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Boycott the Gold Farmers?
Next Generation is running an editorial penned by former PC Gamer Editor-In-Chief Gary Whitta, wherein he calls on gamers to shut down gold farmers. From the article: "PCG's refusal to accept their advertising is a bold first step toward suffocating these reprobates. But it won't do the job completely: there will always be less-scrupulous outlets who won't be so picky about where their ad dollars come from. The only way to really cut off gold farmers at the knees is not by refusing to take their money, but by refusing to give it to them. And that responsibility falls to you, the community of players they target."
Whenever a sweatshop closes, a family starves. Now, I don't know if that's necessarily how goldfarming operations work (certainly not to the same degree), but it seems like more people stand to lose more from goldfarming's collapse than players have to gain.
Yeah Gold farming will stop when good games are no longer dependant on time snks.
I can name one: Star Wars Galaxies. The games economy was completely trashed by billions and billions of Duped credits. Those duped credits were largely created by gold farmers who were duping and then selling them. Others were duping them and then dumping outrageous sums into the economy on silly stuff. The prices became hyperinflated and the amount of gold kept pace, but acquiring money was *never* an issue during the period that duping was most prevelant. The only saving grace in SWG was that the money was all kept in the players hands, so if more money was available then things just became more expensive. My guild knew right when duping became prevelant, we were already selling alot of things and prices and purchases shot through the roof across the board. The thing is, acquiring money from the game quests became nearly pointless. You had to be some sort of merchant. Duping isn't the same as farming in so far as *how* the gold is acquired but the fact is farming to sell the gold directly to another person causes amounts of money to enter the economy that are out of sync with the amounts of money that can be acquired from the normal gold producing means. So quests that give gold become pointless, what you really have to do is be some kind of trader. Prices rise and the viscious circle begins.
Hey, Alan Greenspan just retired from the Federal Reserve, so he'd be a natural to help develop something like this. Managing the overall level of the money supply has been his gig for many, many years.
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I do not play MMORPGS, I likely never will. I have issues with them(ethical and cheapskate).
But I think that all of this opposition to gold farming is pointless. The games are designed to require large amounts of gold to get the good items. Gold takes a lot of time to acquire in any large quantity. So people who don't have the time to put in to get all of that gold but still want the good items in order to play the better quests are either locked out of them or forced to acquire the gold by other means.
I have seen some people liken this to the "war on drugs" and in one respect they make a valid point but the point that seems to get overlooked is that Blizzard(and the other game companies) is pretty much impotent to do anything about the practice outside of their game.
They can make it impossible to give any item away, but that would unfaily punish the people who are trying to help out a real-world friend who is new to the game. In the end I'm sure that would only decrease the number of people who renew their subscriptions. It's a stalemate and the gold farmers can't lose.
Either change the dynamic of the game, or quit bitching.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Its actually the opposite. If I had to farm for gold myself- I would have quit FFXI after a 2-3 weeks, and WoW after 2-3 months, not the half years I played each. Why? Because I would have had to spend large amounts of time doing stuff that wasn't fun in order to get back to the fun. Buying gold keeps me a subscriber for longer, not shorter.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
i buy from gold farmers ;)
i dont see anything that wrong with them they are only a minor inconvenience
they found a way to make money 'playing' a game
plus when you see these guys working in sweat shop like conditions for so little money, and this is the best they can find in their area you have to almost feel sorry for them
so some people are minorly inconvenienced ON A GAME (oh crap my favorite farming spot has a couple chinese guys in it booo hooo they dont speak english)
gold farming is some of these peoples lively hood, it allows them to afford a skinny ass chicken (that may or may not have bird flu, ooooh scary!) so they can feed their family another night
man are we soo spoiled that we get this up in arms about video games while we do nothing as the inalienable rights that our ancestors fought and DIED for are taken away by an adminstration that attacks country after country "pre-emptively" (unprovoked, and next time maybe with nukes! oh joy!)
As for level grinds in MMOs, I think the biggest problem is due to people's different play styles. As you mentioned, there always be power gamers that just breeze through the normal quests/instances/etc. For those folks, maybe a level grind isn't enough, so you force them to go through reputation grinds, gold grinds, and raid grinding. For casual gamers, the normal level grind might be enough. I think WoW does this fairly well actually. But it could always be better. And there's the problem with casual gamers seeing what the hardcore gamers are getting and wishing they had access to that content as well.
Maybe an MMO that does something similar to what Oblivion does, would be good. In Oblivion, the enemy usually scales in level with you. So if you walk into a dungeon at level 5, all the mobs are around that level. If you came in at level 10, then they're also around 10. What's missing, though, is the sense of progression, that you really ARE getting more powerful. Maybe if there was an MMO that combined both level scaling (keeping casuals and power gamers at the same skill level, despite how much time each put in), but still gave people a sense of progression, that would be a good thing?
-- jchenx