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Gold Buying - Time Saver or Cheating?
Sunday's online version of The Wichita Eagle has a piece on buying gold in a MMOG. The author of the piece examines what's involved, and ponders whether such an action is cheating, or just a shortcut. From the article: "Getting my gold was a snap. The smallest quantity for sale by IGE was 500 pieces for $60, about twice what I wanted to spend. I decided to go for it, however, as I simply could not abide the prospect of skinning even one more level-10 boar. Within 20 minutes, the gold appeared in my WoW character's mailbox." From a Cathode Tan post. What is your opinion: Cheating or Shortcut?
Just plain stupid.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
If it wasn't cheating, Blizzard would have sold the gold to you themselves.
It's clear buying gold is not within the spirit or the intent of the game.
Conclusion:it's cheating.
Insert some stuffa bout a free-market economy and that the game companies only don't like it because they aren't in on in the deal (yet SOE is changing that with EQ2).
This is just one in a multiple list of problems concerning the RL relationships of MMORPG players. If you can withstand them all and still have fun, more power to you. I'd much rather play a single player game where I know where everything stands.
//just catching up with Smash Brothers Melee. Good times...
The people you buy gold form online had to get it from somewhere. Usually that somewhere comes from selling obscene amounts of items far below market value, making it all but impossible for honest players trying to make a few silver here and there to sell anything. Buying gold from then
a) Keeps them in buisness
b) Screws with the game economy even more, and
c) is against most, if not all EULA's
I already know i'm going to hell, now i'm just trying to get cable down there.
What is your opinion: Cheating or Shortcut?
It can be two things!
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
It's definitely not fair. Some people spend hours upon hours, sometimes in-game days to tradeskill (made harder by the presence of Chinese farmers) and acquire in-game wealth. Others spend a minor amount of cash to instantly acquire this same wealth (and in a manner that enables and encourages further Chinese farming). At first I found this incredibly unfair.
Now I have another take on it. Note that I do not, nor will I ever purchase gold. But as a working professional, I don't have the same time to devote to the game that high-school and college students do. I don't want gaming to become a 9-5 job just to have fun. I only have a few hours on the weekends to play. I will never be abel to effectively tradeskill. I will level once every two weeks, if that.
For some, buying gold is an efficient way to obtain materials for tradeskilling that would otherwise require hours of dedicated playing; time that many people (like me) just don't have. Even now, I'm looking at the mats required for weaponsmithing, and all I can do is throw up my hands and say, "I don't have time to do this." I don't know anymore. I wish Blizzard would make the game funner for impatient people who can't devote their life to the game.
It is option c) SPAM supporting.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
I agree. If you're sick of playing the game, stop playing. Otherwise its not a game anymore -- it's an addiction.
If you can't play the game, instead of buying your way through it, don't bother playing.
Spending $60 on game gold. That's 2x what I paid for the game itself. I could buy 3-4 DVDs for that much, or another 4 months playtime on WoW. What a ridiculous waste of money.
The game is dull.
At least it is for poor player. There aren't enough interesting ways to make money.
Anyone could easily offer a service where I go on quests for a player in order to gain level (at least I presume so. Don't play MMOs), but nobody would bother because it would be taking away their fun. Dennis made this clear himself. "I had essentially quit my job and grabbed for life's gusto". Why do people want to get home from a tedious job, and do another tedious job?
Blizzard need to address these gameplay issues and make it so that getting rich as as gratifying as being rich.
...forces you to do repetitive things that you do not find fun (like harvest gold or whatnot), then find yourself a different game. It's not like there aren't options out there: I've never understood why people tolerate poor games, and even pay money to play them.
It's cheating, a shortcut, and annoying.
I'm farming for the materials for my Robe of the Void and guess what, there's a Gold Farmer running the same path over and over in Azshara looking for Satyrs so that he can sell off the Felcloth.
24 hours later and this Farmer has went from level 52 to 55.
Fortunatly for us, Blizzard enforce their policies with regard to buying gold etc over the internet. A quick glance at their news archive shows they have already banned many accounts farming gold for selling, and accounts that have purchased gold.
:)
The main problem most MMORPG players have with these gold selling antics is that it ruins the economy of the realms. The gold farmers come and either legitimately farm gold, or more commonly use bots to automate the farming (also against the TOS) 'generating' extra gold on the realm which is then sold on, boosting the prices in the Auction House etc because there are people with more gold to spend.
It would be very naieve for someone purchasing gold on the internet to not think it can be traced - Blizzard logs ALL transactions to be able to perform rollbacks to the realms and to retrieve lost items. If Blizzard catch a gold farmer selling gold they will also be able to see everyone that had gold sent to them from that account so have a nice chain of accounts ready to be banned
Just don't create a file called -rf.
I'd rather spend the $60 on another game, preferably one that realizes I want to play, not work.
Somehow, somewhere, this meme got into the MMORPG world that players have to "earn" their stuff, preferably through repetitive tasks.
Unfortunately, somehow it works. We all play along and accept it as normal, pretty much like computer crashes (try telling any admin of a 1970s mainframe that regular computer crashes are nothing special).
Yes, it is a shortcut. It most definitely beats having to do the same nonsense another 100 times. It is probably cheaper, as well (i.e. you earn more money in the time you saved than it costs you).
But damn, it should make you re-check your priorities and ask yourself if you're sure you want to sink more money into that game, and why. And whether you're ready to do it again, and again, as it's unlikely that phase of the game was unique.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Depends on the game. Take Second Life, for example - in there, exchanging real-life money for in-game money is not only possible, it's actually encouraged and can be done through the developing company (Linden) itself. And what's more, the way the game is set up otherwise makes it pretty impossible for you to seriously get into it unless you do it.
I think Linden has pretty much figured out the second step on the road to Profit!!!, but since it's at the expense of pretty much everyone who otherwise might be interested in the game, I also dare say that they won't be able to continue with this forever.
But then, maybe that's not what they want to do, anyway - a few millions right here and now are nice enough already, right?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
If it was a single player game, even if it was a Diablo-like game, I couldn't care less. Enjoy it. You take a shortcut to what could usually take long to get. No problem. It does not affect me.
It does affect me in a MMORPG.
Now, sure, you have an item I don't. That's not the problem. It's also no problem if you're just a lucky bastard who decides to sell his once in a lifetime find on EBay.
The problem starts with commercial farming.
Worst problem are non-instanced encounters. Commercial and organized farmers can and do monopolize important spawns. They do have the key equipment, they do know where to be when and they do know how to cooperate. In other words, as a normal vanilla player with a normal vanilla guild (if any), you have NO chance to get that item into your hands.
Unless you pay for it.
Now, this problem can be remedied with instances. Go there with your guild and eventually you can have the item, too. No farming guild can keep you from getting it.
Another problem with farmers: Inflation. When a ton of money is pumped into the system, prices go up. I buy XXX money for YY$. So I have XXX. Would take me 2 weeks to get, and if I had to invest the time, I'd probably think twice. But who cares? 200 for a sword worth 20? That's about 3 bucks, one pack of cigs less and I can do it. Mine!
Over time, the only people able to afford certain items will be those that farm like crazy or those buying money from farmers. You, the ordinary player who doesn't want or can't spend real money for virtual cash, you're out of the loop.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It doesn't matter if you don't think it's fair. A M:TG player can build a deck by buying each card individually -- nobody says they should be forced to buy booster packs until they uncover all the individual cards they want.
It doesn't matter if you think that the MMO gold is just pixels and a record in a database somewhere. Trading cards are just ink and paper, but some of them have ridiculously high value to collectors.
The only stupid thing here is the MMO publisher trying to stand in the way of the law of supply and demand. It's like trying to overcome gravity by force of will. Or, more like pissing into the wind.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
What is your opinion: Cheating or Shortcut?
Are you people for real? Do your mommies really allow to waste their money, $60 at a time, just to get to a higher level in an asinine game? If so, would you please assist me in getting some money out of my country?
My name is Mr.Moses Odiaka.I work in the credit and accounts department of
Union Bank of NigeriaPlc,Lagos, Nigeria...
The saying "More money than brains" really can apply to this..
Maybe online MMORPGs aren't for you. Or at least not the one you're playing. If you "don't have the time" to earn gold then you probably "don't have the time" to gain levels or do any of the other time sinks computer RPGs and especially MMOGs are famous for. Case in point -- the author was skinning level 10 boars in a game with a level cap of 60, which would be insanity if you were high enough level to kill and skin higher-level beasts with more valuable pelts. So he hasn't put in the work to level up, but has already spent $60 to buy what would be a ridiculous amount of gold for his level. How long until he just gives that up and buys a level 60 character with all the best loot because "I simply could not abide the prospect of doing even one more 'kill X many of Y creature' quests".
I understand that MMORPGs are huge time sinks, and lots of people don't have the time to spend on them. If you can have fun playing, then I suggest that you just settle for never being rich, and never having the very best items. If you can't have fun without being rich and having the best loot, may I suggest another genre?
The enemies of Democracy are
I play games to have fun, I find many aspects of the mmorpg genre to be wonderfully fun. But given the fact that many server economies are just screwed up because of the gold farmers, my fun factor has decreased. There is no competing with them. If I want the good equipment, I almost have to buy it.
Because of the money shift that gold farmers produce, fewer people who go after equipment are willing to let people come along, instead they can go get it and sell it. That keeps the higher levels of people just slightly behind the gold farmer's inflated market, but in reality it is that relationship that just fuels them more.
Normal people can't play enough to farm that much gold to buy the inflated prices. So I bought gold. Now, I have enough money to let me enjoy the game again for awhile. I do feel bad because now I too have just fueled the gold farmers, but They are not going to go away ever. I hope that is not a shock to anyone's system. Since they are not going to go away, I just adapt to the new society.
For what I paid in Cash for the Gold, I was happy. In the end that is what is important to me.
I don't think it's a shortcut neither a cheating: The game mechanics allow these transaction to happen.
The possibility of gold exchange should be taken into account by the developers, and the game, balanced accordingly. It's something that the players want to do, you don't battle against your userbase. There are game designs, of course, but once you put l00t and currency, this *will* happen, no matter what the "terms of use" or anything like that says.
The developers should, then, design around this issue, and stay way from simple definitions like "cheating" or "shortcut". If you think it's a shortcut, then perhaps you have a flaw on the loot drops, and it's they that should be changed, not the player behaviour.
Some fights can't be won, and are not that bug deal, so just go along.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
It's a cheat and it degrades the experience for the other players.
I place the blame squarely with Blizzard though. How hard would it be to implement a server dedicated to players who want to buy gold, the way servers are dedicated to PvP, PvE, or roleplaying? This way, they could control the purchase and sale of gold, thereby giving those who want to play this way a EULA-compliant way of doing it, which would pretty much dry up the farmers market. Who would want to risk getting banned when they could easliy go to the gold buyout server?
i really don't mind people buying gold, it makes it easier for the newbs....
although buying gold does artifcially cause inflation, i don't think i've seen it too bad. and inflation isn't nessecerly good. a person at level 40 on a mature server will have a much easier time coming up with 90 gold by selling his wares on an inflated market then someone on a new server... in fact the only way i came up the money for my mount was to take advantage of the rapid changes in the arcane crystal/arcanite market that the farmers would mess up.(i was buying crystals at 9-11g each and selling for 25-30 for the end product)
so i say leave the farmers alone
Why has this concept been limited to MMOs? It could work in any sport, game, or competitive activity you can think of.
...actually, scratch that last one. I think it's been tried.
Having "family game night" with the kids? Slip the wife a little hair-salon money in exchange for having your Candyland character halfway up the board before the game even starts! Your children might end up hating you, but victory will be yours at all costs!!
Playing in a competitive chess tournament? How about for a small extra fee you could buy yourself a few extra pawns, and maybe a spare queen or two? Who couldn't use a few extras, just in case?
Don't feel like doing your homework? Simply hand in an empty paper with a cheque taped to the back and see if teacher won't leave the red marker in the desk drawer that day.
Super Bowl time again? Whichever team is the first to pay for that big urban renewal project in the hosting city gets 10 bonus happy lucky points before the game even starts!
What about that grandest of all competitions, the Olympics? Have a big ice-skating competition coming up but you're getting cold feet? Why not pay your bodyguard to make sure the competion really "breaks a leg", if you get my drift.
Andrew Lenahan http://www.starblind.com/
Money can't buy you happiness, for everthing else, there's China Gold...
If a person decides their time or enjoyment is worth more than the cost of gold or items let them do it. Considering just how much time is involved in these games where speed runs are measured in days, not minutes it certainly makes sense.
It's cheating and a shortcut.
If gold were cheaper I probably would have bought some, but then I remember my $15.00/month cost of the subscription and realize it's just a game.
I pulled the plug today. No more WoW for me.
From a legal standpoint (IANAL) gold farming is completely unacceptable according to the TOS because no one is allowed to make a profit from Blizzard's software.
This is a very similar case to the recent Valve vs. Subway shenanegans where an ad agency showed virtual billboards in Counterstrike games. Valve sued them and won very easily.
Gold farmers are LUCKY to simply be banned from the game. They could be sued (if they reside in the same country as Blizzard, I suppose).
It's both a cheat AND a timesaver.
If I want to play in a world where the rich kids get all the cool toys without putting in any effort... I'll go outside.
This gets at the heart of the problem I've always had for MMO's. One of the central parts of the game is making money. If the process is so little fun that people are willing to spend even more money to not go through it, then isn't that a poor design for a central game mechanic? Also, if you're paying for a game, subscription fees, and now at the very least matching those prices bypassing a large chunk of the game, how fun is that? It's like the satisfaction of beating games with god mode on. Sure you won, but you also missed 70% (those FMVs are so awesome they are the other 30% ha ) of the game.
Cheating. Let's examine the primary arguments that attempt to legitimize the practice of buying gold rather than earning it in-game:
"I don't have time in real life to spend hours doing repetitive stuff to earn gold."
Sounds like impatient instant-gratification whining. There are lots of fun and non-repetitive ways to earn gold in most MMORPGs -- try to be imaginative (in WoW, try playing the Auction House or using roleplaying to sell goods or services). I have a full-time job as an engineer, a girlfriend I live with, and plenty of other commitments, and I earn enough in-game money in WoW to keep me interested. If you can't have fun without having the absolute best items all the time, then don't play.
"The real world is a free market and the gold had to come from somewhere."
Blizzard (and other companies) purposely didn't account for this when they designed the balancing mechanics of the game. Yes, the gold had to come from somewhere, but realize that when creatures and resources respawn infinitely, dedicated gold farmers can theoretically rack up infinite amounts of gold. The only difference between that and duping is the investment of time.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I simply could not abide the prospect of skinning even one more level-10 boar.
But, but...
It was for the boar-skinning that I signed up!
Nothing beats sitting in the comfort of my mom's basement, skinning virtual boar! Every day, I thank God that I live in an age when the delights of boar-skinning can be achieved so readily.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I heard a piece on NPR a week or two ago about whether the selling of in-game items for real-world money creates tax consequences for everyone playing the game.
The IRS doesn't distinguish between "income" due to hobby and "income" due to work. If you make quilts for fun, but you sell them because you don't have room for any more quilts in the house, the money you get for the quilts is still considered income.
