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Blizzard, Square/Enix Ban Yet More Farmers
Eurogamer has the news that both Blizzard and Square/Enix have banned another batch of players for farming. The number of accounts, and the amount of money removed from the economy, is astonishing. From the article: "According to the World of Warcraft website, some 30,000 accounts were banned last month - and, as a result, more than 30 million gold were removed from the economy across all realms ... Based on the results of this investigation, more than 250 [FFXI] accounts among those found to be involved in large-scale RMT operations have been terminated... Thanks to these measures, more than 250 billion gil has been removed from circulation."
Wait, since when did Blizzard and Square/Enix merge? (Also, isn't it "Square-Enix"?)
Anyway...
I have to love the subtle order of magnitude in accounts banned. WoW bans 30,000 accounts out of 6 million, or about 0.5% of total accounts. Assuming Square-Enix banned the same percentage, they have a total of 50,000 accounts.
Now, I know that Square-Enix's MMORPG isn't quite as popular as World of Warcarft, but I'm going to guess that's more of an indication that Blizzard is being more proactive in their banning of cheaters than Square-Enix is.
Both FFXI and WoW are doing a good job at cleaning up farmers accounts right now, but that only fixes part of the problem. These farmers have introduced a ton of new gold into the economies that isn't easily removed. FFXI raised the % of money the Auction House takes from items, so they are slowly removing money that way. While WoW has a small cover for AH purchaes, and you have to deal with repair costs as well.
There is no fast fix at this point, but closing accounts is a good start. I hope they keep up the good work, and hope even more to stop seeing ads to buy gold and gil.
Its not what it is, its something else.
It's interesting to note that removing that vast amount of gold will actually help the economy in WoW (I can't testify to FFXI as I don't play it). It's directly analagous to decreasing the money supply in an over-inflated capitalist market - with the added twist that the money being removed is the money that belongs to the percentage of the population that has a vast amount of wealth in excess of the average.
In short, prices drop, and the "poverty line" is lowered drastically.
There were a large group of unguilded Rogues levelling up against Ogres in the Badlands just a few days ago. There was so many for a while that we couldn't do any quests involving killing those Ogres, it was totally camped. (Its empty now, they got enough levels and moved on.)
This type of action is largely pointless. They've slowed down the farmers for a little while, but they just level new accounts and go back to it. Meanwhile Blizzard is making more things that require Arcanite, which is probably the single most farmed resource on the entire server. That will just drive prices up and increase the pool of people who say "screw it" and go buy gold from some farming operation, spawning more farmers.
If they actually want to do something about this, they need to reduce the need to buy gold to get anything done in a reasonable timeframe, and/or start banning people who BUY gold. They're the problem anyway.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
If people aren't buying and selling items for real cash, then in reality people don't want or need the items in game. When people don't want or need items in your game, there's nothing they're playing for and your game will go bust soon. Its a trend I've watched over several MMORPGS. Players complain about people that farm for gold, but I don't see the big deal.
God spoke to me.
This is a publicity stunt. They took more than 30 million gold out of the economy from every server? I have news for you, there's right around 170 servers worldwide. That means around 175,000 gold per server. That is a incredibly miniscule part of each server's economy, that is it laughable. Also, within one week almost all of those banned accounts will be back and max level.
I don't get the anti-Gold Farmer stance of many players and Blizzard. If I got seriously into any MMORPG, I would buy the local currency. The last thing I want to do after working all day doing borning work is to come home and end up playing a borning game where I have to spend a 100+ hours to get a half way decent character that can do somewhat fun quests.
MMORPG should just sell the gold directly to the players and set up in game to real world money exchanges and let the players decide if they want to play the game that way. They could set up realms where it is not allowed or is limited. If someone wants to spend all day farming items and selling them to rich Americans, then all the power to him. I would rather send the guy a couple of hundred dollars than piss away a 100 hours of play time building up a character.
Linux O Muerte!
Interesting math, but I think you double counted the loss of gold.
I think Blizzard's real motive here however, is clear.
30k accounts x 30 dollars per CD key (I thought it was more, but I'll use your numbers) = 900,000 dollars increased revenue in Blizzard's pocket. Not to mention any additional time purchased on said accounts that was taken (IE, if they were paid 6 months in advance, that's up to 80 additional dollars per account). Why do they make extra money on this? Because the farmers will be back. As long as there is a demand, and the design of nearly any MMO creates the demand, certainly WOW does.
Now think about it - if you could do something that would provide a great PR booster, and make nearly a million dollars doing it, why not?
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
Wikipedia has more info on Farming (gaming):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_(gaming)
Yeah, it's exactly like that. The difference is that it will work here. WOW is the perfect police state: total surveillance and no legal system, other than the unaccountable ultimate power of the game masters. There are logs recording every trade and every AH transaction. There is no way that "users" can buy gold without their action being recorded. The real world isn't like that, because you can buy things anonymously using cash, and you don't have to do business within sight of the police.
I get that. But we should be paying farmers to farm, then send the food to homeless shelters and third world countries. We shouldn't be paying farmers to sit on their asses, and we should never pay them to farm food and then let it rot. It's shameful for us to do that while people in our own country, not to mention others, are starving.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
am i seeing this right?
30,000 accounts on wow, removed 30 million gold, thats an average of about 1000 gold per account
on FF its 250 accounts and 250 billion gil?
thats an average of about 1billion gil per account?
holy crap
Now, if only we could turn off the farmers at the Federal Reserve and stop inflation in the "real" world.
Yes because what we really need is only the rich being able to readily access liquid assets.
