Slashdot Mirror
Mythic GM Talks Warhammer Launch, Banning Gold Sellers
Gamasutra has an interview with Mark Jacobs, GM and co-founder of Mythic, about the recent launch of Warhammer Online. He talks about handling the heavy demands on the servers, and how the launch is going better than the opening of Dark Age of Camelot (during which "somebody parked a truck on our internet"). Jacobs also blogged about the glee with which he and his team have been banning gold spammers: "We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message. Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep it within the Warhammer universe."
I'm considering picking this up. Anyone play? What are your impressions?
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
I'm unaware of whether any other servers faced this problem, but Azazel, at the very least, did not have scenarios (battlegrounds are the WoW equivalent) running on launch day (though that was fixed the next day) due to a bug or something as they worked during the head start or open beta.
Nice! About time someone took a proactive stance to gold farmers. They just present a way for the lazy player to get ahead.
enjoy it while you have it - for it may be gone soon.
I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.
Just send in some employee to buy some gold that is advertised...Then when you are given the gold, trace it back and ban that account along with the credit card info that was used to purchase the subscription. (As well as the product key)
Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
In making an MMORPG you've either got to decide to have an economy that can work with a worldwide populace and economy openly (Eve and Secondlife), or you really need to do something about it and close it up.
When you think about it though, Goldfarming is simply someone forcing outsourcing of your leisure time for you. You don't want it to happen, they undercut you (as their time is nearly worthless) and they screw up the economy.
Best of luck to them on this. Blizzard has completely failed in this aspect and their economy and absurd quests at times show it.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
If you wait 2 weeks to ban an account that's been spamming /tells and local channels, a $50 box is just a marketing expense. If you do it immediately, then it becomes unprofitable.
I mean, by blacklisting, rather than filtering and heuristics?
It's just as impossible as it is to get rid of gold sellers. For every one you ban (block), a hundred more spring up overnight. Not even Blizzard has the resources to spend on making purchases to discover the IDs of these companies.
Should be easy to ban. I don't go more than five minutes without a tell from a different person advertising gold.
I've always wondered if gold sellers have someone working for them on the inside. Diablo 2, for example, had item sellers selling all of the best top tier items and runes approximately 3 hours after the ladder reset and everyone had to start fresh on the lader.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
"somebody parked a truck on our internet"
That would put a big crimp in the tubes.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
While I don't condone the buying of gold I don't really understand what the problem is. There are many reasons for purchasing gold that are completely reasonable while very few reasons otherwise.
Let's use WoW and it's epic flying price of 5000g for example. I ground 5k gold twice, the first time on a character I never play anymore due to a server and faction change, the second time on the differently factioned replacement. The grind is boring! And it's equally boring to have to do it a second time or more. Does someone paying $200 for 5k gold to pay for their epic flyer negatively affect the me or the game? Nope.
Also, what about people just starting in the game after others have been in for years? They have a lot of trouble catching up to their friends. Purchasing gold can help them get there faster so they can be more interested in the game. I bet mature MMOs have probably lost a lot of opportunities to get players because coming into the game now is just too late. The same argument goes for leveling services.
Frankly, there are no downsides to gold farming unless the farmers are preventing other players from doing something, like camping mob spawns. From my experience, they have very little affect on the economy as long as gold isn't the only way to advance your character.
Wait, the random tells are annoying. But other than that what is there? The real problem is that someone is making money 'at the expense' (used very loosely) of the game designer and that wasn't intended. But that's called capitalism. Obviously it's a service people want, so why not give it to them? I would only ban gold sellers who advertise in game or in official forums and let people play the game as they like.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
... C'mon, where's the 'Good luck with that' tag?
Seriously people, as long as one guy can setup an account and make enough money to pay for the signup fee & a little time by selling gold, etc. they will keep doing it, no matter how hard you ban. You have to catch and kick them
Or you can actually address the root problems
1. Your game is so stupidly simple that a crap-tastic script can effectively 'farm' the gold to start with.
2. You end up with some guy who has 5 maxxed characters, and quits playing, and decides to try and recoup at least a little of the time/money spent playing, so he sells off his uber accounts.
The economy of MMORPG's become much more ruined simply through poorly balanced character advancement: a top level character can make hundreds of times more in gold per hour than a low-level one. Once you hit a point in the game where there are a lot of high level players, the economy is going to go into the shitter anyhow, especially once everybody at the end-game already HAS everything, and don't mind passing over loot or just giving the gold away.