If you do something, and someone gives you an item with value (for example, a plumber fixes a painter's toilet, and is given a painting) the value of that painting at the time of the exchange is considered income.
If you play a game and get in-game "e-gold", and that e-gold has value outside the game (as it does in this case) then the IRS may well consider the e-gold taxable income in the amount it could be sold for in real world money - whether you actually ever sell it or not.
The NPR correspondent made a number of phone calls to the IRS, and the consensus was that the e-gold was likely taxable income. They suggested he file as if it were, and see what happens. He ended the piece saying that it wasn't going to be him who brought this issue to the IRS's attention in writing, and left it at that.
The preferred solution is to not have a problem.
These games have broken economies; they are using the wrong economic model, imposing pseudo-scarcity where there is in fact no scarcity at all. It's the game design that's the problem, not the fact that users are finding ways of working around this annoying fact: Don't blame the users, blame the designers.
What's the solution? The Second Life folks seem to have a good one but I suspect it's not readily transportable to other types of worlds. Perhaps the solution for other types of worlds is to base the advancement of characters on something other than that which can be collected and transferred to another character: No gold or items, accomplishments only. Just an idea.
Happy Monday to all!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I could never compete at WoW (if I played) because I don't have time to run around leveling up. I have a wife, three jobs, an education. So I'm at a disadvantage because I don't have as much time to spend. Does that mean people who do spend more time than me are cheating? No - they just choose to allocate more time (resources) to the game. Good for them.
How is money any different? If someone wants to allocate more money (resources) to the game how is that any different from them allocating more time?
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
Blizzard should enforce their policies more strictly to prevent the exploit of chinese farmers but on the other hand the guys that exploit these farmers pay for their WoW accounts.
...what matters is what you like, not what you are like...
One thing to keep in mind about gold sellers is that, even if you're repeatedly doing end-game content in a raiding guild.... you're usually NOT making much money.
Raiding in WoW costs money. Repair bills (especially while learning), consumables (the 2hour flasks cost quite a bit in mats, everyone needs stacks of greater fire prot and greater healing for MC, stacks upon stacks of mana pots for all the casters, etc, etc), not to mention the various miscellanious class costs (candles & other reagents, food for pets to keep them happy, etc, etc). It's not uncommon for raiding guilds starting out to be running a serious deficiet and have to spend time doing nothing but farming gold and/or mats. The alchemists those guilds are either buying the materials or have every single dreamfoil spawn everywhere in the world burned into thier skull.
So, there is farming being done for raiding. It's a fact of life. If you approach WoW as a hobby, then doesn't it make sense to outsource that farming?
You use the resources you have: some people have time, some people have money.
If your time is more valuable to you then your money, you will use your money to minimize the time you have to spend in game. It is an utterly ridiculous waste to time to spend hours and hours grinding away in a videogame when you do not have to.
Its called "grinding" for a reason; and its not because it is fun (in this case :)).
Disclaimer: I haven't bought gold. I don't ever expect to. Why? Because frankly gold is trivial to make in most games. Skinning level 10 boars? A waste. I'll skim off the auction house. Buy low, sell high. Especially if you can reprocess in the middle so people don't realize you're doing it.
Now, having gotten that out of the way. Consider: how long would it take you to farm the mats for... let's pick a couple things I'm looking at recently: the devilsaur set and/or volcanic and/or stormshroud. Fairly expensive: one person is selling stormshoud for about 130/150 a pop per peice on my server.
Now, I can make good money on the AH, but making that much... that'd take a lot of time. Most people don't even know making money like that on the AH is possible, but reguardless. How much time would it take farming ore, or "farming" the AH to make that much?
Right. Now from the article, 500 gold is what, $60? (I think it is less on my server from in-game spam I get from time to time but who knows.) If I wanted to do some work consulting, or even some overtime, how long would it take me to earn $60?
Heck of a lot less time than it'd take in game that's for sure! In fact, for them it may be a net gain. Spend a couple hours working on cleaning viruses off computers, spend some of that cash on virtual gold, powerlevel up whatever skill you want. Now you have some leftover real cash, leftover virtual cash, met the goal you were pursuing in the game and took less time to do it than you would have just grinding in game.
That's why people do it. It makes economic sense to them. It doesn't matter if they could buy another game: this is the game they want to play.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I'm no big-time MMORPG player (I have played a bit of EQ and Guild Wars normally, and dabbled in other games), but I think gold is a replacement for friends when you start out. When I first started playing Everquest, I was lucky enough to have a friend in the game, and found another person nice that helped me get decent money and weapons/equipment (some handed right to me). At least to me, others helping you get started seems incredebly useful. Now what if you didn't find anyone friendly and didn't have any friends in the game willing to give you some backing as a newbie? Well then your shit out of luck, and might buy gold to get stuff with. Be it from a friend or a store using money-bought gold, The end result of getting equipment easily is the same. And let's be realistic. Getting the first amounts of gold needed for decent equipment can be extremely tedious and IMHO is an easy way to drive players away, because they know there is so much more they can do, but are limited to getting the basics down first.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
By the established rules.
Is buying gold banned in the EULA? Did you agree not to buy gold when you installed/logged on/set up a user account? If so, it's cheating.
Personally, I think people who buy gold are short-changing themselves of the full game experience. And if the game is too arduous, or too boring for them without buying gold, then they should be playing a different game, which might lead to more MMORPGs without the grind.
Gold-buying kills game economics for those who don't buy gold. It takes away any sense of achievement from the grind, making it more likely for others to buy gold.
Net net, gold-buying means that the gold-buyers are playing the wrong game, and the non-buyers are not getting what they paid for.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
The whole point of MMO's is to try to achieve more things in less time than other people given the same opprotunities. This requires a combination of equipment management to achieve maximum stat-twinkery, money management, talent tree planning, investments and AH expertise, social networking, and farming. Purchasing gold with real money undermines the entire game, from both you and everyone else on your server.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
I've never really understood the surprised indignation society seems to carry over the fact that there is a thriving real world demand for game characters, items and money. It's definitely cheating and it's definitely in violation of the EULA. It's far less malevolent than software and music piracy, however, and that has become fairly socially acceptable. Both are cases where people take the easy way to get what they want, but it's amusing to see people with 200 GB of pirated mp3's write posts complaining about people who are actually paying for what they want.
Buying gold is a fairly cheap entertainment investment. A stereotypical MMO gamer may pay $15/month for a single account and play about 20 hours per week. That works out to about $0.50 for a three hour play session. Compare that to $10 for bowling, $10 for a movie, $15 for dinner, $30-50 for a play, $50 for a sports ticket and it's easy to see why many gamers feel that MMO's provide very cheap entertainment. Spending $50 on gold every now and then still leaves them on the low side of recreational spending.
Most importantly, the argument that bought achievements mean less than earned achievements remains too weak to alter public behavior. A store bought rug certainly carries less "meaning" than a rug you made yourself, yet most people are unwilling to devote the time and effort to weaving their own rugs. Rug weaving is arguably more interesting than gold farming (some people choose it as a hobby in itself), yet most people still prefer to avoid the issue by purchasing one themselves. In the end, if we ignore the "cheating" aspect of gold purchasing, it is no different than paying a neighborhood kid to mow your lawn for you.
Gold purchasing is here to stay... as long as there are MMO gamers willing to deal in US dollars to acquire things they want. Because developers are paying attention to this it's probably only a matter of time before we see more systems like Sony's marketplace crop up. After all, why should companies let the gold farmers capture profit that they could be earning themselves? Beyond that, I wouldn't be surprised if it was only a matter of time until western MMO's are completely converted to the Free-To-Play microtransation models popular in asian MMO's. It doesn't take much imagination to invision a Star Wars Galaxies 2 where your character account is linked to a checking account, and you have the option to buy things from NPC vendors for either ingame credits, or out of game dollars - say $50 for 5 premium pearls and a unique hologram.
Basically the problem isn't "earning" stuff, as long as it's kept within reasonable limits. I don't think anyone would consider, say, earning your Imp or Voidwalker as a Warlock in WoW to be repetitive or work. One is basically a "go there, get that book for me" quest (and not get killed first by the NPCs there) and the other is "go there, kill the npc, bring back her choker" quest. Straightforward, to the point, a little challenging, and no farming involved. And frankly, not only it's something "earned" to be proud of, but also adds a certain flavour: it gives you a quest to do and some insight in what your class is about, instead of just a new icon sprouting on your toolbar after grinding enough boars.
That's really what gets people addicted, not the later grind for resources. _This_ is what MMORPG gamers really want, and unsurprisingly most MMORPG players went to the game which gave them more of this in the beginning. You'll notice the majority isn't on the games which give you the repetitive grind and (near)impossibility to solo from the start. So that blaming it on MMORPG players and some meme is missing the point by a mile.
But unfortunately that only works that way at the lower levels.
The problem again isn't that MMORPG players start demanding something else, but that the MMORPG publisher only has so much funds for game content. And that content has to last you for about 6 months, which is what an average gamer needs to get past the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase. Some need less, some stay there for 5 years, but when you turn it all into a statistic, 6 months is sorta where the bathtub curve starts going up one way or the other. So the developper has to stretch that content somehow over 6 months.
And currently the formula is to give you more of it up-front when you join, so they get you addicted, and very very slowly give you less and less from there. Until at the end-game it has already crawled to a start and you need to farm one dungeon daily for months, just so you can enter the next one. At that point, any new content or rewards you're getting is in dilluted to homoepathic doses.
However at that point they're not counting on you actually having fun either. They just count that you're well into the "but I'll lose my online 'friends' and my uber-character if I quit!" phase and busy rationalizing it, so you don't need more than a vague shaddow of a carrot dangled in front of you to stay there. At that point, the rewards and earnings are so dilluted and improbable that they just serve to give you some material to rationalize about, not something that's what MMORPG players as a whole love.
So basically even at this point, blaming MMORPG players and their memes is IMHO missing the whole point by a mile. That isn't what the MMORPG players themselves been asking for, it's just the final act of a cruel scam they've been gradually guided into. And no matter how some may rationalize it as being the meat of the game (humans are damn good at rationalizing taking crap), here's the reality check: that's not what got them addicted to the game during the first 30-40 levels. And they're not in other games which gave them that "meat" up-front, from level 1, either. So don't tell me that their whole personality did an 180 degree turn when reaching level 60, and they suddenly started actually wanting to grind for weeks even for a token reward.
Yes, it should make everyone rethink their priorities, and in truth it _eventually_ does. That's why people do eventually leave.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Let the author of this article know what you think about this. He runs Game Politics.com and has asked for opinions on his actions (yesterday's news post).
Personally, I prefer the answer, "Find a new guild."
Yeah its cheating. Yet I see justification in it. The game designs foster the need for grinding, whether it is gold or experience.
WOW was close to getting it right with Bind on pickup items, yet many great items are not this way leading to a market. Since most of these items are random drops (world drops - % chance off anything in level range) it rewards those who have the most time to spend in the game.
Compare the cost to buy gold versus the time you would have to invest and for many people becomes a no-brainer. Most people I know buy these games to play, not to become a second job. There are many ways to combat the problem but it requires the designers to think outside the comfortable little box they live in.
Yeah its cheating, but only cheating because poor game design makes it viable.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why not just spend the $60 on a decent game that doesn't hide its content behind tasks so dull that people will pay to have them done for them.
So many MMORPG players seem to be able to produce these kind of almost convincing, hand-waving pseudo-explanations that almost justify why buying gold is OK: I think they are mostly trying to convince themselves.
If you purchase gold from say eBay, then you have to pay first. What's keeping the other person from keeping the gold AND your money? Please tell me it's more than just a negative point on their eBay account.
It's Cheating. You're playing outside of the rules of the game. I hate cheaters.
I have never played World of Warcraft. Could somebody please equate an average number of hours it would take to accumulate 500 gold units in the game? I just want to get a feel for the dollar to hour ratio people are paying for in game gold. Thanks.
nothing
I just road around Burning Stepps, looking for Mithril or Thorium to mine. Guess what ?
I found no deposits on the entire map. And I am looking at 12 pm on a school day so there should be some spawns of ore.
But there is none.
However, there is a assload of people running around from ore spawn point to ore spawn point.
I whispered a 60 rogue who was mining a mithril vein to help open a lockbox, and the response I got?
"Sorry, me no help'
Easy fix? Make it impossible to mail gold between accounts. If you want to trade gold, you will have to open a trade session. A little inconvienant, sure, but at least this way you could nail some people to the wall.
Another way is to check the AH for examples of this: a stack of linen cloth selling for 500G, and someone has bid on it.
WTF ! Can you say FARMER !
Guns are for wimps... Use a crossbow.. this way you can pin them to their chair when you go postal.
I'm reminded of a conversation I had way back in the day, when I played D&D a lot. (This was back before PCs, so it was all books and dice, paper and pencil.) A friend was telling me all about this cool item he'd read about in one of his books, a quiver of ice arrows or something.
I thought up a cool item (a lightning sword or something) and said, "Cool! I'll write it up and use it in our next session!" He got really mad, and said you can't just make stuff up and start to use it. You have to go on a quest, win it through serious effort and struggle.
I reminded him that it's all make-believe anyway, and why couldn't I just magically get this? He insisted it wasn't the same, that it wasn't right. If I had obtained it through a big quest worthy of such an item, that would be OK, but just suddenly having it wasn't. I suggested that I make up some long story about a tremendous quest that I had gamed with another group, which culminated in me having the item. "Not the same!", he insisted.
I was irritated at the time, because I really wanted the cool item, but now, I see that he was right. If you don't play by the rules, then the game is no challenge, and if you aren't playing for the challenge, to test your skill and creativity and endurance, then you are just there for the scenery, a tourist watching a movie.
Ignoring the rules makes any game go faster, and let's you score better, but so what? Your drive off the tee goes into the rough? Pick up the ball and carry it to the hole... hole in one! It's fourth and 16 on your own 9 yard line? Give yourself twelve extra downs in the possession... touchdown! You're only 18 miles into the marathon, and your legs are giving out? Take a shortcut through central park... first place!
If you don't want to actually play the game, why pretend to be a player?
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them. - Mark Twain
or does anyone else see the irony that this question is brought up while dropping the 'RP' from MMORPG?
No conformist ever made history.
I think it is fantastic that people waste gobs of money on virtual advantages. It's one of the best ways to make money today. Long live dummies with too much money! We totally need more dumb people who will pay even more for the 'sheen' of the gold. Extra shine on gold should cost at least 20% extra. Perhaps 'logos' on their WoW items (Nike boots of speed).
In the future, we will see paychecks auto-deposited into WoW type games, and you'll withdraw from your WoW bank account.
Ooop. Ack.
It's like a real-world economy, if you have the means, you get the things you want. I do find skinning yeti after yeti after yeti for a short yeild to be a little tiresome at times, esp when item prices can be pretty damned high. Not everyone playing an MMO has the time to sit and farm thier own money. Maybe if prices for things like mounts and enchants weren't so much, there wouldn't be the need to get more gold in the first place. I'm in the game to do battle, not try to find a way to pay my bills like in real life.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
I did a week trial at a MMORPG game maker and was asked to write a daemon that would find all the listings on ebay for their game's gold etc and get the sellers id and automatically e-mail them asking them to stop or they'll take action. Admittedly it was against the rules for that game afaik, I don't know about WoW.
