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."

Comments

Competitive feature of the game?

[dada21]

I don't play any game that has an endless money supply in it -- I don't think there are any games yet that have a fixed amount of commodities in the gaming world, but I'd appreciate seeing it. It would really make people strive to earn (or steal or barter) their "income" online.

That being said, isn't the gold farmer there specifically because it does reduce the most boring part of the game? I think this is exactly what the game needs to prove that the money situation is broken. If money is so easy to get by "farming" it, it means the gaming companies need to come up with a new way to handle the situation of money (preferably by fixing the amount available and only allowing more of it through mining or what not). I'd even say dump the gold-is-the-only-money idea entirely, and fix commodities based on the amount of PC players rather than the amount of NPCs in a game. This will let other commodities find value as a bartering mechanism.

I don't see the reason for ignoring something valuable such as the gold farmer -- if it saves YOU time, then it is worth the cost. Money is a store of time, nothing more. If something saves you time, you give them your money (stored time) in exchange. Someone elsewhere in the world is willing to do your dirty work, compensate them if you can't do it yourself.

Re:Competitive feature of the game?

[danpsmith]

How about actual game economics? What you need is a fixed amount of money to flow into the game at all times, instead of merchants constantly willing to buy items off of you and an unlimited amount of gold available. Now I know in games there's _technically_ a limit, but I think this should be more regulated in game form. MMOs are starting to echo the real world in the need for real economic controls. I think prices for things, instead of varying from town to town in game, should also vary based on other factors. I honestly think that a game with a more complicated virtual economy might be able to curtail some of these issues, by making it harder to get cheap gold by tricks, and making it easier to get enough gold to afford what you need. Just imagine if a game had a flaw where you could find an infinite amount of some type of sword by killing something over and over again, but as the market gets flooded with the sword in the game, the price for it goes down just like it would in real life. Now that's a game I'd like to be a part of.

Re:Competitive feature of the game?

[TexVex]

I don't think there are any games yet that have a fixed amount of commodities in the gaming world, but I'd appreciate seeing it.

Ultima Online did early on. People hoarded. The system broke. It sounds good in theory, but there are too many variables you can't easily account for in practice. What about the guy who has a nice collection of some commodity, then doesn't log in for six months? Do you release his supply back into the system? What about when he returns to the game -- is he screwed out of his stuff, or is his supply allowed to go over the limit? I think this is exactly what the game needs to prove that the money situation is broken. The situation needs deeper analysis. MMORPGs are a new layer on top of the RPG. Classically, the "economy" in an RPG is a combination of game world flavor, a way to inflate the game's play time, a flow controller (i.e. to prevent you from buying powerful high-level equipment too early), and a sub-game of decision-making about things like exactly how important it is to have the Uber Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying or if the Elite Sword of Donkeylizard Slaying is good enough.

Single-player RPGs contain things look like economics but really aren't -- it's just part of the game.

Early MMORPG designers built the game systems the same way, without giving much thought to how real economics were going to come into play. It's just a game, one that happens to be multiplayer, right? It's obvious to add in trading of stuff between players. But, as soon as you do that, a real economy emerges. The real one interacts strangely with the fake one built into the game world. The classical RPG economy has the hero being uber-rich by the end of the game, because accumulated money is just another scorecard. But when that useless stuff can be traded between players and the game is designed for all players to get steadily richer over time, then you end up with this huge disconnect between the value of money in terms of the game rules and the value of money between two players. A friend signs on, you give him a small fraction of all the excess money you've piled up, and that little gift allows him to never have to worry about gaining money in the game on his own.

Money is a store of time, nothing more.

In an MMO, currency has the dual role of being a scorecard in a sub-game, and being real currency for player-to-player transactions. On the game engine side, the system is immutable. On the human side, the value of the currency fluctuates constantly in response to uncountable things. It just doesn't work right. No matter how much you bandaid it.

The key is to fix it so that the game engine "economics" adjust themselves dynamically in response to the real economics that happen as a result of player action. Ultima Online took a small step in that direction a few years back, when they made it so that NPCs would adjust their prices in response to player purchases and sellbacks. It was shown to be a successful experiment when, later, an NPC shopkeeper was placed in a dangerous and hard to access are of the game world. Players found it preferable to spend the gold they gained in that dungeon locally with that shopkeeper, because it was literally not worth their time to truck the loot back out for deposit into their bank accounts. Prices on that vendor skyrocketed to more than ten times the price for the same item in an easily accessible part of the world. They eventually stabilized when players began finding it worth their time to truck goods into that area specifically to sell to that vendor. That simple little change in game mechanics allowed actual economics to emerge in that game.

