Slashdot Mirror
Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer
Gamespot has the news that Square has banned some 2000 accounts from FFXI, and Eurogamer reports that Blizzard has banned 59,000 accounts from World of Warcraft. The bans come as game publishers continue to attempt to crack down on Real Money Traders in their titles. From the FFXI article: "The news follows Square Enix's crackdown of 250 accounts in June over money-farming and real-money trading, which is the practice of selling in-game currency for cash in the real world. Concerns over real-money trading prompted the Japanese government--particularly worried about large-scale money-mining operations in video games--to launch its own investigation last week."
Should be something like: Game companies expect revenue increase as banned gold farmers buy new accounts...
Same Crap, Different Day
Back when I played WoW, the server I was on was pretty much owned by gold farmers. They drove up the prices on everything, and unfortunately a lot of players just went along with it. People would buy in-game currency with real money to pay for things in the game sold by those selling the in-game money they got from those inflated sales. A vicious circle, but I guess some players felt it was worth it.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Now what will I do?? - Oh wait - I know, I'll keep ignoring WoW like I have been since it first came out! How ANYONE can support Blizzard after the whole Bnetd thing is TOTALLY beyond me. Screw them. Screw them right in the ear.
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Sorry, forgot the obligatory:
Frist Post!!111oneone!111!omg Ponies!!11!!And Kittens Too!111oneoneone
First off, no one cares about FFXI outside of Japan. But even pretending anyone does:
No one cares about Blizzard doing it, either. Why?
Because they've been banning accounts all along. It's not news. Blizzard bans more gold farmers, twice as many spring up. It's not going to go away just because some accounts were banned.
Now, if this were news about how Blizzard was planning on redesigning their MMORPG to make gold farming a non-issue (and, to be honest, it really is already: the best stuff is gotten through raids, which side-step the gold-seller aspect entirely), then this would be news.
As long as the gameplay rewards people for collecting large sums of gold that can be traded amongst other players, people will be willing to pay others to collect that gold for them. It's nothing new.
Banning cheaters isn't interesting. Trying to fix the root problems that result in cheating would be interesting, but they're not, they're just banning people who cheated.
ArenaNet keeps claiming they care about gold farmers and item sellers and that they're doing something about them in Guild Wars, but it's not true. Sitting in Droknar's Forge you could just watch endless strings of people going out to farm gold and items to sell because, let's face it, stealing an account from a 10 year old isn't hard, and there's no real incentive for them to stop them since they didn't buy the accounts they're using in the first place.
MMORPGs are being ruined by some of the same money-grubbing crap people play them to escape for a few hours. It saddens me that humanity is so pathetic that even something as simple as this can't escape jackasses who are happy to make everyone else miserable for their own small gains here and there.
If you haven't foed me yet, what are you waiting for?
Inflation in games is a lot easier to trace than inflation in the real world. It's a much smaller economy- until you drag the 'outer' economy into it.
I think we should be banned from BUYING gold, too.
Report sellers, report bots, the next time someone whispers to you ingame to visit their WoWgold site, report it under the behaviour tag in the reporting options. This becomes especially important for casual players, who just can't compete.
I know, isn't that just an artificial control? No, it's more like cracking down on forgery- this is wealth that was created for the purpose of selling it, which makes it an otherwise unnecessary element in the economy that hurts the whole.
I say yay, keep up the farmer bans.
On an unrelated note, every time i clean out my bookbag, i wish vendors in real life bought the trash...
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
(Bannings) -59,000 * $15 = -$885,000/mo
:)
(New acct) 59,000 * $40 = +$2,360,000
(Monthly fee) 59,000 * $15 = $885,000/mo
Looks like the business model is working for the farmers and Blizzard. Kind of like a farming tax.
I would like to congratulate the Japanese government for solving all of its countries other problems. I mean, they must have solved everthing else if this is somehow now a priority to them, right?
There's a lesson to be learned from this, banning gold farmers and the people who buy from them doesn't work. 59k accounts banned in WoW? That's ridiculous. It tells me the economics are still not working (I played WoW for a year and saw how bad they were). If games companies want to solve this they will have to come up with some stronger defence. such as:
a) better economics.
b) no tweaking.
c) tie characters to credit card details (will cause problems with gamecards).
d) better economics.
e) allow gold/character selling, but moderate and oversee it.
