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."

Comments

Pwned.

[SatanicPuppy]

Now THAT is how you wield the ban hammer.

Gold farming is a sign your game is broken

[vertinox]

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.

Re:Prices?

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

I think that would be a deflationary depression in traditional economics ... too few dollars to pay for goods and services leading to falling prices. Tell me, have you seen any unemployed avatars selling apples on street corners?

I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but...

[Thansal]

*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 :)

Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but...

[0xdeadbeef]

Is it because you can't afford to buy gold yourself? That's what I think. I think you're jealous.

You've got it backwards. MMOPRGs are contests to see whose time is the least valuable. Hiring a gold farmer is cheating.

Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but...

[The Living Fractal]

Maybe the entire idea of a "different world", set apart from the influence of RL wealth is just a fantasy anyway, but I like the concept, and I hope that gaming communities can find a way to preserve it.

It is complete fantasy. RL wealth provides you time to play more often than people who have to go to work. Someone who can be at the computer 24/7 will always have an advantage over us poor schmucks who have to work. These games are inexplicably tied to real life, no matter how much you want them not to be.

So as far as gaming communities finding a way to preserve it, I don't see that any multiplayer online game in the history of games has ever preserved it. That concept becomes null and void the moment players can play in a persistent universe. Only in single player games does it remain preserved because there is no need to compare your own achievements to those of others. You can get lost completely in a single player game, as the ultimate hero or villain, because when you're in that world there is nobody else to compare yourself against as there are in MMORPGS. In a MMO there's always someone better, and you will almost certainly either run into them or hear about them somehow.

TLF

Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but...

[The Living Fractal]

You wanted a more detailed response, so here you go:

People pay subscription fees to keep the game running. There is no way of playing the game without paying these fees.

I mentioned guild wars, you said it wasn't an MMO....MMO vs. CO RPG.. Let's split some more hairs...

People who buy gold do so for selfish reasons.

People who play MMORPGS do so for selfish reasons.

They want the action without the effort that honest players go through.

They want to save themselves time because their time is more valuable to them than their money. This is none of your business.

This opens up a market for gold farms running bots 24/7 farming gold, driving down the market prices of commonly available goods, and driving up the prices of desirable items, and hurting the people who play the game ethically in the process.

Actually, you're wrong. Let's use WoW as an example, since it is the largest MMO in the world. In WoW bots get banned very quickly. So far, only real human farmers can pull off gold farming without getting banned. And these people are hardly hurt ethically. In the countries many of them live in the American dollar is still quite valuable. They manage to make some American money and probably do quite well for themselves. Secondly, you are wrong about the way this affects the in-game economy. Because everyone can sell their items equally nobody really loses out. Inflation does exist, but if anything it makes some parts of the game easier because there is more money in the game. Such as respecs. It costs 50g to respec once you hit the max amount. It used to be a lot of gold. Now it's not so bad. In some way we have the farmers to thank for that. Your points on the economical effects and their ethical impacts is largely irrelevant except for the respec factor. All the good gear is obtained through instance runs and raiding -- not through the AH. If you need materials you can farm them yourself, or as you have already said, buy them even cheaper now that someone else has taken it upon themselves to do it for you. If anything the gold farmers are making it easier for us.

These people have to sell the items they can craft and loot at lowered prices, and buy their gear at hugely inflated prices.

Explain to me why it makes sense that you can sell gear at lowered prices or buy your gear at hugely inflated prices? It sounds like you're saying the same gear sells low for one person and high for another, merely because the other person is a gold farmer. Absurd.

These inflated prices don't exactly hurt the gold farming community, either.

Nope, they don't. They don't exactly hurt any community except other gold farmers, which I imagine you wouldn't be against.

I'm all for rewarding time spent in a game, and if you spend 12 hours a day farming gold - go you.

Indeed.

