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World of Warcraft For The Win
In a press release from their website, Blizzard has announced that World of Warcraft has won. Or, more specifically, that the game "has surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China - just a month following the game's commercial launch on June 7, 2005. The critically acclaimed World of Warcraft has now achieved another significant milestone as the largest MMORPG in the world, with more than 3.5 million global customers." Relatedly, Gamespy's OnLife column this week centers around the WoW duping story that we touched on earlier. From the article: "Needless to say, many players are a bit incensed that Blizzard isn't taking this as seriously as they feel it should. Others, though, are convinced that there isn't any duping actually going on. It's an urban myth, they say, which gullible forumites are unwittingly perpetuating."
As much as the WoW guys would like for us to believe it not to be true, the duping certainly exists. Guys like MickeyMouse describe the process in great detail. I know that he has buying/selling items for quite a while now to spread the money through the system to prevent getting tagged and booted. He sold several things to me. Heck, before this blew up, several other users reported people just handing them large amounts of money for no obvious reason (to hide the guilty among with innocent.)
Screenshots show this as well.
I know WoW needs some good press to balance out the bad... but don't deny the problem exists.
The chinese connection is even odder... because most of them are FARMERS in WoW. Therefore, they are hurt the most by this dupe bug! These guys have been just working and working to farm-in cash... and others have been just getting the gold for free.
This may be enough to break my WoW addiction... if I don't get booted and banned first.
Never mind duping ITEMS, I think Blizzard must be duping Chinese players! No WONDER there are so many server crashes, bloody Blizzard's customer duper team (the duperheros)
I think this goes to show that multiplayer games are where the industry is now. I do not think publishers can be successful unless they release games like WOW that millions can play together at the same time.
Voice your opinion!
Anyone know how much (in USD) it costs to play WoW in China? Also, I wonder how many of them are gold farmers :)
It should read:
"has surpassed 1.5 million paying eBay entrepreneurs in China"
I just read "World" "War" and "China" and thought Here we go again!
great. that means that there are 1.5 million chinese that have lost their jobs and houses because they spend all day playing this game.
I thought china was behind a sort of Great Firewall of China ?.
Anwyay, you'll find me a the local tavern where all the chinese play talking about Democracy and Fair market prices. If you visit you'll get a free sword of omens - identical to what I use. I'd like to see WoW ban me or block these chinese yuppies from hearing capitalist propoganda (like Google did).
Face it people, they have the population, they have the money (thanks to US shipping manufacturing jobs there last decade) and they have the market.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The dupe exists because it is constantly affecting Slashdot's front page. Mod me troll, its true.
/. spaztech
LEEEERRRRRRROOOYYY!
if you play the game at all you will obviously see the massive amounts of duped items on the auction house. i know plenty of people that abused the hell out of this bug when it was found. cant say im too innocent myself =P
I don't know how they should fix it, but its like opium and any other drug.....completely removes the desire to work or do anything else.
I've seen too many people waste hundreds and hundreds of hours on it....neglecting other, more important things. I'm not even going to touch it.
Ignoring the game itself, it's a pretty amazing logistical feat they have pulled off, all within a pretty short amount of time.
;)
They got caught flatfooted initially but I thought they did a pretty good job recovering from their early mistakes. Now with their massive global subscriber base they have turned into the real juggernaught in the MMO industry.
Now if only they would get off their asses and release Starcraft 2 already.
- Toby
Are actually farmers?
bun-fhuinneog agam!
When they hit level 60.
No endgame FTW!
I'm sure slashdot can beat that by creating 1.6 million dupes in the next week!
EGG, the Electronic Gamers Guild
Seriously people...would you trust someone who told you this?
"Hey man, I'll hold all of your money while you log off/on to dupe it!"
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
You miss-spelled "Teh". -Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
More like 1.5 million sweatshop farmers.
On some servers there isn't a single high level area that doesn't have a handful of suspiciously silent level 60's killing the same stuff over and over for hours. The macroing is advanced enough that if you follow them for a short while, you'll quickly notice them taking the exact same route time and time again, especially in areas that have chests to open.
I know it's not fair to generalize the entirety of China's playerbase as farmers, but it's well known that it is happening, and is also well known that much of the farming is done by people in Asian countries.
On one hand it's interesting to see such an industry spring up, channeling money into poorer hands, but on the other, it'd be real nice to play an online game without having to compete against people doing a job.
From their FAQ:
Why isn't World of Warcraft free? World of Warcraft will require a fee to play. This fee will be used to support the costs associated with the high-quality levels of service, support, and ongoing content creation that we are planning for World of Warcraft.
Are they really adding $30million of value each month? Somehow I think not.....
Are they censoring the game in any way? Are there any secret agents evesdropping to secret meetings?c ensorship.html/
http://www.intelligent-artifice.com/2004/05/game_
I was under the impression that farmed items/gold must be farmed on the server they're sold on. Therefore gold/items farmed on a Chinese server can only be sold to people on that server. Chinese farmers must be on a US server in order to sell items to players of that US server. This is why the 1.5 million players on the chinese servers cannot be farmers, at least not to US players.
