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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?
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...
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.
So why doesn't Blizzard just sell the gold for those players who want to skip to the front? Why don't they just let you roll up a level 50 player with a greater from scratch if you fork over $100? After all, let's say you want to join your friends who play on Battlegrounds, but don't want the agonizing process of leveling up to battlegrounds level... why doesn't Blizzard offer to let you build a character at that level? It would make them money, block off the farmers, let players who have no interest in the treadmill aspect of MMOs get involved, and still allow you to design the player yourself and know what it has (whereas buying a character from someone else gives you a bunch of stuff that you don't know how to use and might not work well).
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.
Start the level 50 characters off in, say, "Valhalla" - some realm where they can get primo gear and have a little time to play alone and learn before jumping into the blender. Give them a day's work of looting and stuff to get accustomed to their character's high-level doodads, then cut them loose in the real world to sink-or-swim. Basically, compress the whole game into an afternoon's play for "fast track". To avoid fscking the economy, make most "fast track" artifacts useless to non "fast track players" or something - if dropped in the real world they turn into gold or something.
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.
making it all but impossible for honest players trying to make a few silver here and there to sell anything.
Oh stop, please.
I'm a casual player who just got back into the game a few weeks ago after a few months off. I started a new character on a new server and am at level 25. I spend most of my time screwing off, and I'm sitting on about 30g and have a full set of 16 slot bags. WoW is surprisingly like real life, where if you put some thought into managing money, you'll have plenty.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
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.
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You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Blizzards problem with farming is A) it takes forever and a ton of luck to get those special items and B) You can't attack the farmers hoarding the items and C) there are EXTREMELY limited drop sites compared to the number of players.
Let's compare to EVE: There are very VERY few 'uber' items. They blow up when you die, so they're used even more rarely. They're not that much better then their freely available counterparts. Anyone and everyone can make the basic gear that 90% of the playerbase is using. A lucky few (8-20 people per item) can make the advanced "Tech 2" gear, a situation which is always a point of contention and is "going to be fixed, someday". The named/faction stuff is either dropped off enemies or given as rewards for missions. Most of it is barely different then the tech-1 basic units except in rare situations (fitting constraints on a tight-fit ship). Oh, and there are hundreds of agents of all levels so there's no real 'hoarding' of agents. As for the farmers, it's open season on them. You can either take a direct security hit and blow them up, or get their macros to do something stupid and then blow them up 'legally'. Or, if you're bored, just push their ships out of range of what they're doing. They'll sit in space until their controller gets around to manually fixing them.
The demand for low-end ores (what the macroers and chinese miners go after) is so high that they can't even significantly depress the market. They do keep it down to a tolerable level, which is great for all players who want to buy battleships. (They take a TON of low-end ores to build)
As for making money via a game? Go for it. I'm in a corp that has access to a TON of resources, so I have more then enough 'isk' for whatever I fly. If someone doesn't have that support but does have a good job, $20 will buy them enough isk to fly for quite a while as long as they're not stupid. I don't think it's "cheating" like it is in WoW. WoW is specifically a timesink. You spend 4 hours in queue, then 4 hours camping a raid boss to get one trinket. If you avoid either of those waits you're "not playing the game" and "exploiting". (Yes, I'm using hyperbole, but it IS the feeling of the game.) There's no "one way" of doing things in EVE, so who cares if I buy some poopsock time from someone else rather then doing it myself? You can't buy yourself a significant advantage, and if you show up with a billion ISK faction ship, expect us to laugh at you while we blow it up in disposable 200k frigates.
Even so, you can't both blame inflation and deflation on the same group of people. That seriously makes no sense.
Yes, you can, because these are different items.
In an MMO I'm playing, exactly this sort of thing is happening. There are so many woodcutters that even if it weren't for the people doing it with bots, the price of wood would still be ridiculously low. There are higher-level items that have inflated out of control, into the tens of millions of coins, and I've even noticed a change in the price of Ambrosia, which I'm selling.
Ultimately, I don't see the inflation as horrible, since most people have something that they can hunt, for money, which they can sell at inflated prices, so that they can afford to buy stuff at inflated prices. There isn't any gold-farming in this game that I know of, so the more insane inflation/deflation comes from bots, and you can't easily bot something which kills creatures (without dying itself), instead of killing trees.
However, the wood has been deflated for a very long time. Recently, everyone is whining very, very loudly at how much the wood prices went up -- because the GMs (Archons) finally cracked down on the "auto-cutters", in the process annoying a lot of legitimate lumberjacks into flat-out quitting woodcutting or the game entirely, and now wood prices are back where they should be, comparable with metal and wool.
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.
Not nothing/everything. Yes, higher-level players have more money, so there will be some inflation. Gold farmers also drive inflation.
In fact, a lot of things drive inflation or deflation in a game economy. It takes a lot of work to make a real economy stable, and a game economy is worse, being wholly artificial. Some game economies artificially inflate, some artificially deflate, some are just completely unstable. For instance, I have two ways of making money in the MMO I play. I hunt Ambrosias and selling them to players, which does nothing to the economy, or even to the price of Ambrosias, since they break on death, so someone always needs them. I also mine/smelt/smith -- that is, I pull mine out of the ground, smelt it into metal, smith the metal into swords, and sell them to a smith NPC.
Now, NPCs have an infinite amount of money, so when I mine, I'm basically making money out of nothing at all. Just like the government printing money, this does drive inflation.
Of course, there are expenses -- I have to buy picks and shovels from an NPC, so sometimes money does disappear into nothing. But that's insignificant, or I wouldn't be mining. Similarly, NPCs do mundane repairs (for a fee), but that's never significant, because extremely high-level (Sam San) Warriors have a spell that can repair anything, even things the NPC smiths can't. So you never pay more to an NPC to repair an item than it would cost for a "Sam Repair", which is handing money to a player for a service, which does nothing to the economy. Hell, the Sam San might turn around and buy a pair of Ambrosias from me -- in which case, I profit, so you can't say that this is even concentrating all the money in the high-level players.
For that matter, Sam repairs aren't the only spell players have that they charge for, but it's not inflated through collusion or anything like that. The spell has Aethers -- I believe the Sam repair can only be done once every several hours of gameplay, so if they didn't charge enough for it, they'd be completely mobbed every hour or two.
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.
Up until this comment, I was treating you like an equal, but now I feel very tempted to just call you stupid and end the post.
Yes, Gold farmers sell their gold all the time. But it doesn't go into thin ai
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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I was going to mod you "funny," but then I realised that "insightful" on a comment like that was part of the joke :)
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.