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.""

Comments

Even Playing Field

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Even Playing Field

[interiot]

There's a huge difference between someone selling a major item or two, every once in a while, or even selling their character once they stop playing the game... and people who SET UP ENTIRE COMPANIES and employee lots of people who PLAY ACCOUNTS 24/7 and whose sole purposes is to sell in-game currency for US dollars, and who do it on an industrial scale. People who pay chinese people to do absolutely mindless boring repetitive tasks, on an industrial scale, force games to move in the direction of mindless/repetitive/boring. This is a GAME. It should be ENTERTAINING. In-game economies should not merge with the real-life economy.

Re:Even Playing Field

[saurik]

Does that make any sense at all? "People who pay chinese people to do absolutely mindless boring repetitive tasks, on an industrial scale, force games to move in the direction of mindless/repetitive/boring." It should do the exact opposite! There is no point in playing a game that involves doing mindless/repetitive/boring things. If the people who make games don't like this, they should _remove the mindless/repetitive/boring things from their games_. Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant. Banning the accounts of people who take advantage of what is really an insightful opportunity simply to maintain the status quo of crappy games is about as stupid as putting into effect a law that states that people can't talk about exploits in software because noone wants to fix them.

Re:Even Playing Field

[edgedmurasame]

Also, the more likely one will get banned for it, the more likely it will get scammed - see Lineage II.

Re:Even Playing Field

[Dachannien]

Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.

Star Wars Galaxies, for example, originally tried to make the route to becoming a Jedi so incredibly difficult and unpalatable that few would go through with the task. (You had to master several professions which were selected by the game, whether you were actually interested in those professions or not.) The idea was that when the task was made so difficult that nobody would intentionally *try* to complete it, the result would be that only the few who happened to pick their combination by accident would succeed.

Of course, this didn't work. People were so enamored with becoming uber leet Jedi that they would suffer through the intense boredom to crank out professions on a character they would never play again after they opened their Jedi character slot.

Now, I realize that you're saying that without the mindless/boring tasks in the first place, this would never develop. But the problem is that there will always be the *possibility* of undertaking even a fun task in the most boring way possible. I honestly don't believe that it's possible to design a game that makes the fun way equal to the most time-efficient way while maintaining persistence.

So, people who don't play the game for the journey but rather "for teh win" will always take the quickest, most boring route. If they can make it even quicker by spending money on it, they will. The best way to stem this problem is to take care of it on the supply-side.

Re:Even Playing Field

[egarland]

If by "even playing field" you mean one where kids who can play 95 hours/week can pwn me because they're level 72 and I'm only level 25 because I have a job and can't, then yes... they are making things more "even".

The fact is, as long as you put barriors in place that can only be overcome with the investment of time, there will be people who pay someone else to overcome them. A game built around skill instead of time investment doesn't have this problem. You don't see this issue in any of the UT's or Quakes do you?

Re:Even Playing Field

[Minna Kirai]

Don't try to outlaw the market: make it irrelevant.

You have a partial point. From a naive, short-term perspective, it would be easy for Blizzard to make those businesses irrelevant. The administrators of a game server can always undercut a 3rd party seller. Whatever price is offered for gold on ige.com (currently $0.21 each), Blizz can beat with no effort (and, they have untouchable advertising positioning and established billing arrangements with the customers).

But in the longer term, legitimizing the sale of gold (or other in-game resources) will devastate the MMORPG business model. Players are attracted by 3 factors:
1. Artwork. An initial attraction that doesn't last long.
2. Achievement. The virtual Skinner-box model.
3. Association. The 3d-accelerated chat window.

Each stage feeds into the next. If the "Achievement" of step 2 were available on the open market, players will do one of two things depending on their personal wealth: Rich players will pay the money, get the ultimate stuff, and then be bored with the game 2 weeks later. Poor players will look at the effort they're spending, see that rich people can buy past it for a few bucks, get discouraged, and quit the game.

Either way, putting a visible price tag on the results of playtime makes it seem less like entertainment and more like a job. Customers don't pay to work at a job.

In a way, this is just revealing the game for what it is: a non-fun level grind. One might say that the optimal solution would be for Blizzard to publish a better game, that will be enjoyable for the journey itself, and not just the tantalizing destination. But it would take major leaps of artistry and technology to accomplish that, and the development cost would likely appear prohibitive.

