Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard Drops the Hammer on Gold Farmers
evviva writes "Blizzard has kept its word and finally closed over one thousand accounts related to gold-farming and character sales. It was about time!" The post reads: "Over the recent weeks we have been investigating the activities of certain individuals who have been farming gold in order to sell it in exchange for real world currency. After researching the situation, we have issued permanent suspensions to over one thousand accounts that have been engaging in this practice. We do not condone such actions and will take decisive action as they are against our policy and damage the game economy as a whole.""
That makes it interesting, as they'll be one of the first MMORPG's to truly enforce an even playing field. While many companies do not condone the sale of in-game items, most allow for the sale of an individual's "time and effort" put into recieving those items. Seems like a fine line, and I'm glad Blizzard chose not to cross it.
Ruin my economy.THEY'RE the reason my gnome has been out of work for the past 6 months...
"I work outa the home"
How can people with no skill ever hope to buy their way to the top? This is insane!
If one sits down and thinks what real-world money represents, it means time and effort owed. The one and only thing each of us truly own is our time; money allows us to trade our time for someone else's time (that they spend making games, growing food, running the gov't, etc for us). It's only natural to expect that people will want to trade the time they spend in game for other people's time in the form of money (I'll beat the level 6 boss for you if you'll wash my car).
Gold mining has been around since Ultima Online (AFAIK) and no one's ever been able to stop it. What makes Blizzard so sure they can? Perhaps an even better question, what makes the virtual property in WoW unlike other virtual property we trade for (like the fees to allow use of a movie or game)? What good or bad comes from allowing players to buy and sell virtual property in this way?
And lastly: if the business is so lucrative, why haven't any of the companies themselves decided to sell "special" accounts to people and cash in on the money?
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Dude, that's total BS. Of course the government could make money off of MJ if it was legalized, it would be taxed just like cigarettes or alcohol.
After running (and flying) around the various zones I came to a simple conclusion: it's one big shopping mall. There's absolutely no gameplay. Of course, there are properties you can go to and play slot machines. There may even be some "really interesting stuff" somewhere but no-one has a chance of finding it in 7 days. In a way it's kinda funny. The best way people could make money in Second Life would be to show people on their 7 day trial around the world. Of course, no-one does that.
How we know is more important than what we know.
On a serious note, I never like playing Monty Hall/Haul Dungeons [what prize is behind door number.....]. Those were games where the DM/GM would rain wealth and items down on players in a twisted attempt to gain popularity. I quit role playing games in 1982, but the rule still applies.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"And lastly: if the business is so lucrative, why haven't any of the companies themselves decided to sell "special" accounts to people and cash in on the money?"
When the game has it so that it takes time and effort to get ahead, getting ahead is valued. Once you can just spend a few shillings to become a grandmaster in some skill, it's not worth your time because you could just pay to be there. You'd never be exposed to the content, and most people would follow a path of lesser resistance and just pay to have higher level chars.
Entertainment on this scale isn't open to everyone; it's open to the people it targets. If people beyond that target also enjoy it, more the better. Enjoying it isn't a right, and people shouldn't destroy parts of the in-game balance just so they can enforce their own ideas of how the game should unfold on it.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
But seeing how anyone can grow it, and how most people can sell and smoke under the radar as it is, there's no gauruntee that the government would still be able to keep a hand in on it.
This is rubbish. Blizzard could make money off gold sales if they wanted. After all, WoW gold is nothing more than an insubstantial product that exists on servers that Blizzard themselves run. If Blizzard wanted, it would be an absolute doddle for them to set up a "buy some gold" button on each player's subscription page. Players give money to Blizzard and Blizzard creates some gold out of thin air to give to the player. I'm pretty sure one of the MMORPGs out there (sorry, can't remember which) is already moving in this direction.
Sorry to burst your little bubble, but this almost certainly about Blizzard wanting to enforce a level playing field.
It's good to see Blizzard taking real action on this. Hopefully, WoW hasn't been around long enough for there to have been serious damage to the economy already.
Most of what I'm about to say is based on my experiences in FFXI, where there have also been well-publicised problems with money-selling and recent attempts by the GMs to crack down on it (yes, I tried WoW, but I didn't like it, so I went straight back). However, it should hold true for any MMORPG where you have to "farm" (be it by killing monsters, crafting items, fishing or whatever) to make in-game cash. Basically, the selling of in-game cash is one of the biggest cons I've ever encountered. Two basic reasons for this:
First of all, as many posters have remarked in previous threads on this subject, all the gold/gil-sellers are selling you is a quantity of a virtual resource which has no independant physical or legal status. If Blizzard or Square-Enix go broke, the money you spent is lost. Ok, this isn't very likely. However... let's just say that the GMs decide to "evaporate" all the large sums of money that were transferred out of the characters who were suspended for selling money. This is one of the perfectly plausible responses they may choose to make. It'd be perfectly legal for them to do this, as it wouldn't be "real" money they were taking away and the player who bought the in-game money wouldn't have a leg to stand on, as he would have been in violation of the Terms of Service by buying the game-cash to begin with.
