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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."
believe it or not, there are some of us who craft for the fun, reputation, and social atmosphere. Puting a stop to all tradable inventory pretty much kills any craft master.
-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
These higher prices aren't payable for normal players playing normally, because it'd literally take like years of playing to get the money.
Yes, they could try to get the rare item themselves. A good idea ! Only, there's a problem: the area where the monster with the item spawns is camped by a dozens of chinese, your odds of ever actually getting to tackle with the monster, even assuming you're *also* willing to camp there for a week, are slim.
So what are you to do ? Accept that the game is now split in three: One, normal players, that play with the weakest gear, and are prevented from meeting the most powerful monsters. Two: players who buy Gil and thus gets the best gear for no in-game investment. They can *also* still not challenge the most powerful monsters, since these are camped. And three: Campers and Farmers that have no interest in playing the game or contributing to the society, but only camp the monster that gives them the most Gil, or does the same farming-thing over-and-over-and-over for literally years.
Can you see why this environment migth detract from the fun for someone ?
Progressive taxes, perhaps?
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.
Simple: keep a set ammount of money in the gameworld. Closed economy. Allow banks to be taken over and money stolen, and require money to be transported instead of magically being at all your banks.
;) Every coin in the game should be really in the game, be it in a shopkeep's pocket or an npc mayor's safe. It's just a matter of getting to some of it.. of course, that introduces a vital role in the whole dynamics of everything.. you've got to have each npc buying food every day, even if it's not visible to the player. Then you've got the bakers, et al, paying taxes and buying raw materials etc. Then you've got your guards, who get paid by the mayor to protect everyone else from players or npcs that try to get their money.
Add dynamic events where certain players' hordes are likely to be broken into by npc bandits - but only if they control too much of the currency in his bank(s). Yeah, it might piss off some players - maybe they should pay the bank to hire more guards
Not only would a closed economy provide a more dynamic and exciting play environment, but it would keep currency inflation in check.
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.
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
Hey, though I agree with you about most of your post, the tattoo remark was a bit irksome. Most people who get large tattoos take great personal pride in them, and I am not talking about the Tazmania Devil/Nike Swoosh/Tribal armband crowd. There is a difference between personal expression and pointless materialism. When I am dead, my car may get reposessed, but my tattoos are mine forever. /rant off