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Hunting Down Gilfarmers
Milkman, over at 1up, revels in the discovery that gilfarmers are finally starting to fall in the battle with Square-Enix. Final Fantasy XI has always had a problem with these Real Money Trader pests, and the company has recently stepped up its efforts to eliminate the problem. From the article: "Is it difficult, time-consuming, and an absolute time and money sink to farm, camp and craft your way to profit in FFXI? Absolutely. But it's been made even harder due to the unbelievable inflation the game has suffered as of late. In reality, FFXI was in danger of becoming a gilfarmer's domain, practically owned and operated by RMTs until the recent purge, if it is indeed a purge. How else to explain the disappearance of gilfarmers across all servers in the last week? While we're still waiting to hear something official out of Square-Enix HQ, the writing is clearly on the wall for currency resellers worldwide."
We'll see how long that lasts.
The thing about cockroaches, is that no matter how many times you purge your home, they'll come back.
The only way to keep gilfarmers away, is to smack them down immediately (which risks false positives) or to change the economy so that their services are no longer profitable.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I see this as a potentially game-threatening problem, not just for Final Fantasy XI, but every popular MMORPG on the market today. These farmers ruin the game experience, not just through their direct effect on the market, but also by polluting the gaming experience - many people play these games to escape the real world, and having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the realism that the game hopes to instill. I am curious as to what companies can do to combat this problem; not even the Warden (courtesy Blizzard Entertainment) can defeat farming accounts.
games journalism blog
The commercial version of the waiting game
Create a MMORPG that *gasp* doesn't allow character trading. Honestly, inventories could be treated just like single player RPG's handle it. The real fun of online gaming comes from the shared experience of the adventure, not trading loot.
The lack of Gilsellers is a result of the Chinese New Year that started on January 29th. The RMT'ers have a week off to celebrate, as was the case last year. They'll be back before the weekend's end. There has been a noticeable change in NM (notorious monster) hunting on my server, and there's been a slight population hit as well. It's sad that my favorite game is so horribly infested by RMT'ers.
I play FFXI, and have been for the last year and a half. I've seen the economy turn to shit in that time. Prices have easily tripled, and in some cases, gone up by 50% in a week's time. I lucked out in getting while the going was semi-decent and invested in a way to make money. Now, anyone ending up on my server is completely economically fucked.
There's been an outbreak of recent "I'm quitting the game" posts on Allakhazam (website dedicated to various MMORPG's) and the people quitting are the one's who were around for longer then me. I either knew them personally or knew of them, via the boards or meeting em in game. Almost all of them were upright folks who I got to know to varying degrees, and they were willing to help out me and others who has just started.
So, since the higher level folks seem to be dropping away like Fox's good shows, people joining the game now and in the future look like they're screwed, economically and socially. The game has definitely stopped being as fun as it was, and what Squeenix is doing might not cure it.
I bought gil when I used to play FFXI. That game was seriously a timesink, I wanted to play with my brother, and unlike him didn't have unlimited time (I make $150 an hour, so I figured it would be better to spend $50 on gil than farm for 8 hours).
That game was seriously a timesink, and it took forever just to get anywhere or do anything. I've since moved to WoW, and although I havn't even hit level 30 yet, I felt like I havn't needed to buy gold yet (although my bro did set me up with 5 gold and a couple packs). The 5g has gone a long way.
Uhg, I still have nightmares of walking all the way to the dunes.
I thought that the fact that Final Fantasy was the first thing that came to my mind with the term "gilfarmers" was wrong, and that this story Was about some odd form of fish....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
The only MMORPG I've ever played that I really enjoyed is one that completely lacks any sort of crafting system. I am a total City of Heroes/Villains addict. The game is about enjoying the experience of playing, and there is a very limited amount of stuff to buy in-game: enhancements and inspirations. That's it, nothing else can be purchased in-game. No crafting, very little player-based economy and it was MMORPG of the year last yeat.
This space for rent...