The second reason why it's a huge con is more subtle. As many FFXI players have noticed, gil-sellers attempt monopolise some of the scarcer (yet still essential) items in the game. By doing so, they drive up inflation across the game. Chances are that a lot of the people who buy money from gil-sellers are people who feel (wrongly) that they need to buy the money in order to not get left behind this inflationary trend. In other words, gil-sellers often have to create a problem before they can milk it. If they didn't exist, the "need" for them would be greatly reduced. If you're wondering about the effect that gil-seller driven inflation has had on FFXI, it's instructive to keep an eye on the prices at www.ige.com (link provided for instructional purposes only, please don't buy anything and support them), who are the largest of the MMORPG-cash-and-items traders. I started watching these in October (and yes, I admit that this was largely due to wanting to gloat over how much my legitimately-obtained gear would sell for in real life). At that time, 1 million gil cost around $160 dollars. Today, you could buy 1 million gil for £36. The irony here is that the people who bought gil back in October essentially wasted their money and, if the trend continues, the same goes for people who buy it today.
In short, the game-cash-for-real-money trade sucks. Don't do it and don't support it. Please.
But then you'd have a Diablo II type problem where people would start duping the gold, and the game would start having D2 type problems where people get banned all day long. I'm only being practical.
Blizzard has long realized that they could ban Diablo CDKeys and monkeys would run to the stores to buy new copies.
Banning gold farmers makes the create new accounts which makes Blizzard happy.
No need to get all draconian about this. Just pay the farmers NOT to produce gold.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
It is similar to the "exploits" in single player rpgs where a mob keeps respawning to give in theory infinite xp. If you got the patience to kill the same mob, go through the same conversation, clear the same dungeon again and again.
The problem is that most MMO designers are pretty clueless about basic economy (why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?) but worse the few clever ones think that real world capatalism is the thing to emulate.
Small problem is that capatalism isn't much fun for the majority wage slaves. In real life the wage slaves ain't got much choice but in game they do. They can stop paying and find something else to do.
The problem is that unlike the real world it is very easy to calculate expenditure vs profit in an mmo. Weapon A costs so much but will allow me to gain that much profit in its lifetime that I make enough profit to buy a new one. In general the more powerfull a weapon the more costly but also the higher the return on investment. Result, in order to make a reasonable income you got to invest in good weapons meaning you have to do the money grind.
MMO's need to stop thinking they are single player games, they need to stop thinking that real world economics work in a fun enviroment.
Single player RPG economies are already screwed up enough. Or I am the only one swimming in unneeded and even unspendable money in games like Baldurs gate, Neverwinter Nights, Deus EX, Morrowind, etc etc. Add taxation and tax the high earners more. But at all costs avoid where a big enough group of superrich exists to ruin it for the rich. Or at least if you want this similarity of the real world add other things from the real world as well. REVOLUTION. Murderers and thiefs. Paternity suits and frivolous lawsuits.
But frankly there are so many problems to fix with the MMO scene. First they should figure out a way for a game to remain fun for month after month without betting on the "maybe I will have fun with just 1 more level" element.
But maybe a simple way of doing both is to decrease the reliance in combat on "super" weapons but instead make for a character depended weapon performance. Meaning that both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Hard? Well yes and no. Both EQ2 and WoW apparently have added more involved combat. Expand on this.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yep, the people who make MMORPGs for a living have no idea about online economies.. but you, random dude on Slashdot, has all the answers. Why do we even bother studying anything? All the answers are on Slashdot!
How we know is more important than what we know.
But seeing how anyone can grow it, and how most people can sell and smoke under the radar as it is, there's no gauruntee that the government would still be able to keep a hand in on it.
Huh? It's not difficult to grow tobacco, or to make alcohol, but most people don't waste their time and effort since they can just buy it at the store for a nominal fee, and get a product with consistent, predictable quality.
If you could buy MJ at the 7-11 with regular cigarettes, it would be pretty rare for someone to go to all the trouble of growing and/or selling their own just to save the taxes.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
no really!
And how would the government make money off of child abuse? by taxing it? dude, you are seriously wasted!
Well, sure, it's easy as hell to sit back here and throw out ideas. Implementing them in a multimillion-dollar venture is a different story.
But you're dead on about capitalism, if you take it in the sense of providing a free market with unrestrained controls on wealth.
I'm not sure most gamers will want to play in a socialist worker's paradise either, though. There has to be the illusion of glory.