Something strange is going on in the game. Not sure if its duping related, but I just received three items in the game's mail system from someone I don't know. These 3 leather armor items show as being made by my own character.
The items weren't worth very much, but WTF? I didn't make them, and I don't know who the guy is that sent them to me.
Starting to lose confidence in the game.
So, there's rumors that Lance's avatar has been duping? Hasn't there been enough speculation and testing?
That's what happens when you launch in Europe - They start accusing the Americans of using high tech duping methods that get past the officials.
Look. If Blizzard says he's not duping, he's not.
Get over it.
I see people going on and on about Chinese farmers. I see this in game too. It's really sad. Yes, there are chinese farmers. It does not mean that every chinese person playing the game is a farmer. Recently I left my guild because of this kind of racism. Of course, it always starts with chinese farmers and then it leads to more controversial types of racism about jews and blacks.
Honestly, I'm very close to quitting the game over this kind of crap. Every guild I join is litered with racists and the leaders don't do anything about it (some even join in).
I reported a guy for racism in barrens chat and I got flamed to high heaven for it. Pathetic.
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
Seeing the fact that WoW has zero character customization and 90% of people look the same as the other person there must have been a character dupe on the first days. Now people just want to make sure that all the identical look characters have all the same weapons so they do not look different!
So how does the Chinese government keep "radicals" or enemys of the state from meeting in these online games? It's not like lurking in a chat room.
Could we see pro-democracy people in China meeting in some strange dungeon or cave in the game to talk about things the Chinese gov does not want them to?
At $15 a month, thats $52.5 million a month for Blizzard.
$52 million a month and their servers still blow more ass than Richard Simmons. They really need to get better tech staff and stop stuffing their pockets.
"you sonofabitch i didn't know!"
Yeah, it's killing Rockstar. And are you aware of how many MMPORGs crash and burn, and how much more they cost to make compared to a regular game?
There's a large gaming market of people like me - people who want to game ~5-10 hrs/week, which isn't enough time to become expert at a game, and who want to have fun without treating a game like a job. I have a job - that's what I'm escaping with the game. I also don't want to subscribe to a damned game.
Put that together and single player games have a lot of life left in them.
People paying for their services are. Take away the demand and you will see the supply diminish.
Farmers aren't only chinese... it's the classic 'pass the buck onto someone else' mantra.
Make the game fun, accesible, and re-using an existing universe that people love (it doesn't hurt that they are adding content at a decent rate, despite the odd hiccup), and you'll easily pass the "hardcore" MMOs whose modus operandi seems to be forcing the player to spend all their time in frivolity.
Everquest didn't peak near these numbers. Why? It's just not fun.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Do customers in China pay $10 USD or would it be lower since their incomes are lower? If so, then what's to stop an American player from signning up as a customer in China via a proxy (human or digital) and then connect to the servers?
EvilCON - Made Famous by
If there are 1.5 million chinese players why are they crowding the US servers as gold farmers and cheaters then? Go cheat on your own servers!
Do you guys feel that there may be a future for censorship on WoW given the massive chinese population? If the chinese government gets nervous over blogs, how do you think they'll feel about an online virtual environment where its citizens can interact with eachother in ways now seen to be perhaps, too free?
"... surpassed 1.5 million paying customers in China"
.5 Million paying customers :P
1 Million ebay gold farmers
(Before anyone complains... this is not racism)
In China people pay $3.7 for 66 hours 40 minutes. Don't know how much of this amount goes to Blizzard.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
We should all boycott Blizzard for using the DMCA to shut down bnetd.
Ooooh, mysterious slashdot, your powers of prediction are limitless! Tell us more of the future oh wise sage!
:
--
Check out the Uncyclopedia.org
The only wiki source for politically incorrect non-information about things like Kitten Huffing and Pong! the Movie !
Please allow me to hate the creator of the 120-character limit: *HATES*. Thank you.
Diablo II had a duplication bug as well. The system became inundated with Stone of Jordans and other copied objects.
These duped items, however, had some internal identifier in common. Blizzard deleted all the copied items, leaving a lot of people who had bought them quite sad. I would not be surprised if the same would be true in WoW.
I doubt gold has the same feature though - the stolen gold is probably here to stay. However, I bet there's records of people going in and out of instances - people are going to get busted if this really works.
I haven't seen any sign of this exploit happening on my server.
The average person in China could not afford the $15/month that the west can pay. IIRC The game is downloaded for free, CD keys are ~$2USD and $0.05USD per hour (IE: every computer in every internet cafe in Shanghai has WoW installed on it)... Blizzard is probably making 1/20th the amount of $$$ from the chinese player then their making from the US player.... Based on all this, you could expect to see 10M WoW players in China by year end, and Blizzard gets to inflate their numbers! The economics here are very interesting.