(Yes, the Cory from Boingboing)
http://craphound.com/000187.html
(with links to a podcast version as well)
It's a fairly well suspected secret that Square-Enix actually allows gilfarming, or at least their GMs do. There are plenty of stories of GMs refusing to take action against obvious gilfarming groups when they break the TOS, and then taking action against the people reporting the gilfarmers for minor infractions.
(Stuff like gilfarmers repeatedly MPKing other players, those players calling a GM, and then the players being MPKed having their accounts suspended for breaking language rules by saying "wtf" or something similar.)
I'd be honestly amazed if Square-Enix actually banned any gilfarmers. The last time they did a "gilfarmer ban" they banned a total of 800 accounts out of 600,000. Woot. (Although doing that now might decimate their current subscriber count, hehe.)
I'm still waiting for them to mass-ban people using the windower to try and make the PC client bearable. The fact that a program exists soley to WINDOW THE GAME should suggest to Square-Enix that they may have something wrong with their client...
As long as there are game economies that allow you to make items, buy/sell items, and store bucketloads of cash, you will see farming done. In fact, of all of the many MMOs I have played (over a dozen, either in beta, live, or both) there have been problems with the economies, with the exception of CoH/V (which doesn't really have one.)
I see one of the biggest problems being that, especially here in the U.S., there is a sense of entitlement. And you have to buy that entitlement.
Players want to have stuff to show off and brag about (the e-penis effect), or simply to be the best at the game in the shortest possible time. So, they are willing to spend real life cash to have these in-game entitlements.
It is no different than their buying cars that they cannot really afford to have. My wife works for a major car manufacturer's credit company. You would laugh at how many people lease luxury cars because they can't afford to buy them, and then default on the car lease because even it is too much for their wallet. Their tales of tagedy all boil down to the fact that they should have never obtained the car they did, because the just have enough income to afford it. The car lease became popular because people wanted to drive what they couldn't afford. It's a sucker's ploy, and look how many suckers you know.
It's also like getting a huge cell phone plan so you can talk to your friend down the street, instead of using a land line. Or getting a lot of "bling bling" for showing off. Or decorating your body with numerous and stupid looking tattoos. Or breast implants/liposuction and other cosmetic surgeries. They are all luxuries you don't need. And most folks are willing to pay through the nose for them.
The farmers know this about MMO players, especially with us Americans. (Hey, I am one of those Americans, and I shake my head at the way kids today think they DESERVE stuff.) They prey on that. They probably run more sweatshops than all the sneaker companies combined.
And it works.
Seriously, a lot of that stuff is run by automated processes. I know a few guys that got real world rich of UO and EQ in that very manner. The trick is to make it so that it requires interaction with a live human or two or more in order to craft some of these high powered items. I know of several smaller privately run RPG game servers that have serious crafting components for those that choose to do so. You can also restrict raw materials. For example, if you want to make leather armor, it takes 10 hides. Now, you can't just walk over to another merchant and get 10 hides. You'll have to get them from a player who's been out hunting and who has the "skin animal" skill. He might only have one or two. You may end up having to buy hides from 7 or 8 people just to have the skins you need. Now you need metal too... You get the idea.
You can stop the farmers if you design it properly from the get go.... Maybe not completely but at least keep it down to a dull roar.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
Why not make a game with a real economy instead of one where gold comes from the hacked and dismembered corpses of innocent woodland creatures? Put a fixed amount of cash into circulation, and issue more as needed via NPC merchants.
Set up sting operations. Buy gil from IGE and then ban the accounts that come forward to give you the gil. Alternatively buy the gil from the person and then flag the account so you can see with whom they are trading items/gil. Pretty soon you will be able to see within reason the network of buyers and sellers. Proceed to ban all of the sellers and warn all of the buyers (or ban them, I'm a little more understanding as to their motivation). Repeat as necessary.
Buying 2,000,000 gil is only $37.95 on IGE right now, which is what, 3 subscriptions? The key is to make it not worth it to them. Watch their hours and gil amounts and then hit them when they have the most gil on them and they've sunk the most time in the game.
