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Virtual Farming Firsthand

Posted by Zonk on from the a-sad-state-of-affairs dept.

This past weekend we discussed virtual sweatshops, and the legal issues they bring up. Today Terra Nova has a discussion in which Julian Dibbell, noted VW economics researcher, asks do such things really exist? Firsthand experiences would seem to indicate they do, with extensive chat logs (via Broken Toys) and the experiences of players documenting farming behavior.

5 of 89 comments (clear)

  1. Virtual Farming? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    I thought this was going to be a story about Harvest Moon.

  2. Re:Almost as prevalent by damiangerous · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You made $80,000 dollars running an EverQuest script while a minor living with your parents? And they STILL wouldn't spring for broadband?

  3. Re:virtual economy... by C0rinthian · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Here's my theory on why game developers will NEVER support this.

    Liability.

    If they endorse sales of items and currency, they agree that said items and currency have real world value. Since they agree to this value, then they could be held liable for losses incurred because of server issues, balancing, database rollbacks, etc.

    Imagine Johnny's $100 Mace o' Doom gets nerfed in a patch and is only worth $10 because of it. He could make a claim that he should be compensated for his loss.

    Imagine a database roll-back on 500,000 characters.....

  4. Re:virtual economy... by patio11 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Here are four reasons why developers would rationally want to avoid monetizing their gold supply:

    1. Establishing an equivalency between real world currency and gold/Archmages Robes of the Eagle/Swords of P0wning invites real world courts and governments to see gold/robes/swords as tangible property. This would lead to a couple of things: taxes, first of all. If every time Onyxia gets capped $150 of virtual goods spawns in Irvine California, sooner or later the CA IRS is going to wonder "Say, where are our income taxes from independent contractor Onyxia?" How long do you think any taxman is going to let a multi-million a year revenue stream go uncounted? Second, if I *own* my little 30 kb that describes the state of my WoW character and Blizzard decides to nerf my Sword of P0wning I could theoretically sue them for taking away my property interest in the Sword. Currently, their EULA protects them (they say its ALL their IP), but if they allow the IP to be bought and sold they can no more expropriate the goodness of my sword than my ISP can arbitrarily delete content off my professional website.

    2. More farmers might mean more monthly income, but the developers will never see a penny of it. It just means there is more gold/items floating in the game than they planned for, possibly bursting their sinks, and thats a problem. For one, it will impoverish non-farming players, because as inflation increases the price of finished goods/endgame content the price of "vendor trash", coin, and static quest rewards will not increase, seeing a drop in the virtual "real wealth" of the casual players -- who aren't going to pay $15 a month just to be lvl 40 Serfs.

    3. Some players are morally offended by the idea that their "fun" is being corrupted, and regardless of whether you think they're hypocrites, off balance, or whatever, their $15 a month is as green as everyone else's and they will gladly take it elsewhere. Most developers think that this segment of their playerbase buys more months of service than the "farming community", and they're likely correct.

    4. Buying upper-level content means content gets exhausted faster, which could increase the churn rate of the same very interested customers the developers are most happy to keep in the system (both because they typically play games for a long time and because they provide structure to the playerbase via guilds/etc, increasing newbie retention and generating "content" for other players via social interaction, guild rivalries, etc).

    --
    Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
  5. Re:virtual economy... by dasunt · · Score: 4, Insightful
    In the short run, it does. In fact, all goods fluctuate in regards to each other and to currencies. But in the long run, gold is remarkably stable. A man who owns an ounce of gold today can buy roughly the same amount of goods as someone who owned an ounce of gold 500 years ago. That cannot be said of *any* fiat currency that has ever existed.

    You need to pay attention to your history lessons.

    The value of gold has fluctuated historically, over the long term. Different societies valued it differently. One often-cited example is gold and silver in the east and west: During the 1700s, the Far East wanted silver, while Europe wanted gold -- the result was that silver flowed out of Europe and gold flowed out of east Asia.

    Also, you need to pay more attention to your economics.

    Gold doesn't buy the same amount of goods now that it does 500 years ago because the value of other goods fluctuate.

    If you are advocating gold for economic stability, it doesn't allow the same 'tricks' that fiat money does, and I feel that weakens the economy.

    If you are advocating gold for a measure of value after the US crashes and burns, taking the rest of the world with it, I humbly suggest that bullets, books and medicines may be more valuable.

    Of course, I could be wrong. Greenspan disagrees with me as well. :)