Blizz and any other games company who thinks about doing another MMOG better get this sorted before they write the next blockbuster, as otherwise I foresee thousands of bald programmers in darkened rooms pulling out their hair and screaming as they have to deal with the intricacies of propping up dying economies and stopping farming rather than writing stuff they actually are interested in.
Promote Charity on Myspace, Show Your Colours!
About 2-3 months ago Blizzard really started to crack down on the buyers and the sellers of gold in World of Warcraft. Before that they would sometimes ban farmers if they caught them. What they've started to do is take back gold from the buyers when they ban seller accounts. This led to a large jump in the price of gold. Where gold was selling for around 2000G for $125 USD a few months ago, it's back around 1000G for $169 USD. That is a huge jump.
I've actually heard of people quitting WoW over this, because the only way they thought they could compete with full time players was with buying gold. Between the growing gear gap, and increasing price of gold, it's making some people reconsider playing.
I always thought the best way to remove farmers was to create a game that's fun to play in ALL regards; farmers only exist because part of the game is so tedious that many players don't want to bother with it. Personally, I'd be insulted if people were paying money NOT to play my game...
good thing a heavy chunck of banination hardware like that stays in hammer space untill they whip it out.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
You know that FFXI has about 500,000 subscribers, right, which means it has more than any other non-Asian MMORPG outside of WoW? A good half of those are not Japanese, on top of that.
Learn what you're talking about before you make yourself look like an ass next time, please.
Blizzard has probably banned more players than the peak populations of most other games... What would make more sense is just to transfer the characters over to a "banned" server. Let that economy fight itself out... Just need a good name for it....
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
Can someone explain, for the benefit of Slashdot readers who don't play, why "gold-farming" is harmful? If some schmuck wants to spend three hours collecting fake gold and magical items to sell on eBay, and if some other schmuck wants to buy that fake loot using real money...who cares? How does it affect other players?
The news with FFXI is that the Japanese government is looking into gold farming. (That's the link from the Slashdot summary, you might want to read the entire thing.)
Plus, if you actually read the articles, they mention that the banning activity has greatly increased this month.
So, yes, it's news: MMORPG companies are banning more accounts over gold selling activies than they have been.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
When will MMORPG makers realize that when you create a capitalistic economy you're going to get capitalists?? I'm not convinced that banning people is the right solution, it seems fairly doomed to failure. Though if they're going to do these things I wish they'd clean up what's left of Diablo II: Lord of Destruction.
Haiku for you!
In FFXI land not all the 2000 accounts where banned (most got 3 day suspensions) and most where not for RMT. The users in question had been using flee/pos/warp hacks and or engaged in MPK or other offences. A large portion of them happened to be endgame players who where using cheats to steal or easily beat high level monsters instead of playing fairly. SE is now flagging accounts for punishment if they are caught cheating and depending on the level of your offence you could be subject of a ban.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
No, jackass, it's nothing new. That's about as interesting as the US government announcing that it's caught another terrorist cell.
1. We have no way of verifying the claim.
2. We have no way of verifying that the accounts banned were actually gold sellers.
And, the most important part:
3. They still aren't solving the root part.
The fact that the Japanese government is looking into gold selling isn't interesting at all. When they decide to tax it in a couple of months, that will be newsworthy. But right now, it's just more evidence of people looking to try and legislate a technical problem.
Gold selling is caused by poor game design. Period. WoW is designed so that the best items in the game can't be bought using gold. There is a lower tier of items that can be bought with gold, so lazy people buy gold and use that gear. Blizzard could solve that problem, but they haven't - yet.
Until MMORPG developers start attacking the root problem, a game design that encourages gold farming, banning accounts isn't news. The games are designed to encourage gold farming. Fix that design flaw, and you'll solve the problem.
Banning accounts isn't fixing it, and news about it is worthless.
Now, if the Japanese government decides to regulate Japanese MMORPGs to force developers to remove the farming flaw, THAT would be worthy of a Slashdot story. Some government committee deciding to investigate some random thing they don't really understand isn't interesting, governments have been doing that all the time.
I wish I had mod points today. You are exactly correct, people buy gold so they can skip a lot of the game. The reason they do this is because WOW is perhaps the most boring RPG ever created.
I borrowed a friends discs once and bought a month's worth of access just so I can see what all the fuss was about. I simply couldn't believe how bad this game is. All of the quests were of the "find ten of these useless things and get back to me" or "kill that asshole over there" variety. My seven year old son's Putt-Putt and Freddi Fish games have more depth.