If they want to get overly serious about locking down the gilfarmers they could also move to just start banning Chinese IP ranges that the accounts come from and suing the companies that sell gil. Granted, I hate to encourage a more litigous environment but wrecking online economies that people play for fun is not something I take kindly to.
Will it ever be possible to eliminate farmers/sellers? Definitely not. Just like the war on crime and war on drugs have taught us, you can't enforce your way out of a crime problem. The most they can hope for is reduction of harms, and that's something I think they can definitely achieve.
make gold irrelevant. Like diablo 2, gold was mostly meaningless. make all the good items bind on pickup and have no more gold sinks, make it quests. For instance instead fo 80 gold to buy a mount, make it a quest that takes 1-5 hours. instead of making your castle require upkeep in gold, make it so you have to spend a X amount of time doing administration (in the form of little games you play for a certain amoutn of time). Make gold available and make it variably avaialble based on how much is in the system, if it starts hoarding gold, make a tax system that robs anyone who hoards it. Got 1mil gold well the kingdom of astermouth will force you to tithe 10% of the first 100,000 20% of the next 400,000 and 30 of the next 500,000. Make it so having those amounts will be hard to force farmers to do more admin work. And deduct your taxes at random (say no more then X times in a period of X days totalling the entire amount. So for a 30% tax, you can take onyl a total of 30% in a 1 mo period but it's taken at random and calculated at random. may 5th it calculates, 16th 19th, 25th it withdraws a third of what the calculation woudl be) all of sudden hoarding gold seems stupid, farming it it not all that worth while. They wont' go away but at least you've made thier lives very difficult.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
As long as gamers can create "money", for example by farming gold, the amount of money (or assets bought by the money) in circulation will increase, which will deacrease the value of the money.
There's only one way to solve this: Have a more or less fixed amount of money in circulation. Don't let gamers create money. Only create money if the population increases.
An observation I've made long ago is that humans (at least the smart ones) do what works, and as a result any game gets the kind of gamers it "deserves". E.g., if a FPS rewards camping more than anything else, it gets swamped in campers. E.g., if a MMO rewards farming, it gets farmers. It's that simple.
And doubly so when the game is a brain-dead exercise for the most brain-dead grinders. If the way to get ahead in the game is to be an obsessive-compulsive clicker willing to _work_ 8 hours a day on mind-numbing repetitive stuff (and pay each month for the privilege), yes, eventually some people will say "screw this, if I wanted more work, I'd do overtime and get paid for it." So they'll buy gold instead or cancel their account. It's that simple.
That creates the demand.
And conveniently most "me too" MMOs also create the supply. There's an abrupt differential in how much money you make per hour at each level. E.g., in WoW even a gray (junk) item dropped off a level 60 NPC is worth about 1 gold at the vendor (i.e., without even bothering with the auction house), while for a newbie 1 gold will pay for all your skills (trade skills included) and equipment up to level 10. E.g., in COH a level 50 can make more than 3 million per hour, money which you don't even need any more (no repairs, no more stuff to buy, etc), while for a new character 3 million will last you until level 35.
So you have:
1. a bunch of people who badly need gold (and face a non-fun repetitive grind of days, maybe weeks, to get it)
2. a bunch of people who can easily supply a newbie's need for gold (in a tiny fraction of that time)
So is it any surprise that a gold trade forms between the two? It's only common sense, not to mention elementary economics.
Complaining about the "evil" gil farmers when the game creates that slope, sorry, it's just brain dead. It's like complaining that things slide down a water slide. ("Waah, things should have slid up hill, and it's such an evil world when they go downhilll instead!") Well, what did they _expect_ there?
Want to make gil farmers go away? Well, yes, how about changing the economy then? Or for that matter, how about designing a game so it's fun for the casual gamer who plays it to relax after work, not to get more mind-numbing repetitive work?
Heck, it _is_ possible to design a game without gold at all.
E.g., look at Planetside. You're a soldier, so your tank or weapon are supplied to you for free. The balancing factors are your certifications (you don't get a tank if you're not certified to drive one) and the timer on some equipment (you have to play infantry a bit until you get your next tank, if you just drove your old one off a hill.) And unsurprisingly, there is no gold farming or trade whatsoever in Planetside. Go ahead, search ebay. You won't see gold or equipment for sale for Planetside.