On the whole, MMO developers aren't generally interested in playing with economic theories. They are much more interested in providing a fun play experience that is visually stunning. Experimentation with the basic game design is a Bad Thing because the results might be unknown and if you f

Re:Competitive feature of the game?

[Swanktastic]

The Auction houses in Wow for instance, represent a capitalist economy with all the dynamics of supply and demand. That hardly eliminates gold farmers.

No, the auction house represents a market system. Markets have been around since the dawn of civilization. Supply and demand is a market force, but not necessarily and indicator of capitalism. Socialist counties also have markets you know.

Capitalism implies that the means of production (factories, farms, etc) are privately owned. WoW is definitely not capitalist in that there are no in game assets that produce income, AKA Capital.

Re:Competitive feature of the game?

[TexVex]

Yours was a very good reply and I thank you for it; it's nice to see that Slashdotters can still be civil and engage in meaningful discussion.

For example a college degree.

The degree is just a piece of paper that says you're educated; it's different from the education itself. With top-tier equipment in an MMO, though, you aren't buying a lie. You're buying the real thing. If I buy a fake PhD and call myself "doctor", that doesn't mean I can do a job that only a PhD can do. But if I buy elite gear in WoW, then it buffs up my stats exactly how a fake diploma won't. :)

Now, I think you've hit the nail on the head with this statement:

if it's unofficial, then you're stuck with a lot of the shady circumstances that pop up. Like in WoW, you've got those gold farmers that ruin game experience for others simply because they're trying to earn a living

What the real deal here is, is that gold buying in an MMO becomes almost exactly like real-world vice crime. When something victimless like pot smoking or prostitution is legal and is reasonably regulated like any "legitimate" business would be, then it doesn't cause a stir. Brothels are peaceful, secure places where money changes hands, people enjoy themselves in privacy, and disease is not spread. Herb dens are like pubs except full of happy stoners instead of rowdy drunks.

But, when those things become illegal, that doesn't stop the basic human desires that lead to the demand that creates the market; people want to enjoy themselves, get laid, or whatever else without being bothered and without hurting anyone. So, they do these things anyway. But, without the protection of law, they have lots of negative ancilliary effects and secondary crime, all of which reinforces the negative perception of the original vice and clouds peoples' judgement over what the real solution is.

On the gold farming thing, I think the best way to handle it is to sanction it and not try to stop it. You'll waste a lot of time and effort trying to stop it, ruining the game experiences of the "cheaters" who just wanted to skip over some of the boring parts along the way, and you won't really stop it. By "criminalizing" it, you're exacerbating the problem that you created in the first place. It's better to noturinate into the wind, right?

I think creating a real no-grind MMORPG will require creating a whole new kind of beast. These games must have huge subscription revenues to be profitable, because they cost boatloads of money to make and maintain. You can't put content into the game cheaply enough and in enough volume to keep your playerbase engaged and still make a profit. So, you have to put in the level grind and the loot grind to give players more hurdles than just the quests and instances you build into the game. Otherwise, they power through all your content in no time, and you might as well have sold them a single-player game, because they won't subscribe and will move on to the next RPG. Since the grind is required for an MMO to be sustainable long-term, then you have to embrace the "seedier" side of people just engaging in capitalist economics vis-a-vis gold farming and gold buying.

It's interesting watching things like Second Life emerge and evolve. SL is all about being a virtual world and not about being a game; there's no grind to it and there's an officially sanctioned currency market for it. But, it's not a game. However, I do bet that eventually we'll see an MMO that is somewhere between Wow and Second Life, where player-generated content provides enough playability to eliminate the ridiculous grind.

Wrong!

[dsands1]

"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."

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The only way to really cut off gold farmers is for companies like blizzard to change the game such that there isn't so much focus on "gold". I don't like the idea of having to spend 3 months of farming herbs to be able to afford to buy an epic mount, hence i go buy gold to get the epic mount. If they made it based on completing quests we wouldn't have this issue? No gold necessary to get the epic mount. Just quests. The reason above is the only reason that I've yet bought money in an MMO.

I agree there's a need for some currency to be used in MMOs, but the current implementation of it in games like WoW is the issue.