I didn't end up getting the job in the end and feel like I was used as a cheap temp to do a project for them which they probably still use, as it did work reasonably well.
Bastards!
Personally if you're going to play a MMPORG then you should expect it to take forever to complete, that's half the point. But if it get you out of a rut and makes you happy, I don't give a monkeys.
I bought a few hundred Gold for one of my WoW characters for like $35, which over a short period of time after upgrading my character to the best weapons and armor, eventually found its way to my other characters. The game now, I must admit is much more fun than before now that I can hang with the elite creatures in higher areas. Plus I can explore the higher levels without worrying of getting blitzed by over powerful creatures. It was a chore and still is, to skin and leatherwork for money, but its fun to get new patterns as well and sell those in the AH. I know for a fact that I would'nt be as happy playing WoW if I didn't have that gold initially. I had like, 10 or less gold before I bought my gold stash. I'm down to 40 gold now, as I'm trying not to spend it all in one place. But now that my character is lvl 40+ money is a little easier to come by in larger quantities. I must note though, that Blizzard did cancel/suspend hundreds of accounts a week AFTER I bought the gold for players doing just that! Buying illeagl gold on the grey market so I myself might be faced with a suspended account in the future as well... But in the end, I say its both cheating and making the game more enjoyable at the same time.
The author says that he is not impressed by the EULA violation 'theory'. It is not a theory. I've heard a lot of people complain that Blizzard is not doing enough about gold farming, but this is one of the rare cases where I see the problem.
Buying or selling gold is clearly against the EULA. However, there is no real-world legislation covering that. The most Blizzard can do is ban accounts. And since an IGE sale is not public knowledge, there is simply no way to link a particular in-game transaction with a real-world money transfer.
You're breaking the EULA, but it's a clause that's impossible to enforce, so everyone gets away with it.
In many ways it's irrelevant due to how soulbound items are implemented.
In World of Warcraft the really good items can only be gained by being there for the actual boss kill - they can't be bought. Gold farmers will never wear or sell the best armor or weapons in the game. In the endgame, the items gold farmers sell become increasingly irrelevant.
There are a few exceptions sure, and someone might buy gold to help with repair costs - but playing by buying gold will only get you so far. Eventually you have to go the rest of the way on your own.
On our realm, like many realms - players who buy gold and use it to advance their character are considered jokes. In a game where reputation is just about everything - being known as a gold buyer forever locks that player out of the "top 1% of the top 1%" players strive for.
I wish I could worship gold coins, not bytes on a bank's computer. At least gold looks cool, or the GIF did.
People accept that there is nothing that may be done to resolve the problem without greatly impeding game play. While I was admin on muds (old-text-style-mmorpg's for you youngsters), we implemented diminishing returns.
The idea simply being that the more you do the same thing, the less value you get from it. (In my example, pardon my knowing the genre and not the game itself.) That first level-10 boar nets you 100 silver - a phenomenal amount! The next 10 boars are each worth 95. The next 10 are worth 90. Continue this and eventually boars are worth a trivial silver each.
Any normal (or even slow) player will out-level those boars and be off killing some other level 12 mobs well before diminishing returns penalizes them. Farming would be halted simply because at some point the character out-levels and meets the diminished return on farmable mobs.
It could be either, depending on what you do with it.
Case #1:
I just stared playing Eve Online over the weekend, and after 10 hours I was still flying around in a rookie ship not having much fun. The important thing was, I could tell the complexity of the game and involvement was to my liking. My time is valuable, and when I encounter a good game with a bad ramp-up time, it's a real shame. So I dropped $15 on some virtual money. It didn't actually get me very far along, but it did remove the annoying ramp-up time. I don't consider that cheating, I consider it working around game design flaws. You shouldn't have to smite 8 million small bunny rabits before you can kill large bunny rabits- not when you're paying a monthly fee.
Case #2:
A player wants to kill other player characters. To that end they purchase a pre-built character, complete with weapons and money. The player never would have gotten that far in the game otherwise. They proceed to enjoy the game by playing with said character, killing other players for the fun of it. That scenario disrespects the work, time, and enjoyment others have put into the game. That would be cheating.
Obviously there are other cases, but I suspect these are the two most common.
There is a very real sense in which time is interchangeable with money, if someone wants to spend their money instead of their time getting gold in a game, I have no problem with it. Of course, my opinion is likely to mean little when I don't play any MMORPGs. The closest I come is Magic Online.
...didn't happen.
If you pay money to exist, why not pay money to subsist?
Blizzard can systematically prohibit this. If it did not want gold to be bought, they should have designed it to be non-tradeable (soulbound) and force all transactions through the Auction house. The reality is though, it is in the best interest of their business model.
The fact is this is a chicken/egg problem, where the need for gold results (at least in part) from inflated economies that do not cater toward the casual player. Inflated due of price/wage differences from armies of players farming the world for loot and money in other parts of the world.
I have purchased gold, and in each case it increased my enjoyability, because I was able to 'play' the game, instead of clocking into another full time job.
This market (the secondary MMRPG market) is estimated at between $200M-$1B/year (npr.org.) Cheating or not, this is a HUGE market for imaginary possessions, and like it or not, it's not going to go away (until it is taxed by governments, and maybe not then.)
The reality is you are simply seeing the time=money equation applied to another place where someone spends time. In many ways it is really not alot different than any other currency exchange.
"Money is a substitute for time or skill. Next on the news: sun comes up in the east. Back to you Jim."
Look, wherever 2 people are competing, the playing field is NEVER precisely even.
Person A might be unemployed and living at mom & dad's, so he can spend 12 hours a day 'perfecting' his game, and farming 000's of trashmobs for phat lewt drops; player B might have to work 60 hours a week, and use the game as relaxing escapism.
The only problem comes when B feels he should/needs to compete with A. He cannot match the time commitment of A, so he can offset some of A's advantage with money.
I'm guessing this is a far bigger problem on PVP servers than on PvE, but in any case there's going to be the matter of "comparing e-penis size".
Face it, what we have is h4rdc0r3 gamers, who for one brief shining moment were able to be superior to the people with lives (family, jobs, committments, etc.), who are objecting to the ability for the people with lives to shortcut the 'grind' and super-equip their characters as if they had run Molten Core 10 times themselves. (And FWIW, it's been going on for 10+ years as any newbie who tried to enter a MUD will tell you, there was a "Cult of the E-penis" even in MUDs, where the 'wizards' gaveth and tooketh at [arbitrary] will...)
There's nothing inherently unethical about this. As far as Blizzard is concerned, these items were earned fairly, by playing the game (ie not hacked). The fact that someone later sells them for RL cash is irrelevant to Blizzard, as it should be. Accept that there are two routes to ubergeardom:
- spend 12 hours a day mindlessly grinding mobs for drops - probably what, about 10g/hour return? 120g for 12 hours.
- spend those 12 hours a day WORKING AT A REAL JOB and use the money to buy gold and loot. ($9/hour at the local burger place * 12 hours = $108 less taxes equals about $70. This buys you about 500g.
The lesson? Get a job, and don't spend so much time at your computer, dude.
Personally, I don't see that as a bad lesson to this little morality play.
-Styopa
Someone else said it best earlier... All these people complaining about cheaters when they probably have thousands of mp3's they downloaded from their Warez sites.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the gold farmers. If I or anyone else wants to drop $50 or whatever to save themselves some time so they can focus on the 'fun' parts of the game, more power to them. All this talk about inflating the WoW economy is silly, it's a stupid game.
On Friday there was a major update, including a new spawn that dropped a new weapon. On Saturday, in a major dungeon, I spent about 80 minutes playing through with a team. I traded the drop I recieved at the end of the dungeon for that new staff Sunday morning. total grind time, about 90 minutes.
I think it's pretty fair, as a new player I wouldn't necessarily have any friends or be able to join a guild. Those that do just get handouts from their friends anyway. I don't like the gold miners, but the bs of trying to get a little money doesn't apply to everyone in the first place.
Think of it this way. we all have a lawn. I like to sit in my lawn, read the paper, watch some TV outside, play in my lawn, etc. The problem is, my lawn is kinda big. So do i take 4 hours a week, every week to keep it up? Or just pay the neighbors kids to mow my lawn? For someone who is scrapeing by on paycheck to paycheck, it might not be an option to pay a kid 20 bucks for 4 hours to mow their lawn. But If you have alot of income and are willing, why not. Get the enjoyment of the lawn, without the trouble of maintaining it. Would anyone say that i don't deserver my lawn, because i didn't do all the work to get it like it is? Where as some put hours and hours to get their lawn looking nice, i just put money. In my opinion, the same can be said for MMORPGs. I take zero joy in the farming of worthless things so that i can buy a sword. The money is almost nothing to me , i spend more in coffee in a month (starbucks owns my soul :D )
What you have to ask is this: Is your time more valuable than what they are chargeing for the gold? I play wow, and i havn't bought gold, but i don't think its that big a deal. Say you want to buy a epic mount (around 1000 gold) As a casual player, it could take months of playing to get that type of money, unless you spend your day grinding for gold. The other option is to put down 80 bucks, and 10 min later you have 1000g in your mailbox. To some that is not worth the 80 bucks. But i don't think its worth it to spend 80 bucks a month for movie channels when basic cable is ok for me. It all comes down to how much you enjoy the game, and how much you feel your time in that game is worth.
I play MMORPGS almost exclusivly now, and i feel they save me a great deal of money. I use to spend 50-100 bucks a month buying PC and xbox games, winning them, and then putting them on the shelf. Now i put down 14 bucks a month, and thats about it. The system requirments are not that high, so i don't have to upgrade my video card every 6 months to play a game. I figure playing WoW and EQ before it saved me thousands of dollars in games and upgrades. So spending 80 bucks on gold...not that big a deal to me.
Also keep in mind, that buying online property is going to be a Huge market estimated to grow to be in the billions. Sony is already supporting online servers that allow people to buy and sell items to eachother. Xbox live allows you to buy online property for your games and gamertags. sony will probalby do the same with the ps3, and you are going to have to pay for the revolutions older games from the nintendo generations.
Really it's unfortunate that real money can build an imbalance between players (say 14 year olds with no money vs. 9-5 salary earners), but its really the fault of some poor design. The WoW end game really sucks right now because it is a pure grind. To get an epic mount for 900g, with the exception of Pally's and Warlocks, there is no real challenge or goal other than a flat out repetitive kill-anything-that-drops-money grind. It took me 3 solid weeks of grinding/farming all kinds of mobs and doing instance runs for money (not for fun), lets say about 90hours of game time, to get 900g to buy a mount. I'd really rather have just laid down $70 for it and saved my precious time. There was no difficult challenge to overcome, no boss, backstory or interesting quest. Just a grind and a comitment to somewhat pointlessly sit at the computer mashing buttons like a zombie.
The same can be said of forty man raid content. I loved the 40 man stuff at first. The initial challenge of killing the boss and finding a strategy the first time is awesome and feeling of success is amazing. But after the first few kills it once again becomes this silly grind to hope the random drop gives you your items, and let me tell you spending four hours in MC for the 100th time because your guild has gone 6 weeks without your drop gets plenty dull.
Really up until 60 I saw no need to buy gold, the best items came from playing through instances with friends and completing some of the enjoyable quests. Surplus money would only serve to buy some over the top enchantments and load myself up on potions, neither of which is a necessity.
Blizzard seems to both be getting better in some respects (forcing smaller group sizes in instances, allowing upgradable to epic equipment for non-raid players in patch 1.10) while at the same time promoting more endless grinding (all that faction garbage for ZG/AQ). Players with lots of time on their hands will still get 'further' than anyone else in any game IMO, but that should be by virtue of having practiced more and being more skilled as a result, allowing them to take on challenges that less-experienced players can't handle yet. Instead WoW, as many suggest, is on easy mode at the moment giving out rewards simply based on your ability to show up the longest. About the only challenging thing at the moment is finding 39 other competent players to spend those endless hours in the raid dungeons with you. Most of the skilled, motivated, and socially enjoyable players that I have dealt with in WoW have all quit from burnout and bordem at the state of the endgame.
WoW player's tough choices:
Option 1 - Do the in-game "work" to earn the rewards.>
Result - No time for a date.
Option 2 - Buy the gold instead.br> Result - No money for a date.
Option 3 - Realize WoW is a time sucking click-sink. Result - Time and money for a date.
http://newropeans-magazine.org/index.php?option=co m_content&task=view&id=3463&Itemid=85
Yes, I know we're not talking about "that" kind of gold...
Picture any other game.
Monopoly
Axis & Allies
Checkers
Chess
Imagine being able to bring use real cash to buy extra game money or pieces.
Hmm. I need some $300 dollars more to buy that hotel on boardwalk- okay, I'll just put down $3.00 of real money to buy $3000 game money. Wow- this is so much fun- this game of monopoly is so much faster and I'm much more likely to win since I have $100 in my pocket and you only have $20.
Unless the game itself explicitly allows you to buy items with cash, then buying gold this way is cheating.
---
It can't be stopped tho. So any game that has a market means that normal people are playing in a game where people are rampantly cheating all around them. And the games are fundamentally unfair in several ways:
1) If you don't have to work... you win.
2) If you can log on just an hour earlier than the majority of the players.. you win if critical content is not instanced.
3) If you start the game with a group of friends from a previous game- you have a huge advantage.
These are advantages but they are not cheating. Buying gold and equipment with real world money means you are not playing the game (unless the games rules explicitly allow you to purchase items with real cash in game).
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My thoughts on this are that it only ruins the game for yourself. If you buy a max lvl uber character then you have flat out missed 99% of the content in the game. If you want to do this, fine. It doesn't hurt me at all.
As for player economy, it really depends on the implementation. Galaxies had a terrible economy. If you wanted a weapon or armor you had to buy from a player. You couldn't buy it off an NPC and you couldn't find it through loot. Thus when prices skyrocketed, it became a problem for me personally. It meant I had to find a way to make millions of credits to buy armor. Granted, I think they changed this during their nuking of the game but it stands as a good example.
WOW on the other hand is a little different. I for one have participated VERY little in the player-player trading system. It is a direct result of what I liked about Diablo. I played to lvl up and probably primarily to find that better item and better set combo. (i have no idea why I find this fun at all but for some reason this simple formula for a game worked) For me, part of the fun of playing WOW is the prospect of finding the items. I have played WOW now for 3 months and have probably spent less than 100g at the AH.
That said, I look down on gold buying and selling. Its idiotic at best. You seriously need to think about it a minute. You are giving real money for something not real. You are throwing it away on something you can't substantiate. At the same time you are giving CASH $$$ to people in return for in game gold. Gold that most likely goes RIGHT BACK TO THEM when you spend the gold on cool items for sale by the same people selling you the gold. (where else do you think they get the gold) Think about that for one freaking second and ask yourself if that makes sense.
A friend of mine irl does this in WoW (Buys gold). (No, this is not me).
It makes him very popular in the guild, people talk to him when he logs on, etc. His pally has all the cool gear and stuff. I think he does it for the adoration mostly.
Essentially, this comes down to Hardcore players VS Casual players issue.
:)
The Hardcore player needs a WoW where lots of grinding is required, long quests, mats that takes time to acquire for the price of very rewarding items such as elite mounts for instance.
