Selling Virtual Gold for Fun and Profit

Grimrod writes "Dave Long of GamerDad has some musings in his column this week on the virtual world of massively multiplayer online games and the legality of selling virtual goods." Mr. Long is commenting on a story posted last week at Plaguelands detailing a supposed duping bug in EQ2 that allowed a small group of players to make thousands of dollars in U.S. currency. From the GamerDad article: "For me personally, it's impossible to grasp the idea of buying virtual goods to make my in-game character better. A lot of people seem to have a lot more money than sense though and for them that's perfectly reasonable. To further cloud the issue of who really owns virtual goods, in EverQuest II a crafted weapon keeps my name on it as the creator. If I want to sell that to someone for real money, there's no better defense than to say, "I made that!" and look right there online to see my name on the item."

Comments

Re:Paying for virtual items... my 2 cents...

[interiot]

I've posted these before, but this page and this page are absolute must-reads if you're interested in MMORPG economies. And they happen to deal with UO too, and in some places, with the dup bug in particular:

In the real world, we associate hyperinflation with the almost total devastation of a country and its population. In UO this really did not happen because there was little that players wanted that was purchasable with gold. The one major exception was reagents which were also cloneable! The hyperinflation, while annoying, did not preclude players from having fun and, in the end, this is all that matters. This should perhaps introduce a bit of humility into the over-design of the economy - for all its complications, it is not required to make the game fun.

That's somewhat true in World of Warcraft too. Once they reach level 60, some people create a different player to explore how other classes are played. The most obvious way to speed up the new character is to mail tons of gold (harvested at level 60) to your low-level toon. This helps to some extent (eg. allows you to buy top-notch equipment and buy all possible skills and spells), but isn't such a strong and disruptive effect that Blizzard considered removing this mail-yourself-money feature.

Also, some data shows that inflation tends to always happen in MMORPG's, regardless of whether there's a dug bug. The papers above go a long way towards explaining the theoretical reasons for why that might be.