You can certainly have taxes though, especially ones that can be bypassed using an expenditure of time several times the cost of the tax (e.g., toll bridges), or where a valued service is being offered (such as a secure two-party financial transaction).
But there's more to economics than just free-market capitalism. Hell, you could create a game where any form of interest was considered illegal (since money is "dead"), and the official rules varied considerably from economics (they already do).
Or you could use the classic technique employed in many marginal economies (such as illegal ones in federal penitentiaries), of using multiple currencies and "flipping" the exchange rates periodically. With a couple of monopolistic organizations (=run by the company) aware of when the flips are going to occur, the company can eliminate or severely reduce concentrations of wealth that it does not control. Besides, imagine the chaos of an ebay auction during the periods of wild currency fluctuations.
What? My 400 quatloons are now worth peanuts?
Ultimately, the problem is in your comment about character development vs. gadget hoarding. I've always preferred games that rely on skill and ability rather than supertoys, but the problem is not everybody has an equal shot at skill and ability. Let's face it, at any game based on such things, most people suck. And people play games to escape their own mediocrity. The advantages of time-based levelling and gadget-driven gameplay are A) like gambling you get intermittent positive feedback that keeps players addicted, B) Nobody's excluded on the basis of incompetence. Play long enough, and you'll get where you need to go. and C) It's really, really easy to write. Experience points, levels and level-based narratives. the only downside is that some people will pay to enjoy the social benefits of higher-levels (including that of seeming a bad-ass in front of one's peers), and to avoid the tedium of playing the game.
Simple solution: assume a (plausible, dynamic) average playing time for an account. If an account's playing time is well over the average, tax that account's income, to a point where farming degenerates in diminishing returns.
I thought I'd point out that while slashbots will congratulate Blizzard websites like IGE just raised their prices by a little and are still selling.
That would destroy the economy so fast. I wish my government would print us all a million dollars so that I could pay $10,000 for a soda. Thats what would happen if Blizzard made a buy some money button.
"Flush that, you bitch."
30 points for the reference, 20 more for the next line.
503 Sig Unavailable
The Signature could not be accessed. Please try again later or contact the administrator
Broken forums != broken game. From what I can tell, the game is running just fine.
Dey took our jabs!!
Duping items was a D2 bug that existed when players logged out of a game and quickly logged back into the game before it closed, or something. I don't remember the exact details. It had a lot to do with timing. I don't see how this could be done on a persistant world, such as that of WoW. Besides, do you really think they would have neglected this? They probably coded the game with these kind of bugs and exploits IN MIND. It's only practical.
"If Blizzard wanted, it would be an absolute doddle for them to set up a "buy some gold" button on each player's subscription page."
It would be even nicer if they did this in lieu of monthly subscription rates.
These games are already prone to massive inflation as it is. If they did that with a game of this size the economy would collapse in weeks and people would leave the game.
Yep, the people who make MMORPGs for a living have no idea about online economies.. but you, random dude on Slashdot, has all the answers. Why do we even bother studying anything? All the answers are on Slashdot!
He didn't offer an answer really. Merely some thoughts about the current systems and a few ideas for improvement. As for the professional MMORPG makers, name one that has done a better-than-mediocre job of creating an in-game economy. All of the games out there have very flawed systems, which is why we see so much of this stuff going on.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2005-02 -16
it takes far more skill to grow good bud, that it takes to make cider.
But, who makes cider when you can buy it?
Just wondering, all those people who got their accounts closed, do they just lose all their characters or lose their full rights to play the game? Since it's an MMORPG, losing online rights would basically make you lose everything you bought (with your real money, that is). I hope Blizzard won't make any mistakes...
This has been seen before, and seems to be working rather well for the makers of Gunbound. You can play (for free) for hours and hours to accumulate "gold" wealth, or pay a nominal fee directly to the company to receive an injection of "cash". "cash" could be thought of as a service which increases the enjoyment (and thus has "value", considering that games are a vehicle for selling fun) of an otherwise free game.
The interesting thing about Gunbound's model is that "cash" and normal "gold" are not the same, nor are they directly interchangeable, as I recall. I haven't played for so long that I can't remember, but I believe you aren't able to directly transfer "cash" in Gunbound. "cash", which can only be bought, generally has (IIRC) 10 times the value of "gold", which is earned by playing matches.
This reminds me of the old, old days when BBS sysops would sell Trade Wars credits for real cash. That never seemed fair at all, however, since Trade Wars is a long-term strategy game which generally has an eventual "winner". Giving one player money would unbalance the game terribly. Note that Gunbound, however, is a simple shooting game that revolves around matches, and not an RPG or long-term strategy game. Items gained by long-term players give them a slight advantage in matches on high-ranked servers, but it is possible to play the game without worrying about economics at all.
