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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
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.
(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...
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."
That's not an entirely accurate assessment of the situation. Let me give you an example of what part of the problem is:
Let's say there exists a dragon that drops a valuable item. This dragon spawns approximately once a real life day (randomly somewhere between 21 and 24 hours to mix it up and make sure it doesn't stay in the same time zone forever), and the item that it drops isn't guaranteed. This item is also highly sought after.
That would make this item pretty darn valuable, wouldn't it? There is at most one of this item entering the game world every day. This is a perfect target for a RMT (real money trader) organization to try to monopolize.
For the average player, there are times this dragon will spawn when you are at work, at school, doing guild events, out to dinner, asleep, etc. And there are also times when you just don't have a clue as to when that dragon is due to spawn again.
But it is just perfect for an RMT company to go after since they are always online, playing in shifts around the clock. And since they were there last night, they'll know exactly when it is due to appear tonight. You can do your best to try to compete against them, you might even get the item a few times, but they're always there.
Now repeat the process for every monster in the game that has a multiple hour spawn window and drops a valuable item, and you can see why so many players are getting angry. It's very hard to get anywhere when facing competition that never sleeps. And the worst part is that there are enough RMT workers to cover almost every monster that fits this description.
This is a fundamental design flaw of the game and it allows the RMT companies to get a serious chokehold on a game's economy. I'm not blaming every single problem with the economy on RMTers, much of it is player greed, but they aren't helping.
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