And I really hate how everything seems to "charge" you in time. Cast a spell, wait a few seconds. Open a chest, wait a few seconds longer. It's like the whole mechanic of this game is to make me sit here wasting my life watching progress bars while charging me $15 a month to do so. And then there's the fact that half the game experience is watching your character's back while he trudges slowly across the landscape.
And there's other really dumb things in the basic interface. You click on a guy attacking you from behind with your sword and it says "facing wrong direction". Well no fucking shit, man. I thought I communicated my intention to turn around and whack that fucker when I right-clicked on the monster. The game is filled with stuff like this. I had far, far more fun playing Diablo online.
I'm just not getting why this is the most successful game of all time. Maybe it gives obsessive-complusive people something to do? Seems like the best play here is to just not get involved in it in the first place.
Or you can do what I do - play a game where the economy is based on a real currency. I think there are others like it. I'm guessing they don't mind if I sell currency - after all, they do, too. OTOH, why would you want to? There are few reasons why you would.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Between the growing gear gap, and increasing price of gold...
I think a lot of politications would do pretty well in November running on a platform to eliminate the "Gear Gap".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
shouldn't the free market decide if the gold farmers are successful or not? :)
I kid, I kid. Screw the gold farmers for messing up in-game economics and screw Blizzard for selling out.
I'm always shocked how pro-freedom geeks forget their morals when it comes to a game or a product they like. Fanboys will be fanboys, that's the reality of the situation.... Lots of these guys grew up on Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo, but the reality is that the Blizzard of today wasn't the Blizzard of your childhood.
Didn't Sony set up thier own service to sell characters, gold, items, etc? How is the economy doing on the EQ realms. Maybe Bliz should set that up. Then they get a portion of the profits, people that are casual players can buy the things they would like to have (epic mounts) and casual people can cut the farming companies out of the loop.
I'll assume you're just relatively ignorant and haven't spent much time living in Japan. As it is, they keep a very tight grip on the economic reins in a number of areas, and money laundering and taxation are two of the big ones. These are serious issues for anyone doing business in / with Japan, as banking and wiring service websites will show anti-laundering / anti-fraud messages from time to time, and the government's efforts to prevent money laundering and tax dodging are partly why it's so difficult now to get a bank account in Japan. If dodgy types have found out that gold farming is a quick and dirty way to skirt the laws, it makes perfect sense to me that the government would be interested in finding out about it -- hence the investigation.
As another poster noted on the linked GameSpot page,
For crime, as with anything, follow the money. That's what Japanese law enforcement does, they follow the money as one of their many tools in trying to run a tight ship. And as virtual money starts to look more and more like the real thing, you can expect all sorts of government attention in other countries as well.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Personally, I believe that Square and Blizzard are mad that they don't see a cent of that money made on the side. I mewan,it's not like thay make $15 a month from millions of gamers out there... oh wait...
Every time I read a story like this I think of Cory Doctorow's Anda's Game. It's an interesting thought-experiment for both sides of the issue. While I certainly don't condone game currency sales, it's not a terrible way to get another perspective on who is really affected by it all.
1. It is a _game_.
2. No matter how big someone else's equipment is, yours is good enough to play, have fun, and be happy.
3. Trying to compete with others for time, money, or equipment size is always going to leave you lacking.
4. Trying to play with "full time players" if you aren't one is a waste of time. Find "part time players" and play with them. The full time players aren't having more fun.
Please, if you have to compete by purchasing gold to "catch up" then don't play.
You can't be serious. *Anything* which somebody would rather pay to have done than do themself, will get paid to get done. If you take away money incentives, then people will start selling items where they can, or assistance where they can't (I don't know WoW so I don't know what can't be sold). A less scalable but entirely possible scheme would be for people for a service of building your character for you while you're doing more useful things (like working, resting or watching paint dry) at a rate not unlike a day job. It'd be like a boss hiring an employee to organize things in the office, except that it's completely stupid because nobody should be playing WoW anyway.
Sam ty sig.
I'm sorry, but when I hear the word Banhammer, it makes me think of some German heavy metal band. Kinda like a cross between the scorpions and poison, big hair, tight pants and too much drama. Perhaps a side project for Mr. Hasselhof.
Please, can't we call the mass banning of players from some online game something less embarasing? Like, I don't know, mass banning?
Baaaanhaaamah! rock you very much! (tm)
I don't know about WoW, but in other MMORPG's I have played, there is simply too much money in the economy. The game had several ways to make money, but few ways to take it out of the economy. The effect was rampant inflation as the total amount of money in the economy kept increasing. If a new skill or event was created that would take large amounts of money off the economy, inflation and money farms would have less of an effect.