The same could work in a lot of other games. E.g., in COH, you don't even have equipment or such, you have new techniques or enhancements for your signature moves: it's a trivial exercise to re-design that to work basically as skill points gained at level-up, instead of being bought. E.g., in WoW, you don't even need to go that far: bump quest rewards up to be actually suitable for the quest's level (as opposed to getting a level 12 mace as reward for a level 30 elite quest), and you've just made money entirely unnecessary. Etc.
And in FFXI's case, heck, they just need to get a brain and realise that the Japanese kind of "work simulator" is entirely the wrong game concept for the vast majority of us Westerners.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
What, am I the only one who read the headline about Milfarmers?!
I think the point that most people are missing, is that the economy of FFXI has components similar to many of the solutions suggested by posters above. You can't just assume that the inflation of all the items is due to the fact that gilfarmers are 'farming' gil. In actuality, gilfarmers in FFXI don't really contribute as much gil to the system as the fishbotting problem did. The rapid inflation of rare items (like Haubergeon+1, Juggernaught, Nobles/Aristocrat's Tunics. etc etc) are due to both the massive RMT that takes place, and the declining server populations.
When somebody quits, they don't quit with all their gil. They give it to their friends, in hopes that their friends can use the gil to jump ahead and get those items they truly wanted (Astral Earring, Juggernaught etc). This leads to less people in general holding the same total amount of gil. Obviously the prices of items will go up in this situation.
Solutions like taxes have been implemented in FFXI for a long time now. Large (10%) taxes on bazaar sales, on all auction house sales in Jeuno/Tavnazian Safehold, increasingly demanding chocobo fees (5k/chocobo for a 3 minute ride is normal), Dynamis, Limbus etc are all money sinks that are implemented with the sole purpose of sucking gil out of the system to try to control the average gil holdings of all the people left on the server. As with all solutions, people get away with tax evasion (bazaaring in starting nations or in open fields), direct trading, etc, but the solutions are still implemented with varying success.
The problem with gil farmers in FFXI lies in the fact that they monopolize NM/HNM's and become the sole source of rare items deemed fundamental for normal play or crafting synthesis, and then abuse the discrepencies in supply and demand to make huge profits of gil that they later RMT back to players. Somebody suggested making crafting require absurd amounts of materials as a solution. Some recipes in FFXI require 8 ingredients (that may or may not be stacked, requiring intense travelling) of varying rareness or origin, multiple craft sub-skills, etc.
It's not like WoW where gilfarmers just sit there killing monsters and collect the gold that they drop. No mob in FFXI (goblins dropping 5gil/kill) is worth farming like that (better to farm beehive chips in giddeus and HQ beeswax for hundreds of k worth of gil on the auction house). And, almost all mobs worth killing require at least 6+ people to do it (either for experience points, or camping HNM).
To counter this, Square-Enix started to move away from HNM centric loot distribution, and towards instanced battles, with participation rates determined by how many beastman seals you could collect (not so common), and then later with more fights with participation rates determined by how many Kindred Seals (even less common) you could collect. These were the right direction in the end, and they implemented fixed interval fights ENM's that proved rewarding and fun. These are really good changes and any FFXI gamer that has experienced the effects of these will tell you they add to the enjoyment of the game.
The problem almost all FFXI->WoW converts complain about is that it takes too much effort to get items in FFXI with little gain. Almost all the items in the game worth getting are the results of huge collaborations of team effort (and organizational nightmares). This is the part that seems to separate the average WoW gamer and a true FFXI junkie. The WoW convert detests investing insane amounts of time/effort into the game without quick rewards/satisfaction, while the FFXI junkie will not have it any other way.