$50 per game x 3.5 million = $175 million
$15 per month x 3.5 million = $52.5 million per month
$52.5 million x 12 months = $630 million per year in subscription fees.
I'm in the wrong damn business!
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
So this gets reported, but for obvious reasons Blizzard neglects to mention the fact that like 20 servers currently have queues to play, there's tons of server lag/crashes, and player disconnects (who then have to wait in line again to play), all this 8 months after launch.
1. Bandwidth, large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support, ongoing content development, etc, all cost money too. What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
...to Wow somehow?
Blizzard has the worst QA team in the entire industry and their customer support is horrible. What are they doing with all of that money?
Oh, and there is no monthly fee.
Seriously, you should try it out. You don't even have to go to the store, you can download the client and then use it to purchase your account online.
They said that the game starts at 60. That is such a crock. There are five instances at 60 that are dooable: Scholomance, Stratholme, Black Rock Spire, and Upper Blackrock Spire (which is really the same zone, different parts), and Dire Maul.
There is also Molten Core, and the new Blackwing Lair, both of which normal players like me will never see since they require 40 people and assloads of organization.
But look...
The point I'm trying to make is, someone did the paper-napkin math and came to the conclusion that Blizzard makes 50+ million dollars a month. That is a crap load. That is plenty to hire a slew of people and start cranking out content.
Let me compare this to EverQuest 2 (and no, I am not endorsing EQ2. Just using it as a comparison). Since WoW opened, we've gotten 3 things: Dire Maul, Blackwing Lair, and Battlegrounds. All of which are very cool and well-designed, make no bones about it. But thats it aside from the tweaks and such that are a given in any MMOG.
EQ2 on the other hand came out just 1 month before it. They have had two addon packs, and an announced complete expansion comming out in Sept. that raises the level-cap from 50-60 amongst a lot of new lands/mobs/items/blah/blah/blah. They have a fraction of the subscriber base that WoW has.
I just don't know what they are doing with all the money, but for now, I'm leaving until they expand the damn game!!
++Om
I agree with a good portion of what you say; however Blizzard's customer service is....lacking.
/afk.
You bring up GM support as a cost. For 3.5 million people, guess how many GMs they have? 400. I was in a bugged WSG game last night (no one could capture their flags), ticketed it, two hours later still no response and I had to
The content development. Eeek. Have you seen 1.6? It's awful. It looks like BWL wasn't beta tested at all, and the bugs that were on the test server weren't fixed before release. Two classes are broken, and another one has god mode against casters (grounding totem, "working as intended").
I'm a fangirl, but Blizz is testing my patience.
I think there will be a lawsuit. Gamers demand that the people running the games keep play within the rules.
Personally, I never liked the on-line games. I preffer to play single player games. Back in the day, Bards Tale, Wizardry, Might and Magic were all awesome games that did not need 20,000 on-line players to make it fun. There were puzzles, you built your team, and if you could, you beat the game.
What happens with on-line games? Somebody with more money than brains goes to ebay and buys a FireSword +25 fire damage, and DiamondHelm -15AC, he also buys 5 bottles of healing potions. He then sets out, and defeats monsters that should be a challange, he does quickly. He advances a few levels. Then he meets some other character owned by a real person. They are the same level, so it should be an even fight, the one who plans better should win. But it is not a fair fight when the ebay buying guy whips out his Scrolls of Instant Death, and kills your character that you spent a month developing. Gee, I did not see a level 3 character unleashing a scroll that does 150 points of damage.
What can a player do to get even, go to ebay and cheat too. Let the black market take over.
And what is even worse than the ebay people who buy stuff for their characters they should not have, are the ones who find exploits in the game, ways to manipulate it. I've read reports of people running scripts to advance their characters. The human owner does not even have to be at the computer. They just run the script, go to bed, and wake up with a character that gained 10 levels.
Games are only fun if everyone plays by the rules. It is like baseball, it stops being fun when you catch the pitcher rubbing the ball against sandpaper in his glove. Or when the batter corks his bat. Then it becomes a cheater who makes the game frustrating for everyone else.
There should be some way of keeping track of human players honor. If someone is caught cheating at one game, they are not allowed in another.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
I've seen alot of comments about this, but for what it's worth: the Chinese servers are separate from the US and European servers. There's no practical (in-game, that is) way to transfer gold/items across servers in this game.
I admit that any sort of trading in-game currency for real-life currency annoys the hell out of me, but these players in China (those not using the US or European clients and not playing on those servers) can't sell whatever their characters own anywhere but on Chinese servers. Odds are, the vast majority of these new subscriptions are to legitimate players.
400 that probably work on shifts and they're STILL hiring more. They're doing what they can as fast as they can.
-Randy
Back in the early UO days I went off the deep end and published one of the more infamous dupe bugs in UO. Got banned for it and eventually reinstated by a VP at Origin.
