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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.
"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.
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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?
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.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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.
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.
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.