was meant to demonstrate his experience with MMO economies, not to be a statement of purpose for the whole article. If you had taken the time to RTFA you would have seen that it is a rather insightful analysis of MMO economies with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of WoW's. As far as it's value as an article goes, a game's economy is one of the biggest driving forces of any long-term MMO and such mini-economies are currently being looked at by governments and economists as a possible model for real-life economic theories to emerge from or as a testing ground for them. It's NOT an article crying about the policies Blizzard has chosen to implement as far as item/account sales goes. It's an analysis of their economy from the perspective of someone who has a lot of experience with the subject.
/. was purposely set to mislead readers into thinking it was a rant about the denial of his chosen profession in WoW and thus attract more interest in the article (read: flamewar). Or mebbe it was just coincidence. *shrugs*
If you're gonna rant for 10 paragraphs about an article, have the common decency to READ IT FIRST. It's like writing a book review after just reading the jacket cover. Take some time. Hear what he has to say. Then if he still irritates you, flame on.
As a side note, I mostly agree with the anti-selling posts. I just hate to see the insightful points made wasted on the wrong argument. Perhaps the subtext on
"Not all who wander are lost" -- JRR Tolkien
If you had taken the time to RTFA you would have seen that it is a rather insightful analysis of MMO economies with a focus on the strengths and weaknesses of WoW's.
If you'd read my post (and the article more clearly) you would clearly see that I have and understood it and that it has a nod towards some elements of merit. How on earth do you imagine I managed to pull quotes and make references to it if I hadn't read it?
It's not purely some act of innocent reseach he's doing here. Anyone who thinks that has not really read and understood the article.
He makes it quite clear he has made money selling items from EVE as well and has done this to earn a living, and has even tried to make a living at day trading. He is NOT merely commenting or researching this topic, he's someone actively exploiting the system for his own benifit, but who also happens to be posting his experiences of doing so (and note his disgruntled tone at having his ebay auctions torn down).
I've also pointed out that you don't need to actually sell items to see what they are worth (because exchange rates are posted in numerous places and can be garned from ebay too, which shows how much people are actually paying for items).
I reject the 'Winnower Rider' defence ("I'm not not shoplifing, I'm just researching for a part"), he has has freedly admitted to doing this in order to make personally profit, and he's made it very clear that is a direct goal of his - and that he is doing this material reasons, not the lofty goals of academic research into on line economies.
I suggest you re-read the article and judge it's tone more clearly.
I suppose MMORPGs have economies, but they are ultimately controlled by the developers. The company can turn rare items into common items in a matter of moments, and with those games, it really ticks you off when they do that to you.
The problem with long-lived adventure games is all the loot you find in them. Because players love loot, the game authors usually supply it, and because loot gets collected over time, it has to be regenerated. Because most games also have regenerating money stock in stores, the total amount of money in the game keeps going up, resulting in runaway inflation. This happens in the real world too, as the mercantilist policies of the sixteenth century demonstrated by importing lots of gold and silver from the Americas.
Why does a game like WOW have to behave like a well balanced economy? All of his points about inflation and ending up with an abundance of currency after sufficient time make sense. I agree that at a certain point people will be running around with effectively infinite money, what's the big deal?
This is a social game. If you were to start playing in six months, the smart thing to do would be to join a guild with some high level characters and get them to finance your new character. It would be idiotic in WOW to buy money off of Ebay, when it will be essentially free in game. This is, I think, as it should be. The developers at Blizzard should be seeking to keep it this way, and not ruin the social aspect of the game by attempting to run an economics simulator.
So this guy did some "analysis" and discovered that inflation happens when more money is created than is destroyed. Anyone with a degree in anything could tell you that.
The reason this happens in games is that game developers are reluctant to introduce money destroying mechanisms because it is inherently unfun to have your money destroyed. Heck, in the real world, if buildings, machinery, everything didn't decay we'd have the same problem too.
The only way to fix these problems is just to introduce some control loops. All you engineers out there know how to do this- the solution is trivial, but to do so would take away from the entertainment value of the game.
Honestly, I think the best way to destroy money in a fun way is to have wars (it is Warcraft after all). It's humanity's most effective way of destroying property after all. Oh wait, it's NOT fun when your elite mount that took you a month to save up for dies. You see, it's not that easy to balance an economy.
Yeah, I agree, FFXI did suck.
Everyone seems to be jumping on the fact that this guys wants to make a living buying/selling in game items. While I applaud Blizzard for wanting to prevent this, we don't have to lynch the article's author for this single point.
Some good points of the article:
I've witnessed some of this first hand. I was in alpha, closed beta, and open beta. In the final days of open beta I decided to test a new class so I created an alt on one of the old crusty alpha servers. This server was filled with 60s. I kept my character pure (no gimping) and tried to level up, group, buy and trade with the auction house, etc.
It was horrible! Not only were there very few low lvl characters but the ones that were there were equiped with the best equipment and had no incentive to trade. The auction house was barren of low level items.
I re-rolled on one of the newer servers and the game was filled with low level characters, grouping and trading. It was fun...like the alpha servers were 6 months before.
I'd like to think that Blizzard sees this problem but I'm not so sure. As soon as 1/5 or so of the players on a server hit the cap (and this will happen very quickly in WoW) the whole economy will go to hell. I don't see anything in their Under Development page that indicates otherwise.
he claims that high level players have nearly no expenses. simple solution (which worked well on several MUDs) is to make repair costs for high level items very, very expensive.
MORTAR COMBAT!
there are crafting recipes that generate more G when the finished product is sold to an NPC, than requires to make them
This is what happens in the real world, too.
Ford takes a couple hundred dollars worth of raw material, adds a couple hundred hours of work by a lot of people, then sells a car for several thousand dollars. Ford profits and all the people who work for them have more money.
I don't know enough about the economics of FFXI to argue about wether the rate of inflation is acceptable, but inflation, as you describe it, is a perfectly normal thing.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
I don't have the time to scan all of slashdot, so I found Frogbeater useful.