In FFXI you camp kings for 3-9 hours/day (rotating times so it might be 3pm - midnight today, and in 3 days the spawn windows could be 3am to 9am) for the 'chance' to be able to fight (150+ people in a tiny zone trying to claim a mob that pops every 21-24 hours at 30 minute intervals and 12-18'ish people get to fight it for 15 minutes to an hour) and out of that chance, the 1/11 chance that t
I'd consider myself a "hardcore" FFXI player. I've got one job at level 75 on the Odin server and another getting very close. I'd estimate my weekly play-time to be in the 15-20 hours range for an average week. It's been blatantly obvious since November or so that *something* has been changing in the dynamic between GMs, RMTs (real money traders) and other general griefers.
First of all, just to clarify what I mean by "farming" in this post. Farming is not, in itself, an illegitimate activity, or against the terms-of-service. If you want to make some money in FFXI, farming is one of the most reliable ways of doing so. Run out to a zone where you can kill the mobs easily and quickly and where the mobs drop items that you can sell on for good money. The longer you stay there farming, the more money you make. As you will need a lot of high value items in FFXI, some of them from quite an early level, most players will spend a lot of time farming at various points. "Farming" only deserves its negative connotations when it is done with the express purpose of exchanging the gil made for real-world money.
Although I haven't bought gil myself (despite extreme temptation on a couple of occasions), I'd estimate the proportion of players who have at about 25%, mostly for when they've wanted an expensive, one off item that's essential for their job (the Haubergeon for melee jobs is the classic example). I'd also estimate that maybe 10% buy gil on a regular basis (as in, several million gil per month). I've no hard evidence to back this up... just observations of how many people seem to be able to get by with little or no farming, acquire expensive items at a suspicious rate and so on. To be frank, anybody levelling Ranger or Ninja at a rate of more than one or two levels per week is almost certainly buying gil, unless they started with a vast amount of capital.
Now, for a long time, this had been widely known and the situation had been more or less stable. There was a constant, but managable, level of inflation in the game. Most players looked down on people suspected of buying gil and nobody would actually own up to it, but it wasn't significantly unbalancing the game and those who didn't buy gil could generally get along just fine without it. However, in October/November, IGE started a series of price-cuts on gil. I'd only been monitoring their prices since August or so, but I'm told that price-cuts up to that point had been relatively minor and relatively evenly spaced. At the start of October, 2 million gil would have set you back about $50-60.
By early-December, 2 million gil was down to $30. This was already having a significant impact in-game. The price of many of the "premium" items, such as the Haubergeon, Scorpion Harness and Peacock Charm had doubled. In early October, the prices of those items were 2 million, 4.5 million and 8 million respectively. By the start of December, 4 million, 8 million and 15 million.
Then came the Christmas-sale. Suddenly, IGE were selling 4 million gil for about $22. Lots of idiots who got cash for Christmas ran right out and spent it on gil, tempted by the insane prices. Of course, this was a pretty futile exercise, as inflation immediately went insane. The three items above peaked at 12 million, 19 million and 32 million respectively during the week between Christmas and New Year.
Now, the big problem was what this meant for the people who didn't buy gil. See, when people buy themselves gil for Christmas, it's not because they want to use it to pay for their food or ammo costs for the next few months, or to level a craft. It's because they want a big, shiny premium item. So the inflation was confined almost entirely to the highly desirable items in question. The number of hours that an "honest" player would need to farm for to afford one of these items had pretty much quadrupled overnight. For the first time, those who didn't buy gil were at a real, almost insurmountable disadvantage. This was nothing less than an attempt by IGE to sieze outright cont
If wow emphisised crafting over drops i think a few problems would be fixed...
I was hoping this would be a story about 'posses' going out and about hunting down and PKing known gold farmers.
Darn.
square enix undercuts the gillfarmers so badly that they cant turn a profit anymore.
why bother to spend the time to farm that 1mil gil when anybody can buy it straight from square for $5?
gilfarmers die off and square turns a nice profit.
win/win
I believe I could stop gold farming today, right this minute. (I'm only familiar with WoW, however). Here it is: don't allow large sums to be received through the mail from sources that don't receive anything in return. Put it on a timer, so that the farmer doesn't work around it by simply sending many smaller shipments; scale the value to the respective level. I guess lvl 60 characters might be legitimately receiving 100 GP from their guild mates, but if that amount is going to anyone under lvl 30 over the course of less than a month, that character has paid for the transfer with real money.