Wow, how insightful.

[Phanatic1a]

Okay, I can almost understand why somebody might want to buy gold to cut out some of the more boring aspects of play and get them to their epic mount that much more quickly. But that's not all that these sludge barons offer. Aside from gold, they'll sell you a ready-made level-60 character if you wish. Or they'll even take your low-level character and play it for you, without you ever having to lift a finger. Hey, why confine this practice to MMOs? Why not pay an experienced Counter-Strike player to rack up several thousand frags in your name to earn you a killer online rep? Oh, that's right -- because it defeats the whole point of playing the game in the first place.

Here, I thought that the point of playing the game was to have fun.

Clearly, nobody purchases fragging services in Counterstrike because that would not be fun. You'd be paying someone to play the game for you.

Just as clearly, people do purchase gold from gold farmers because grinding for gold...isn't fun. Grinding faction isn't fun.

The fact that gold farmers exist, the fact that leveling services exist, these things speak to deficiencies in the game design. There's this game, that people are paying millions each month to play, and yet on top of the monthly fee many of them feel that it is worth additional money to pay others to essentially play part of the game for them. Why? Because that part of the game isn't fun.

If MMORPG designers want to eliminate farmers, they need to look at what parts of the game people are paying them to play, figure out why those parts of the game aren't fun, and change them to make the fun. Bitching about people who are willing to provide a service at a rate people are willing to pay is, like in every other aspect of life, silly.

Re:Wow, how insightful.

[jchenx]

The fact that gold farmers exist, the fact that leveling services exist, these things speak to deficiencies in the game design. There's this game, that people are paying millions each month to play, and yet on top of the monthly fee many of them feel that it is worth additional money to pay others to essentially play part of the game for them. Why? Because that part of the game isn't fun.

The problem is that fun is (obviously) highly subjective. What you deem as fun may be entirely different than what I think. The vast majority of gamers in WoW don't buy gold. The process of slowly accumulating wealth (which includes gold, equipment, and other loot) is supposed to be challenging and rewarding. That's just a part of the game design.

Now the issue is always going to be "how much is too much?". I'll take WoW as an example. From most people that I've interacted with in the game, accumulating the 90 gold or so necessary for a mount at level 40 is a challenge, but it's something that everyone achieves. However at level 60, the epic mount costs around 800-900 gold, and that's something that many people (myself probably included) will never reach. So I can understand the argument that the cost of the epic mount is too high, and that might be considered bad game design. But that's not the problem.

All it takes for one person to think that the normal mount cost is too much, and bingo, the gold farmers have a business. Heck, you can say having any type of economic system is going to invite farmers, since there will always be those lazy individuals where ANY amount of work is too much. These gamers are probably the same folks who cheat and hack their way through every single-player game, blowing through them in a fraction of the time that it's supposed to take. In my opinion (and many others would agree), that's a poor way to play a game. But all it takes is a few of these gamers to generate a business. I think of it the same way with spam. The only reason we still get e-mail spam is because there are a few idiots who still fall for the "Former King of Nigeria" tricks or buy Viagra through their inbox.

I think TFA makes a good point. It usually is obvious when you've got someone who just paid his way to a high level character. Make it so they never want to do it again (don't group with them, ban from guild invites, etc). It should be the same stigma as someone who cheats in real life: cutting in front of a long line, snags a few dollars from a donation box, takes credit for other people's work, etc. General asshole behavior, even in on-line games, should not be tolerated.

I admit it.

[stlhawkeye]

I buy gold off them and I'd do it again. It's stupid to spend 4 weeks farming gold or whatever when I buy that same amount of gold for $100, an amount of money I make in about 2 hours of work. For 4 weeks of mindless drudgery I could at least be getting paid about eight grand. Boycott nothing. If the game producers don't like people circumventing the grind, stop adding stupid grinds to games.

Whos fault?

[imunfair]

I'm not a gold farmer, but as I continually read articles about them, I've come to wonder whos fault it really is.

It seems to me that gold farmers are just performing rote in game tasks. If they're automating it that would be cheating, of course - but assume we're talking about a person who manually farms gold. It's their choice what they do in-game - if gold farming is really so harmful isn't it the fault of the game designers for not programmatically stopping it? Can they truly not structure it in such a way that gold farming isn't effective?