The thing was, the instructions I gave were so convoluted that anyone attempting to follow them would have been blatantly obvious. Of course it actually did work. Back then the only way to get the UO team to jump was to light them up in the forums. Even UO's Green Acres got clamped down after hounding the team in the forusm
Yet at the same time many other postings were just bunk. You get copy cats who with just a slight variation manage to start wildfires that have no basis. This is best done on fan sites where certain words are known trigger fanatics into waves of frenzy. It is even easier today as many emulators exist which can be used to produce screenshots which are game engine generated and not photoshopped.
Still there are some game companies that ignore the problems, or worse acknowledge them and do nothing. The best example is Turbine games who allowed and still allow cheating/macroing/etc in their first game Asheron's Call. They allow things that make other MMORPG developers flinch. What this does for the industry is cause all such cheating/macroing/duping to be considered a norm. On the really bad side it gives some players reason to believe that if you can cheat in one game everyone should cheat, or if someone is really far ahead that they are just cheating.
Blizzard really has done a good job on being proactive. I think people need to realize that they cannot just swing the sword of banning without doing the research needed to ensure they get the right people. Collateral damage does not go over well in these games.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
but for upcoming 3rd generation titles such as Vanguard : Saga of Heroes (www.vanguardsoh.com) they look like they will bite the hell outta WoW's market share... EQ won round 1. WoW won round 2... my bet is VG wins round 3.
If they'd let people telecommute (haven't seen that word in ages!), they'd have less of a problem. I'd love to work for Blizz, but I'll be damned if I'm moving to LA.
If they did that, how would they watch over your shoulder to make sure you're not playing games when you're supposed to be working?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Forget the players; WoW itself is racist. From the moment you start the game you are racially segregated from the "enemy", who the NPCs constantly defame with derogatory and insensitive language ("Those filthy humans are at it again!", "The night elves are a bunch of tree-hugging scum", and so on). Now, you might be thinking, "But that's not real racism - it's just pretend! There are no "night elves" or "humans" in real life, so what harm could there be?" Besides the fact that such "pretend" racism has been scientifically demonstrated to provide a template for hate against actual ethnic groups, there are in fact plenty of examples of subtle (and not so subtle) slings against real minorities. Take the Tauren race, for example, which is a gross stereotype of native americans, complete with NPCs with such names as "Chief Runningbull" and "Brave Leapingdeer". As if the native peoples of this land haven't had enough to deal with already, now they must bear being mocked and compared to cattle in "World of Warcraft" (Or "World of Racism" as it should be called). Then there's the goblins, a race of money-grubbing, hook-nosed midgets, who have obviously been modeled after the stereotypical covetous Jew. 6 million didn't die in the Holocaust for Blizzard to get away with such disgusting racism.
There are infinitely many more examples of the blatant racist overtones that appear in this game, but I think my point has been made. Next time, before you go complaining about people acting "racist" in this game, remember that the game itself was made by and for racists. Blizzard should be ashamed, and so should you for playing it.
two hours
How much does a 24/7 support contract from Oracle cost?
Well, being an MMORPG, the game allows you to pick your friends, therefore you shouldn't be able to pick your nose (or your friend's nose)
Sorry, couldn't resist the opening...
Those who complain about affect & effect on
You hit 60, though, and there is not much to do, besides PvP and run through the same dungeons over and over again.
Battlegrounds, it is much more than simple PvP. In some you are more like a unit in a Warcraft III single player campaign map.
Get your l33t sp34k right.
[09:38] spyrral@mac.com: dude, this slashdot convo is surreal/ 1341215&tid=209
[09:38] spyrral@mac.com: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/21
[09:55] ephardtthatcher: what's the big deal?
[09:55] spyrral@mac.com: it's an argument about chinese gold farming
[09:55] spyrral@mac.com: straight cyberpunk
[09:56] ephardtthatcher: hahaha
[09:56] ephardtthatcher: amazing
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: the funny thing is, I read a short story about this basic subject that was set like 10 years in the future.
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: you know what's next right?
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: vigilante anti-farming groups
[09:57] spyrral@mac.com: then labor organisers
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: the the farming companies start hiring mercs to protect the farmers
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: oh god
[09:58] spyrral@mac.com: I'm rock hard.
[09:59] ephardtthatcher: Anda's Game?
[09:59] ephardtthatcher: I loved that story.
Well the Trolls are partly right. When sony created everquest it didn't cost them anything to buy the seervers because they already own the fab plants, and had/have lots of stalk computers sitting around. "tech support" pays about 8:50 USD in San Diago CA. They charged 30USD, that meens they are still left 21.50 I don't know what the electric bills are like etc. They USED to have a "downtime" around 2000hours. So assume that WoW is about the same, they still have some money to hire AT LEAST a few trouble shooters. Pluss how long did it take for blizzard to admit how easy it was to cheat in Diablo? Or how many people could spoof the a"new and improved latter system?" I rest my case. Mediocre programing and slopy tech.
Ever hear of proxy servers?