The Casual player needs a way to keep up with the hardcore player so that everybody can play more or less on the same level. But because those players cant spend hours & hours collecting items, they're consistently behind....
One version of a game and two types of players that can't exactly coexist on the same server.
Why not make two version of the game ? One favouring grinding and highly rewarding items and one favouring casual players where its not so hard to get to the top but where you will not find the same items.
GIMP servers would be easy to level, easy to get money but without the high rewards
L33T Servers would be your regular WoW with money difficult to get, reputation slow to rise. Big rewards.
But then... we might end up with the same issue, casual players wanting to play on l33t servers because there's better loot AND chinese farmers to sell g0ld
oh well...
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
From the article:
"I bought gold last week. You're reading the Business section, so that may not sound unusual. However, the purchase wasn't for my investment portfolio. And I'm not talking about real gold, either. But I did plunk down $60 of cold, hard cash in return for 500 virtual gold pieces for World of Warcraft, Blizzard's best-selling massively multiplayer online (MMO) adventure game."
Given that you can get 1000 gold for less than $60 now in WoW, I'd say he didn't make a very good investment. I'd hate to see his real portfolio.
I tried Lineage 2 for a couple of months and the frustration there was just how much leveling up depended on your gear and yet the gear was hard to get through normal means. You couldn't level without gear and you couldn't get gear without leveling.
One of the reasons I like City of Heroes/Villains is that there is no "mad loot." There isn't the farming problem because you don't have to have exceptional gear to level up.
#1 Farming causes more uber items to be injected into the economy. This leads to deflation which makes it harder for honest players to make money.
#2 Farming causes more gold to be injected into the economy. This leads to inflation which makes it harder for honest players to buy items.
Suppose farming leads to deflation. Although, the honest player can't make as much money, this is balanced by the fact he doesn't have to pay as much for items that he wants to buy.
Suppose farming leads to inflation. Although, the honest player has to pay more for items, this is balanced by the fact he will make more money from the items he sells.
I will readily concede that the honest player is at a competitive disadvantage to the player who buys gold on Ebay and then spends it getting the best gear in the game. However, I have yet to hear an arguement that makes it clear to me that farming makes it more difficult for the honest player to acquire items.
Is it possible that some folks at various MMORPG companies twiddle some server bits to generate eBay Gold? That's far easier than organizing a Chinese or high-schooler/college age student sweat shop.
I don't consider buying gold to be cheating, as I would consider cheating to be an activity that puts other participants at a competitive disadvantage. However, I don't see evidence of competition in WoW, outside of the organized PvP gameplay. This is not a game where some players win and the rest loses. Each player plays at their own pace and at their own leisure. Why does it matter to a player if another levels faster or easier?
I've spent the last 8 months on a very old server, Zul'jin. There are gold farmers aplenty, but there are also a great deal of long-term players, most of whom have several level 60 characters. I have observed a few patterns to the inflation in the auction houses in this environment in the 8 months. The inflation rate of the lower level items (required level less than 30) steadily grew, the mid level items (required level between 30 and 50) stayed fairly level, and the top level items (required level between 51 and 60) suffered deflation as time had gone on.
The inflation of the lower level items are most easily explained by the fact that, as individual players grew more wealthy across all their characters, they feel more willing to spend 10's of silver more to help their lower level characters level faster. Most likely, they can earn more money in the time saved on their lower level characters by grinding with their level 60's.
The deflation of the high level items occur as it became easier and easier to find experienced raid groups for high level instances that were willing to take a few lower leveled (low and mid 50s in this case) characters. Players generally ignore the items available in the AH in that level range and opt for the instance drops instead. I do see occassional players who boast a collection of high level BoE rare and epic items, but they are few and far in between.
The extreme cases of inflation only exist for PvP twink items. These are usually rare or, sometimes, uncommon items, that are just below the level cap for a tier of one of the battlegrounds. They are usually only relevant for items with level requirements below 40. The possession of these items do present a competitive advantage. However, low level battlegrounds seems to be a domain of the rich and jaded. The players who bother twinking are usually ones with level 60 character who has outgrown most of their need for gold, having already bought their epic mounts, and equipped with gear from the 40 man raid instances.
Ironically, inflation at the lower levels made life easier for new characters, as the higher selling prices for the goods they find make it easier to afford the fixed cost things such as training and mounts. I have recently created a hunter, and, by level 25, has made over 80g, without the need for any grinding. Comparing this to January of 2005, when my friend and I, after hours of grinding, was finally able to afford a horse for him at level 40 (I was a paladin), I'd consider it a good thing.
Gold buying/selling does not appear to be capable of any effects on the economy that can't be produced by the presence of many players with a lot of total time played. In fact, gold farmers, with the simple act of adding timed played to a server, hasten the maturity of the marketplace in that server, which can make life easier for new characters.
Work smarter, not harder. A friend of mine was telling me about a problem with MUDs (text precursors of MMORPGs) where the corpses of monsters were building up and clogging the system. The solution? Allow players to use the corpses as ingredients to make healing potions. Players then grabbed corpses and dragged them out of the dungoen to sell potions. Problem solved.
A lot of gamers get on their moral soap-boxes about cheating and gaming ethics, and call for the devs to come up with more enforcement. I think that's just like the "War on Drugs" mentality. It's a losing game, because you are opposing market forces. Instead, get the market forces on your side. Heck, as a MMORPG game dev, you control the fabric of reality itself. If you can't think of a trick to co-opt "cheaters" then shame on you!
I play Eve-Online, and it's come up that the "Macro Miners" are ruining things for legitimate miners. Macro-miners are mostly Russian guys who use macros to run Eve automatically and mine-out whole systems so that they can sell in-game money on eBay.
But while it really sucks to be a competitor to these guys in mining, it's *great* for piracy. The unattended miners are full of valuable ore, and mostly unable to defend themselves. (And if they do defend themselves, they do it poorly, and this allows you to destroy them *legally*!)
So don't try and enforce a ban on macro-mining and other MMORPG "cheats." Instead co-opt them. In Eve, you could change the game dynamic so that the Macro-Miners would be even more attractive targets for pirates. Put a time limit on NPC corporation membership, and legit corps could even declare war on them without being pirates. (So if you're a mining corp, you could just declare war on these guys and take their ore!) Furthermore, if you put time constraints on refining, the macro-miners would be forced to sell material to other players to refine their excess, which would further contribute to the economy of Eve-Online.
And we thought of all this in about 15 minutes flat. I'm quite sure that other tricks could be thought of for WoW and other MMORPGs that would have similar effects.
Buying gold, characters, etc... is simply like buying a new game. These games are take much longer to "beat" than a typical standalone game. Each part of the beginning/middle/endgame is comparable (on a per-hour basis) to a standalone game.
If you spend $60 to avoid 40 hours of "play" you are simply buying a new game....the one that starts at level 60. I don't have a problem with this. If you get bored but want to see the raid-driven/end-game...spend the money & have fun.
What I don't understand is the article comes from Philadelphia Inquirer, so why isn't linked to the Philadelphia Inquirer but kansas.com?
2 09.htm
The original article is right here:
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/business/14018
Cheating ...
... play by them ... if you don't it cheapens the game for those of us that DO play by the rules.
If the company that runs the game says it is cheating, it IS cheating. they make the rules
If the company that develops the game says it isn't cheating, then its not and have at it. Though, paying real world money to get virtual money that is worthless is, in my opinion, stupid.
Cheating, however, is something I do happen to know quite a bit about, and not just codes, but the more esoteric forms like memory modification, and profile hacking. These things are definitely cheating, and have no place in a "fair" online environment. By definition to cheat is to circumvent the rules of the game in order to obtain some sort of unfair perk. More HP, higher levels, etc, those are all definitely cheating but buying something? That is where the lines become blurry.
Purchasing gold or other items from someone else is certainly not the noble way of doing things, and I wouldn't encourage it, but it's no more cheating than any other instance in which someone uses their financial status to circumvent the work to accomplish something. If your car breaks down, do you start learning how to repair cars, working through levels of apprenticeship up to those of master mechanic? More than likely not. You pay someone to do the work for you, while you reap the rewards. The game is no different. You don't necessarily want to become good enough at the game to gain the money, or perhaps you simply don't have the time to get it yourself, so you pay someone else to do it for you. Wherever there is a desire, there will be a market; pure and simple.
Ultimately, this is just a sign that the world of data and the world of real goods are starting to converge. You already pay real money for software, and you pay real money for music, and you pay real money for naked pictures too. How is paying real money for digital gold any different?
Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
Ironically the Google ads at the bottom of TFA promote WOW gold selling sites.
You're comparing real life to a game. Spending $50 to hire a maid to clean your house translates to real-world benefits such as a clean house and increased free time. Spending money on video game gold gets you the same thing as spending money to buy 1 ton of video game horse poo - absolutely nothing. So you spent $60 to basically advance your status in some imaginary world - big freaking deal. Why don't you put that money to some real work in the stock market so you can advance yourself out of your parents' basement?
Actually... I think most people's responses to problems are to throw money at it.
Heck, I've seen more than one corporation run into a problem and decide that it would be easier to hire "consultants" to fix the problem than actually do it in-house. This is just human nature, when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with you start to pay other people to do things for you when you could do them for free.
Change your oil? Nah pay the other guy.
Do my taxes? Nah pay the accountant.
Grow my own food? Um... Errr... Buy the food at the grocery store.
But you get my point, humans will often see problems as "How much money can I throw at it til it goes away?"
The problem with WoW is that it fosters a system where people see value in things as either "How much time must I spend?" vs "How much money must I spend?".
In reality, this isn't breaking the economy. The economy was already broke. You can't recreate a working economic system on a game without a real economic system with supply and demand and limited resources.
If WoW really wanted a realistic economy, they'd make it so you could make animals go extinct from "fur farming" or mining resources go out after a given amount of time and you have to a new location.
Or inflation from the unlimited amount of gold pouring into the world. Seriously, if you can make gold by killing anything than people would be using gold to make houses and chairs out of while every resorted to a barter economy because gold was worthless. Real economies have inflation and wow does not.
However, if you put those features in the game, I bet many people would quit.
So either we put up with the farmers, get rid of the time sinks, or suffer with a real world economy that is unforgiving. That is about our only options.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You've got to be braindead to do that...
Think about it this way:
1) You pay a monthly subscription fee to play the game.
2) You find aspects of the game so awful you'll pay other people real money to releive you of the burden of actually playing the game.
Meanwhile, this encourages true no-lifers and/or impoverished asians to try to make a real world income by satisfying your desire not to have to play the game you subscribe to. Which floods the game with piles of greedy morons who make the game less enjoyable for those who do actually enjoy playing it.
Here's a suggestion: Cancel your subscription and play something you actually look forward to playing. There are surely more satisfying uses of your time.
Why are you playing a game that's 80% treadmill if you hate the treadmill? The Mmog is a complete package - and you hate most of it. To get to the bits you like, your character has to slog through the bits you don't - paying someone else to do it is ridiculous.
You wouldn't sign up to a book club (where you read a book and meet to talk about it) if you hated the books they chose most of the time. And what you're doing is even dumber, you're paying someone else to read the books for you, just so you can stay in the book club.
What the fuck is wrong with you people?
Are you kidding me?
GET A LIFE!
While Warcraft has been a rather intresting game an upcoming move will prevent me from playing for some time. Since I'm in a hardcore raid guild my main, a 60 Shaman, will most likely have to take his leave since raid high raid attendence is a must. Additionaly I'm unsure if I'm really into playing Warcraft anymore.
As such I'm making this post to try and gauge intrest if there is any value to be had in selling my account. My main, as I stated a 60 Shaman, is a Troll on an active PvE relm. He has 4 part of his Earthfury set in addition to the Helm of the Lifegiver, and the Sorcerous Dagger with the +22 Int enchant on it. Currently he is speced to be a restoration Shaman with an impressive (Best on the server as far as I can tell.) mana pool however with said mana pool he could easily shift to an elemental build and dish out some very sick damage.
Also on this account I have a 60 Orc War and several other smaller toons which comprise of a Druid, a Warlock, and an Alliance Hunter.
Also of note is the Shamans tradeskills include 300 Dragonscale leatherworking with the ability to make all of each dragonscale sets. (Yes even the full Black Dragonscale set, epic boots and all. And oh yes he has a pair of those for himself as well.)
The other toons also have a fair set of tradeskills with the war being a 300 chanter and the warlock being very close to 300 in both alch and tailoring.
Anyway just wanted to put this out there to see if there is any intrest, send an email to: shaman_4_sale@yahoo.com
Assuming you have a class that is capable of farming, how many hours of time and effort will it take you to farm 500 gold? Let's say at an aggressive rate of 50g an hour, it will take 10 hours to achieve your goal. This is already on top of a raiding schedule, work, school, or whatever.
It really all boils down to:
a.) how much gold can you farm an hour on your own per hour
b.) how long does it take to achieve whatever goal you set
c.) does the prospective buyer have enough disposable income to support the purchase
d.) is it time effective to make said purchase
For those that raid extensively 5-7 days a week, and work full-time jobs, purchasing gold is arguably an effective use of time/money/resources to handling repair costs.
...but some of us have jobs, and I spend at least $60 on dinner 4 times a week. Simply put, I got more money than time, and if I get kicked off for violating the EULA, well that's probably a good thing for me.
where the corpses of monsters were building up and clogging the system. The solution? Allow players to use the corpses as ingredients to make healing potions. Players then grabbed corpses and dragged them out of the dungoen to sell potions. Problem solved.
:)
//insert happy monster data stuff
//automagically attempt to move inventory to the room
While that is pretty neat, it's actually a heck of a lot easier
void create()
{
call_out("death",30);
}
death()
{
remove();
}
The reason why goldfarming exists is simple. It's no fun doing the same repetitive things over and over just so you can gain experience points to play the same game as the rest. It's also by design made so you have to spend hours every day for months to get up to a decent level.
People don't have time for shit like that, hence goldfarming. Why was CounterStrike so popular? Because you could enter at any time, and the only criterion for whether you lived or died was teamwork and/or skill. If you were a quick learner then a few hours or days would be enough.
In WoW, quick learning and skills mean a lot less than actual time developing RSI and butt callouses playing this game. WoW may be a lovely game, but I have a full time job and a family, hence there's no way I'm going to enjoy WoW.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
...first the raw materials are oversupplied so they sell very cheaply affecting people like this guy who can no longer earn any reasonable amount through skinning, secondly they artificially inflate the prices of items by giving plenty gold to clueless nabs who throw it around like theres no tomorrow
You appear to be thinking that people buying gold won't spend that gold on raw materials in order to raise their profession skills. At level 42 in WoW, I decided to learn cooking. It took me a great deal of cash to get all the materials to level my cooking skill up, but I got to 250/300 in about two evenings. Now, I used a great deal of my own cash to do that. But, I could have just as easily gone out and bought gold farmer cash to do it as well.
Even so, you can't both blame inflation and deflation on the same group of people. That seriously makes no sense.
The fact is that you have no idea how these gold farmers are making money. The likely thing is they're using multiple means of getting gold. Sure, they could be overfarming, driving down the price. The problem with that though is once the prices are down, they make no money from overfarming. So, like everyone else, it is in their best interest not to overfarm. Further, economies on servers tend to improve over time as players level up. That would suggest that a bad economy has nothing to do with gold farmers and everything to do with the number of higher-level players overall.
