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Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Virtual Currency Market
miller60 writes "Telecommunications outages from Tuesday's earthquake in near Taiwan have disrupted the market for virtual currency from MMORPGs, with market leader IGE and other major online sellers reporting inventory and delivery problems. The market for the real money trading of game assets is highly dependent upon suppliers operating 'gold farms' in China and other Asian countries. With Internet access from Asia limited, these suppliers are apparently having trouble logging into games to make deliveries of gold and accounts. Online markets for the sale of game assets have grown in recent years, despite heated debates about the practice among gamers."
Now THAT is how you wield the ban hammer.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Has this affected the prices of virtual commodities in MMORPGs? If so, how and to what degree? I noticed that IGN isn't buying gold on any of the US or Euro servers that I checked; however, I don't follow MMORPGs, so this may be unrelated to the earthquake and telecom outage.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
I know the usually two camps of this argument is "Ban all the gold farmers!" or "Who cares?", but to me I don't care for the practice, but I don't blame the farmers.
I think it is a sign that the game is too tedious or that there are too many times sinks in order to actually play the game.
Collecting gold and loot should actually be the fun part of the game. Not the actually sitting around with your treasure or spending it on items that are required for you to have fun.
In games that require leveling, the disparity between players is quite large and a level 1 player can't see the same content as level 20 and the level 20 can't see the same content as players at 60. This is a discouragement for casual players who don't have the ability to spend 10+ hours per week in the game.
Personally, when it ceases to be fun I quit the game all together. It just isn't worth the effort or my money. While others (who have more money than they should) pay gold farmers to actually enjoy the game without effort.
Personally the last MMOG that I really enjoyed was Shadowbane because it was more about PvP rather than sitting around killing mobs to get to the next level and Shadowbane's leveling wasn't that grueling either and the power disparity between levels wasn't that huge.
But I still think Ultima Online has the best system of advancement with skills rather than levels and players were all pretty much equal in terms of time sinks. Sure there was gold farming, but to me killing monsters and raiding dungeons was just as fun as actually have property in the game.
Of course you could always craft items for a living which made things interesting too.
On a side note... There is a debate that the Taiwan earthquake has also caused a reduction in spam or botnets. I've notice an extreme drop in my levels on various email accounts and according to digg the number of tracked bots dropped from 500,000 to 400,000.
Of course it could be the influx of new computer or kids home for the holidays fixing their parents.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
A real earthquake disrupts virtual currency market? Well, I guess it's better than a virtual earthquake disrupting a real currency market...
*insert a Nelson "HAHA" here*
:)
I honestly dont' have much against the gold farmers themselfs, and I do feel bad about the people injured and those stuck with out communication, however I have to laugh at the tools that make this all possible, the people BUYING the gold.
Hey, "every one" complains about goldfarmers destroying the ingame economy, etc etc. however they wouldn't be able to DO that if it wasn't for the people buyign off of them.
and for those tools stuck with out their gold, I simply laugh at them
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Now Wow addicts will have to either work for their gold or do something else! The Horror!
Laborare Est Orare
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is a great opportunity for companies like Blizzard and SOE to correlate login times with the earthquake and then investigate the accounts that pop out. Most of them will be gold farming accounts that can then be banned.
Guild Wars was created with players like you in mind; casual gamers who don't spend more than a couple hours a week playing.
1) Max level is 20 and reached quickly.
- If you just want to PVP, you can create a level 20 PVP character with max stats and items.
2) Equipment isn't the biggest deal; you'll usually be strong enough for the next area by the time you get there as long as you do most or all of the quests along the way.
- Some people like to pay for extra rare items with nicer looking skins (same stats as regular equipment, though).
3) No monthly fee, so if you stop playing for a couple of weeks or months it's not like you're losing money.
4) Only at the highest levels of PVP does it matter which chapter(s) you own. PVP was designed so players can be competitive with any combination of chapters.
You should give it a try.
No, the problem is not that the game is "too boring" or "broken", it's that we have become so fucking lazy as a society that we are too lazy even to play "for fun". Everything is instant gratification, no planning or effort. Want an HDTV? Why save and work hard when you can buy it on instant credit, spending money you don't actually have? No-one knows the value of money, or effort any more, and buying virtual items is just an extension of that. Bought Need for Speed Carbon for the 360? Want an easy time? Buy the cars and upgrades for real money on X-Box Live - why play the game when you can spend real money to OMGWTFPWN people with your Tier 3 car instantly?
If MMOs have taught me anything, it's that in whatever sphere of life you are in, even one where every person starts out equal, there will be people who are just too fucking lazy to do anything for themselves. Witness the beggers hanging around cities on any WoW server you choose.
Utterly pathetic.
Its interesting how many people decry the evil of buying and selling virtual assets with real currency. Its also equally interesting how the multi-national companies that run the games, who generally claim to oppose the practice, are unable to stop or even slow it. Despite PR campaigns and well publicized, but ineffective, mass bannings nothing has slowed the growth of these services. I personally believe that the gaming companies are quite happy with the current situation, does anyone really believe that WoW would have over a million subs in China if it weren't for gold farmers? I think not. At the same time this underground economy allows for an additional path for in game advancement, one that suits people with more spare money than spare time, a condition common among working professionals who want to continue gaming but don't have the 30+ hours a week that they had in college to devote to gaming. I'm sure the gold farmers are also pretty happy, both the workers and the business owners.
:)
Which would you rather do, build furniture on an assembly line in Shanghai or grind in WoW/CoH/EQ/SWG/$fav_mmo for gold and items? This isn't to say the practice is free of flaws or negative impacts, but I'd say its better for gaming as a whole because it allows far two different vertical markets to be engaged and allows the third (people who enjoy time spent grinding) to stay in the game. If the unofficial pressure valve (short cuts) didn't exist I'd imagine that the content would have to be changed to stay relevant, and that would upset a large number of people who like the repetitive and predictable nature of these games. I've noticed that, in general, companies like to have more customers rather than fewer.
Turns out every cloud does have a silver lining. WoW recently proudly announced over 100,000 account banned worldwide but I don't see this as being very relevant as most of these were surely 10 day trial accounts just used for spamming the various gold sites.