The choice is left up to the user -- live in "high society", where (real) money and (virtual) possessions are quite important, or just play the game on the casual servers, where items are simply status symbols of cosmetic value.
Considering that the game still seems to be alive and kicking, I would say that this is a viable model for "legalizing" and regulating the currency trade in online gaming.
Perhaps an expert player of Gunbound could give an estimate of the real world value of cash, in terms of roughly how much grinding time worth of wealth one US dollar buys.
Most of the MMO designers I know are aware of basic economic principles. Heck, most companies have someone who is specifically tasked to make sure that the economy doesn't fall to pieces.
The problem with expanded-skill based combat is that you must account for lag, which while not as bad as it used to be is still a reality in most MMPORPG's. You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off. You could do combat on the local machine, but then you have all sorts of security issues. So unless by skill you mean take the focus off of power leveling and gold hording and put it squarely on just power leveling, then this is unfortunately a no-go.
I do agree about the wage-slave problem, though. It isn't much fun. But if you take out leveling, gold/resource farming, then you can only progress through items and quests. And while quests can be nice, and do need to take an expanded role in games, there just isn't the resources to create enough quests for a group of people who may be playing 6 hours a day every day for a year. Player created quests would be better, but it seems like everyone who has done player-generated content over the years has gone seriously overboard with it (see 2nd life).
I'm not saying the current situation is ideal by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just saying that it is complicated.
The ______ Agenda
but Blizzard should let it happen because it attracts people to the game.
I doubt the correctness of this statement.
First of all, in a market that's increasingly competitive, people will jump ship for the next new game if they think the company running their current game isn't running it properly. That's a ton of people who don't want their game ruined by gold farmers like they ruined FFXI/Lineage 2. Keeping them happy by doing something to stop gold farming is a good business decision.
And second, there are two big obstacles that stand in the way of growing the MMOG market further: an uninformed populace and the cost of playing the game. Both of these indicate that gold farming will do nothing to increase customer base. If people don't know about a game - even if the game permits or encourages third-party gold farmers - they won't buy it. And if people are already reluctant to pay the monthly subscription costs for a game, they're certainly not going to fork over extra cash to buy gold in that same game.
The best part about this whole scam is that you should never need to buy gold in WOW. It is so easy to come accross. However the primary means of sale in WOW is the Auction House. These same companies that farm gold have accounts that sit at the Auction Houses all day. They purchase any and all items of rare value and then relist them at 2x - 3x their normal price, causing artificial inflation. The person who wants that item now has to either play 3x as much to earn enough gold or purchase from a farmer, who sells 500 gold for a $100 and then gets that 500 gold back when the person buys the auction and then the sells it to the next sucker. And all the farmer had to do is farm 200 gold.
One of the things about gunbound is that the -only- advancement in the game results from buying better gear and that it's strictly PvP - there is no concept of characters becoming stronger over time. This means that a total noob willing to spend money on the best gear, while not completely unstoppable, will be able to defeat significantly more skilled players.
Granted, they're only really hurting themselves in the long run since players with 'low-level' gear are unlikely to play with overdeveloped chars, leaving the only opponents available to be other characters with that type of gear. Meaning they're going to be either playing people who actually worked their chars up, meaning they'll be completely destroyed, or other similarly rich noobs, in which case they might as well have not purchased the gear & just played with the gear they 'rightfully' own.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Now they can slowly cut down on server load by banning accounts!
Then again, I don't play the game so maybe 'gold farming' is worse than it appears to be? (I'm sure it violates the TOS, but still...).
I fail to see how it could possibly attract people to the game to allow gold farmers. The single biggest annoyance in FFXI are the gilsellers. They have no decency (steal logging, mining, and harvesting points), they'll MPK (violation of the ToS by the way) you without a second thought if you try to camp the same NM as them. They work in teams to monopolize NM spawns, which gives them a monopoly on the drop, which in turn damages the economy (granted, on Ramuh most of the gilsellers that camp NMs quite frankly suck at claiming them, so it's a moot point).
Allowing gold farmers to continue doesn't help the game. It ruins it for everyone that wants to play the game as it is meant. Average people will not monopolize some monster spawn, or do the same repetative task and monopolize a certain kind of item drop, day in and day out for months at a time like a gold farmer would (of course, since I've never played WoW, I'm trying to imagine what it would be like based on my experience with gilsellers in FFXI).
It's really an either-or situation. Either the company itself sells in-game money for a fee to their players, and that's really the only worthile way to get the money (which puts everyone on the same level field), or the company does not allow anyone to buy in-game money and makes sure that there are plenty of ways to earn decent money in-game (again, putting everyone on a level field, except WHMs, who can't farm for crap =P). You can't have both without totally hosing the economy.
