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."
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!
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.
(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.
A lot of WoW players do care about the game and farming just as much. Unfortunately the game is not setup the same way EVE is and there isn't a mechanism to allow anyone to go out and kill/impede the farmers. Some PVP servers may allow for a small amount of policing but the majority of servers don't even have that.
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...
To police effectively in WoW, you have to be able to police your own side. It's too hard to tell who's farming on the other side when they're immediately hostile, and you can't talk to them anyway.
I've been on guild "Squish the Farmer" events, but all to often it turns into a pitched battle because people on the other side misinterpret your assault on the farmers. Anyway, that's of extremely limited utility anyway, because the economics of the sides only impact each other through the little-utilized neutral auction houses.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
It's not always just gold farmers, as players reach 60 and run out of things to buy, money piles up quite a bit. As the servers get older and the money piles up, people create secondary characters and twink em, spending large amounts of gold to make their earlier levels easier to get through. If you're server is older than a year (which most WoW servers are) - and with a market that doesnt constantly change and eventually stalls, money piles up and prices get sky high.
In real life you run out of things to buy and that's full of free enterprise, now take a closed off world where new items aren't constantly introduced and you end up with this problem thats plagued any and all MMPORGS.
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.
Except that in order to play on the WoW US realms you need a US account, and you can't interact between the different segments of the world (US/EU/China/Korea/etc.), so in order to farm gold for US buyers they'd need a US box.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
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."
Good question. The U.S. Congress has very specific enumerated powers as listed in the U.S. Constitution. Anything that isn't specifically enumerated for Congress to govern/make laws for is considered a right of the State or the Individual.
The DMCA has no provision in the U.S. Constitution. I believe that the law passes muster only because individuals of today have accepted an outrageous definition of what the "interstate commerce clause" offers as a Congressional power. Rather than have power over making sure that interstate commerce wasn't regulated by the States (as originally envisioned by the founding fathers), the U.S. Congress and Supreme Court believe that the clause offers Congress the right to regulate Interstate commerce as a force instead of as a watchman for individual rights.
The DMCA and all IP laws show that you need to use government force to support inefficient and unprofitable businesses. Without government force, these businesses would be much more competitive, and new markets and profitable sectors would arise out of the creation of content. Unfortunately, the average consumer, taxpayer and voter doesn't see the freedom that real freedom would bring us -- instead they think we need more force to battle the problems that previous use of force created.
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.
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.
I like how you started out discussing EVE and then take a violent turn into what must be one of your pet hates, plus you managed to get +3 Insightful. kudos. I look forward to future rants of yours.
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.
The problem is that WoW does not have complete open ended PvP in that you cannot kill members of your own side, alliance or horde, who are farming or generally being jerks. The duel is crap because you have to issue the challenge and they can always refuse. The loser of the duel doesn't loose very much either so that makes the duel doubly unappealing. They need to have a server where anyone can kill anyone else at any time for any reason. That may sound like a bad idea, but really some of the best MUDs back in the day used this model with great success. People tend to be more polite, in character, and less of an ass when they can get ganked just for being an ass.