Except for in Australia and NZ where there was a DVD duplication error. That was slightly frustrating but after that, it was worth waiting for the patch
While I'm glad the spammers are being banned immediately, in all honesty they don't really have a market in Warhammer at the moment. The only mount is gained at level 20, it costs 20 gold, and its very easy to come across that amount of money before level 20. After that, you could spend gold on professions and purples, but there again mats for professions and purples are also fairly common right now. There's just no need for a large gold purchase.
Sure baby, I'll give you my phone number...in Hex
While I do agree with you, having bought gold/characters/items in at least three MMOs that I've played, gold sellers do create an issue for both players and the parent company. Inflation. That 5k gold you ground for your Minotaur Axe would have only cost about 2k gold if it were not so readily accessible on a website.
Based on the blog posts they don't even have a way for people to easily report gold spammers yet. That is pretty lame. It should be quite easy to add a right-click menu option for reporting/ignoring them as many other games have. That - and the in game messages spamming people to announce every time they ban a goldseller - makes it seem like a bit of a PR stunt.
What I think would be cool is to implement a reporting system like the above and the offenders will be silenced from sending global messages after a certain number of people report them. That way you don't have to wait the several hours for the GMs allegedly dedicated to banning these folks to take action.
The problem with a company allowing RW gold sales is that suddently theyve suddently attached a real monetary value to a virtual item and opened themselves up to countless liabilities.
Say they alow gold selling, sudently all the items in your inventory are worth possibly thousands of dollars. Then what happens if your account gets hacked, or theres a server crash or something. What are you going to do? Sue the company for the value of your virtual items.
It is much easier for the companies to say, gold selling is not allowed, gold and items have no official RW value and you will be banned for buying or selling, than to deal with the headache of being responsible for possibly millions of dollars worth of virtual items on their servers.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
... with in game currency and real money transactions is that the farmer doesn't obtain gold from other players, but rather triggering money-making actions forcing the server to generate more money. When you have a market for that you'll have thousands of characters exclusively dedicated to generate more money. It causes inflation.
I need a gig. Can I be on your strike team? How much does it pay? I don't have to move to Ohio, do I?
Well, I've played it for a couple of days, since I'm bored to tears with WoW by now. It's certainly not a horrible game, and there isn's even much "bad" about it, but it's certainly not half as polished as WoW. There's probably some gem in there, but unfortunately nobody tried much to separate it from the rock, much less give it a shine. In other words, it's yet another half-arsed, me-too attempt at milking the MMO market.
In fact, probably the best thing that can be said about it, is that it copied WoW shamelessly. It's a good thing, really. WoW did figure out the righ gameplay by now. And yes, I really mean clone. E.g., Witch Elves and Witch Hunters work _exactly_ like WoW Rogues. They build up combo points, then spend them on finisher moves. In fact, they may even be renamed "bloodlust points" and "accusation points" respectively, but at least one tooltip still calls them "combo points." E.g., Ironbreakers (dwarf tanks) work almost exactly like WoW warriors, with 0 to 100 "grudge points" that build up as you hit or are hit. Are you thinking "rage points" too, Pinky? Only dumbly enough, they didn't understand the role of that mechanic on WoW, like the difference between burst damage and sustained damage, so as a warrior you're _also_ stuck with a mana bar. Etc.
The downside isn't that it's a clone, that it's yet another half-arsed, shove-me-out-the-door-patch-me-later clone.
To understand what I'm talking about, just look at the web site. Two days after release, it was still talking about preordering, and it was telling me things like that I don't need to register my preorder code again. When in fact, I was registering the game key for the first time. They didn't even bother updating the web site. Now I'm certainly not playing the web site, so it's not a vital issue, but it serves to illustrate the half-arsed attitude I was talking about. Rest assured that it's reflected in the actual game too.
Ok, to the game itself. The first thing that happens, is that promptly at the list of servers the game informs me that server X needs more players. Do I accept? Well, ok. Good thing I decide to double-check that choice, because it turns out to be an open PvP server. (Ok, ok, RvR.) Normally the game seems to ask, basically, "do you really want that?" when you choose such a server. But IIRC if I'm goaded via such a dialog, it didn't. Though maybe that was still one step too early, because when I see "Open RvR", I'm out of there. Way to make friends with your potential customers by trying to shaft them out of choosing a type of server they like.
I pick a new server and start by creating a character. As it happens, on the Destruction side. I play with it for a bit, and, being the altaholic that I am, figure out I'll see if there's an equivalent on the Order side. I need to go to another server for that, though, and honestly I have no problem with that. I like to keep my characters sorted like that anyway.
