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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."
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.
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'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