He probably has but they are completely and utterly irrelevant. Re-read the post and article. Gold cannot be moved off of your character's server, your character is fixed to an account that is fixed to one particular server, servers are regional. A person playing on a Chinese account is playing on a Chinese server. A Chinese person playing on a non-Chinese account on a non-Chinese server is counted as one of the 2 million US, European, or Korean players not one of the 1.5 million Chinese players.
There is no spoon.
For those that Don't play WoW...
What is a Farmer, and what is the relevance of them being Chinese?
"That's enough money to hire at least 500 senior programmers to fix their damn game."
Yes, and luckily, they can, since all their servers and bandwidth have been graciously donated at no cost by an anonymous source.
Oh, wait...
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
No. Move along, Citizen.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
You mean, video card right? Since I assume the monitor he uses leaves no distributable imprint on files he views...
FTW
...shouldn't they be looking at the S. Korean market?
I mean, the China market just tells them they have yuan.
Chris Mattern
I dont see why it has to be either or. Why does it have to be "all games are going online" or "MMO games are gonna crash and burn."
I didn't say that it had to be either. I'm perfectly content with both coexisting because each tackles completely different target audiences, although many people enjoy both types.
I personally don't like MMORPG because I don't have a lot of time to spend on them, so I prefer to get involved in a story-rich, single-player game (and there are a lot of them out there) that I can stop and pick up later as I choose. (I don't doubt that there are MMORPGs that allow this, but given the choice I'd rather have a single-player. Personal preference.)
Intel vs. AMD, Nvidia vs ATI, Xbox vs PS, MS vs Apple, Windows vs Linux
I think that you're starting to get into apples and oranges here. A lot of the debate between those topics also takes into cosideration the corporate ethics of each company. I prefer AMD because of various technical and ethical issues that I have with Intel, not the least of which is that AMDs are cheaper, run cooler, and 100% compatible in my experience; I prefer NVidia because I've had problems with ATI cards but none with NVidia; XBox vs. PS, I despise Microsoft's attempts to dominate every fu*king market that they see, so I will not support them; MS vs Apple, see previous response, but I also don't like Apple's pricing; and so forth.
There really are no such issues like that with MMORPG vs. single-player. Sometimes I have no problems hopping online, joining a team, and going after the other team. Conversely, sometimes I get fed up with the little fu*kwads who have no tolerance for anyone who doesn't live up to their standards. ("We lost again! This team sucks!" Yeah, yeah, f*ck you and grow up. It's a game, you prepubescent brat.)
MMORPG and single-player serve different markets with some overlap between the two. They both need to exist, and sales of each type of game cotinue to prove that they both can exist very well as long as quality games are released for both.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
From China. China is quite wired, relatively speaking, however most people don't have all that much money relative to those from the US. So, the players there discover that they can spend time playing the game collecting gold, and players in the US will pay what is to them a large sum of money for it. $20 goes a hell of a lot farther in China than in the US. I mean frankly, all moral and legality considerations aside, the amount of time I'd spend to get $20 worth of gold isn't worth it. I can make more than that doing a little phone consulting. I'd rather just play the game.
It's the economic disparity that leads to situations like this. I'm sure if Africa was more wired and people had computers and could get the game, you'd see plenty of African farmers for the same reason.
So, while I'm sure not ALL gold farmers are Chinese, it's not an unfair generalization. Of the nations with significat players, that's where it makes the most sense to do it, hence that's where it's done the most (all the gold farmers I've ever enocuntered have been Chinese thus far, not that it's been that many). It would be equally fair to genealize the gold buyers as American. I'm sure others do it as well, but the US has by far the most disposable income and thus is the most likely to waste it on something as stupid as paying another person to play a video game for you.
WoW is my first mmorpg, but aside from hitting lvl 60 and collecting all your set gear, I don't think the endgame is nonexistant. I'd say that less than half of all end game guilds (that is, guilds capable of and actively raiding lvl 60 instances regularly) on any given server have cleared all of MC, including Ragnaros. Then beyond that, there's BWL, where there's still just so much to be discovered strategy-wise. Meanwhile, there's the challenge of conquering outdoor raid bosses (this is more of a challenge on PvP servers than normal servers! :o), and of course, earning rank in battlegrounds.
So...there's an end game, you just need to be in a fairly active guild to experience much of it. :o)
Choose your future, choose life...
But why would I want to do a thing like that?
Why? Well something that life has taught me, over and over again, is that whever you deal with a commercial product you really get what you pay for. If it's much cheaper than the rest, there is a reason and almost always the reason is that it's cheaper in BOTH sense of the word (as in it's alos poorly built).
So that Guild Wars has no monthly fee tells me there's something wrong. Running a successful MMORPG is EXPENSIVE, really expensive. It costs a shitload in bandwidth, staff, new hardware, etc. Recurring expenses, not one time. So if you don't have a recurring revenue stream, you are doomed to fail.