You also have no idea how many of these gold farmers exist on the server at any given point. Given the thousands of players on each server, a few gold farmers are not likely to affect the economy on a long-term basis. Gold farmers only become a problem should their numbers become high enough to overwhelm the balance of the server. And since these people are presumably selling their gold all the time, that means they actually have less influence than regular player characters of the same level.
LeeROOOOOOOYYYY....Jenkiiins
Dislexic Hex. It's A1 with me.
They found an abundant market, and are profitting from it (all be it against a EULA it isin't against any laws). I figure it's a win/win. I get my gold or power leveling, some chinamen gets a paycheck.
It's supply and demand at it's finest. I have the expendable income, someone else has the time that I don't.
If you want to debate about how it's wrong because it messes up the economy, consider that you're trying to apply real economics to a video game. It's a cool concept but in the real world you can't kill a wolf that will respawn in 5 minutes for a few copper that appears out of nowhere. The money supply is endless and has no real standard.
I see gold farming as pure capitalism and I think it is hilarious that the chinese players are beating us with it.
In our real life economy, there are those with TIME and those with STUFF. Money is a nice intermediate because it is universally valued. So we basically trade stuff for stuff, time for stuff, or time for time but we generally do it through money because it is convenient.
Gold farming is purely based on Laissez-faire Capitalism, the only "blame" should lie with the entire community. People with time have the best stuff, people without time want that stuff.
To me the only difference between somebody skinning 2,000,000 boars to earn 500 gold and paying $60 for 500 gold is perception. How is spending the time in-game any different than spending the time at your 9-5 job? The only difference is that loud, whiney kids living in their parent's basement don't have a 9-5 job, but they do have 12 hours a day to skin boars. I mean honestly, how are they contributing to the game world any more or less in either situation? (even if he sells the boar hides)
I say it's not fair that some people get free rent. 10 years ago my parents made it clear when I came home from college that I could only stay til one week after recieving my first paycheck, then never again, no matter what. My parents would rather see me homeless than be a mooch, even if I lose a job, even if I get divorced. And I've seen some bad times since, with no hope of a safety net I didn't provide myself. So think about that before you complain about what's fair and not fair in a video game.
Some people would say not having a job, girlfriend/wife, or a social life is cheating, since those people are able to play 12 hours a day.
Buying gold levels the playing field a bit. It makes perfect sense really.
If you are a kid with nothing to do, you have tons of time to play and grind up all that gold and loot. You probably don't have the money to buy gold on eBay since you don't have a job, but everything works out since you still wind up with the gold and uberloot.
If you are an adult, with a job, SO, kids, social life, etc, there is no way in hell you have the time to grind your toons up or earn gold, so you take a little bit of the money you earned at your real job, and apply it to your game toon. Now, you didn't have to spend 20 hours skinning mobs and collecting plants to earn enough gold to buy whatever it is that you wanted.
It is indeed a problem that this screws with the economy a bit. I don't think the answer is stopping people from buying gold on eBay though; I think the answer is more creative content from the developers.
It is hard to strike a balance between the jobless/lifeless kids, and the adults with jobs and families, but it is after all, the job of the developers to solve this issue.
Unfortunately, I think most game designers and developers haven't gotten it quite right yet. There needs to be a way to "cash in" all the work you have put in to the game, so that you aren't stuck with a few high lvl toons you are bored with. It would have been nice to take my 45 mage, my 32 druid, my 27 hunter, my 24 warrior, etc., and trade them in for bonuses or faster advancement for a new toon.
The thought of completely starting over is enough to make a lot of people cancel their accounts.
It did me.
So I bought battlefield 2 and haven't looked back.
There are thousands of people on each server. There's always going to be someone better. If you're one of those guys that spends 8-12 hours a day on WoW and tries to get the highest-ranking character on the server... then... well, some of us more moderate players may not see the actual harm caused here. Aren't many of the best pieces of equipment "Bind on Pick-up" anyway? It's not like players can go out and buy those.
-- dR.fuZZo
Both inflationary and deflationary effects are present because of gold farming and sales. Overall, I think gold farmers have a beneficial effect on the economy of the game because they enlarge it, which stabilizes the market forces. Low pop servers have problems with wild fluctuations in prices and availability, but in a game like Eve Online with a huge market, there are predictable trends and supply/demand situations that allow players to assess the 'normal' value of something and even capitalize on it themselves.
The problem with gold farmers is their impact on actual gameplay: They squat on valuable resources, chasing away real players who interfere; they exhaust statistical drops, effectively decreasing the odds of receiving certain loot for players for whom the game is just grinding towards getting something; they inflate the equipment in the game, meaning that your average player is further behind in terms of equipment (which has a big effect in PvP or raid slot availability).
Really, the fundamental problem with gold farmers is that they're jerks. If they were well behaved, their impact would be far more beneficial on the balance.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Time.
What distinguishes work from fun? What distinguishes game from real life?
What is a time sink? Are hobbies time sinks? Are they all fun?
If a player feels that they have to buy gold, that is an indicator of what they don't have time for. Buying gold is a quick fix, and sure, entire books can be written on what that does to everyone; however, I digress.
I personally blame Blizzard for designing their World of Warcraft game as a time sink. It is my belief that everything they do for the game ultimately requires their customers to remain nothing but occupied -- and that is their objective; to hang on to as many customers as they can until a new patch comes out that requires them to pay for it. Many players feel that their game is more work than game.
Having quit the game recently, I made a nifty little website with a list of complaints about WoW, including even a pretty pink graph using some real data. It highlights how Blizzard equates time with "worth" in the game. Anyone who doesn't have insane amounts of time to spend playing and "grinding" or "farming" shouldn't play it.
http://www.redrival.com/hateown/
I would appreciate some comments re: the site from the WoW player community emailed to the adress listed on that page.
I may not have specificaly named gold farmers and poor state of affairs, waste of time in it but I certainly did use the theme as glue between thoughts -- and there is a climax -- private servers! Talk about saving time and obsoleting gold sales.
I haven't seen the inflation from farming on Alleria. There are enough money sinks in the game (hell, my repair bill last weekend was 8G on one run) that I think the cash flow evens out over time. In addition, the supply of inexpensive rare items is very nice. If anything, the prices of high-end, very good quality weapons and armor is cheaper when the farmers are active, and more expensive when they're not. Crafting materials, especially arcane crystals and arcanite bars, are cheaper. If anything, farmers are driving the prices down, not up.
Part of me thinks it's cheating, because I went through the work everyone else should too. I remember saving up for my elite mount on my warlock (It's cheaper, but it's not free). On the other hand, the classes and talent specs I've chosen are very...sub par...at farming. Very nice for other things, but not great farmers. That's part of the reason I'm levelling a hunter, they just blow through mobs like crazy.
Part of me would rather just buy 500G and send it to one of my new characters so I can level them up in all nice gear. I've played the game, I've got 2 characters at level 60 and a third at 48 (Druid, Warlock, Hunter, if you're curious, the first two are my 60's, and I levelled them both before they got talent respecs, so it was hard mode). I've played the content. A lot. I've also always thought there should be some "shortcut" mode to level up your second or third character, like having them never lose rest state or something.
Having never played the game I might have gotten this completely wrong, but is gold farming done by going to a location where you know a certain type of creature/item spawns, waiting for it to spawn then harvesting/killing it and then selling for profit? The thought occurs that breaking the links between items and monsters and locations would cripple the gold farmers somewhat.
A better solution would be to allow offline play. Give the player the option to log off while leaving the charactor to continue in a gold making task which continues at he same diminishing rate as on a server, only without actually diminishing the resources on the server.
I've not liked any mmorpg I've played. I don't like the feeling that I'm competing against people I can't ever catch up with, I don't like the feeling that at any time another player who has been playing for ages can come along and effortlessly kill me/clean the area of resources/drive up the prices etc. I don't like having to repetitively perform the same task over and over to gain experience. It doesn't make for satisfying games for me.
I think the real problem is that people are ignoring the RP in MMORPG. Everyone in the game is trying to do the same thing really. If you are playing a game, I think it's safe to say that most people would want to be the hero, I know I would. Being the hero means probably having the toughest most damaging player, which needs items which players are going to get however they can. So really you just have to design a game around those desires.
How about a mmorpg in which the player individually has no experience or items, but players together gain experience collectively as part of an army? Imagine for example players being part of an army sent to attack a city. You could have them travelling over land having to using skills say gather food for the army or create weapons etc but the group gaining the experience. Think of it as players teaching each other. When it comes to fighting, all players are evenly matched except for weapon quality or tactics etc. You see where I'm going with this, the idea is to remove the grinding and reason for buying gold in the first place.
There's no way to win a MMORPG (yet) so it's pointless to say anybody's cheating. You're no further ahead in the end.
You respawn every time you die. Everybody does, & is basically equal because of it. Gold doesn't help you win.
$
My level 60 Rogue on Whisperwind has bought himself and 2 other people epic mounts (they are normally 1000g, but my rogue is honored and well above Sergeant in pvp rank, so they are 800g for me, yay for double discounts). I've never once purchased any gold online. There are plenty of ways to make money in WoW, and if you do it right it doesn't take hours on end and can be a lot of fun. You simply have to find a niche. In playing the gold-farming game I've had lot of fun, learned where the sweet spots to farm are, learned what sells hot and what is worthless, haggled with people in the trade channels, played the auction house, and made myself a rather rich man in game. It's a good feeling and it was *entertaining* which is why I play WoW.
If I had simply bought the gold, I'd have been *bypassing* hours of fun, and robbing myself of a sense of accomplishment. Granted, to some people, farming for gold isn't fun, and maybe it's different in other games, but if you do it right in WoW you can have a lot of fun at it.
So, anyone on Whisperwind want some gold? :P
"To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit." -Stephen Hawking
I play WoW actively, and I have several beefs with people who complain about gold farming.
I think it's too hard to tell whether gold farming has a significant detrimental effect on the economy of a game such as WoW. There are too many variables that we don't know about - for instance, as players all we see is what we percieve as inflation at auction house. We assume the inflated prices have a direct correlation to gold farming, but we don't know if Blizzard takes active steps that also counter inflation. For instance, we don't know if Blizzard reduces the rate at which a farmable commodity is dropped. We also don't know if a lot of those putting items with inflated prices are simply players who are matching what they see as healthy market prices. There are far too many variables to account for to assume gold farming has a significant impact on game inflation (a market with a made up value in the first place, at that).
I hear this counter argument to gold farming used so much it's becoming cliche, but I think it still works: ultimately aren't we all gold farmers? Blizzard has set up a game that encourages people to go out and grind away in order to earn money. An epic mount usually costs 1000G, and 1000G requires that you grind and grind and grind in order to earn money. You end up performing the exact same activity that a gold farmer does. The only difference is that you'll spend it on an epic mount, while a gold farmer's 1000G goes in a sort of limbo for a while until someone from the outside buys it, and then uses it in the game itself. The fact that Blizzard makes gold farming legal means it's fair game, so to speak.
But Blizzard does use some techniques to make it rather pointless to have lots of gold at lower levels. Most of the armor and weapons that a lot of gold will buy don't help lower level players in the slightest. To get the best armor from the auction house at level 20, for example, doesn't require a lot of gold. And on top of that, the best armor outside of the auction house can't even be bought, you have to finish quests or fight specific rare NPCs to get it, and it binds to you the second you pick it up. Can't even be sold on the market. At level 60, there's nothing you'd want to buy on the auction house for any amount of gold except for perhaps commodities, commodities that you can go grind for yourself pretty easily at level 60. I get the distinct impression that Blizzard works hard at making sure that the gold you need at any given level to buy good stuff is pretty finely tuned. Excess does not equal an advantage.
And finally, as a level 60 rogue, what do I care if a level 20 guy has 1000G that he bought from someone? It doesn't hurt me in the slightest. Whether he begged it off of people or bought it from Chinese gold farmers it doesn't change how I play at all. Even if a level 60 player bought 1000G I wouldn't blink an eye. He won't have an advantage over me - he still has to go fight for his weapons and armor.
Ultimately I have to fall back on the argument of whether or not Blizzard makes it legal. If the game allows it, you have a recourse - you can stop playing the game.
The real problem here is games that bore you to death. But sometimes, you know that the entertainment payback, such as a change in social relations, or a cluster of more interesting quests, will make it worth the time or money to advance. Why should the vendor of a gaming experience have to right or the desire to determine where I chose to optimize the time vs. money tradeoff?
Perhaps the concern is motivated by a competitive imbalance favoring the wealthy. I think you'll need to get over this personal psychological issue, if you want to have an enjoyable life, either in the virtual world, or in the real world.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I play Ultima Online and I have personal experience with this.
The ability to make real life profits from scamming people and monopolizing resources even to the extent of preventing other players from having access to them brings out the worst in people.
If there was no way to convert game gold into real life money, these people would get bored and go someplace else instead of making a living at ruining the game for others.
In Ultima Online on some shards player killer guilds have a strangle hold on the "power scrolls" resources which allow people to raise their character skill levels. In other words if you want to raise your characters skill level you must pay these people ridiculous quantities of gold for the scrolls. Quantities which by my estimate would take 6 months of normal game play to collect. But of course there is the real life money short cut which enables this to continue. Many less people play UO these days because of this. I have found that people who buy gold or accounts for that matter are anti social and play the game as if it were an arcade game.
I would be happy if transfering gold between characters not on same account was made impossible. The influx of cheaply bought ill gotten gold inflates the economy and makes good items beyond reach of people who play the game as it was intended to be played.
There is a place for people who want to take shortcuts so that they dont have to "waste their precious time" by playing the game. It is called test server. Let the shallow people go there and get their free uber items and set their skills to maximum value. I certainly dont want to deal with them.
Gold buyers are like the people who think you need Air Jordans to have fun playing basketball.
I'll just pay my taxes in e-gold.
Where's the U.S. Treasury in WoW?
Is wrong unless it's from the company that makes the game. There.com actually allowed cash for its online currency. That is something you can't argue with. For WoW buying gold isn't an option. I've worked only 2 druids to 60 but I earned every penny I spent by questing or farming my own stuff to sell.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Is it cheating to exchange real world money for in game money? Probably. You are gaining some type of advantage inside the game using something that's not game related. Although, what happens if I join a server 2 years into the game and I personally know 50 of the players on that server in real life? What happens if they all decide to deck me out in thousands of (real life or in game) dollars worth of equipment, is that cheating? What about other outside of game mechanics (Teamspeak, Ventrilo)? Don't those pose a significant advantage over other gamers who do not have that particular software? What about a souped up UI when compared to the default UI? Personally I believe all of that I've listed above is 'cheating' in various different degrees. I haven't personally spent real life cash for in game gold, but I don't look down on those I know who did. If people are upset at how farmers are 'ruining' the game, I think that anger would be better directed towards Blizzard who designed the game that made this so easy to do, so worth it to some people. I think the challenge here, for future designers is to design a game where this type of real world transaction for in game gold is not desirable - rather than trying to crack down on the sellers and buyers. It's still a time saver though, the subject was a trick question! It's a time saver, and it's cheating!
For the record. I understand PERFECTLY well that my WoW character is not "real" and is by no means a reflection of me as a person. It's a game.
.... amazing
Here's the kicker.