I just canceled my account today, after (and this has been grating in my mind for sometime now) a young member of my guild asked a player who was level 60: "Wow, XxX, what is it like to be level 60?" To which he replied: "It's pretty cool. I just started a new undead toon." Granted this has nothing to do with gold farming--but I seriously don't see how there was a market for such things.
Compared to DAOC, at least, there is NOTHING to do in WoW after you reach the pinnacle. In other MMORPGs, you could buy a house, fight enemy realms for something tangible, etc. In WoW, you either continually raid the same dungeon or start a new toon. "But you can raid towns!" Sure, what's the fucking point? There is no penalty for death and no reward for taking over a town (for 5 minutes before the NPCs respawn).
"But the honor system will change this!" The honor system as currently outlined sucks ass. I don't have time to play forty-hours a week just to have the best items just so I can kill more players just so I can get more honor just so I can get better items.
Don't even get me started on the social aspect of the game--it just doesn't exist. There is no situation where concerted group effort is required as all fucktards can easily succeed in the grouping game.
and damage the game economy as a whole
Really? Would anyone from Blizzard care to point to a healthy economy that is fueled by the lack of free trade? It's rather amusing to see how Blizzard's actions mirror the heavy handed use of power by those governments that are globally most despised. It'd be less far less funny if it weren't just a game (but, then, if it's just a game to them why are they being such dicks?).
"And lastly: if the business is so lucrative, why haven't any of the companies themselves decided to sell "special" accounts to people and cash in on the money?"
AO and DAOC employed a gold seller, making $100,000/month over a few months.
Everyone would be banned if they tried to sell something, but this guy with 3 pages of gold for every seller never got banned.
God spoke to me.
Ragnarok Online (www.ragnarokonline.com)
anyone played this game? Basically there's no quests, to simply put it. Sure, a couple one or so, but not compared with other mmorpg's. So you live off killing monsters and praying for rare drops and then sell them!
I have to say this game has by far the most simple and entertaining economy i've seen. You can actually engange in a merchant profession and just place your character to sell your stuff with stores you make, which btw are intuitive and simple to use.
Then again, you can make money in a simple fashion way. Either sell rares or sell the loot to npc's. As for rares, prices vary. From 3 million to 12 million. You name it. Godly items, like this card that blocks magic can hit the 1 billion easy. That's right. 1 friggin billion zeny (game currency).
Shit, if you like business, this is the game folks. You can be a merchant. Buy items at discount price (24%), like potions and stuff, then resell to players. That simple.
Haven't really played it deeply enough to see the long term effects of character "development". Thanks for the insight on that one. In my experience, most of the items only tip the odds very slightly. But I can see they could create a virtual goliath when stacked up by a big enough budget.
Hmm... that would mean that the hardworking are rewarded by the rich and foolish. Overall, I like the sounds of that economic model! If only the real world were so just.
You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off.
I think there are more important obstacles than lag which prevent player skill and reaction time from factoring more into combat resolution.
1. There is the unfair distribution of "twitch gaming" skills in the customer population. MORPGs aim for the biggest possible market segment, and have partly succeeded with a old and more female user base than the average videogame. But if reaction time and mouse accuracy are required to do well, then the best players will be 14-year old males. Many of the other customers will lose interest.
2. There is truth to the saying that "MMORPGs are chatrooms with pictures". Longterm players enjoy chatting with their teammates equally or more than playing the game. (Players often comment that the only reason they maintain a subscription is to keep playing with their established online friends, and not because the game itself is compelling). The slow-paced combat in today's MMORPGs allows players to engage in chat or other distractions without endangering their prospects for combat success.
I think the whole idea of buying extra cash for an online game just plain sucks. You should play these sort of games for fun. I played the demo of WoW for 2 weeks and did find it utterly boring - addictive, but boring.
They really do need to think about the economies - the better characters all have the best gear / weapons, and they basically hand it down to lower levels. You never see any low level people making stuff for high level creatures. Its all based around what gear you've got, your actual level is pretty pointless... I certainly felt no sense of acheivement leveling up.
People should be doing better things with their time then playing computer games for that long, to make money out of other people playing computer games. Blizzard are right putting a stop to that kinda thing, and I'm sure they'll make plenty of cash out of the game regardless of the money farmers.
Flame these stupid cheaters at flameboards.com
The problem is that most MMO designers are pretty clueless about basic economy (why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?) but worse the few clever ones think that real world capatalism is the thing to emulate.
Using "repair" or housing as money sinks can fit within the context of the alternate world. How would your "tax" be implemented, what if the player doesn't want to pay, and how would you be able to implement within the context of the game? All a tax would do is slow the rate for everybody, even with a progressive tax all the gold grinding companies would do is find the way to maximize gains. Instead of playing one character 16 hours a day, they might have their worker play 2 characters 8 hours a day to avoid higher taxes. Further, the economics of an MMO goes beyond just gold. Tax gold too much and you'll just have even more people grinding/camping for items to sell directly instead of gold.