That said, have the ill effects of gold farming actually been proven? I don't think I've actually seen anyone name a real game that has been destroyed by such activities, I'd be interested to know if one (or more) actually exist.

Banning capitalism usually doesn't work

[edremy]

Farmers have a commodity. (Gold, high level character, etc) Other people want these commodities and have real money to spend. There's *going* to be a marketplace no matter what you, Blizzard or anyone else wants.

I remember visiting a communist country back in the late 80s. We were deluged with requests from folks on the street to exchange money, buy our jeans and a dozen other transactions ranging from officially frowned on to downright illegal. We had something they wanted, and they'd break the law in a second to get it. Remember that most of the Chinese gold farmers are seriously poor by Western standards- this is a major step up the success ladder for them, and they don't even need to break any laws. just violate an agreement with a game company. The "War on Drugs" has utterly failed to stop drug sales despite endless "Just Say No" anti-drug messages and serious law enforcement. Here all we have is "Just Say No" and Blizzard banning a few accounts now and then.

Ban capitalism at your peril- if things can be traded, there will be a marketplace.

Stop Making Lame ass Games

[Thedeviluno]

Yeah Gold farming will stop when good games are no longer dependant on time snks.

Good luck with that...

[rAiNsT0rm]

Seriously, this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. The market exists, companies capitalize on it. Now if a game maker would get their head out of their ass for a minute and create a MMO *NOT* based around gold and time grinds then there would be no need for any of this. Instead of relying on "gold" and 20+ year old concepts, GET CREATIVE, and implement a system without gold or other monetary forms and make the focus on the *game*... imagine that.

I personally hope gold farmers keep hosing up these poorly implemented and derivitive systems and dragging the game down with them. Force the developers hand and make them come up with a solution. FARM ON!

Another reason

[Lord_Dweomer]

There is another less-publicized reason why the MMORPG companies like Blizzard want to fight gold farmers. Gold farmers shorten the number of months someone is likely to play the game.

While I don't have any studies to back me up, I would be willing to bet that someone who buys there way to the highest level and equipment plays the game a significantly shorter time than someone who earns their way to the top. The reason why is simple...it takes a serious amount of time to amass the gold that those guys do. If you cut out that time by paying a $50 or so, then thats a good month or two of subscription fees.

When you start looking at things in terms of shortened subscriptions, you can see why companies like Blizzard are concerned. Of course, they probably make up for it by having the gold farmers just buy a new copy of the game every time they get banned.

Re:Does anyone like Gold Farmers?

[AuMatar]

I like gold farmers. I have used them in the past and will use them in the future.

I play games for fun- not as a second job. Farming for gold isn't fun. Its mind numbing, boring, tedious work. Yet due to flaws in game design, many MMOs require it. Since I don't like doing it, I'd rather pay someone else to do it for me, allowing me to skip directly to the parts which are fun. Its a win/win/win. The gold farmer gets cash, I get to have fun, and the game company continues to have me as a subscriber.

You want to stop farming? STOP MAKING FLAWED GAMES THAT REQUIRE IT! Remove the god damned grind already. Get rid of uber items. Get rid of items that drop once a week or once a year. There you go- we now have no reason to farm, so we have no reason to buy gold. And the game is better as a result- you've removed a monotonous, repetitious bore from the game. Until the industry evolves away from the EQ idea of time sinks as content (hint to developers- no, its not), gold farming will live on, as its the only thing that makes the games playable.

There's A Blocklist Available from Tim Buckley

[Firewalker_Midnights]

Tim Buckley of the Ctrl-Alt-Del webcomic made a blocklist available to prevent gold farming sites showing up in google ads.

http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/news.php?i=1011

" A few days ago I talked a bunch about gold farming and its adverse effect on MMO's. This caused the google ads on our page to specifically display the gold selling ads in their inventory, so we could effectively block them.

We've now compiled the list we're using it and made it available to you. If you run a website that used google ads, feel free to use this list to help block these gold farmers. If you frequent a website that uses google ads, email them this list and ask them to use it to block gold farmers.

Like I said, I doubt gold farming will ever disappear, but every one less customer makes the business less profitable for them."

I found this rather helpful.

Re:Does anyone like Gold Farmers?

[Diabolus777]

You buy a game.
You have to pay a monthly fee to be able to play the game you already paid for. You have to pay someone else to play for you because you think the game is boring.

Why did you buy the game?
Why do you still play the game?

Boycott the game, not the farmers.