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

[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: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.

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: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: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: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: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: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.