Well I saw one other game try this, Anarchy Online, as it was rapidly sliding down the shitter, decided to try and bribe new players in with a year free. You downlaoded the client for free, and your account would cost noting for a year. I didn't bite. Why? Well, given my experience last time I tried it, it's overpriced, even at free.
So it makes me wary of Guild Wars. How do they plan to make money? Eventually implement a fee? Start with lots of advertising? Sell in game items? At some point, they have to start charging, since the inital money you paid for the game will have been spent in resources to allow you to play.
Being in a large room with many other people making shirts around warm sewing machines?
Fucking moron.
Here is what I find humorous:
They have 3.5 million customers but how many people own more then one copy of the game?
I wouldn't be surprised if all the people who ran the gold farming sweatshops accounted for more then half of the numbers they are giving us (I over exaggerate of-course, but I don't doubt that its alot)
You will also never hear about all the people who leave the game for one reason or another, if you tallied those numbers it would proly be a huge one.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
It's amply clear you have NO idea how World of Warcraft works, or indeed most other MMORPGs. So I'll cover WoW since it's the one relivant to this /. article and the one I'm playing right now:
No matter how much money you spend on your character, you will never be uber. Period. There are monsters, lots of them, that you will not be able to kill by yourself. Doesn't matter how much of anything you bought, you can have the best equipmetn in the game, you still will die to them in less than 5 seconds. There are monsters that require 40 people to kill, not only that, they require those 40 people to be a cross section of different classes, and to be well coordinated. If you fail to properly execute your strategy, you die.
Now speaking of buying of items, you cannot buy the best items in the game, for any amount of money. Many items in the game, including all the most powerful, bind to your charater when picked up. That means you can never give them to someone else. So you actually have to go out and do the necessary steps to get the item.
And there are no scrool of instant death, or anything like that. No matter how powerful you get, other players will always be a challenge for you. Even low level ones. I've seen a mob of level 10-20 players whack a level 60 player. He killed quite a few of them, but they won in the end. No such thing as irresitable superiority.
Speaking of death, it's no big deal. They don't kill you and you're done, they kill you and you are able to come back after a bit, and keep playing. You don't lose your character or anything.
They are fun, a lot of fun, and though cheating happens some times, generally those that do get their asses banned.
They could pay for all of the servers and years of bandwidth costs out of the $175,000,000 they got for selling the game intially.
The bottom line is they're making money hand over fist and the game is still basically in beta.
Blizzard used to be one of my favorite companies but they've fallen far indeed.
Question everything
LOL
How many of those "enthusiastic" new gamers are goldfarmers (or whatever the WoW equivelant is) in a game room somewhere in China?
VOTE!
Sure you want to know that? It'd make your freakin head spin.
It was a rhetorical question. The original poster seems to expect support levels (2 hours for a fix) for $15/month game that are better than most people will get for a multi-thousand dollar support contract for a mission-critical system.
ahhhh i was playing the other night and i was killed dew to lag... it was like 4am here where i am...so it was around 12:00 japan time... dang lunch breaks... but for the lagest MMORPG they realy should get more servers for having charge so much a month...
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
Since many of the comments are on the topic of gold farming in WoW, I just have one question:
Are that many people actually buying the farmed gold? I guess the simple fact that the farming shops are alive and booming answers that question.
I haven't look at any auction sites or whatever, but it seems to me that the people who pay these farmers, or pay for their accounts, might be more likely to give it up if people wouldn't buy what they're selling. Then they'd be out $15/month (or however much theyre paying per month/quarter/year/etc) for each farming account.
Simple rule of capitalism: lower the demand and you lower the supply. Obviously some farmed-gold purchaser isn't going to read this comment and say 'Omg I've seen the error of my ways, I'll stop right away and toil for hours to get my OWN gold, and be so proud of it', but basically as long as there are buyers, there will be sellers.
Perhaps Blizzard should cut out the middleman and sell their own gold for real money. They've already got game codes and credit cards. Sacrifice one day of game play for 10g, or 5g, or 20g, or whatever. I bet lots of folks would do something like that.
And they said zombies weren't real!
People should get over the fact that games which have such massive amounts of players, constant patching, and tend to be ten times as intricate as a single player can and will break, alot. So what, you're saying you expect them to catch every single bug, when have the products (not just software, but drugs, machines, cars) experience the same kind of problems.
Yes, it's still in developmental stages, and when its out of developmental stages everything will be nice and there will be very few bugs, but there will also be about 12 players.
I, like you, typically invest my time into single-player (non-net-connected) games. WoW was the first MMORPG that I spent any time at all in. And I think it is an amazing achievement, made less amazing by the throngs of idiots playing it. Which is a shame really. I feel a little bad for Blizzard when I read the endless crabbing on the fora (but only a *little* bad... they are making millions per month).
Anyways, my point - after going to level 40 with a character I decided that WoW is great but I want my own copy. The whole frickin server to myself and my friends. The game is a wonderous mechanic, filled with amazing artwork, uplifting music, incredible scenery and challenging adventures. And I want everyone to get the hell off of it so I can enjoy it. :)
Anyone else experience this sensation? I wonder what kind of spec I need to run WoW Server (were that actually possible)...