Wow, simple, huh? I have a hard time seeing what's wrong with this solution. Not hard to think of, either, which means that Blizz must have thought of it themselves already--and dismissed it, because they don't truly want to shut down farmers, for any number of reasons.
The problem is that if you depend on tediousness to increase the play time for the game that you develop, you're going to attract people that want to circumvent that. If you make your game fun to play for it's own sake, nobody will want to circumvent it. My chief gripe with WoW is completing a quest, only to get a later quest that returns me to the same area I just left--now to get another item. If those quests are chained, I can't even do them at the same time. Not only does this break the suspension of disbelief--"didn't I just get done killing all the creeps in this area? where do they come from?" it signals lazy development. Why develop two interesting spots when you can just send the character back to one? Yeah, I'd pay something to someone else to take my PC through that again.
--
$tar -xvf
Here's a few thoughts.
* Remove spawn camping from the game. Use only instanced environment for PvE combat.
* Require NPC interaction to get a 'quest' to open an instance or spawn das uber beast.
* Use collision detection. Farm scripter will have a much harder time automating the process if someone blocks their route.
* Control the economy similar to a real economy. The game server is like the Department of Treasury, they control how much new money is going into the game. The trick is they need to work on ways of preventing the money hole. In the real world money doesn't just 'disappear' when you buy a weapon or a house. If you buy a house, someone is getting paid to build that house. And that person is paying someone else to gather resources. True, this would mean that the MMO would have to include tons of non-combat orriented classes (or skills). House builders, lumber jacks, miners, smithies, jewelers, seamstriss, armour smiths, weapon smiths, tanners and leather workers, etc... The end goal is that you reduce the 'disappearing' money to a minor amount spent by newbs on low level gear.
-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
Gold farming for low-level characters isn't really an issue in WoW. Quest rewards are typically pretty good for their level, and at the very least they're usually good enough to see you through to a higher level.
Honestly, most people buying gold are level 60 themselves, and they could actually earn money QUICKER than most farmers if they put their minds to it (because they know how to play the game better than a guy who's just doing this as a crap job, and because they can find groups to get into high-end instances).
The only reason there's a market for gold is that the farmers are mostly from China or third-world countries and value their time much less than American WoW players; they're happy to get $1 for an hour's worth of gold grinding. There's free-trade economics for ya!
...it's the prohibition.
The reward from farming is largely the result of the artificial search costs created by deeming it illegitimate. If you made gold farming open and accessible, the profit on the activity would drop, fewer would engage in it, and the obnoxiousness factor would become negligible.
No one would send spamming tells, because everyone would know where to go to turn gold into cash and vice versa. Also, to limit some rich kid's ability to make the game inherently unfair, just have periodic rampant inflation in the economy, effectively redistributing the wealth away from those who have amassed inappropriate fortunes. This might have drawbacks, but surely other discrete macroeconomic measures can be employed to encourage general fairness.
It's tempting to think that a game that encourages gold/cash trading would never be worth playing. But consider Second Life, which runs a PayPal integrated stock system for trading in game currency for real money. The profit margins are so tiny as to make gold farming basically impossible.
How about creating a progressive tax with an exponential curve? The more gold you have stowed away, the more the game gov't gets every day. Perhaps with the more tax you pay, you could gain some sort of prestige or privalige or something, so that a normal rich gamer would not be straight robbed.
The notorious gilfarmer people are busy celebrating Chinese New Year. This happens every major Chinese holiday. They should be back to work this weekend or next week.
Like so many things in this world, farmers are not a black & white issue. Especially when it comes to capital Communists. ;) You don't need to make a game that is farmer proof, you just need to make your game less efficient. If a farmer can work for $20/hr (farm and resall value) on a DAoC server, but can only work for $10/hr on your game, they will go to the $20/hr server to maximize profits.
Like out running a hungry and pissed off bear, you don't have to be faster then the bear, you just have to be faster then the other guy running from the bear.
-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