Again comes a dialog asking me to join realm Y, 'cause it needs more players. I'm weary, but say "OK." Immediately comes a prompt saying that the realm is full and I'd face queues if I play there. What. The. Fuck? It just told me they need more players on a full server?
Ok, I pick another one, toy with character creation for a bit, want to go back to my first one on the other server. But, as it happens, the server names say nothing to me (I'm not a tabletop buff or anything), so I forgot its name. But that's ok, because it has a column in the server list which says how many characters you have on a server. And an option to sort by it. So finding the server should be a two second affair, right? Wrong, because it's non-functional and says 0 for all servers.
After a brief scare that it lost my character, I resolve to do it by brute force and perseverence, by joining and leaving each bloody server in the list, until one has my character in the list. Yep, that's some time lost just because they can't even finish the very first list you'll see, before they release the game. The impressio
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The smart thing to do, though, would be to leave the farmers themselves alone, but infiltrate and watch the money trail.
When the gold reaches the end customer, just take it away.
Hah, what a huge lie. Warhammer Europe launch was quite bad, for example compared to the LOTRO launch a year earlier. It is also obvious they shipped the game too early - because it lacks a lot of polish. There are a lot of obvious bugs that I've encountered in the first 10 or so minutes:
- The registration process for online downloads is convulted
- The game forces you to accept the EULA at every launch
- There is a cinematic button in the main menu that does nothing
- For online downoad guys we still have to use the beta client and while the FAQ states that it should work (and it does), this is still lack of attention to detail
- Every time you get a tome entry in game, there is a popup saying that you've learned about such and such. You can click on it and it displays the knowledge article. But in the tome of knowledge there is also a "new things" page. It doesn't take off entries you've viewed with any other method except through that page - so the "new things" indicator keeps flashing. Obvious bug.
- Stability problems: OK, this is the first week when they are live and they've got serious traffic. However there is no excuse for the desync - the client side getting confused without there being a mechanism to handle it, either by disconnection or just by not getting desynced in the first place. The patcher and the server list has been down a lot aswell.
- Optimization problems: I've got a high end pc, but the game is so slow that I had to go back to medium settings. But even on high, the game is kind of ugly. For comparison LOTRO has much better textures and effects while managing to put less strain on my pc.
- Lots of small interface and game bugs.
Now, I remember the slashdot article back from last december that said they delayed releasing the game, but by what I'm seeing they should have spent another year working on it.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
I saw the popup about someone being punished by the king or something, and later another about someone and was like "WTF?".
My initial response was that this was probably futile, but these guys are annoying to the extent that they interfere with other peoples' experience by their invasive spamming. They have to spam in-game to advertise, so I guess it's not impossible for the dev's to keep on them, esp if they implement some sort of 'reporting' function like Blizzard has for inappropriate spam comments. Report - check by dev - if it's a spam ad, that account is banned. Done.
I would guess that for the guys who are running gold-selling sites without ingame spam, who cares? I mean, that's pretty much outside the game, and it's both a source of revenue for the developers as well as a fertile field for the developers to see and analyze bot tech in their games.
-Styopa
This MMORPG war on gold farming just seems to me like the USA's ridiculous War on Drugs. It seems to me that these things are true:
My point is, from an observational standpoint, those two things appear to be facts. Therefore, fighting this is going to consume lots of time and resources (the game makers admit to having a "strike team" specifically for this purpose, which I assume costs them money), and at the end of the day, strike team or not, I doubt that gold farming can ever be stopped if there's enough will among the community.
So, I don't know...I don't understand why they don't just design the game so that gold farming can be a part of the game and skim money off the top? Certainly, real life is organized this way; some people want to do grunt work and sell the results of their labor, and some people are busy with other stuff and want to play the more "fun" parts of the game in the limited time they have available to play. Design the game so that people can excel at tasks with or without the gold, and set up a central store where people can sell stuff all they want.
gameDB
Because it's a game, and there are controls that can be implemented that differ from real-life. That being so, there's supposed to be a certain balance to things so that most players can enjoy the game equally, as opposed to having the richest players able to skip ahead by paying out some gold farmer for enough to buy a +10000000 damage "axe of newb slaying" right off the bat.
* Spammers 'toons tarred & feathered and hung in the market square. Fun for all, bring the kids and a picnic!