Re:Even Playing Field

[hikerhat]

There's a difficult balance here though. A game would be no fun if it was so hard to get rich in the game that it would take a single person years to get the good stuff. That would only be fun for the true fanatic. The game would go out of business. But a game would need to be that had to prevent farming.

If you make it easy enough that it only takes a few months to get the good stuff, well, then it is cheap enough to hire people to farm the good stuff and sell it on ebay, but still difficult enough that there would be a demand to buy the high level stuff on ebay. At the same time the challenge level in the game would be enough to keep many players playing.

If you make it so easy to get the good stuff that there would be no demand for it on ebay then there would be no farming, but the game would be so easy that nobody would want to play. Again the game would go out of business.

Anyway, finding the economic sweet spot where there is no demand for buying high level stuff with real-world cash might not be possible. The only option left is to try to artificially regulate the economy.

Imposing some sort of regulation on the market isn't unrealistic or 'OOC' anyway. In the real world truly free markets don't work either. That's why we have real world economic regulation, unions, etc.

Re:Even Playing Field

[wickedj]

You might want to give Guild Wars a try. Sure the big draw will be the no monthly fees but one thing I found interesting is they are trying to get rid of all the time-wasters.

Instant free waypoints from place to place (no more gryphon riding)
The max level cap is (currently in beta) 20.
If you don't feel like building up to level 20, you can start with a prebuilt level 20 character.

The way combat is set up is almost like a card game (ala Magic). You can earn a hundred skills but only have 8 or so slots to fill. Before each battle, you have to pick and choose what you want to use.

Most of your battles will be party battles so choosing your skills depends on your role in the party (ie. healer, tank, support, etc.).

In the end, this allows those who work 40 hours a week and go to night school 10 hours a week plus take karate to compete with those 14 year olds who spend 90+ hours a week playing the game.

Re:Even Playing Field

[Moonlapse]

Practice helps, but there are some people that can stop playing for 6 months, and come back and still pwn people who play 12 hours a day. That's the skill he's talking about. Moving a mouse quickly to land on someone's head is in your DNA!

Re:Even Playing Field

[drinkypoo]

The people who patronize gold farmers are like the people who patronize spam. Because the gold farmers negatively affect the economy, the people who patronize them are the real problem. If they didn't do so, no one would farm gold. If [some] people didn't buy stuff from spamvertisements, pop-ups, et cetera, no one would bother to utilize them as a marketing tool.

Re:Even Playing Field

[Anonymous Coward]

An RPG has 1 story. Multithreading fails because the story never was about the lost dingus or the salvation of humanity, its about the journey of your character. You can't remember the names of the earliest places explored or enemies bested without looking them up, because they were unimportant. The player looks past semitransparent layers of fluff toward the personal story of their choices. Usually the backstory has the quality of a dimestore paperback with hackneyed themes and repeated archtypes, except that you're paying 40 times what its worth and turning the page is a Herculean task.

The number of PvP battles you engage your friends in over a FPS is equal to the number of stories you find in it. You don't really care that the stupid space ring is really a weapon, because you cannot use it. You DO care that you can run your best friend over with a tank. Usually the backstory has the quality of a dimestore paperback with gratuitous gore and repeated archtypes, except that you're paying 40 times what its worth and turning the page is a Sysiphan task.

Current MMOs have tried to take the horribly uninteresting backstories and the requirements only an actuary could love from RPGs and fit them over top of a substandard FPS. I submit to you that the two themes are not compatible. Death in FPS is a laughing matter, death in RPG means a prolonged bitchfest. Picking up a lame weapon in an FPS can be resolved in a few seconds, picking a lame or nerfed skill in an RPG means you have to start over with a new character or suck until you do.

There is a free MMO called Runescape. It boasts numerous crafting and battle skills, equipment, and quests. I logged in expecting to see people escaping from day-to-day drudgery. Instead, most of the people were trying to sell materials of artificial scarcity to other players at exorbitant prices. The number of salespeople and their shouted wordbubble advertisements filled the screen. In their spare time they were engaging in the very drudgery they might have done during work. Except most of them were too young to work, most were only 13 years old. Why? Because they didn't know what else to do.