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
What will Blizzard and the Chinese government do when the Chinese players start forming WOW guilds called "Democracy Now" or "Remember Tienanmen". Will Blizzard cough up the names and addresses when ask?
Given the Google and MS precedent of rolling over to totalitarianism for a buck, I would bet they would, but it may not be that easy. Depending on how fungible game time is, it may be possible to keep the true identity of your on line avatar secret.
The next Chinese revolution may be started by a raid party of Night Elves in the alley behind herbalist in the Dwarfen city of Ironforge.
Even if the majority of professional farmers are Chinese, that's very different from the majority of Chinese players being professional farmers. Do you seriously believe that those million and a half people have nothing better to do than sell you gold?
If there was one thing Blizzards always been good at its hype.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Wow, you might need to kick his ass over THE INTERNET!
And the game is still buggy as shit according to those few of my friends that still play.
You might want to check what your friend is smoking, because I'm on Blackhand and it has been rock stable for a long time. Its still fun, after I hit 60, I started another character and am still having fun.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
I consider the BnetD project legitimate competition, since they wrote the code on their own (I would agree with going after warez).
As a result, Blizzard's suing the BnetD guys got them on my boycott list. Without that, I might have tried WoW.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Like I said, had to be a reason. Reason is it's not really an MMORPG. Now, nothing at all wrong with that, however that doesn't really make it an MMORPG replacement. There is something cool about games with massive environments, with other players running around everywhere that is just cool. It's ccertianly not the only way to game, and not the only kind of game I play, but it is something that I (and many others) really like.
So sounds like Guild Wars is similar, but no real replacement.
If ever there was a license to print money...
Which would make my reply pure sarcasm. I'll assume we both know that Oracle 24X7 support gets billed at numbers large enough to put an HLV into orbit and leave it at that.
I have no regrets, this is the only path.
My whole life has been "UNLIMITED BLADE WORKS"
Yes, chinese client cannot connect to US realms...
But theres this thing called the internet, and it doesnt matter where you are at in the world you can connect to the US realms using US client.
US client has been out since Nov04...plenty of time to import a mass amount of US Copies for gold farming operations.
And yes gold farmers are rampant on every single server, its very obvious..and while You may think its racist to call them all chinese farmers..Send a few of them tells
Reply: me chinese no speak english
Out of their own mouths
I read somewhere that one of the bigger farming operations was owned by a canadian...that employs chinese workers(his own admission btw).
While not ALL of the gold farmers are chinese, a large portion of them are, and 98% of them dont speak more english than they have written on a cheat sheet next to the computer.
We had a Chinese college student in our guild, and he was one of the nicest people I'd ever run with. He spoke decent English, but we still had to explain a lot of things to him (mostly slang, such as what "pffft" meant). He left and then came back shortly afterwards saying that the WoW China servers only let them go to level 40, but I'm thinking that was beta. Have they extended the levels to go all the way to 60 now? He hasn't been back on in some time, and I assume that's probably what happened.
Name another game that has experience this kind of growth. IMO, they're handling the growth pretty well.
-Randy
and I haven't even bothered to look at the screenshots. Asheron's Call had a similar bug, and they never really fixed the root problem. Because a character's inventory wasn't permanently saved each time it changed, all you had to do was drop an item on the ground and relog really fast. You'd have the item back in your inventory *and* on the ground.
A long time ago in a place far away, banks figured out these things called "transactions" which have prevented people exploiting dupe bugs in banks quite successfully for many years now.
It saddens me to think that preventing such things is found so much harder by game developers.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I mean, they go from 2 million to 3.5 million overnight. They must be duping players...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Every company I have seen on the Internet who sells gold (ige.com etc.), are from the asian corner of the globe .... Whether or not they hire only people from their country or not is anyones guess. I can't imagine being able to pay someone $6 or $7 per hour (the US minimum wage) when only selling 300g for $25 ... im sure it takes several hours to get 300g in the first place no matter how many macros you can program.
...
If anyone knows of any gold sellers who are not from the Asian continent, I would be interested in their URL
WoW is no more racist than life itself. Face it my friend ... there is racial and social segregation on this planet ... it is a fundamental human characteristic which should be embraced, not used for hatred. I find the diversity in life to be extremely interesting, and will jump at the chance to spend time in another culture to learn how they live and deal with life.
... Blizzard has done an EXCELLENT job at creating a virtual world that parallels real life.
... the races within those factions have absolutely no hatred fostered against each other in any way, shape, or form ... in fact, there is no racial hatred anywhere in the game ... only political disrest and disrespect, which spawns some really fun PVP action.