MMO's need to stop thinking they are single player games, they need to stop thinking that real world economics work in a fun enviroment.
This gets to the heart of RPGs, should they be created as games, or as alternate worlds? It's a difficult balancing act, considering a "Role Playing Game" means different things to different people. For some they are entertained by exploring an alternate persona, for others the way the game plays is more fun.
The problem is these aren't single player games. Some people don't want to be Ajax the Mighty Gnomeslayer, they'd rather be Ajax the Uber Alchemist. Creating professions that are not PvE means that some sort of economics need to be developed not just for adventurers but for non-adventurers, and they need to fit within the context of the game, and need to be "fun" for thousands of different people.
The economic designs are evolving, and the only way to figure out what works and what doesn't is to make a game and see what happens when a couple hundred thousand people play. We're in only the 3rd generation of MMOs.
REVOLUTION. Murderers and thiefs. Paternity suits and frivolous lawsuits.
There are some people would would love to have those things, others would hate it (look at the clashes of opinion on things such as PvP or permadeath). You can't please everybody.
But maybe a simple way of doing both is to decrease the reliance in combat on "super" weapons but instead make for a character depended weapon performance. Meaning that both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
What incentive would people have to enter a dangerous dungeon? If people can sit outside and kill a single pixie spawn over and over, why would they risk going into a dungeon? Why play after you reach maximum level? What do you do about the people who want to be artisans? Besides, all you do is shift the commodity these grinding companies make from gold/items to characters.
It comes down to basic economics. If there is anything difficult to get that somebody wants, there is money to be made, and some entrepreneur will exploit it for all the money they can get.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
This same system breaks, however, when faced with a MMORPG, where the entire goal is to level up and gain resources. Best online RPG-esque game I ever played, actually, was a pretty basic text game which restricted you to three user challenges per day (only way to get exp) so those with the best strategy, not the most time, pulled ahead.
1. Artwork. An initial attraction that doesn't last long.
2. Achievement. The virtual Skinner-box model.
3. Association. The 3d-accelerated chat window.
Well and good, but you missed two steps:
4. ???
5. Profit!
Ahem.
The real problem is that you can buy all the good gear in the first place.
Wait, listen. In Marvel Comics (yes, I am a huge nerd), Thor's superpowerful magic hammer Mjolnir can only be held by someone who is "worthy". So, even the superstrong Hulk can't pick it up. No one is strong/powerful enough to wield it except Thor. Only someone who is a paragon of virtue like Captain America can pick it up. Everyone else struggles because the hammer is magically glued to the floor.
So, the solution is simple- make it so you can't buy the +5 Vorpal Sword. You can't even pick it up unless you complete the proper quest. Trade it? No way, that's too dishonorable- the sword changes into a regular one, offended that you tried to pass it to an unworthy warrior. It's MAGIC, right? And it adds to gameplay- you can name your magic weapon, decorate it, perhaps even upgrade it (you need to find a wizard who can do such things, another quest). No grinding, either, you don't 'automatically' get magic gear when leveling up, it's not available in stores, you have to GO SOMEWHERE and DO SOMETHING. Getting top gear will involve hard quests, something that will build friendships and shared experiences, adding to gameplay.
Camping? No, the game should be able to tell if you never leave an area for a certain period of time. Why not make it so a very very bad creature shows up and eats camping players? Better keep moving- don't want to tempt the Grue. Adds to gameplay.
The owner of the servers can control how many magic swords are around in the first place. No reason why there can't be enough for everyone- as long as you play the game properly to get them.
No reason to gold farm if huge quantities of gold can't buy you anything very interesting. A little imagination and breaking out of the job/salary/grind model of role-playing would help a lot.
did they ban any of they buyers of the gold?
surely they can track who recieved the products from these accounts-
when cops fight hooking, they run stings against the hookers and the johns... it's a double sided coin
close an account for buying gold, the game junkie will likely buy another copy and never do it again..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I just got WoW the other day and this is truly a great improvement for MMORPGs. I admit, I did buy gil on FFXI, but that was because the game was unbalanced and you get cheated out of money. As for gold in WoW, it is much easier to get and if you're too lazy to earn it on your own (questing), then you shouldn't be playing. Infact you should be playing no games. Ive gotten to level 14 in one weekend, and it was no trouble at all.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
They're willing to work much cheaper than their dwarvish cousins, and don't demand health benefits (just look at the boils and sores on some of them!)...
pooptruck
Oh, bullshit.
Let's assume for a minute that some guild decided to camp a given NM constantly (because they have enough members) so that they can get a monopoly on the Sword of Pwning or whatever it is. Would that be against the terms of the game? As long as they don't try and sell it, my understanding (based on other threads) is that it wouldn't be against the TOS Squenix set up and would be considered fair play.