If you care about fun, refuse to pay for a game that does things wrong. It's the only way they'll get it.

Re:Even Playing Field

[Incoherent07]

Well, I think that instancing hasn't gone far enough yet. In WOW, you can still somtimes come into a monster's lair only to find another group already waiting for it to spawn, so instancing isn't universal.

I'll tell you a story from my WoW play as a counterargument. A week or so ago, I was doing a quest which required a group to go through a densely packed area of elite (balanced for groups) mobs to find an Ancient Egg. My group worked its way through the area, which wasn't instanced, and finally reached the final objective. As we turned to leave, we saw a single human rogue run from behind us to get the egg as well. Turns out he'd found another way to accomplish the quest, even though he was not grouped, he was too low to sneak past everything, and he certainly couldn't fight his way there: he simply followed our path of destruction and finished the quest. No exploits, no bugs, just a clever way to avoid trying to find a group.

If that area were instanced (which would be easily possible, although currently instancing in WoW is not transparent because the instances are on a separate server), it would not be possible to do what he did. Is this something we want, to make everyone do things in a conventional manner? I think the imaginative solution is worth something as well.

I predict that future MMORPGs will take instancing even further, so that the entire world will seem instanced as soon as you step out of the homebase city, with the only other visible players being those in your party.

This game is called Guild Wars.

The problem with this model is that the whole point of a MMOG is that you can and will run into other people; sometimes you'll work together, sometimes you won't, and sometimes the other player is an enemy and you'll decide your best option is to fight it out. (Also, the reason I told the story above is that it, too, couldn't happen if the area were instanced.) Making the entire world instanced means that none of these things can happen outside of towns. The effect is that you're proving the grandparent's point anyway, because the more you instance the more you make the MMOG like, say, Diablo II.

Honestly, finding a party is one of the most boring parts of a MMOG. Will you be able to find the specific set of classes you need to make a balanced party? Will you be able to find X number of people who want to go to the same place you do? You wait 2 hours for a party, so that you can spend 3 hours together, and this is fun? Honestly I would think that there are other ways of having players interact without reducing the game to single-party zones.

A losing battle?

[Prien715]

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?

Re:A losing battle?

[QuantumG]

Because it makes the game shit which results in everyone leaving your game. To make a stupid analogy, what you're asking is similar to asking why golf clubs don't offer a for-pay service to knock your ball closer to the hole before your competitors get close to the green.

Re:A losing battle?

[DingerX]

Well, shucks. If you design a game where being logged in and doing something mindless generates value, and where social status is determined by a simplicistic system of fancy items and levels, then yeah, you're going to have a market of people willing to do the mindless things to sell to the rest of the world.

It's a basic problem with this design, especially in an open economy were cash and value are just spawned in game. I don't think you can effectively police it; and I doubt you can social-engineer the problem. But you could consider bringing economists in on your next game design session, and figure out how to make hoarding and transfer of resources unprofitable. For example, have a large closed economy where hoarded wealth beyond a certain quantity has to be stored in a PvP-friendly area of the game. Got a lot of cash? Well, it's gonna cost you security to store it. Suddenly cash farming, while still possible, costs three times as much (one person to collect, one person to guard, plus losses), and its value to the average player decreases considerably. But what do I know?

Re:A losing battle?

[Malor]

The only way to stop people buying commodities is to ensure they have no value. In other words, to prevent people from trading them, they have to be useless. If they're useless, why are they in the game at all?

When there are such enormous disparities in income in the real world, and all characters can generate resources at about the same rate, the 'cheap' people will sell things to the 'expensive' people. That is just how things work.

Ultimately, it's not about commodities. Instead, it's about time. All of the MMORPGs are designed to be time sinks. That is, you spend a lot of time doing things that are 'less fun' (in theory at least) to gain the ability to do things that are 'more fun'. So people buy their way out of the 'less fun' time using real money.

The only way the Chinese people will not be able to find a way to sell their cheap time is if the game experience and items have no value. If time you have previously invested has no real bearing on time you spend later, there's nothing to trade for.

As long as the games continue to be designed as time sinks, then some method of selling the cheap Chinese time will be present. Even if you can't trade items, they could trade time helping you level up your characters. The only way to avoid it is to remove all value from time invested. Given the current design of MMORPGS, that means to make the game no fun.