I was playing last night and got one of those messages. I wish I'd written it down now, but it was something along the lines of "Emperor Frobozz has banished Ruetard for activies against the empire". I was playing my empire ("good" human) priest at the time.
I figured it *probably* meant they had just booted a gold-farmer, but it was kinda hard to be sure from the message.
Its kind of cool to see that, but they did it rather annoyingly. They didn't put the message in the chat window, and didn't have it come up as big text on your play window either. They put it in a pop-up window that you had to dismiss by clicking on the "OK" button. If I'd been in the middle of a furball at the time that could have been deadly. I still *had* to stop what I was doing to read the darn thing and click it away.
What a giant crock of shit. There hasn't been any server downtime apart from planned maintenance which is announced. Servers have not been switch to open RvR, and you can change your server even if it did happen. The entire point of the game is RvR, there is no PvE, there is never going to be PvE, this is not dikumud, its a game. If you want a chat room, go to a chat room. Don't join a RvR game and then whine that its focused on RvR. What the hell are you so scared of anyways, there's no penalty for dying.
Heh. Wait. Did I read that right? Did you just presume to tell me what I should like in a game, and what should I play like?
Are you offering to pay me a salary to play like you want me to? Because if I'm doing what someone else tells me to, then it's no longer my entertainment. Then it's work. Should I send you a bill for my usual consulting fee?
At any rate, you illustrate what _amuses_ me the most about fanboys: that dog-brained willingness to bark at customers and try to drive them away from your "master". I saw an actual dog do that once, and I found that to be the _perfect_ metaphor for fanboys.
E.g., Mythic and EA have been in quite the rush to assure us PvE players that PvP is really purely optional, and, really, you can get to max level without PvP-ing once. Come on over, everyone, anyway. You tell me essentially to go away if I actually expect that. Hmm. You're not really helping your idol's sales, you know that? Are you trying to cost them some subscriptions, or what? Did they do anything evil to you, or what? :P
But, anyway, what matters is that they advertised PvP as being purely optional. I merely expect them to keep their word there. They _could_ have told me the same you did, basically, "don't join it if you don't like RvR." I could respect that. It's their game, their choice. Then they don't want my money, and I don't have to try their game. Nothing wrong with that. That's how capitalism was supposed to work. But if they seem to have decided that they want to make a game where PvP is purely optional, and advertised it as such, I just expect them to hold their end of that bargain and respect my choice. I _only_ paid for this game based on essentially that promise that I'll jolly well be left alone, if I don't want to participate in PvP. I do not appreciate bait-and-switch in any business. Nothing more, really.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ok, it looks like I had missed a link to the news in the patcher anyway. Upon checking their list, though, nope, the downtime of the 3 servers on saturday doesn't seem to be there.
Also the possibility does strike me that maybe the server was _cloned_ to a RVR one. I don't think so, but I can't exclude the possibility.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I read about Warhammer, and was impressed. I saw a few game clips online, and was impressed. I spoke with a friend involved in the beta, and was intrigued. I now read about a concerted effort to keep gold sellers minimized, and I'm almost ready to cough up the money. But my brand new 3GHz iMac and I aren't welcome. I'm not coughing up the money for a Windows license just to play this.
Make a better system.
Seriously, gold sellers are exlpoting an aspect of the game.
WoW could implement several thing that would make them very useless, and it would make farming as a grind more difficult.
But they don't.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
whats funny is... warhammer online has barely no need for gold. its easy enough to make. these goldsellers are just trying to scoop in the people that are used to buying gold already from play WoW, for example. they wont stay in THIS game long. but im glad mythic is taking a stand against them almost immediately. you also have to hand it to the playerbase. as soon as i got my first gold spam i reported it right away as well as my guildmembers. we aint takin no guff!
If you are suddenly curious about Wurm Online, be warned that it is not a traditional MMO. It's not about fighting mobs.
There is no sound and the UI looks like something college students produce for their first Java assignment.
That said, it's interesting to see a persistent world where literally every town is player built, you can alter the terrain to make slopes, flat areas, hills, etc.... pave roads, dig actual mines (with tunnels that require support beams), have fields full of various crops that actually grow over a few days, and a lot more. It's a worthy and free distraction if you're totally bored and the game you really want isn't out yet.
Heh, wait... so if a bug doesn't happen on your particular computer and set of servers, it can't _possibly_ happen on any other computer. That's your argument? Every computer in the world is a clone of yours, or what?`
Ok, it looks like I was hasty to call you a fanboy. If _that_ is your argument, then you're a cretin. Sorry for the mis-labeling.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.