It's a game I enjoy playing!
I like to be happy. I like to smile. I like to do things I enjoy.
I don't like to be overly frustrated with tedious tasks. I don't like to get smacked down by people who can sit at home all day and farm eq/gold. I don't care for it, it makes my 14$ a month pointless.
I enjoy playing WoW, I just don't have tons of time for it. I understand that the people at blizzard cannot make a game that suits everyones schedule. I don't hold this aganist them, and I think it's probably better that it takes a long time to do these events. (The end level stuff can't be bought in the Auction House for the most part, so buying gold only really helps you level to 60 and buy mounts OR help you make more money on top of it.. so really gameplay at the end is about the same)If these raids and such at the end didn't take time and strategy it would degrade the gameplay. Even if you're wearing epic equipment for some of the last raids.. if someone slips, you all die. It should be hard, it should take a long time. I don't refute that at all. But i'll be buying my time back from a chinese sweatshop TYVM. So while you guys are whining ingame and skinning boars. I'll logon, waste some time raiding or playing battlegrounds with my great eq. Have a GREAT time.. then just go hangout with my friends, family, whatever i feel like doing in my free time. time i BOUGHT..
One guy compared spending money on WoW gold to hiring a cleaning service. I agree with him wholeheartedly. He got well.. flamed for it.. since it's a game? as if we don't understand what we're spending money on? I know what i'm spending money on, i made a concious effort to spend it. I've enjoyed it immensely when logged on. I bet he did too. So why flame him for that? It's a service. We're just buying a service. When i look at money vs time in my life, i'd rather drop the 60$ than take the time away from other things i like to do.
So if i'm so strapped for time, maybe i shouldn't play?
The thing is i WANT to play and i don't feel like any smartmouth answer like "you should just not play" fixes anything...
None of us have THAT much time here anyway. Do what makes you laugh, do what you enjoy, and don't let hateful whiney people take away your time. If there's a market for this service use it if you want too, depends what doing the things you enjoy (all of them) is worth to you.
Personally i want to do as much as i can. So look, selfish me buys gold.. and has a GREAT time! Then logs off, and still has a great one in RL.
Cheers,
=D
These guys are max level and know what they are doing. The game has 60 levels that are semi logarithmic. While you can go up 1-6 the first day, going from level 19 to 20 took me 6 hours, and my friend who plays one long night a week for 6 months has a level 55 character. At level 1 you can make a couple of silver an hour(1 gold = 100 silver)
At level 20 I make 50 silver an hour, but im playing not farming. I imagine if a tried hard I could quadruple that, say 2 gold an hour.
Getting to level 60 like these guys takes hours and hours.
1 gold is more than a 10 level character can spend (outside of auctions) to equip with all 'good' stuff. Prices get high (available in auctions)on rare or epic magical items, but you still would have a hard time spending 10 gold.
At normal playing levels, gold is an impossible good deal - 10 cents and hour work, these guys make it seem more like 6 bucks (10-20 cents per gold). Neither is a living wage in San Francisco, but man for me, low level, playing for fun one dollar for 10 hours worth of earned gold sounds like an awesome deal.
*titled* "Philadelphia Inquirer | 03/05/2006 | tech.life@play | Time-savers or spoilsports?", even though it's bannered as "Kansas.com - The Wichita Eagle - 'the same article name'"?
I know that this is simpy another aspect of media conglomeration, as the parent company of both the Philly Inquirer and Wichita Eagle is Knight Ridder. But it does speak to a lack of diligence on their part not to keep on top of minutia.
And minutia is what this is all about, the minutia of WoW, tedious as it may be.
Having only recently become involved in WoW I can sympathize with Dennis McCauley. I too am getting sick of killing inoffensive creatures to advance in skill and accrue cash. There seems to be all too much of that taking up my time. So much so in the first 20 days that I am already at risk of getting bored and bagging the whole thing, despite a $50 initial up front investment and the purchase of a game card.
So then, to the question "Is it cheating?", buying online gold with RL cash?
I'd have to say, no. Someone just found a market and filled a need, and as long as they do it forthrightly, without stealing from their customers, no one else should care.
But some will always care. More than likely those who are not so well off, who look down their noses at "trust fund babys", or those of "Old Money" who denigrate the "noveau riche", or those already overly invested in the old (only by gameplay) way of accrual. All of which are pretty discriminatory and arbitrary ways of looking at things.
I don't really care how you came about your level 60 armor, as long as I'm in the same war party. Can we go kill some demons now?
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Some people don't realize the other sect that buy gold. I'm in a raiding guild, if I'm logged in (which is pretty often despite working 6am-6pm) I'm raiding. I don't have the time to do disenchanting runs in Dire Maul, but my guild needs me in instances. So I bought a few gold for repairs and to buy some mats for my pots. Does it suck? Yes. Am I an asshole? Maybe. That being said, I have the discretionary income to spend. The dollar value of my time works out to some gold selling rates. It makes discal sense to me in terms of time invested. The game shouldn't be a job, it's a game. Farming Dire Maul and herbs is a job that I do a LOT of as is, but when I hit a wall at work and had no time to farm I made the plunge. Since the vast majority of my gold was used in repairs I really don't think I helped to destroy the already broken economy. Maybe I'm just being naive.
Also, some people are a bit out of touch with Warcraft. The value of skins isn't low because of farmers. It is low because leatherworking is broken and serves little to no purpose. The only useful skins are Core Leathers, and you can only get those in Molten Core (where farmers can't go). Stating that your rugged leathers don't sell because of the farmers shows a lack of experience in the game.
It's possible, but only if you have luck on your timing and a little money to invest. There are ways to play the market (especially with the way the war effort changed the market). Like the real world, it's easy to make money if you have money. While you can't grind 500g from scratch in that amount of time, it is certainly possible to turn 500g into 1000g by investing that time (and your gold) on the auction house during the right time of the day.
It's even easier if you don't limit those 6 hours to a contiguous block of time.
I got WOW on sale for $19.99, and put $10 of the savings into 100Gold. I think of it as giving my character the advantages in life that I never had. Call it the Paris Hilton effect. It means he doesn't have to scrounge for reagents, and he can upgrade to the better armor when he really doesn't "need" it yet.
But, I only buy the stuff the game sees fit to sell me - I don't go to auction house and load up on the best equipment and buffs. That keeps my character moving at about the right pace, but I figure it saves me a few hours per level in scrounging time.
I'm now up to level 25 and I've only spent 1.5Gold out of my "nestegg".
This is very simple and the reason I originally started gold farming in Ultima Online. Time equals Money. If I have an effcient way to convert time to money and you don't then we can come to make a deal. It's that simple. If it's not worth it to you to buy ingame currency then don't. It's just that simple.
Now where this actually helps MMORPG is when people trade ingame currency for gametime subscription codes. This generates business for the game owner while also making money for the gold farmer. A win win situation.
IMAGE VERIFICATION IS EVIL!
Lame? You are willing to spend more money, over and above what you are paying to access the game, to enhance your status in an otherwise imaginary world. To quote William Shatner... "Get a life."
Im basing this to wow. I think that when it comes to gold buying, you are paying for what you find fair in value. The gold IS there, The gold WAS earned. I think there is nothing wrong with a person using there game time to spend earning items of value, and so what if he/she wants to sell them to a friend for nothing of in game value but for cash. I used to see it at school all the time. Back in Diablo II a friend would boast on how he gained a drop of a rune or something, and someone else offered to buy it from him. Its all about value and what someone thinks a fair trade is for it. The economy will change, and items will always have a high value. Blizzard insured this buy allowing some items to only be able to worn by one person. As for the EULA, i cant stand that bullshit. Some company trying to tell me how IM going to play the game? i don't think so.
Is it 'fair' for rich people to make sound investments with their money and live off the proceeds without ever having to work a day in their lives? Is it 'fair' for their children to never have to work a day in their lives?
Is it 'fair' that it takes money to make money?
It may make me angry and sad at the same time, but whoever said life was fair? Is it so surprising that virtual worlds modeled after this world have the same heartbreaks?
Bitch all you want, you won't change the way either world works.
Of course it is.
If you put in a cheat code in starcraft to give yourself extra money, that's cheating. You know it is.
If you put in your credit card number to give yourself extra money in World of Warcraft - that's cheating too.
You're essentially rewarding the character with resourses that he did not earn.
End of File
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Wow, aren't you clever!
Of course (like duh) but apparently there were other reasons why the corpses of monsters were persistent. (For puzzle purposes.)
And, I think the fact that objects stick around makes games better -- characters can have an actual effect on the environment.
I have never played to WoW. But I played Eve Online and I can tell you that people who sell millions of isk (isk are the currency of Eve Online) for RL money piss me off. Not because they have an avantage over you, but because they kill the market prices of the goods! I don't know if the impact is the same in WoW, but in Eve Online there are enough "script players" that mine in high security sectors and sell their ore low that the prices got trough the floor! That's what piss me off!
Reading about the woes of various MMOs makes me that much happier not to be playing them.
that you examples of cheating all have a specific end goal.
WoW does not. This mean different people can play differently. If someone goes out and buys gold so they can purchase ultra cool meage weapon, it does not matter to me. It has no real effect on me.
Your example of DnD is about Good story telling, not about cheating.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's a great concept to employ in Eve, but Eve is much more pvp oriented than WoW is, in the sense that you can take materials from other players, and destroying their ship has real consequences. Killing someone in WoW is a 2 minute setback, and the gains (honor) are diminishing. It's not like you can spank them and take the krol blade they just got. And changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
What makes me laugh is the people that I know that complain about the gold farmers, are all the same people that have, get this, bought gold from them. I think their complaint is coming from the fact that the amount of real world money they would have to spend for certain rare items rises. People that learn how to play ecomonies, buy low, sell high, and farm marketable items, will prevail in any inflating market. People that rely on outside help will be victims to the market squeeze. That simple.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
For puzzle purposes
:(
:)
Anything that ignores a clean_up function usually causes more problems that it solves
There's a couple of tricks you can use to make sure the chest key doesn't vanish if a player drops it for a second and the room resets. Checking for livings in the room before resetting is probably the easiest. See, the mud I played had a system where you could pre-emptively throw items away to recover health. Problem was, someone could macro to a quest where there's a bunch of stuff on the ground and get instant, full health. A specific example, granted, but it's just one of many.
Though, I have to admit it is kind of cool to visit a quest after a few days of uptime and finding like 56 bone keys on the floor
You go to the marketplace area of your game and find nothing over 10,000 gold pieces for sale. This is because the moneysellers have accumulated so much game money that any time anything valuable goes up for sale in the marketplace, they instantly buy it for game money... and then put the item up for sale on their web site for real money. Now let's say that you want a particular item that drops from a rarely spawning mob. In the above scenario, you now have two choices: either camp the mob, or buy it with real cash from a shady 3rd party. Oops, you only have one choice, because the moneyseller is paying asian kids sweatshop wages to permanently camp that mob on your server. This isn't a theoretical example; it has occurred in Everquest and FFxi that I know of. The way the gold farmers also corner the item market explains why you see seemingly contradictory claims that they both inflate and deflate the market. Do not underestimate the pervasiveness and ruthlessness of the goldselling industry. It is a BILLION dollar industry. When the quality of your gear is limited by the size of your real life wallet, the game is ruined for everyone.
For ONLY $1,000 US - I will give you an advanced Operating System Better than Apple's OS X, Linux, or Microsoft Windows.
;^)
The disk contains 400 MB of Zeros and 300 MB of Ones, some assembly is required.
Honest! This isn't cheating, just a short cut for your programming efforts.
And I have this swamp land in Phoenix, AZ for sale too - free bridge included at no extra charge.
It rewards time playing.
Sure, as a good player you get stuff quicker. And? A 'good player' in his mom's basement (the typical stereotype) who spends twice the amount of time online you do is going to be twice as successful. 'Good play' doesn't get you to 60 that much faster. Spending twice the time, on the other hand, will.
Plus, how much "good play" is required for the resource gathering in wow. Wait till the fishing bobber goes "sploosh". Shift-click it. Recast, repeat.
Run around to all mineral (or plant) nodes on your map. Check mini-map for spawned item. Loot. Optionally kill mob guarding it (if you don't have another way to loot it without bothering).
Warcraft's economy was ruined the moment the servers opened. It is broken by design. Not that it isn't quite probably the best MMO economy I've seen so far, but that doesn't mean it isn't broken.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
give me a break, this is *hardly* the forum for your reasonable common sense solution! where's the loud, undeducated complaining that i'm here for?
changing the easy pace game design that got them to the 5 million mark for a hardcore systemt that barely gained 100k subscribers? Probably not the best business solution.
Geez, doesn't anyone generalize on their own? (No, people turn off that section of their brain when they want to make a point.)
I wasn't talking about doing the *exact* same thing for WoW. Market forces obviously play a role there just as they do in Eve, the situations and particulars are different. The devs need to figure out how to get them *on their side*. (Which is to say: on the side of mre fun gameplay.)
I bow to your greater MUD coding experience.
I was answering in part because I thought you were trying to claim cleverness by pretending to have invented memory management. But I see that your point and your knowledge goes deeper than that.
I read the article summary and couldn't figure out what was real or imaginary. Real or virtual gold? Real or virtual $60? Sorry, I'm all confused with these virtual games.
You're right. In general, MMO companies prefer long-term casual players. Why? They get the same subscription fee from you no matter how much you play. If your account is active and being charged, all the time when you're not actually playing is time when they don't need to be providing bandwidth and support for you. In other words, it's free money for them. Paradoxically, the optimal MMO player (from a profit perspective) is one who keeps an active account but rarely if ever plays. Smedley admitted this in an interview ages ago.
The way to design for this is to make it so that play is short, amusing, and solo friendly, but rapidly gets repetitive. City of Heroes, often attacked for having repetitive content, fits this bill exactly. Such games can be played both by the truly casual player who simply doesn't have the time to play more, as well as by more "hardcore" players who want to keep a secondary MMO around. In both cases, you have players who pay a subscription fee, but "use" very little of it.
Of course, there's nothing necessarily positive about designing for maximized profitability... it just happens that CoH works out that way.
The Freelance Wizard
I've got a great game I'll let you play for $50/month. It's called "Cleaning Dan's House". Here's how you play. You come to my virtual reality holodeck -- the graphics are totally awesome, it looks like a real house -- and you apply for the job of servent. You then take a vitual mop (the deluxe gameplay now features pressure feedback so it feels like a real mop) and clean the bathroom and kitchen in my vitual house. Eventually you work your way up to vaccuming and cooking me dinner. As a reward, I pay you in Danny Dollars (looks like cheap paper, but you get a lot of them) and I send you on awesome quests like "get a day job" and "go grocery shopping".
If you want to get money quickly, I'll give you one million Danny Dollars for only $5,000 USD. OK, who want's to play?
