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."

Comments

How is it hard to prevent.

[Drakin020]

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.

Re:How is it hard to prevent.

[vux984]

Doh. bloody filter choked on 'less than symbol' $30 and clipped off most my post...

I never understood how it was difficult to rid these guys.

Then you haven't thought about it.

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)

Well duh!

1) The account that was used to transfer you the gold isn't the one that was used to farm it. Ideally, the accounts that actually do the transactions are "free" throwaway buddy or trial accounts. (Which is why some of the more modern games have limits on those free trial accounts to limit how much gold they can actually have, to prevent them from transfering items at all, or from sending mail, or talking in certain chat channels, etc...) Not much use in banning the free throw-away account now is there?

2) Even if they can't use free throwaway accounts, then they use paid throwaway accounts. The accounts generally cost less than $30 bucks and gets them a free month. If they make at least 100% markup (and they do) than all they need is to sell $60 worth of gold before getting banned to break even. That's exceedingly easy to do. Hell, even if they get 'stung' by an employee, as long as they set it up so that they log in and fulfill all their orders at once, by the time the employee identifies the account, a couple hundred bucks worth of gold will have been moved and the farmer is ahead of the game.

3) Even banning a credit card isn't effective. These guys all pay by prepaid game card at best, or have prepaid visa debit cards etc, which can be obtained en masse trivially, never mind the potential for using stolen card numbers.

4) What mythic is doing by banning the spammer accounts is just stopping in-game advertising, not gold farming, or gold-sales. To do THAT is much harder, and there is little they can do to stop THAT, without very careful game design with that as a goal.

5) The gold farmers also are known to use hacked accounts. (where they've guessed or stolen user names and passwords of a legitimate customer, and use those accounts to move gold between farmer accounts and seller accounts, part of an in-game 'laundering' scheme). The 'victim' never even knows he's been hacked, because they just login for a few seconds to move THEIR gold around and don't otherwise interfere with the account at all.

This makes it difficult for the game-devs to act, because when they ban people suspected of being part of the gold-trade, they have to deal with the 'collateral damage'.

6) Of course, gold sellers also use hacked accounts for spamming sales.

Seriously it doesn't seem that hard.

Its FAR harder than it sounds.

Embrace them or Ban them

[TibbonZero]

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.

Re:Embrace them or Ban them

[Areyoukiddingme]

That would be true if Wurm was designed like most other MMOGs. It's not though. Instead of having 20 orders of magnitude in effectiveness of a character based on gear, you're lucky if there's even one. Wurm's gear advantage is very very flat in comparison to pretty much the entire rest of the world. So yes, people want good gear, but a character with gear that's half the numerical value of some other character's gear is still very effective. In terms of combat, character skill counts for much more than the difference between low gear and high gear, and the only way to get character skill is time and effort. (Naturally there's a market in buying and selling characters, but again, the character skill curve is relatively flat, though not as flat as the gear curves.)

I like Wurm particularly because it avoids some of the amazingly stupid flaws that every other MMOG has inherited from ancient level-based designs with crazy power curves. That one simple concept introduces a remarkable number of problems, and then the designers spend years coming up with monkeypatch hacks to try to paper it over and make it ok. More games need to question that basic assumption. The results could be entertaining.

Re:GOLD = BAD

[GigaHurtsMyRobot]

As someone who has played just about every MMO that has come out, most casually except for 4 years of EQ, I still cannot understand why it's so bad or wrong for people to sell or buy game currency. In my naive opinion, it is mostly harmless if the economy is just a little more sophisticated than EQ, and benefits just about everyone. Tell me why this isn't true.

What is the problem?

[Krater76]

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.

Re:What is the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem, regardless of what Blizzard may say, is that it has the potential to reduce income for Blizzard. If I pay $15 per month to play the game and then pay a goldfarmer a few hundred more so that I can instantly have access to all the nifty junk I want I can play for a few months and then perhaps get bored and cancel my account.
Blizzard wants me to put in the hours/weeks/months for each and every item I want so that I have a reason to log in and play so that I keep paying that $15 month after month. If I have a job/other interests I might have to play for a year to get the items I could pay a goldfarmer for my first week. It's just bad business for Blizzard to allow that.

Re:What is the problem?

[Chris Burke]

I don't understand your logic. Using the in game transfer system to transfer gold you bought online is cheating. However, buying a strategy guide or a subscription to a website with tons of data is perfectly alright? The data you pay for in the strategy guide or map site is all composed by someone in the real world. Gold is composed by someone in the real world. Sharing it with someone for a fee or not is the same in both situations.

It's the difference between gaining knowledge to help you in the game, and bypassing the game itself. You could view the effort required to gain knowledge solely through game play as 'part of the game' but it's really the meta game, while earning gold is a literal part of the game itself and buying gold is bypassing that part of the game.

Think of it like this: You could try to learn all chess strategy for the first few moves simply by playing chess. Or you could acquire a book of opening moves. A book of opening moves isn't cheating. Moving all the pieces into your preferred opening configuration is.

That's the difference.

Re:thinking about it

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't pick up your pre-order?! People like you are why it's impossible to find a store that will hold a game for you.

Re:GOLD = BAD

[crossmr]

Wow.. you're right. Someone call the president we have to get a law in place to regulate....

.
.
isn't this a video game?

Someone traded time for money... guess what you do it every day when you go to work, assuming you work.

However you got to have the fun of building the character, they traded their hard earned money to get a character they may not have had the time to invest in. Would you deny someone the experience of the endgame because they don't have 5 hours a day for 2 months to sit around grinding to get there?

Let me tell you a little secret. There is NOTHING special or unique in an mmorpg. They are built to be static and repetitive. There are hundreds of thousands upon millions of people collecting the same loot and doing the same quests as you. Just because one guy bought a sword because he couldn't be arsed to spend the requisite 47 hours camping out a raid location to get it, doesn't make yours any less special. Its the other 20,000 people who just did the question yesterday that makes it less special.

Re:overly public bans

[thesandtiger]

"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."

Bad idea. Large groups of people will grief regular players by mass reporting them.

What would be better is to design the game in such a way that people don't want to buy gold, they'd rather play.

Personally, I think a game like WoW would be MUCH better off if they simply allowed gold to be irrelevant - make it so all the stuff people really, really want to get (better equipment, faster mounts) is obtainable only through play. Instead of a fast flying mount costing 5k gold, make it require an incredibly challenging quest line. Instead of making skills/spells cost money, give them to the character when they hit the appropriate level and then make it so they have to use them to become fully effective (kind of like the way WoW's weapon skills work now, except a bit quicker). Gold should *purely* be seen as a way of getting stuff from NPC's like food, or paying rent on housing (housing that is initially earned through quests) and so on.

If I want to worry about money, I'll just deal with real life. I play MMO's to escape from that kind of thing and enjoy myself.

Re:thinking about it

[ericartman]

I never play a game that won't give me a trial. Sorry, to many choices out there, money to tight to spend 50 bucks on something I throw away. I'll stick with WoW.