Square and Blizzard Drop The Banhammer
...and made one insomniac EQ-camper very very happy.
I mean really, come on. I consider myself a geek and what not but really people, paying 12 bucks a month for what? To say I got my character to LVL 1234567 before some other retard. Paying every month to virtually hang out with other nerds is dumb as hell and anybody stupid and desparate enough to pay real money for fake money should be locked up
This seems like a legitimate move, from almost every standpoint. They've created the game and they allow network play over LANs. I've played through a VPN like tinc or openvpn without going through Bnet...
The OSS Warcraft clone also seemed like more of an attempt to control their IP (which I honestly believe is in their right to do) rather than to squash some lame attempt at porting the game to foonix.
It's not like every invocation of any bit of the DMCA is inherently evil. If you guys are gonna hammer anything, go after the US patent system in regards to software. Some measure of protection of course is required for both individuals, not-for-profits and corporations, but as of now it's all far too broad.
I enjoy both. I don't do spoiler sites or compare my stuff to other peoples stuff or buy gold. Most of the people who buy stuff in games for real life money are the same kind of people who buy red sports cars to make up for their small penis. Seriously. There's nothing wrong with the games. It's the people who are broken.
Thanks to eating disorders most chicks are reasonably good looking these days.
I used t play WoW. I am quite bored with it now but I played for about a year. I played through to lv 60 twice and enjoyed everything but the buying and selling. Epic items cost way too much for me (a hardcore gamer to my wife but actually a casual gamer to the Slashdot crowd no doubt) to get many.
In the last two months of playing I made a discovery that just about blew my mind. For those not in the 'know', Blizzard allows a certain amount of mods to be used in game. These do various things such as map enhancements, custom button grouping etc. Now one of these is called auctioneer. What it does is make you money. Not just a little bit but a whole CRAP PILE of money. This mod will NOT get you banned from WoW that I know of either.
How does it work, you ask? Glad you asked. Its very simple. If you have ever heard the phrase "Buy low. Sell High" well no truer words have ever been spoken about this addon. It scans the auction house for items that are being sold under the mean asking price. So if the average price of a stack of gold bars is 2g (for instance) and there are 5 auctions with bids below it will flag them and allow you to bid on them. You can say show me items with a bid
I struggled with the morale of using such a tool, but as my subscription was running out I wanted to see how much gold I could make in my last 30 days. I tried to do this on paper for a few weeks early in my WoW career but it is a tiresome process. I had about 6G in the bank. I would run this once a day and by the second to last day I had over 1000g in the bank! Broken or what? It was then I realised I would never play again. What is the point? If its that easy and I can buy whatever I want then there certainly is little use in playing.
Oh well. y other $0.02 is that I don't think I can support Blizzard too much any more. I loved Diablo2 and WoW for a time but I can't stand it when companies treat their customers like criminals. Close the loops you idiots! Don't blame the guys that spent possibly $100(s) on your @$%^ games. Its THEIR (read: Blizzard's) fault.
End rant.
Only problem with this is a lot of these raids take so many people that you will almost never get the item you want. There are a lot of corrupt guilds that won't let you roll on items you should be able to use. If I can wear it I should be able to roll on it. Period. Thats not to mention the ninjas....
ROT IN HELL NINJAS!
Seriously? I played for a year and a half and I never saw anyone seriously disrupt the farmers for more then a few hours. EVE may allow you to shoot anyone you want in low security space, but the majority of farmers exist in high security. And they are nearly always in an NPC corp (which can't have war declared against them by player corps), which means you have to lose a ship to take one out (not losing your ship to the NPC police upon attacking another player in high security space is considered an exploit). The best you can do is to sit around in a combat ship and take the ore before they have a chance to move it to their hauler (this flags you so the person you stole from can kill you without NPC intervention, but farmers are never in combat ships).
When you consider that a lot of these operations go 24/7 (my alliance monitored the ones in our area of operations) there is very little you can do to seriously impact them. I spent a week harrasing my local farmers and all I would ever achieve is to shut them down for a few hours. While I was playing I never saw the developers do anything serious against blatant farmers (up to twenty ships mining, all named xyzzy1, xyzzy2, xyzzy3 etc). This is because all the farmer has to do is keep watch on his twenty bots and talk to the investigating GM and they can't touch him (the ultimate test by EVE GM's is to start a conversation with a suspected bot, which doesn't work against these professional operations).