There is one simple easy and affordable way to avoid theese problems. Stop wasteing your time on MMORPGs. People are stupid. People cheat, bot, and spend WAY too much time doing things that have no point. WoW, Guild Wars, EQ2, it's all the same. Time passes in real life, you pay for a game that gets boring in 20 minutes, and you have to deal with the "n00b" spamming. MMORPGs are not worth the time and money. Yes multiplayer online D&D games are fun, but theese days it's impossible to have the kind of time they DESIGN theese games to take. They are not interested in your game experience.. They want one thing: your money. If you really just want to spend your time and money send a check to me, and mow my grass. MMORPGs are the ultimate capatalist ideal, Give nothing and make millions.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
There are plenty of ways that I can do better than other players in WoW that isn't considered cheating by Blizzard or most players:
-- I have a 6mbit cable connection, which is really going to allow me to advance in the game much faster than players limited to a modem or crappy DSL connection. Believe me, there are plenty of players out there using modem connections, I've played with them, and I can literally run circles around them while they die over and over, which ends up costing them serious money and time.
-- Having a slower video card doesn't handicap you as much, but does to some extent. You have more control over your video settings to even things out than when it comes to your connection, but it certainly helps to have a top-of-the-line video card that allows me to easily zoom out and see farther away than other players.
-- Getting a guild together made up of high level Real-Life friends gives you a HUGE advantage over other solo players like me. Sure, you can just make the friends online, but it's a lot easier if you already have a group of level 60 geeks (especially family members) waiting to help you almost any time you want. I've been seriously left in the dust because of this many times, ESPECIALLY when it comes to WoW objectives that are mostly based on gold (epic mount, mount, etc.). I've seen players in a guild who would literally give 100-500 gold to members based solely on the fact they are Real-Life family members. Is nepotism any less cheating than buying gold from a gold farmer? I don't think so.
I think the first and especially third points are, by far, the most common way that a random level 1 player can get to level 60 in a couple of weeks. I've moved up a couple of high-end levels (mid to high 50's) in an hour or so each just by tagging along with level 60's who were just bored and wanted to show me how much butt they could kick.
I also think that the fact that getting a big gold hand-out from a family member or simply buying it with real world money shows there are serious flaws in the gameplay of WoW itself. Anything that costs a huge amount of gold or has ridiculous drop percentages is just Blizzard's way of telling you, "Hey, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel in content here, so just bite the bullet and start grindin'!".
Grinding is a substitute for good game content, and WoW has been (and still is) lacking a lot of good game content in the high levels (level 40+) for a long time.
Not to mention how many high level quests are so bugged that you have to wait weeks to do them. Some of the quests allow you to make stupid mistakes that can easily be solved with a bunch of gold, which encourages more gold begging/buying. Many high level quests are blatant in how they expect you to grind or waste huge amounts of time gathering crap to complete the quest. Most people just buy the crap to complete the quest in a few minutes.
The real problem with WoW is that they set up the content so that you can easily advance by cheating. Then they're surprised when people actually do cheat?!?!?
Give me a break, Blizzard, come up with more/better/less buggy content, then you can complain more about cheating (which is probably why you don't hear Blizzard complaining too much about it).
Oh and, in the meantime, if you're going to crack down on cheaters who buy gold from gold farmers, why don't you just start regulating/restricting all sales/transfers/trades of 100 gold or more in the game? Then you'll stop ALL the B.S....
If its against their rules it could be called a cheat, but its also clearly a shortcut - but i don't think most people really care. Witness they had a poll on Everquest and most people didn't care, so Sony started selling stuff. The ones who whine are kids who have no money, but they have oodles of time to play around the clock and get really leet - where an adult has not, so he tries to buy a level playing field :) The world is not fair and balanced, its naive to think that games would.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
But to answer your question of cheating or shortcut, it's definitely cheating. The poor 16 year old getting paid minimum wage who can't afford spending $60 on imaginary gold is at a disadvantage with someone who has a much better job. Where are the ethics in game playing??
"Happily lived Mankind in the peaceful Valley of Ignorance." -- Hendrik Willem Van Loon
Recently I played the game Candyland. The game requires zero skill. There are random chances to get ahead or be knocked back, but they require no user input or any kind of decision at all. If I left the room for some reason and had someone "play" for me, it wouldn't affect the outcome of the game at all. It is not inherently "fairer" to personally pick the card from the stack, than to have someone else do it for me.
Wow is exactly like Candyland in many respects. If I take a few days off and run around nonstop harvesting in a zone or zones, no one would think that was anything but fine. But if I went to work and had a friend play my character and he just ran around harvesting (the exact same thing I could do myself), some would think that morally wrong (leaving the ToS out of it). The common complaint is it isn't "fair", as though autorunning between nodes is somehow character building.
Oddly enough, buying already harvested items off the auction house is considered perfectly acceptable, even if I do it with gold my guild gave me. It's not uncommon for guildies to farm for gold to buy epic mounts for someone, perhaps even an IRL friend. But if that IRL friend pays them money, or takes them out to dinner, as thanks, how is that different? And if the people out farming for me aren't people I even know, why should you care? As long as the gold enters the market from authorized, in-game methods, it's no different at all.
*Note: I have never bought in-game currency.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
http://www.puzzlepirates.com/
The way they handle this is a micropayment system, in the form of doubloons. On a doubloon server, you buy doubloons for ~25 cents each from Three Rings (the developers). These are used to pay for the parts of the game you use - such as access to higher ranks and items - in addition to the in game currency of Pieces of Eight. The doubloons are sunk out of the economy completely, whereas the Pieces of Eight go to the merchant who you buy things from (who is also a player).
The key is that they have a player-driven exchange, where you can offer to buy and sell doubloons (the micro payment currency) for Pieces of Eight (the virtual currency). The price point fluctuates with demand, but it effectively allows those who want virtual cash to buy it - but only in the form of paying for other players' subscriptions.
So if you are an adult with a full time job and a credit card, you can pay other people to make cash for you by paying for their playing time directly. Conversly, if you're cash strapped, you can play for free by putting in the extra time to earn in-game cash and sell it for doubloons.
This system doesn't apply to the Subscription servers, which are a traditional fixed price model. But the Doubloon model has helped them really take off in terms of revenue.
Author spent 60 dollars on 500 gold.
The ad banner just beneath his article :
1000 gold for $34.99
nuff said
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
The variety of patently impossible and mutually-exclusive claims being made here is insane.
We don't know exactly what effects farmers have on the economy, but when there was a famous exploit many farmers were using to obtain lots of Ace of Warlords, you know what happened? The price dropped, a lot.
I don't think farmers are necessarily driving prices up or down that much. My guess would be that they slightly lower the costs of trade goods (by selling enough to meet demand), but increase the price of blues (by giving people more money to twink with). But I don't know.
I have a few characters, and I've found that it's pretty consistently possible to make money if you know your fields. There's exceptions; very few alchemy potions are worth detectably more than the cost of their ingredients, for instance. But you can rake in money on arcanite transmutes...
I don't think the economy is that broken. I also don't see much point in buying gold; it's pretty easy to make a LOT of money.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I only skimmed the comments but didn't see anyone pointing out that... I don't have the passage in front of me, but i believe that gold farming is specifically outlawed in the WOW EULA that players are forced to agree to with every single update...
Some people pay money, others pay alot more - time.
Personally, as long as people don't buy a toon - I don't have a problem.
My Mage 60 isn't wealthy enough to go on raids and stuff, and I certainly think buying gold is a valid option.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
If you did you'd notice it does make sense. Whine and lose; others will be stomping over your corpse soon.
You can justify buying gold anyway you want. Some people like to totally immerse themselves in the game even if means taking longer to earn that extra gold for that epic helm that will let you hit a bit better.
In games like World of Warcraft where there is no an "official" way to buy gold, and people buy gold from so called "gray market" vendors despite Terms of Service, buying gold encourages several behaviours.
First, buying gold makes things more expensive for everyone since there is an influx of more money into the economy thus raising prices. There is a chance you can get in on the extra gold if you have a rare item that a lot of people want to buy or the like. If no stabilizing/regulating force comes in like say Blizzard cracking down on gold selling and "gold farming", you can eventually screw up a server's economy.
Second, so called "gold farmers" resort to undecutting or price fixing or other means to get as much gold as they can. They basically have to get as much gold over time so if undercutting regular players helps them they will do it. Mid to Worst case scenario, this leads to the user pool having a harder time raising gold by selling items.
To aggrevate this "gold farmers" and their companies resort to finding exploits to duplicate items and gold. Not only that but this also includes writing viruses and trojans that scour the net to infect PCs hoping that the infected PC runs the game, so that it can hijack the username/password and hand it to an individual who runs scripts that log onto the player account, sell or disenchant all the items on the hijacked player account and send it off through the mail system to a dummy account. Then the gold/materials end up being sold to so-called "grey market" companies and this in turn resold to a different player wishing to upgrade their character's gear.
Now ask yourself is this right or wrong? I say wrong. If it only benefitted your character without hurting anyone else by the means outlined above it might be ok. A hard core gamer would shun away from it anyway.
.... ... }
int main (void) {
Like the author of TFA, I'm a working stiff who can only manage to play WoW a couple hours a week on average. And I'm milking it for all its worth. I'm savoring every moment and enjoying the hell out of myself. I actually pity the folks who played their brains out for a few weeks to reach level 60 only discover there is virtually no end game. Also, WoW is not tedius at all compared to some online games. It is well-tuned to players like me, actually rewarding time away from the server with experience bonuses. I have found each character level unique and interesting and I have rarely felt really broke or stuck. The ability to have many alts of different races and classes adds great variety to the game.
To buy easy gold may seem, superficially, to have certain conveniences, depending where you are in the game. Granted, sometimes a little extra game money can free up a tedious distinctly un-fun character log jam. I'm sympathetic. After adventuring with a player who had a higher level alt, he tossed my 11th level character a single gold piece in the context of the game. It was a breath of fresh air for that character and allowed me to get a few extra items and class training I had neglected. For a level or two, money wasn't such a big deal.
To have purchased 500G for $60 at that level would have made me wonder why I had bothered to decide to play the game at all. My advice: just stop playing the game and *pretend* you had the experience of leveling up and gaining the skills and experience in-game because the sensation will be about the same -- and about as satisfying.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Why don't you put your $15 a month toward your retirement and stop expecting Uncle Sam to take care of you when you're 65!
Its cheating hands down. What has become of our children and the message we allow them to learn in these games where things come easy?
Karma: a simple way of silencing those with unpopular views regardless how correct or just that view might be.
How can you cheat at a game that has no score and never ends?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Your comment gave me an idea...I think separate servers for "hard-core" and "casual" (i.e. working stiff) players might be a good idea. However, I don't think they should be differentiated by making one easy and the other hard. How about limiting playing time for the "casual" server? If you decide to sign on to a casual server, you get max 20 hours of play a week. If you exceed your time limit, you get booted. This means everyone on the server is competing under the same handicap--you won't have to worry about some unemployed loser living in mom's basement spending 3 straight weeks online to become an in-game god...if someone is better than you are, that's because they're a better player.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
It probably will end up going the same way as the real world. You'd like to live in a world where you don't lock your doors, but the thieves ruin that for you.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Socio-communists would call this cheating. Libertarians and Republicans simply call this free market capitalism.
I have bought alot of gold. Thousands for gold. I got a Krol blade, devilsaur set, all the enchants I want whenever I want, an epic mount, a darkmoon amulet, epic trinkets, an unlimited supply of consumables for pvp. My gold has helped me and my friends (without their knowledge) advance in the game. I don't think its wrong and I don't think Blizzard cares very much. The sites I have bought from often include their web address in the mail they send me the gold in. Ok so you know where I stand on this issue.
Now to bring up something I find more interesting. There is someone in my guild who smokes pot. And boy does he love to tell everyone about how stoned he is or how much weed he smoked today or how week has opened his mind and made molten core less lame. He is breaking a law which could lead to a felony (maybe I'm dumb) and gets to talk about it all he wants. People accept the fact that he breaks the law and has a habit that most likely has a negative impact on his life.
To contrast, if I ever mentioned that I bought gold in guild chat I would be kicked out of the guild. I would be reported to game masters. I would be blacklisted on my server. etc etc.
I let him to his thing and I do mine. Just something to consider.
Yeah, kinda cool when you have:
"You see 56 bone keys, lying on the floor."
Not cool when you have:
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
"You see a bone key, lying on the floor."
etc.
[ Lameness filter encountered.]
demand
supply
very simple concept. Yet everyone has such a problem with it. Just because you don't want to buy anchor shaped male dildo butt plugs or warcraft gold or country music cds it certainly doesn't mean people in general don't want them. There are certainly dumber things than buying gold in wow to impress some dude pretending to be an elf chick.
"At level 42 in WoW, I decided to learn cooking."
Can *you* now cook?
Deleted
I agree. I've never had a problem with gold in WoW. I did everything you're supposed to: Upgrade your bags as soon as you can, auction ALL greens that you get at a decent price, look for things to buy low/sell high on the AH, don't spend too much (or anything) at AH, etc. When I hit 40 on two characters (both on different realms, so I couldn't transfer gold), I had more than enough for a mount by then.
:P
... boy if she saw me write that, she might kill me)
Conversely, my wife was always low on funds. Funny thing is she was able to get her mounts from friends who were more than willing to give her gold, just because she was a girl.
I always wonder if those who have problems accumulating gold in MMORPGs also have the same problems managing their real life wealth. A lot of WoW players are still kids, who don't have to worry about things like mortgages, college savings accounts, retirement, etc. And there are also many adults who are horrible at saving, what with their massive credit card debt, tanked credit report, etc. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they're also the ones complaining about saving for WoW gold.
(Not that my wife is also bad at managing real life wealth
-- jchenx
One of the thing I like about WOW was that a new char makes money at about the rate they can spend it well. When I twinked an alt it didn't help all that much.
I have never felt the need to buy cash, though I wouldn't complain about someone who did. I thought I would to buy a mount, but reduced spending, more ah time, and a loan for a few days kept me from having to wait or buy cash.
To my mind, that is a key design feature they got right. I have played other games where some one factor became an issue that drained the fun.
YMMV I know some classes are more of cash hogs than what I picked.
Here is something to consider. What's the one thing that every MMOG player complains about? (I mean besides the patch that didn't go very well.) It's the amount of time they waste. Whether it be skinning boar or collecting compoenents to make items to sell in your shop it still isn't killing monsters or questing. The real kick in the teeth is that you are more or less forced to spend spend/waste the time making money so you can afford the equpment to go out and adventure and have fun. So is it cheeting? Maybe. But let's face it, if you find it tedious to sit around collecting venom sacks to turn into poison you can sell for 5 copper more than what it cost you to make it, then maybe buying you gold with real money is the answer to your entertainment woes.
The thing I like most about this job is all the rocket scientists who bang their mice on their desks shouting 'It Broke!
On Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates's doubloon servers, there's no subscription fee; instead, you pay with a special currency called doubloons as a delivery charge on various items (which usually need to be replaced every 30-60 days) and for badges that let you participate in different parts of the game (which also need to be replaced every month). A labor badge lets you work in shops, a captain's badge lets you start your own crew, etc.
The only way doubloons enter the economy is when they're purchased with cash for around 25 cents each. They disappear once they're spent on items or badges. However, you can trade them for the other currency, pieces of eight, which flows freely from NPCs - most transactions are done in POE, including wagers and the non-delivery-charge cost of items. But unlike in Second Life, you can't [officially] change doubloons back into dollars.
