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."
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
Yeah really... The one thing I have to give to Eve is it's mature attitude towards PvP... players actualy hunt down the farmers and disrupt there trade. I would like to see a WoW player care that much about the health of there game.
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Mark Twain
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.
There was some of that on my server, back when I played. But certainly not enough. It didn't take long before it was simply too dangerous to go into the farmer's territory. If you tried to tag mobs before they could kill them, they'd call in their farmer friends of the other faction to start killing you over and over.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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!
Lets see here...
59,000 X $40.00 = $2,360,000
Damn, time to invest in blizzard stock....
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
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
Standard answer: Slashdot is more than one person. There are people out there who watched the whole Bnetd mess and really are not buying Blizzard or Vivendi products right now. There are people out there who ignored or missed out on the whole Bnetd mess and are buying Blizzard or Vivendi products solely on their own merits. There are even people who watched the whole Bnetd mess and decided the outcome and the issues it raised were not important enough to make them give up the experience of playing future Blizzard products.
Also, it wasn't just some random company blown away because Blizzard felt like being mean. Bnetd was intimately tied to Blizzard's products and business model and they created this relationship without any cooperation or even permission from Blizzard.
I haven't played EVE in a while, and I've never played WoW, but doesn't farming have a different effect on the economy in Eve? Rather than inflation, doesn't it make things cheaper? If there is a huge influx of minerals, the price of them goes down and items get cheaper to manufacture. Where as in WoW you get raw gold coming in and devaluing the current gold that people have. Or am I way off here? What is the real problem with farming in Eve?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I really don't see the point of going nazi over one of the few cases where it was actually semi-legitimate.
1) Arguing that bnetd enabled piracy is dumb; pirated copies could still be played offline, over a LAN, or through other workarounds. Furthermore, the bnetd developers offered to add support for verifying CD keys against a Blizzard server but were ignored (yes, individuals running bnetd could hack the source to disable the check, but that'd make it pretty obvious what they were up to, and Blizzard could've nailed them, not bnetd itself).
2) People are banned from bnet for other things, such as cheating, and there's a fair population of jerks on bnet. Someone with a valid license may want to play online but be unable or unwilling to use bnet. I own a legit copy of war3 but I'd definitely rather play with friends on a private server.
3) Blizzard's (well, I think it's Vivendi's) management and legal department already had a reputation among a lot of people for being grand assholes, so people weren't inclined to give them any benefit of the doubt.
I'll agree it's not the WORST use of the DMCA, but it's still pretty indefensible. People have a reason for holding this particular grudge.
Sorta, but if there's 10x as much gold, you can usually make money off doing things a player with two years in the game and a bunch of upper level characters wouldn't want to do. Everquest did a good job of this by requiring low-level mob drops in a bunch of crafting recipes and as spell reagents. They were just inconvenient enough that a level 60 wouldn't want to go out and farm themselves, but plentiful enough that as a newb you could make decent money off them.
And especially in today's quest-based games like WoW and EQ2, I'm a bit surprised plat farmers make money at all. Even with two maxed out characters in EQ2, when I ran up alts, I didn't bother twinking them out at all. It's just not worth the money when you can quest items and blow through levels ridiculously fast while you're doing it.
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.
But isn't the devaluation of ISK in EVE offset by cheaper hardware? When I played EVE, I was into manufacturing. When I could get minerals cheap, I could make/sell ships and ammo cheap. As for miners, what is the essential difference between a miner and a farmer beside what they do with the ISK after they sell the minerals? In EVE, full-time mining is a legitimate "career" path. The only argument agains selling ISK outside of EVE that I can think of is just that it is not "in character." There are so many ways to make ISK in EVE that it just seems stupid to pay real cash for it. Hell, I made a fortune just buying an dselling used ships.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I just hit level 40 and wanted to get a mount. That would take about 90 gold, and I figured it would take me about a month to save that much. (I'm a casual player, maybe 5 hours a week). For $12 I got all the money I needed, in an hour.