WoW is an echo of real life
WoW is about competition among factions who happen to be two sides composed of a cumulation of various races who work well together. The politics are Horde / Alliance
Yeah, wonder about the machine it takes to do that. Then imagine a Beowulf cluster of them!....*ducks*
I, like you, typically invest my time into single-player (non-net-connected) games. WoW was the first MMORPG that I spent any time at all in. And I think it is an amazing achievement, made less amazing by the throngs of idiots playing it. Which is a shame really. I feel a little bad for Blizzard when I read the endless crabbing on the fora (but only a *little* bad... they are making millions per month).
Seriously, crap like that is why I don't do MMPORGs. I'm closer to 30 than 20, I like a little fun playing games a few nights after work, and I don't have the time for either 1) a mindless quest game, or 2) retarded prepubescent politics in a game. I like Warcraft and Blizzard so WoW is probably the closest I'd ever get to liking a MMORPG, but still, no thanks.
Basically, I'll take AI over teenagers any day. I dealt with that idiotic shit in high school, I don't need to pay for the privelege again.
Is separate from wow north america and wow europe. So the farmers in china would have to sell to chinese consumers. The playerbase would always have to be much greater then the number of farmers for them to be able to sell their shite.
Hmmm... Pie...
www.puzzlepirates.com
1. Bandwidth,
Is overly expensive in the US, they should fight that rather than milke the rest of us.
large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support,
They do that for their sake not ours.
ongoing content development
Again for their sake not mine, what do I care they are working on something now that they'll finish six months after i have left.
, etc, all cost money too.
So what - its not like they are sacrificing themselves to save the world, they are trying to make money by milking us.
What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
And isn't done by a saint for saintly reasons, but from people who want money. And I paid them when I bought the disks (which I don't even own, but just "rent") - when you produce something tangible you can sell it once - because of copyright they can sell this over and over and over and over and over and over. Stop pitying them.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
No, the weakeast link is the program. When I go into the AH I don't give a shit about the other players in there, but I still have to wait for all their graphics to load. Totally lame programming. (And we don't believe you when you say you have no lag, unless you only run around there at times when there are only 100 people)
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
You can't have it both ways, either they let people host their own games or they do it for us - in which case it stuffing their pockets.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I am sure they are all excellent programmers but I think things are mixed up and/or overstated. Which is the norm when you start a new company and go out looking for venture capital. Only your most recent title matters, not how long you had it.
I believe O'Brien, not Wyatt, was the brains behind Battle.net. There was some game magazine that listed 50 or 100 influential game programmers and I am pretty sure he was "the" Battle.net guy. The various game credits seem to back this up.
According to the Warcraft 3 credits the game engine seems to have been really lead by Jay Patel. I think NVIDIA published something referring to Patel as the 3D guy for Warcraft 3 as well. O'Brien left very early in Warcraft 3's development and from watching the game change over the course of several E3 trade shows the engine seems to have been completely redone.
Now if you want to talk Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, and Diablo 2 they have an excellent track record. Now add Guild Wars and the credit it deserves. However keep in mind that individuals don't make great games, teams do. Blizzard's success is not attributable to a handful of guys but rather large teams. Arena.net will only be successful if these guys can build teams that are effective. Their individual talents are not enough.
Legitimate competition with...what?
"Competing with battleNet" is nonsensical, businesswise, because Blizzard actually loses money on that little operation, unless the ads (mostly for Blizzard products somehow cover the costs. It's like saying that a restaurant's different dishes are competing with one another -- sure you have to decide what you want, but nobody else really gives a shit what you choose. It just doesn't affect anything.
Blizzard didn't start doing anything about bNetd until it became clear that it was going to be extensively used to bypass copy protection. Nothing that the developers of bNetd could have done -- implementing CD-key checks or whatever -- would have stopped this, as somebody would always just strip that part out.
Im from Australia. What I'd like from Blizzard is an AP server. Or even better an AP south & an AP north server. Maybe they have made a new one since I was away (the last online blizzard game that I played was Diablo 2 - they had a US east, west and a Europe server) but surely they have made enough money out of the Asia Pacific region to launch a server here.
OK, then call it a legitimate replacement.
Considering the copy protection, I think that BnetD has enough legitimate use to justify its existence, similar to the Betamax decision of the Supreme Court. The BnetD case is not over, btw. See
http://www.eff.org/IP/Emulation/Blizzard_v_bnetd/
C - the footgun of programming languages
"This sound an awful lot like how parts of WoW work."
I took the liberty of highlighting the keyword there: parts. I do play WoW, and its use of instances is at best minimal.
Try COH sometime. At _least_ 75% of missions are instances, and everything else is straight hunting and/or optional. You start on instances at level 1. Even the tutorial area has an instance. (Think having an instance right in the Northshire Abbey or Teldrasil or Anvilmar newbie areas, for a WoW equivalent.)
WoW has instances, yes, but so few and far in between, they can almost be ignored for the purpose of discussing gameplay. If you did an average over a couple of months, on the average for each hour spent outside you have maybe a couple of minutes spent in instances.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In other words, all of us.
(and BTW I changed my sig; I see you did too)
--
Trolling all trolls from 1992_Called to users.pl