The result is that players with a lot of time but little money can just play the hell out of the game and earn enough POE to trade for doubloons, and players with a lot of money but little time can buy doubloons and trade them for POE as needed. (I spent around $50 to get enough capital to start up a couple shops, and now they're successful enough that I may never need to pay cash for doubloons again.) Players with neither can still play the game for free, but some parts of it will be closed off to them. The system seems to work really well.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Most of the fun I've had playing MUDs and RPGs has been at low levels, espically when I didn't understand the game mechanics.
The higher level you become, the more route the game--until you are not enjoying it at all and are just playing it to regain the good times you had when you first started.
Another thing--I discovered 20 years ago or so that if I wanted to get myself to stop playing a game I was addicted to, all I had to do was use some cheat or exploit that made it easy, I'd immediately get sick of the lameness and stop playing.
Spending money to ruin a gameing experience that you are already paying for just seems silly. Why don't you create a new character and muck around the low levels instead?
Those big high-level fights aren't that much fun anyway.
Oh, a quick fix for this crap? My first mud (Scepter of Goth--essentially THE first mud) had a great system. When you die if you make your constution roll you lost 2 levels, if not you lost half your levels, either way you lose 1 point of con (standard 1-18 range), when you reach 0--start a new char.
This along with a little less power gained per level really makes the game more playable--LEROY might have been a little more careful under those rules--gives 'em something to lose.
It also REALLY stops the macro farmers.
I've bought gold for WoW, and I'm not ashamed of having done it.
The day WoW hit the shelves, I picked up my copy. I played it to level 60 as a Hunter, and loved it. Then I played it to level 60 as a Rogue, still loved it. My server turned to shit over time, thanks to Blizzard's inability to build enterprise-level infrastructure, so I moved to another box. Luckily I got to move my main two characters before the (early) transfer cutoff, so I took my hard-earned gold with me. Not a small amount either, I have roughly 800 gold in cash, maybe 1200g worth of enchanting materials, about half my tier 2 gear, etc. Not a single part of this was paid for in real-world cash either, I did all that the hard way.
But I got bored for a while, and stopped playing. 6 months, roughly.
Then the APAC time-zone servers came out. So I looked into it. Turns out there were zero realm transfers happening to these new servers, but that's where I wanted to play. So I re-rolled. There I was, a lowbie with zero cash and hating the game. You see, without at least a small amount of cash the early levels are hell. You can't earn 50g in a day as a lvl 60 (no matter what anyone says, the only way to earn 50g a day is to play for 24 hours solid), and you certainly can't earn even 50s as a lvl 1. So I bought 100g online. It was dirt cheap ($7 USD), and it meant I could play the game properly.
I didn't change much though. I picked up a bunch of bags, some gear, a weapon, and levelled up fast. The fast bit stops around 25 or so, then it's just the normal game but at least you skip the pain of not being able to buy anything you need. Of having to travel back to town every 15 minutes because you filled your bags again.
The clincher for me was being unable to afford Gryphon rides. I'm a pretty skilled player, I know how to make money, yet I constantly found myself too poor to pay for transport in-game. For those of you who don't play, walking-time alone can add dozens of hours to your first 20 levels in this game. Does this fulfil some secret "purpose" of the game? Does not walking for 20 minutes to get between locations (instead using the game-provided flight system) violate the "spirit" of the thing? I doubt it.
I agree with the article, and I personally don't see how this gold farming affects the game in an adverse way. I've spent many months on high-population servers seeing first-hand the impact of farmers. They crowd some of the richer spots (Tyr's Hand, for example), and that's it. You can't find them anywhere else! Congrats to Blizzard for finding a way to concentrate them all into one single location! Prices on the AH aren't impacted, it would take hundreds of farmers per server to make any difference there. In fact, I've personally found that they're easily exploited by simply watching the prices, buying bargains, then on-selling them during timeslots where farmers aren't around!
Blizzard made some significant mistakes building WoW, but permitting gold-sales to continue wasn't one of them. They won't stamp it out completely simply because it keeps a significant number of long-term players (the ones their accountants truly want on the books) connected.
I should point out that I don't see the point buying 5000g, purchasing epic mounts, purple-gear, etc but the game was designed with this in mind. If it wasn't, this stuff wouldn't be Bind on Equip.
Finally, I pay somebody to mow my lawns each month. A mechanic services my car (despite me being more than capable of doing it myself). I wouldn't object to a house-keeper, and I certainly don't iron my own shirts! We all pay other people to do the bits we don't like. It doesn't violate the spirit of the "game" at all. It's what we call "commerce".
He's not contributing to the people who are raising the AH prices, otherwise each person who plays WoW normally would be getting Cash.
the source of the ingame inflation in anygame is the same: Its the Common man, wanting more money for their goods. Its the Players fault that the individual material to make an item sells more than the item its self. Its the players fault useless gear costs 100000 times more than it should. The biggest evidence of this, is in games where you cant buy gold. Ragnarok Online for example. Inflation there is TERRIBLE. You cant pay for money, but you can certainly make rediculace amounts of cash off a worthless item.
So in closing, while Paying for money in game is stupid, You might want to get the reasons for it correct.
As far as ingame inflation is concerned, Blame your neighbor. The finger pointing only ends when the community gets together, cleans out the auction house, and starts over with agreed price ranges. This of course, Will never happen. I will eat my hat the day it does.
No really.. aren't the blood elves supposed to be able to suck away
magical energies and use them against their foes?
Sounds a lot like the IRS to me. One can only guess at the "world event"
blizzard is planning that will bring them to Azeroth.
always thought these games were for the reality-detached crowd.
what a moron.
with the real pgm's going for moon in price, this guy buys the virtual/nothing.
"there's a sucker born every minute" g.h.
People actually pay real cash for fake cash!!?? WTF! That's freaking insane.
That price is 'starting from'.... the prices are higher on some realms.
However - we don't know his realm so we don't know how much ripped off he wasn't.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Since prices don't scale linear (i.e. sell 2 lv 20 items and you can buy a lv 40 item), you would have to trash a LOT of lv 20 mobs to afford that lv 50 item. In fact much more than you'd have to if lv 20 gear went for "normal" prices and you could in turn get a lv 50 item for a normal price.
Inflation is especially devastating for a fixed price NPC economy, like the one you encounter in MMORPGs invariably. Because NPC prices stay the same. In WoW it is less pronounced, at least last time I checked, because most of the items that you need cannot be bought anyway. But at the very least it means that Alchemists for example have a VERY hard time getting some decent coin for their everyday work. As long as you can buy an item from an NPC, you can't compete with the price as a PC crafter.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I never farmed and I never had any need for money. It's just a matter of playstyle: instead of farming gold to buy BOE epics for 500g, I devoted that time to play in endgame non-raid instances and ended up with better gear, more money and far more fun.
You can apply the same reasoning for raid-obtainable BOE epics, because it takes less time to access or even create a PVE raiding guild and farm Molten Core than to amass the insame amount of money needed to buy those epics. They also are rarely on the market.
Buying epics is just plain stupid, unless you prefer to grind than run an instance. In this case, you chose the wrong game.
Hint: you don't need the best equipment to be able to do certain things. Wow is far more based on playskill than on gear.
Makes sense, doesn't it? A game the economy of which is gone down the drain is sooner or later devoid of players (except the farmers) and shuts down due to a lack of funding.
One of the textbook examples was Earth and Beyond by Electronic Arts. It had everything a MMORPG needs to have its economy wasted in no time:
1. No instances
2. Insane influx of money
3. Very few key encounters.
The net effect was that even a "hobbyist" money making guild could monopolize the market. It didn't even take the Chinese Farmers (tm).
Lineage 2 has a similar problem. This time with professional farmers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What values the USD the author paid with? The fact that the virtual demand created by the oil and other world markets exists. Imagine OPEC doesn't use the USD, as some economists have started to decry in their rants, then the value drops because it's being used less. It's all virtual in the real world already, you have just created yet an other economy.
Good point, I didn't think of that.
Buying monopoly money is more complicated than I thought!
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
In eve for farming the best way to make money is by mining. As miners are openly hunted if they don't have the firepower to protect them rather then pay someone to protect them instead they mine in high security areas. The problems with this is that asteriods are limited resources, so it can be quite normal to log in to find the system you have started in as a newbie to be mined to death.
"you would have to trash a LOT of lv 20 mobs to afford that lv 50 item"
True, but a level 20 will use green, blue, and purple items so you get a LOT more level 20 items in an hour of farming at level 60 than you would farming level 50 items at level 60. Level 20's don't go to the AH as it's a waste of their time aka the gear will not make you level fast enough for the cash and trip to be worth it but a level 60 will buy items and mail them to an alt so you can sell items at inflated prices so level 10-30 gear sells for about the same cash. Think of what it takes to farm a purple spawn (even a low level one) you sit in one area and outside of some trade skill loot most mob drops are close to worthless. Not so with farming low level items you get about the same value from trade skill loot over time but you can sell a tun of 1-10 gold items in the AH. If your making 50-100+ G/h it's not that long to pick up a nice 500gold item. I don't think it's a good idea to try to do this with all slots but if you realy want X item you can get most of them in about a day of farming this way which is about what it takes to get that item the normal way IMO.
PS: I made about 50G/h at level 40 so at 60 you should kill faster so...
As a former player of WoW (and many other MMOs) my advice is play on a PvP server. Get a bunch of your friends/guildies and go farmer farming. You could easily shutdown the farmer economy (at least the mob grinding ones) by killing the farmers and killing the mobs. Our guild would go out in groups of 20 and just shut them down until they logged.
Call a spade a spade. It is cheating. I still don't have a problem with it though. I mean, if you want to take the risk of cheating, and are willing to do it as a shortcut, take the risk. Some people will get caught, some will get away with it. But it really shouldn't be a deal breaker for the people who cheat or those who don't.
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
"Perhaps instead of paying $60 for money that has no value outside of the scads of fools that are addicted to WoW, people should pay $60 for a game that's actually good."
WoW came out a smash hit from moment one. Despite all sorts of technical hiccups, they've become the most successful MMORPG ever, by a wide margin. A year later they've maintained that user base.
And along you come, saying WoW is "not good". Nice two word dismissal. Clearly, though, you're simply wrong.
For how messed up the AH can be. When I was working towards my epic mount, mostly by selling mid to high end herbs, I used to deliberately corner the market on items, drive up the prices, buyout anyone who undercut me and resell at the higher price. Once you have a base of gold to work from (say 300g or so) this can be pretty easy to do, so long as the items are not super common.
You also learn when to sell and when to buy. The big raid guilds usually have pretty consistent schedules so it's easy enough to time buying out the supply and listing it high. After all everyone needs materials for certain potions.
It took me about 2 weeks to get the gold for my epic mount. Rather than being broke I had a good deal of materials left over from my "business" and cleared an additional 400g just from leftover stock.
Now I wasn't doing this full time, just one or two hours a night. This was also on a high population server with plenty of materials flowing into the AH.
Now, if you have a guild that actually coordinates its harvesting and pooled its funds - I would imagine you could completely turn cost upside down and make mad profits. I believe this has been done in game before.
I've also heard people in the forums complain about this behavior. It's just a natural part of an open economy. There is no penalty for monopolizing a raw material but you do take a risk that someone will flood the market and undercut you (which I've done to my competitors). I've had to sit on a ton of items because the price was driven down too low and I had way to much stock to buyout the glut. A couple days later however I was able to move the stock at double the price.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I hate to say it - but if you have people who want to use real money to buy and sell virtual items AND people who feel it is cheating or in violation of the EULA - maybe Sony has the right approach with the Station Exchange. Sony maintains a site for the sale of gold, items and characters within EverQuest II. The catch is, sales are only allowed on servers which are "Station Exchange" servers.
This means that if you are that player with too much extra cash you should consider playing on one of those servers rather than deal with potentially shady 3rd party transactions.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
A MUD where NPC corpses remain persistent? Whoever is coding that particular MUD is somewhat of a, as we would say here, fucking idiot. In the case of a required corpse for a puzzle, it would be MUCH more reasonable to instead impose a script which would, upon the NPC's death, create a faux-corpse object with a special persistent object flag. Hell, why even waste the resource on the "faux-object"? Simply flag the object persistent and code that flag properly. There's always an alternative.
Friend, I submit that characters in a MUD can have an "actual effect on the environment" in many more ways than re-creating Auschwitz. By blurring the lines between the builder and the player (implementing the ability for a player to manage resources and construct, or even destruct buildings), you create a TRUE sense of player involvement. Let us for example imagine a MUD where a world map is overlayed with an array of population density information for various NPC races - sounds simple, right? From this, we can spawn and move groups of NPCs of various races about the world in a predictable and reasonable fashion, giving a true sense of collaborative AI between NPCs (totally fake, but still, believable if done right). Now, we can allow NPCs to create structures to fortify locations, or battle other NPCs and attempt to move into areas - an interactive game of life, more or less. Why all this? Giving the player the sense they can change something. A group of players can now conceivably band together and commit genocide on an entire race of NPCs, wiping their existence from the MUD. A powerful sorcerer can conjure up a new magical race of elementals branded with his mark, assisting them in taking over a region of the world. Players can combine roleplay, politics, and gaming in one interesting strategy MUD where they really can change anything with work.
Does this conflict with the traditional MUD "setup" of pre-built areas? Hardly! Players and NPC factions can still wage war for control, just that these areas can be systematically converted between owners as well. So, the orcs march into the region of Midgard, vanquishing all their foes with ease: iterate through the mobiles of Midgard and convert them to orcish races. Specify a variable system in which descriptions and short/long descriptions for mobs can be modified in such a fashion that they reflect their current race. Iterate through the list of races and update their hometowns based on current faction standings. Hell, update race availability based on current standings! The game's rules itself can then be changed by a powerful player or group of players.
Heh, keeping the twenty festering bat corpses nobody remembered to sacrifice piling around Dungeon Nowhere constitutes "characters can have an actual effect on the environment."? Please, "StCredZero", get a clue.
StCredZero, should you read this, I apologize. I came off in an extremely patronizing tone and my post seemed ripe with antagonism. I am actually quite pleased to see fellow MUDders entrenched in Slashdot. I just wanted a chance to rant on about some of my MUD ideas and theories! Hope you enjoyed reading and have some criticisms/ideas of your own. I have been coding and tinkering with MUDs for something like ten years now, from the more popular codebases to several homebrew MUD servers written in a plethora of languages, I am just obsessed with coding, building, designing, and drafting them! Sorry for the asshole attitude. Cheers.
:P.
p.s.: I suppose total object persistence, in spite of its glaring inefficiencies, could allow for some feel of involvement
You buy? 1000g You buy? 900g You buy? 1200g No more golds for you round eye!
In my case, I'd rather spend $50 a week to have some service come to my place and do all the crap stuff around here...
Fine, then pay somebody to clean your house. Who cares? Your feelings about housework have absolutely nothing to do with whether buying gold in a game world is cheating or not. You might as well say a baseball team should buy homeruns because they just don't like physically running around the bases.
If you don't enjoy the way the game is played don't play it.
Thanks everyone who replied to this thread. You have given me some good insightful info that I am taking into account. Also if your on REXXAR please feel free to deposit some gold to LSONESMULE 8')
as I have taken your advice, and created a mule / bank char.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I'm not sure about you, but my time isn't free. Really, it comes down to simple economics: should I spend $20 and a half hour of my time to get somebody else to change my oil, or should I waste an hour of my time, plus the time for buying oil and disposing of the old, etc?