In other words: it's not the gold farmers messing up the game. It's that the game is already messed up. It shouldn't even be possible to "steal logging, mining, and harvesting points".
why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?
Are you serious? Can you imagine what the message boards would look like if they did something like that? Can you imagine how many people would quit?
Games are supposed to be a fun diversion in which one can leave real-world issues behind. Would you really want to accumulate wealth in a game, only to have it taken away? And, more importantly, do you think the subscriber base would stand for it?
No thanks; I see enough 12-year old rants in broken English as it is.
(why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?)
Because it's not just money you want to keep out of the system, it's items. If items last forever, then the economy eventually gets glutted, and even the best equipment is pocket change.
There's also a practical reason: Those items are all data. That data has to be stored on the servers. More items means more data, which means less space on the server and more data being pushed around when people click their inventories and so forth.
Because it's not just money you want to keep out of the system, it's items. If items last forever, then the economy eventually gets glutted, and even the best equipment is pocket change.
Unless they constantly create newer, better items. This seems like what they're actually trying to do--it keeps demand up there for high-level items (although specific items will certainly lose value as time goes on)--and it's new content, which keeps people paying the monthly fee.
Game design is hard. Really hard. Mind-boggling awful, stay up all night thinking about it hard. To build a game that it, on one hand, adequately balanced on so many different planes, and on the other hand, entertaining and engaging, is a tremendously difficult art.
Not everybody is up to it. Very good programmers and artists can get together and make a network-based, super-duper eye-candy fun to play for awhile game that will bring people together, but which will ultimate fall flat as people move on to other games.
Unfortunately, the eye-candy and super-duper programming is expensive, very expensive. There isn't a lot of time to work on hard problems. So, instead of making a GAME engaging, companies often fall back onto smoke and mirrors, which is to say, fake markets that can be arbitraged so easily that it is profitable to set up a gold farm. Duh.
Blizzard has no gripe. Yes, the game sucks when people are able to do anything the physics of the game permits. This means the game sucks, not that anyone else is doing evil.
Blizzard's enforcement is a band-aid over a self-inflicted game design wound. Rather than work on solving the hard problem, they try an easy way -- kick people out of the game by micromanaging the simulation. That's simply solving one problem by creating others -- as they will discover, capital (both the real and in-game kind) is a force of nature, like a river, that is tremendously difficult to reroute. Unintended consequences from this effort are likely, and because their initial design was so flawed as to admit their current problem, it is unlikely their band-aid will hold for very long.
Some games can long survive such atrocities. Others can't. Markets are funny that way. Hapily, there is only one market Blizzard can control, the false and defective one they set up in their game. Maybe they will make it. Maybe not.
Pity the poor Davidson & Associates Cabal. They probably aren't able to do much better than this. They are now stuck in a hard place -- trying to heal a festering sore in a game design defect was exploited by the game players, fanatics and entrepreneurs who are in part the reason for their success. Their solution is probably sub-optimal. I would hope that they were up to the task of actually improving their product, better to redirect all that love and passion back to the game. Apparently not.
The people that buy game content for real money are the same idiots that respond to spam. So after their miracle weener enlargement process fails to get results they have to buy the biggest polearm in the game to make up for it.
I applaud Blizzard for making the attempt to stop this nonsense. I see them going from one server to the next cleaning out the vermin.
-- What's this '-r *' file doing here? -- Oh well, a simple 'rm' should do the trick.
Broken forums != broken game. From what I can tell, the game is running just fine.
It's not actually. The realm I'm on goes down at least once a week for hours on end. They had a hardware failure last week that took down 8-10 realms, which took 8 hours to make a 'temp' fix for. Then on Friday (two days later) they realized the game was near unplayable even with the fix so they took down the affected realms for 24 hours to install new hardware. They really do need to work on hardware/latency issues since they have so many more subscribers than they expected.
Alright, I hadn't heard much in the way of problems from my friends who actually play the game. I was just pointing out how the poster said the forums were broken and then went ahead and said the whole game was broken, just because the forums were broken.
The simple solution I see to all of this is to tax money EVERY time it changes hands between players. Other than the occasional money give to help my friends start, I never give money to any non NPC. I'm not sure what would be lost taxing player to player money exchange. The higher the transaction, the more money is taken.
Sure, it's not realistic, but it would make it much harder to buy money. You could also get around it by trying to find a money substitute of some sort, but you could also tax that as well.
Basically, if the game monitors every transaction and does something to reduce it, I think the problem would be solved.
n/t
Pay then entirely in Flooz.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Legend of the Red Dragon, Lunitix,etc
They were a lot of fun to play. They had a good community. Nobody messing up the economy (There was no EBay yet) and depending on the Sysop the game would end in 3 months or so depending which came first someone beating the game or the time limit. So in three month's or so everyone was back at the begining just having fun trying to win.