Personally, I'll take a game that's fun and has gold farmers.

Re:A losing battle?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thievery, murder, and child molestation have been around for time immemorial, but we still do everything we can to stop those activites, BECAUSE THEY ARE WRONG.

So how do you account for the fact that the rich frequently AREN'T punished for thievery (and many companies get away with acts that many people consider thievery)? Maybe "thievery" isn't such a simple concept as all that.

How do you account for the fact that some people think euthanasia should be legal, while others think abortion is murder? And some people consider the death penalty murder while others think it's the only valid punishment FOR murder? Maybe "murder" isn't such a simple concept as all that.

How do you account for differing ages of consent around the world? In some countries it's child molestation if the younger party is below 18, while in others it's fine to marry a 12-year-old. (Historically that was the case in America, too, at one time.) Is it child molestation if two 13-year-olds have sex? Some say yes, some say no! Maybe "child molestation" isn't such a simple concept as all that.

Looks like morals aren't as black and white as you'd like to think, mister. Typing "THEY ARE WRONG" in capitals is not an adequate substitute for defining what you mean by the words you use. And any set of definitions you choose will inevitably be contested by at least a quarter of the world's population.

Re:A losing battle?

[MBraynard]

Your sig suggests that I could find more reality in a Lewis Carrol novel than in your worldview, but I'll bite anyway.

The problem with your description is that it will inevitably lead to false positives - someone who spends a lot of time getting gold and trading it to other players. It would also miss a lot of folks - the result of making tasks more difficult is that they simply challenge the macro writers even more. Known a good deal about what in-game macros are capable of - I can assure you that it will make it harder for lesser programmers to access them - at first - and enhance the profits of the skilled programmers - at least until the script kiddies get ahold of the code and they inevitably will.

The solution is to ensure that in-game activities require a human brain to engage in them. It may be as simple as having to interpret text in a very complicated image file (like when you create a new account on certain gaming forums).

Game definition.

[Inoshiro]

"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.

Re:Let it be.

[RogueyWon]

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.

Re:I signed up for the 7 day trial of Second Life

[QuantumG]

Oh, for the people who can't join the dots and see why this is relevant: Second Life is the supposed MMOG which "encourages" real world exchange for virtual world currency. The result is that no-one actually does anything in Second Life except try to figure out some way to make a buck. If games like WoW were to take a lenient stance against gold farming, WoW would become just as bad.

Re:Intresting idea but reqiuires a rethink for des

[DingerX]

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.

Re:Reasons to dislike money-farming in MMORPGs

[The-Bus]

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.

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.

Also, what you've described is actually currency deflation, as now each real US dollar buys MORE gil. If you mean items in-game are now more expensive, then yes, that is inflation (compared to gil). However, you didn't really mention that.

The whole argument boils down to this:

1. "I don't have the money to just buy a mansion with five Wherecats and +6 Pantaloons of Obedience."
2. "I don't have the time to be unemployed and play the game for eight hours each day."

The only way to combat this is to make the game fun at every level. Have being a Level 1 character be just as fun as being a Level 40 character. There will still be some people who, no matter what, still want to be a high level character to show off how cool they are but this works about as well as the idiot driving around in a yellow Hummer who thinks he's the cat's imported Chinese silk Neiman Marcus pajamas.

But, ultimately, in your example, the people who spent $160 for 1M gil in October presumably could buy more with that 1M gil than the people who spent $68* for 1M gil today.

* Honestly, why switch around currencies to make your point? It just muddles up the post.

Re:Reasons to dislike money-farming in MMORPGs

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you could quit FFXI.

Square-Enix is never going to do anything to fix their game. You've noticed this. They finally took a small, token action nearly three years after the game launched. And as you pointed out, it didn't solve a damned thing.

Stop giving them money.

They don't deserve your money. Stop playing the game. If you don't enjoy the game, stop playing it.

Re:Reasons to dislike money-farming in MMORPGs

[RogueyWon]

Well... I could, but...

The simple fact is that for the relatively serious MMORPG player who's willing to put a good bit of time into a game over months/years, there still isn't a better game than FFXI.