And just suiciding ships to take them out will hurt them more then you, as once the farmers get to large mining barges and battleships, you will need to lose either a much more expensive ship or several (in the case of the BS) to kill it before the NPC's kill you.
I think CCP believed that making the China cluster (they even spouted some rubbish about real money trading and in game item purchase being more acceptable in "asian culture" and so would be allowed there) would get rid of a lot of farmers, but they are going to stay right where there customers are.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
But WoW isn't a bank or a wire service...
How is this different from someone weaving baskets in their spare time and selling them on Ebay? Does the Japanese government worry about that? And if not, then why do they worry about this? Is it that these people aren't paying taxes on their sales, and that makes it easier to launder money or defraud people?
I play WoW on a regular basis and I have read about gold farmers and how they detract from the game so it pleases me when I hear about Blizzard dropping the Banhammer from upon high. However there is one impact that gold farmers have that isn't commonly documented: racial discrimination. Because most gold farmers come from the same racial group (i.e. Chinese) other players automatically condemn everyone from that racial group regardless. If you say "Ni hao" to another player in WoW don't expect a friendly response. This problem also occurs in other MMORPGs. My friend plays Lineage 2 and he says there is a lot of discrimination against Russian players in that game. He has even gone to the extent of learning how to curse in Russian! It saddens me when groups in society are judged wholly on the actions of certain minorities within those groups.
Don't forget about the time Vivendi sued MP3.com for its business model, litigated them into a $200mil settlement, and then bought out the financially weaken company. Vivendi then offed the same service and sued its own lawyers(who told them this was illegal) for malpractice.
They should wait until one second after the account submits pay for the 2nd month, and then ban the accounts. Voila, it's like they're paying twice as much for the monthly fee!
You must be new here.
Someone else put it well. Your time is the currency in these games.
Some people however don't have the time to do all their own work, so they pay someone else to do it for them. It's no different than hiring a maid.
I don't understand quite why these people don't just quit if they find they don't have the time. But hey, different strokes for different folks.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Bwahaha
In Soviet Russia, hot grits put YOU down THEIR pants.
More people are abandoning the game not because of the inflation because you can't even buy the good armor but because its getting way too tedious. They are restructuring the dungeons so now instead of bosses dropping loot they will drop "tokens" which you can turn into loot. But they don't drop enough for 1 person to make 1 item. So you'll have to have every character if every class run through dungeons for much longer without seeing a return on their time spent. ZG and AQ are like this but they are making EVERY raid instance token based. And I won't even get into the China farmed PvP rating nonsense that went on. The problem is that Blizzard is making advancement past 60 so ridiculous that you either have to be pissed slaving away for hours or just give up.
Is 59,000 Accounts enough to make a dent in WoW? Is 2,000 enough in FFXI? Is a lesson really learned here?
The latest reports cite WoW having 6.5 Million Accounts. FFXI has 500,000. The average account in FFXI has 3.4 characters. I haven't seen an official number for WoW but I know the max is 50 characters per account. Lets say each account has 5, on average. (I could be pulling that out of nowhere)
WoW Acct Removal % = 0.9 %
FFXI Acct Removal % = 0.4 %
So Blizzard gets rid of almost 1% of its population and Square dumps half of that, relatively. The general consensus in both games is that there are much more than 1% of the players engaging in RMT or Using 3rd Party Tools. In FFXI (which is what I play most) the average player will tell you that at least 25% of the accounts engage in RMT. This may not be the truth but its how most people feel. I'm sure the sentiment in WoW is similar.
If 25% of accounts do engage in RMT then Blizzard and Square have managed to eliminate 2~4 % of the problem in their respective games. Imagine if your local police force only caught and punished 2~4 % of the crooks and thieves in your town.
Would that be an acceptable amount?
I don't think the lesson will be learned until these numbers increase drastically.
They should have put bounties out for all the farmer's on the pvp servers. Everyone involved in lynching them would receive a portion of the profits.
When their character died, that was it.
Don't ban the account, just have fun with it. At random increments strip the player of all weapons and any money.
Banning an account for someone that sells in the real does nothing but generate more money for the game company when banned user's just buy another one. If they really wanted to stop this, they would make it too frustrating for people to continue doing this.
Or like someone above posted, just move them to a 'banned players' server.