New the game is fun again, and I travel / level faster.
Why is this wrong?
I'm sorry but what is it we're all supposed to believe in and support?
I guess my pod must have been defective because I thought people were still allowed to think for themselves.
When did slashdot become a hive mind? Did I miss a meeting?
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
I haven't played EVE in a while, and I've never played WoW, but doesn't farming have a different effect on the economy in Eve? Rather than inflation, doesn't it make things cheaper? If there is a huge influx of minerals, the price of them goes down and items get cheaper to manufacture. Where as in WoW you get raw gold coming in and devaluing the current gold that people have. Or am I way off here? What is the real problem with farming in Eve?
EVE's economy is so in-depth and profound... "macro-miners" in EVE is in many ways akin to illegal immigration controversies. "macro-miners" are stuck doing their thing in high-sec systems, and even there they can be hasseled so it's not a 100% free ride; i.e. I can steal ore from their can, I can kamakazi them, I can do number of things.
CCP takes what seems to be a bizarre stance on macro-miners. Given the depth of the economy within EVE, CCP probably doesn't see dire economic situations indicative to excessive macro-mining (where resources, work, wealth is diverted from the host system.... like billions of California dollars sent forever into Mexico and medical service bills pawned off on Americans and insane rise in medical costs to compensate for losses encurred by treating illegal immigrants...) The universal economy is so established, these atrocities are absorbed into the mix and their effect diluted; like, while most Californians can't even afford to see a doctor with the best insurance plans, they are able to go to Vons and buy food at a reasonable price becuase the harvest was completed by illegal immigrants--it's a love hate relationship.
CCP does, swiftly and almost clandestine like, make people who buy isks on eBay or elsewhere disappear. One day, you'll be wondering where so-and-so went and why they haven't been on for a long time. But, they seem rather impartial about complaints about macro-miners, and this really does make sense.... as we'll find below.
Over 15,000 people demand a product. To make that product, X amount of resources need to be attained. Manufacturing of said product should be within a reasonable timeframe, and distribution equally reasonable. Then you have the sale of said product.
Let's put this into real life percpective. Even well known restaurants like Taco Bell don't even see 15,000 demands in a month for any individual offering on their menu; most Taco Bells probably don't even reach 15,000 dollars in sales a month. But, once a month, the big eighteen wheeler rolls up and supplies that store for a months supply of produce used to create your taco. It is, by any practical standard, a LOT of food. Tomatoes, sour cream, syrup for cokes, pre-cooked meats, boxes and boxes of green onions... the point is, there are MASSIVE operations held honestly within EVE just becuase the demand and economy needs it. The secondary (and main) point is, from an individual standpoint, it can be difficult to identify a macro-miner(s) versus a serious EVE-ONLINE player(s). There *is* substantial demand in EVE, and it follows that there will be very impressive operations within EVE to meet those demands. I've seen mining operations in 0.0 where I'm just... "holy sh*t!!!", and they weren't macro miners...
So, it's a love hate relationship in EVE, which becuase this reflects real life economics... it is very impressive overall. And I think CCP simply keeps an eye and investigates blatant macro-mining and becuase of this reaction... well, I think this too reflects politicians seemingly slow response to illegal immigration. 1) to some degree illegal immigration is necessary or negligable 2) some of what appears to be illegal really isn't... etc etc.
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.
Those are some of the lamest bots ever you're describing. I've botted some on WoW for my own personal benefit, and the bots were alot more sophisticated than that. I imagine farmers have something similar.
There are bots that do random emotes, that buff passing friendly players, that use pets and spells in a moderately skilled fashion.... it goes on and on. Maybe one or two gold farming companies use bots as crappy as you describe, but much better bots can be had, and you don't have to look far for them.
(I don't bot anymore btw, but I did sell the account for about what i put in in game purchase and monthly fees.)
Which brings us full-circle to the point made by the GP - the game is setup in such a way that players are forced into long hours of tedious tasks in order to get enough goods/gold/equipment/levels be able to continue having fun.