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I couldn't agree more. After several years of playing MMO's from EQ, to FFXI and now about to quit WoW, I find that each complained about farmers. But the reason why farmers existed was because the choice for players was:
A) Spend a combination of 40 hours playing a game killing creatures to buy a sword so you can continue following the game's story line, quests, and continue playing with others
B) Pay some dude $20 and buy the sword so you can continue following the game's story line, quests, and continue playing with others.
I think the worst example of poor game design was FFXI. In it you had crafting skills which required pieces from all over the world. You could literally spend an entire weekend aquiring the materials and spend 2 hours watching the materials critically fail and now you are out the items you spent 40 hours worth of WORK in addition to into and haven't gained much progression for your character. MMO's are all about playing with other people and advancing, yet developers purposefully create time boring sinks which cause people to rely on farmers in order to get back to the fun parts of the game.
In my opinion if an MMO came out that modeled Diablo or FF in the sense that would allow soloability (the option of playing with others is better than having to play with others - see WoW's user base) as well as by the time you reached max level you're character could easily afford anything he wanted or needed without having to "farm" you'd have a solid game and one that could potential be the end all be all of MMO's.
But unfortunately no one wants to make one. All the companies hire designers who enjoy forcing people to play variable classes in certain ways, farm for greater amounts of time than playing with others, and insist on making MMO's more tedious and annoying. Why? Because the longer it takes you to achieve your goals, the longer you have to pay them a monthly fee.
Ave Molech Setting
It could also be thought of thusly:
Playing the game long enough to gather enough gold to buy that item you want takes time. Sometimes lots of time, and sometimes spending it farming mindlessly for hours. This time you're investing into the game is real time (obviously). One could think then that buying gold from a farmer is essentially trading real-life money for time. Time that you would've spent killing mobs for hours on end. While I don't buy gold, and don't approve of it, when I think of it this way I can understand those who do.
I'll say what I said back in the days when this was a "problem" in EverQuest: it's not a problem, it's just a matter of supply and demand. There are people who focus on certain things. For some it's specific quests or gear. For some it's social play. For some it's just exploring the world. It can be nice to be able to "buy in" to the game and not have to do everything just to do the things you want.
During my time in EQ, I bought plat so that I could buy things for friends who were starting the game. Eventually, I started farming my own money (legitimately, from buying and selling goods). I generated hundreds of thousands of plat, all of which I gave away in the end.
Too many people try to figure out what's "wrong". There's nothing wrong, it's just that time has a value, and people are willing to pay for it.
If the United States were to decide to grow enough food for all the hungry in the entire world (and we could for at least staple foods, we've got plenty of empty farms due to subsidies, etc), then all of the food (not far) beyond what we already distribute would rot in a warehouse waiting to dispursed. It's a sad state of affairs yes, and it's unfortunate that fixing the problems isn't a higher priority for the government or the people, but that's just the way it is.
Also, it takes more than just water and sunshine to make a plant, and with every bit of produce sold off a little bit more of the needed nutrients go with it. By not growing food on a plot of land every year it allows the soil to be revitalized every few years, allowing more food to be grown in the long term.
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Er, you need to do a bit of reading on this. Production-tied farm subsidies are incredibly harmful, more so than regular subsidies. When the market is inundated with food that's free or below the cost of production, it makes everyone not getting subsidies -- such as African farmers -- go out of business.
The difference being that it should be fairly easy to automatically detect unusual large money transfers, plus any conversation that preceded it, plus the levels of those involved, plus the countries that each player hails from. I expect that in itself would provide sufficient evidence in many cases.
Until receantly I was a member of a top horde PVP guild (most of the guild has now quit playing). I have no purple items at all. All those that did had only PvP items. None the less we were great at PvP. Had multiple peopel who'd been high warlord, etc. When facing a random group of people, even those with epics, we'd 4 or 5 cap. Against the good alliance PvP guilds it was all tactics. When it was like 10 of us and some random people, and nobody really took leadership, we generally lost. When it was 15 of us and our leader was there, we almost never lost.
Gear helps, but only so much. It really comes down to tactics more than anything. Besides, the best gear in the game is only dropped, not bought. The tier 1 and 2 sets are all high-end raid gear. Even though there are a couple BoE peices, you never see them for sale. The farmers can't farm them. Why? Well you need 40 good people, of diverse classes, working together, and you can only hit each dungeon once a week.
You show me some guy who's bought the best stuff he can with purchased gold, I'll introduce to someone wearing all blues (not me necessiarly) who will kick his ass. The more people you get together, the more true that is. Give me 5 good, trained PvPers against 5 guys who bought a service to level them to 60 and bought their gear, I bet we don't lose a man.
The idea is that the high end gear is to give those people that want to play insane amounts something to work for. It does confer an advantage, at a large cost of time. However unless you've got a real inferority complex, you don't need that. You can play casual and still have fun. Will you get your ass kicked sometimes? Sure, but we all do. No matter how good you are, you find someone better. There's no ultimate trump.
I remember a quite amusing time when 3 epic'd out alliance had killed and were camping our guild master. They were taunting, acting tough, etc. What did he do? Called in his troops of course. Like 10 of us ran in there and just waxed them, and waxed their friends that came to help. They couldn't muster a force to do anything to us, and basically just sat and skulked until we got bored. However that's not because we were ultimate, later that night an alliance guild mopped the floor with us in BGs, a guild that we had beaten in the past.
What it sounds like to me is that you just want to pay money to be better than anyone. You feel that you should be able to buy your way into being powerful. I fail to see the point. Winning in PvP is fun, but hard fights are more fun. If I want to win all the time I can fire up a single player game and just engage all the cheats. For that matter I don't need to do that, I'm better than the AIs. The point of playing against other people is that they can be better than me, much better than me. The can provide a challenge.
If you dont' like the rules, don't play the game.