If you have bots running chars around in machine farms with the sole purpose of making profit for yourself at the expense of the health of the game economy that *people pay subscription fees to have access to*, you deserve absolutely no sympathy.

Why would you? You know who else deserves no sympathy? The company who allows it to happen. Again, using WoW as an example: Blizzard has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for using bots. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual farming bot in WoW. I see plenty of bots advertising their sales on the chat channels, and they get banned almost immediately. Poof, another free trial account is banned. There is only one thing Blizzard needs to do IMHO, and that's restrict free trial accounts from using the general chat function until their free trial expires. That should solve a good deal of the advertising problems.

While it's evident from your post that you enjoy having e

Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but...

[The Living Fractal]

Well, you asked. Here's another one.

Yes, it is my business if they pay people to violate EULAs and break the market economy for their own gain. People play MMORPGs for their own entertainment, but that isn't by definition "selfish". Buying gold at the expense of other players' enjoyment of the game *is* selfish.

So, farming thorium at rich thorium veins on a 24/7 basis, forcing all other players out of the area because you dominate it, that isn't selfish? I mean, even though you're just farming it for 'in game' money, that's not different than a gold farmer? It's the same thing. You cannot expect players to not be selfish in an MMO just as the same goes for life. Except in life people are selfish for themselves and their extended family which is an extension of themselves. And of course their friends and other social structures. You'll find players who aren't, but don't expect that to be the norm.

Bot farming is against most EULAs, and they are for a reason. An MMO economy is created and adjusted according to what the average player would get from going through the game at a normal pace. Bot farming yields gold in amounts several orders of magnitude above that. The game economy isn't tailored to handle that influx of money.

No, the economy is not tailored. It adapts. You are making a mistake if you think a game economy will ever be free of the same vices as a real economy. Artifical impositions on the economy by the company who runs the game will never work. They simply, logically, cannot do anything about it. So I guess all I am saying is get used to it, because it's here to stay. If you can't beat em, join em.

In a virtual world where money literally does grow on the trees, the economy needs to be carefully balanced.

Last I checked money grew on trees in the real world too. It's call agriculture.

Normal game state

-Player craftable item - 30g - Intended market value
-Player lootable item - 20g - Intended market value
-Player fixed price service - 200g - Cost related to predicted average income
-Player high end item - 800g - Fair market value

Haha. "Intended market value". That's a good one. Really, come on, it's not even reasonable to assume it is possible for a company to control the market like that without, like I mentioned earlier, artificial impositions. Which would destroy the immersion factor. Across various WoW servers items go for different amounts, even though they aren't farmable by gold farmers. But wait, OH NOES, they aren't all at the "intended market value." You act like you have a grip on economical theory. I don't see it.

It's obvious that you like playing your games on the "easy" difficulty setting, and just coast right through, but MMOs aren't democratic by nature, and any behaviour causing the game to deviate from the intentions of the developers is really not something you can logically defend. If you don't like the pace of the game, find another one instead of messing it up for the rest of us.

This is why I play games like Doom 3 on Hardcore? Games like Halo on Legendary? Don't act like you know me.

As far as a game deviating from the intentions of the developers, I can easily logically defend that. An MMO is an amorphous dynamic entity. The developers pick a starting point and say "GO" and the game evolves. Aside from them fixing things which would abort the evolution and development of the game, such as rampant hacking and cheating, the game largely takes a course defined by the PLAYERS, not the developers. If the players don't like the game, it doesn't exist. The developers merely have to find a state that agrees with the playerbase and expound upon it, as they have done and continue to do with games like World of Warcraft.

TLF

Virtual goods for real money = new economy

[Thorizdin]

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. :)

Re:Prices?

[Bandman]

I thought of this too. Later on down the road, a large DDOS attack could send ripples everywhere.

Very interesting stuff here. I'll be watching more closely from now on, for sure.

Re:Yawn

[ClamIAm]

a virtual earthquake disrupting a real currency market

I think this is pronounced "Apple press release".