Why got QuantumQ a troll rating? (The parent of this post)
... but accepted other dissadvantages on the other hand.
He is absolutely right. There are allready research projects and Phd. programs about game economies and about the interconnection of game economies with real world economoies.
Its one of he biggest issues in game designed during the last years.
Designing a working game economie is "NOT EASY". The suggestions here make most of the time not much sense.
Blizzard did a somewhat good job
I suggest for further reading and getting a clue: http://www.igdea.org, the "inernational game developers education association" or http://gamasutra.com.
Both sides publish reports and articles about university research, commercial research as well as ideas and principles in game design.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
1) Make cigarettes the official in-game currency.
2) Get cigarette companies to pay for product-placement on the currency, with the higher paying advertisers' goods being more valueable.
3) Get endorsement of anti-smoking lobby for discouraging smoking because cigarettes are more valuable for buying that shiny new sword than getting lunge cancer.
4) ???
5) Profit!
That, to me, doesn't make any sense. That's like saying today you are wasting your time spending $40,000 on a brand new BMW when you could've gotten one for $10,000 many years ago. No, it's more like saying a 1980 BMW cost $40,000 in the year 1990, and it only costs $10,000 in the year 2000. (I know it'd depreciate a lot faster, but this is just an example.)
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
This seems to be a type of problem Blizzard encounters over and over. The ability of individuals to take characters offline and enhance someone elses gameplay in the online world. Is this cheating? If you want to have benefits from both online and offline play with the same characters, then you don't have much choice. Personally, I don't seem much benefit in taking characters and or items offline. Ruins the gameplay for me. I guess I am one of the few morons who struggled through Diablo II the old fashioned way. Blood Sweat and Tears, no purchased items at all. I would not play World of Warcraft any differently. What is the point of playing the game if you are going to get to the end by buying the things you need on Ebay? You have lost most of the fun and challenging part of the game.
There needs to be some sort of Guild that just goes around and kills all of the gil-sellers camping for it. When the move, you follow. Make their life a living fucking hell, and keep doing it. That sounds like fun to me; it may get boring after awhile, that's why you have shifts. Square should pay people to do this.
I'm f#$king magic!
both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Would only help a little bit. In that case, the gold-farmers become level farmers. The only practical difference is that characters can't trade levels between each other, so the farmers will need to sell the entire character as one item.
Final Farming XI is the ultimate carebear game. You can't kill other players. Ever. It's explicitly against the terms. Purposefully allowing someone to die to a mob is actually against the TOS.
So that can't ever happen.
> What I would have done, which would have caused much whining, is make force sensitivity a random thing. At 100 days, the force sensitivity of the character is revealed (a random chance), and the player is given the choice of becoming a jedi (if the amount of sensitivity is high enough).
This would drive those who do this sort of farming for a living to make LOTS of characters, and then let them stew for 100 days. The ones that come force-sensitive would then be sold off for cash. Soon, there'd be a lot of Jedi running around. Your solution doesn't solve the problem of gaming the system by brute force.
> That way, you won't have so many jedi, and only the ones who are dedicated to the game have a chance of becoming one.
There'd also be one heck of an attrition problem after 100 days, as folks who worked so hard found that they'd never be Jedi and quit for other MMORPGs. In a gaming model where retaining customers for years is done regularly, you'd be cutting off a good part of your customer base that way.
> The point is that not everyone in the SW world was a jedi, or even had a chance of becoming one. They probably all would have loved to be one, but it just wasn't the reality of the situation. As for me? I'd much rather have been Han.
So, instead of being one in a million that can become a Jedi, you'd rather be the one in a million that parlayed being a smuggler into success instead of death? For every Han Solo or Lando Calrissian, there were planets full of Greedos.
The point of the game is entertainment. People don't want to pay money to join a world where they're unimportant. They want to be heroes, and the game should cater to that by making the unimportant people NPCs so players can be the movers and shakers of the world. If my desire is to be a Jedi, and I only have a small, random chance to be a Jedi, why would I bother? There are a dozen other games that will let me slay the dragon or save the world if I can't do it in this one.
Virg
Recalling this previous article, I am quite impressed that Blizzard not only slash more accounts involving user agreement violation, but they are also straight to the point--these 1000 or so accounts are removed because they are involved with gil selling, which is illegal and will not be tolerated. The message is loud and clear.
Why can't Square-Enix do something like this?
Well, it's more Lambda MOO than it is WoW, at least. It's really all about user generated content. Unforetunately, it lacks enough well-polished content to maintain much of a consumer community, so all you're left with is the tiny fraction of users that are interested in content production. If second life had some of There's refined look and feel, they'd probably be tearing up.