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.