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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.
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.
I agree. If you're sick of playing the game, stop playing. Otherwise its not a game anymore -- it's an addiction.
Mr. Black, Ms. White, I'd like to introduce you to someone. His name is Gray.
I'd rather spend the $60 on another game, preferably one that realizes I want to play, not work.
Somehow, somewhere, this meme got into the MMORPG world that players have to "earn" their stuff, preferably through repetitive tasks.
Unfortunately, somehow it works. We all play along and accept it as normal, pretty much like computer crashes (try telling any admin of a 1970s mainframe that regular computer crashes are nothing special).
Yes, it is a shortcut. It most definitely beats having to do the same nonsense another 100 times. It is probably cheaper, as well (i.e. you earn more money in the time you saved than it costs you).
But damn, it should make you re-check your priorities and ask yourself if you're sure you want to sink more money into that game, and why. And whether you're ready to do it again, and again, as it's unlikely that phase of the game was unique.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If it was a single player game, even if it was a Diablo-like game, I couldn't care less. Enjoy it. You take a shortcut to what could usually take long to get. No problem. It does not affect me.
It does affect me in a MMORPG.
Now, sure, you have an item I don't. That's not the problem. It's also no problem if you're just a lucky bastard who decides to sell his once in a lifetime find on EBay.
The problem starts with commercial farming.
Worst problem are non-instanced encounters. Commercial and organized farmers can and do monopolize important spawns. They do have the key equipment, they do know where to be when and they do know how to cooperate. In other words, as a normal vanilla player with a normal vanilla guild (if any), you have NO chance to get that item into your hands.
Unless you pay for it.
Now, this problem can be remedied with instances. Go there with your guild and eventually you can have the item, too. No farming guild can keep you from getting it.
Another problem with farmers: Inflation. When a ton of money is pumped into the system, prices go up. I buy XXX money for YY$. 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.
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
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/
Hrm... I take issue with this conclusion. Is something that is "not within the spirit or the intent of the game" automatically cheating? I would argue the heavily abbreviated, almost l33t, shorthand used in chat is also not within the spirit or intent of the game, as it detracts from the atmosphere. Does that make it cheating?
As a GAME, the point is to be fun. If people like some aspects of the game but have found a way to get around the money treadmill does that necessarily affect you? Sure, there's the whole issue of more money entering the economy, but if someone bought the money from someone else, the money was already in the economy, it's just changed hands.
One of the reasons I don't, and won't, play MMORPGs is because of that extended treadmill experience.
I say that something is cheating if it is synonymous with something that is illegal or is simply blatantly against the rules. If Blizzard has declared that it is against the rules and transgressors will be punished, that's great. That is enough to make it cheating. It's Blizzard's world and they make the rules. However, if this is a gray area where they've not said much, it's not cheating unless it somehow operates completely outside of the game's mechanics, as in generating money from thin air or something.
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.
Bingo.
I'd go a step farther and say it's a sign of bad game design. If you, as a player, find yourself seriously thinking about paying someone else to play the game for you, that means that the game has stopped being a game and started being a chore. If I enjoy something, I'm not going to pay someone else to go enjoy it for me. But if it bores me, then I might be willing to pay someone to do it so I don't have to.
Is gold buying cheating? Almost certainly, in the same way that slipping someone $5 real world currency for Boardwalk would be cheating in Monopoly. There are rules that you're supposed to follow, and buying gold is breaking them.
But it's also a time saver. Instead of having to camp some stupid mob for hours on end to get your Jujitsu Gi, you instead pay someone to camp some stupid mob for hours on end, thereby skipping the boring part.
When a game has people willing to pay good money not to have to play the boring parts, that's a sign that the game has problems. Gold buying is both cheating and a time saver - and a sign of poor game design.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
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'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.
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
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.
...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.
Author spent 60 dollars on 500 gold.
The ad banner just beneath his article :
1000 gold for $34.99
nuff said
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