This is just something Blizzard likes to flaunt that doesn't really mean anything. On the server where I play, there's a bot that farms the same set of harpies repeatedly. People post about him in the forums to try and get him killed by the other faction. We've tried to bust up his program, initiating duels, trades, inviting him to groups, tagging his kills, mind controlling his kills, etc. I reported him twice. The first time, I got your standard CSR email "We've investigated and taken appropriate actions." The appropriate actions were, apparently, nothing. So I reported him again, and this time I got some big speech about how Blizzard is anti-bot and has banned nearly 60,000 accounts in the last month. The GM assured me they were going to investigate him, again. That was 2 weeks ago. As of a few days ago, he was still there, running his same circuit through the harpies.
You would be right if it wasn't for Blizzard's current implementation of PvP.
Player versus Player matches are organized into brackets every 10 levels, so everyone fights people against whom they have a reasonable chance of winning. In theory.
In practice, because a raider or twink can get uber-gear, character levels don't really count, they can easily take on 2-3 (sometimes 4) players of the opposing teams in inferior gear.
Blizzard doesn't yet have a system that takes this gear-imbalance into account. Several solutions exist each with its own pros and cons, but I think any of these would be better than practically shutting out all casuals who don't like to be steamrolled by hard-core raiders in uber-gear in the Battlegrounds:
1) standardized gear: it would be like an FPS team match, but people who spent a long time (often several months) getting their current gear don't like it.
2) gear-matching: you would fight people in similar gear.
3) rank matching: you would fight people who's win/loss ratio is close to yours.
I'd like to PvP, but building a properly geared character takes a long time and is pretty boring for me. I can't justify paying for this when I can play Enemy Territory for free where gears is balanced and these problems don't exist at all.
That's a bummer. I've seen my share of computer controlled players and farmers, but none of them seem to even get the proper consequences.
There is a program well known now called WoW-Glider, which in a case you set rally points throughout the world ng and your character goes to those points and kills anything in its path. This is a way for farming, power leveling, or in some cases i have heard taking the kills of the other faction. WoW-Glider is not free although, it costs 200 dollars from what i have heard, and seems to be one of the most used programs.
I think Blizzard in general does not buckle down on this kind of use of thier games, or any MMORPG for that matter. It doesnt matter that they banned accounts, or disabled other players auto-farming, these kind of programs are constantly growing, and becoming more popular. You cant really just keep banning players and accounts, you need to buckle down on the problem itself, which in this case is these auto-playing programs.
Another thing that i dont understand is how it can be illegal to trade in game cash for real cash. MMO's cost almost 15 dollars a month in most cases, those companies dont have anything to complain about. World Of Warcraft brings in almost 90 million dollars a month for Blizzard. How can Mogs or IGN.com stay alive? Isnt the way they make money through selling in-game cash for real cash? Why would it be illegal to buy from a friend, but not from IGN.com? Its your life, and a MMO is just a game, you should be able to go about how you wish.
Im Coming To Take Your Town
Both thottbot and allakhazam are owned by the largest gold selling company.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
you're just mining plants.
In fact, if you really examine your efforts mr. enchanter, I think you'll find that you are, at best, breaking even with the greens. It's not really your fault though, in a mature mmorpg economy, the finished goods are always worth less than the materials to produce them, for the simple reason of the experience points garnered making them. This is exacerbated by the problem that there is no variation in quality of similar finished goods. every +1 sword of witty remarks is exactly the same as every other one.
There are a few ways to combat this, but they all involve a complexity that probably cannot be sustained in a mass-produced artificial environment.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No, but as virtual money begins to have real-world value to the point that there is an effective exchange rate, then the lines between such a virtual economy and any real economy are much blurrier. WoW might not be a bank or wire service, but if WoW money is being exchanged with real money in significant volumes, it may as well be.
I think this is the crux of the issue -- that goldfarming sales can be pretty substantial, and that they go largely unreported for taxation purposes. Given the informal and unreported nature of such transactions, it's also conceivable that goldfarming could indeed make it easier to launder money or defraud people.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this is definitively the case, not by any means. I don't know enough about the situation to say one way or the other. Nor do I think the Japanese government is saying this either, at least as far as I've read. But I *do* think the potential is there, which warrants an investigation to look more deeply into the facts -- which is what the Japanese government is doing.
My point is simply that there is significant potential for shenanigans of the sort that governments are usually interested in controlling -- to wit, tax evasion and money laundering -- and that, as such, this investigation is reasonable, and the GGP poster is a bit out of line in suggesting that opening an investigation must necessarily mean that Japan has solved all other problems.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."