Personally i reckon it's a way of reinforcing a players emotional binding to the stuff that the player aquires in-game: if you invest a lot of time in getting something it's much harder to let go of it and, by extension, to let go of the game - it certainly worked that way on me for a while.
It's thus hardly unexpected that people which are short on time will short-circuit the whole grinding component of the game and just buy the gold in real life to "unlock" the rest of the fun.
Personally i blame the greediness of game publishers, not the gamers that buy gold from e-bay.
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.
For Kesmai, all i have to say id: asak nungi irga lubluyi.
And i probably spelled it wrong.
Here's the problem with farmers. A casual player can make gear that sells for 10g in the auction house. This will enable them to equip their character pretty well, not great but not bad, with a new item that someone else produced or looted.
But wait! Gold farmers mean that for a little real money, everybody who is willing to pay can suddenly have as much gold as they need.
This means that prices go up, because the standard is now that everyone has 1000 gold, not 10.
Damn.
Now all of a sudden, everything costs more- to anyone who doesn't buy WoW gold. Before, only a few players had thousands of gold. That kept the playing field relatively even. Now, the playing field gets evened once again, but at higher prices.
This creates problems. a.) the gold farmers sell low level items (potions, etc) far cheaper and drive down the prices i'll get for anything low level i make
b) they increase the prices on everything else, because everyone can afford more.
So anything i can farm, i lose out on the profit of because there are so many gold farmers doing this to get the gold in the first place (items that other people need for potions, or the potions themselves, for example, are cheap. This is useful for those buying potions but not useful as a production skill anymore, because what's the point when you won't for them what you need? The whole skill class has basically been outsourced to third world countries because people want WoW gold and are willing to spend money but not time on it. It's not as much of a problem in a larger economy, but in WoW you have a small, server-wide economy with money pouring in from the farmers.)
and anything that's a dropped item somebody else would sell is infinitely MORE expensive because they assume we all have bought the gold to pay for it.
If you are the only kid in third grade with a $1 allowance and everybody else has $10 allowances, that's what this becomes. The kids are trading $10 things at $100 rates. If i played full time, i'd get gear drops i could sell for high rates- which would still continue to buy me less and less as farmed money poured into the economy.
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
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.
Fixed.
WoW is basically built around farming/grinding, whether it be for gold, items, "reputation", "honor" (to get said items, this is probably one of the more aggrivating farming deals I know of -- one particular mount--a bluish cat--requires about a month of PURE FARMING just to get the option to buy it). And for an entry-level MMOG, that's likely fine. It doesn't need a deep economy (like EVE's), or any stiffer penalty for death than a slap on the wrist (Death sucks on most other MMOGs) and a smidgen of time. What it does need is "Endgame" content to keep the high-level people there (bigger dungeons to farm, longer timesinks [see Zul'Gurub rewards as an example]). Even then, the 'casual players' are screwed--such endgame content is effectively barred from them by the sheer logistics (has a Molten Core pickup group ever gotten anywhere?)--meaning that if you want to have the 'phat loot', you MUST find a guild that runs a high-level instance like Molten Core (which is the general example) and farm it with them (oh, and most of said guilds are tailored to the more 'hardcore' players).
But what about PVP? Can't someone just blunder onto the world and start offing people? Isn't there a set of gear for the people who only want to PVP? Yes and no. The PVP gear requires no less of a time committment (heck, it likely requires more), and the irony here is that the players screw themselves in their race for the top (as the ranking system is all relative). To reach the higher echelons of the PVP rankings, substantial farming of the battleground instances are *required* (say, 8-10 hours a day for a few weeks). On top of that, the top PVP equipment (which is purchased) is still inferior to the high-end equipment acquired through dungeon farming (and to make the climb to the PVP top with any sort of efficency, you need most of the dungeon gear anyway). World PVP... hrm... Blizzard is apparently doing something to "fix" this (although I have a feeling it won't be nearly enough), although they have already pretty much committed to the Battlegrounds being the IN thing when you want to PVP.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"