I tried World of Warcraft. I played it fairly heavily for a few weeks. I enjoyed most of this time quite a lot. Then I stopped. I was bored. I'd basically exhausted most of the possibilities of the game after just under a month of (admittedly fairly heavy) play. I'd played around with quite a few of the classes, on both Alliance and Horde sides. I'd experimented with the PvP, which left me cold. I'd gotten to a high enough level that I could see that there was just a complete void where the high level content should be. World of Warcraft is very "front loaded". The initial stages of the game feel very fast and exciting; there are a vast number of fairly varid quests to do, which mean you barely need to grind at all. Your character gets a lot of new abilities very quickly. You're exploring a lot of new areas. Then the new stuff just stops coming. By contrast, a lot of FFXI players say that the game doesn't even start properly until you hit level 70 and start doing dynamis, sky raids and HNM hunts. I've also experimented with SW: Galaxies and Everquest 2. Both seemed competent in their own ways, but neither had anything particularly interesting to do. In the mean-time, every single one of my friends in FFXI who quit for WoW has now returned to FFXI, mostly cancelling their WoW subs.

It's not as if Square-Enix have been sitting on their arses since FFXI was released. They've created a vast amount of new content for the game, both in and out of the paid-for expansions. We've had a new PvP system, new missions, boss fights and a whole slew of top-level content. I hadn't noticed gil-selling as a real problem until mid 2004, so while Square's response is a little on the slow side, it's not catastrophic. If Blizzard can maintain their player-base anything like as well as Square-Enix have maintained theirs, in the long run, I'll be very surprised and impressed indeed.

Re:Let it be.

[Dachannien]

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.

Re:Let it be.

[zoips]

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.

Too little too late

[SamBeckett]

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.

Re:Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

No other MMORPG in existance has such an innane account closing policy as FFXI does. Every other company I'm aware of is more than willing to get customers back. I guess maybe it's a Japanese thing, but Square-Enix seems to take someone quitting as a personal insult and never wants them to come back, ever. It's the only thing I can think of that would make them ever decide to delete characters.

I currently have no intention of ever playing that game again, but it doesn't matter, because my character is already permenantly gone. If I could get my character back, I might actually consider it. Since I can't, Square-Enix is never going to get any more money from me for FFXI again. If they don't want my money, there's no reason to give it to them.

Re:Intresting idea but reqiuires a rethink for des

[Minna Kirai]

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.

Re:Economics 101

[devnull17]

The problem with arguments like yours is that WoW is a game. It's supposed to be fun. I don't frankly give a rat's ass whether someone can profit enormously from it. If that's what you're looking to do, you're playing the wrong game.

The issue is that when the stakes get high enough (in any economy), people turn into unethical assholes. That's why drug violence is such a problem in our society. It's why there's so much trouble with insider trading in the stock market. Hell, it was even responsible for that comical London IKEA store riot last month.

The problem with purely free markets is that a large percentage of people tend to end up getting treated like shit. Which sucks in real life, but that's an entirely separate issue.

But why in the world would you want to deal with these issues in a game that you're supposed to play for fun? Do you want to have to work around Chinese sweatshop grunts perpetually camping the enemy that you have to kill for a quest? Is that an acceptable price to pay for the opportunity for a few people to get rich in a game world? Is your right to make money in the virtual world of Azeroth more important than the desire of a vast majority of their subscribers to just have a fun, balanced game to play? I don't think it is.

And, in more direct terms, Blizzard owns the servers, the software and everything in between. If they don't want you doing something, that's their prerogative. If you don't like it, return the game and go play the stock market. Granted, there are financial ramifications for bad decisions--people will cancel their subscriptions--but that simply gives them more incentive to cater to the vast majority of subscribers who want these pricks removed.

And finally, do you actually play WoW? If not, you are, in my humble opinion, not the least bit qualified to comment on what's good for the gameplay experience. But hey, this is Slashdot, after all, and that's never stopped anyone before...

Re:Reasons to dislike money-farming in MMORPGs

[Anonymous Coward]

Of all the FFXI players I know who left for WoW, NONE of them have returned.

Then obviously you two are talking about two different types of players: one type likes the fast-paced killing spree that is WoW, and the other likes the slow-paced level-grind that is FFXI.

Stop comparing apples and oranges and go easy on the ad homs. Your vitriol isn't helping your case at all.

-Random Simultaneous WoW & FFXI Player