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Game Developers On Gold Selling
Eurogamer has an article which takes a look at how various game companies deal with gold spammers in their games. Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users. "In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, 'they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven't recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.'" Still more companies are experimenting with real money trading (RMT) to at least establish some control and security over the situation.
Maybe read the article and find out? Ass.
RTFA. It has a link and a direct quote of the "Go to hell" comment.
Because when I see that people are actually PAYING someone else to play the boring parts of a game for them, it's easy for me to deduce that what we have is not a fun game, but a tedious grindfest designed to keep bored teenagers playing forever and ever.
The solution to goldfarming should be to find out why earning gold in the game is so bloody tedious and focus your design efforts on making the game fun to play. Games are supposed to be fun, not a second job.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
After all, barbershops and even paid-for sex changes have come about due to player demand in World of Warcraft.
Uhm. Paying for sex in WoW?
Exactly how deeply entrenched in your parents basement would you have to be to do that?
I feel that it is my duty to even the score. When writing this letter, I had originally intended to segregate the pure errors of fact in Mythic's comments from the assertions of questionable judgment where there could be room for dispute. I eventually decided against that approach because you might say, "Mythic should stop and savor life, not discredit legitimate voices in the negativism debate." Fine, I agree. But its ebullitions always follow the same pattern. It puts the desired twist on the actual facts, ignores inconvenient facts, and invents as many new "facts" as necessary to convince us that every featherless biped, regardless of intelligence, personal achievement, moral character, sense of responsibility, or sanity, should be given the power to destroy our youths' ability to relax, reflect, study, and meditate.
Mythic wants us to feel sorry for the soporific muttonheads who weave its deranged traits, hateful deeds, and juvenile announcements into a rich tapestry that is sure to instill a subconscious feeling of guilt in those of us who disagree with its fulminations. I maintain we should instead feel sorry for their victims, all of whom know full well that that fact is simply inescapable to any thinking man or woman. "Thinking" is the key word in the previous sentence. I overheard one of Mythic's flunkies say, "Mythic's activities are on the up-and-up." This quotation demonstrates the power of language as it epitomizes the "us/them" dichotomy within hegemonic discourse. As for me, I prefer to use language to remind Mythic about the concept of truth in advertising.
The conflation of fatuous maggots and tendentious dingbats in Mythic's holier-than-thou attitudes is either dramatic hyperbole or a fatal methodological flaw. This applies first and foremost to a claque under whose superstitious brand of exclusionism the whole of honest humanity is suffering: Mythic's army of illogical, slatternly yobbos. If you're not part of the solution then you're part of the problem. At the risk of sounding hopelessly belligerent, Mythic sometimes puts itself in charge of challenging all I stand for. At other times, one of its comrades, who are legion, is deputed for the job. In either case, any claim to the contrary is patently false. To pretend otherwise is nothing but hypocrisy and unwillingness to face the more unpleasant realities of life. Let us now exert a positive influence on the type of world that people will live in a thousand years from now because in that is our only hope for the future.
Seriously, why?
Players obviously want to do it.
Is it just a matter of developers wanting to be cocks to the people who are already /paying them money/ to play their game?
Let me be the first to say:
WHAT?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
MMORPGs as a whole are designed to spread content through the level range, where equipment is relatively scaled to what you need at the time. In WoW, you can easily survive till level 50 by just using the loot that you find on enemies you defeat. If you stick with the quests that are given, you get great level specific hand outs. Unfortunately, once through in the existence of a higher level, players will not care about the content that they are already in. It is this style of player that is prayed upon by the Gold/gear sellers. They want to experience the high end of a game, and don't care at all about the low end. They do no care about the quality of the level 10 quests, or anything else that doesn't gratify them instantly. No matter what a game developer does, they will never be able to prevent this manner of thinking without abolishing the entire working model of an MMORPG. People love progress. They love the thrill of leveling up and gaining near gear. Gold Farming is just an byproduct of the system.
Fixed this problem by introducing the CCG to the gameverse, sure you still get people trying to spamsell you credits but many folks now instead by packs of the ccg cards using in game credits despite having purchased the ccg packs with real actual money.
Thus far SOE have accepted this as allowed.
How much people would play chess if players could pay 20$ to change one of his pieces into a queen?
Chess is an extreme example but the point is, some people play to compete. Maybe not in a direct confrontational way but they like getting some kind of advantage by playing "better".
Having people who directly buys advantages in the game makes it less interesting for the competitive players.
Usually, there are more competitive players than players willing to spend money for an advantage, and the game creators try to keep the bigger group.
If the spending players weren't heavily outnumbered they'd be a better marketing target and more games would be based on the "Buy the better gun" model.
Economics. the allocation of scarce resource. If it is not limited, then there is no ecomomics.
In these games, time is the scarce resource, and maybe patience!
People sell their time (collecting gold or whatever) to people who want it.
The problem for the Game developer is that they do not have a real economy. (hey, just like the real world!) that is, the money created just appears and floats upward, whereas in a real economy it circulates, and is never "used up" (present circumstances excepted). Unless the game can simulate an economy successfully, then there will always be problems with currency in game.
This means work, or some simulation of it, which is by definition not that much fun. (software developer excepted, of course). So I would conclude that they are, um, wrong to ban external labour simulating in game labour. so far, the free market has proven to be the most efficient distributor of resources. well, till now, anyhow.
It's drivel from the automatic complaint letter generator. http://www.pakin.org/complaint/
Ah, thank you. Successfully trolled I suppose.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
The patch before the last was pretty much an invitation to gold sellers ... the last patch made the prices a little more sane, but some of the higher level ones are still only affordable by people who abused the crafting opportunities early in the game to stockpile and sell after the last patch. Mythic created a large number of very wealthy players who will be soaking up anything valuable for quite a while and driving up the prices.
when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, "they lost 10 per cent of their membership...there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe."
Lost 10%...went from four million to two million players. Maybe someone should have spent less time playing WoW and more time doing their school work...
Which is fair..
A lawyer working 60 hours a week, buys a 600 hour character and a million gold for 5 hours of income.
or
A student, retired, or independently wealthy person who plays 60 hours a week? Always gets the best non-instanced content first (sometimes blocking it for over a year to other users).
---
The game company sells levels, gear, experience for money.
or
The game company sets up quests so you if you can be logged on continuously for 14 to 24 hours you have a 100% chance of success.
If you can log on 24 hours in 2 hour chunks, there is a good chance you will *never* finish the quest (25 to 30%)
---
Who is more skillful
The person who can log on at 1pm, get the best camps, play for 12 hours straight, and reach the new level cap in a week?
The person who uses a cheating macro program that lets them see what loot the monsters are carrying and where the monsters are even when their characters are "blind"?
---
None of these are fair. I applaud the efforts by the game companies to make a game fair.
But morality is such that mmorg gamers would feel it was fair to be able to buy extra cards in poker or to get the best hands because they could show up earlier than the other players, or win merely by virtue of being able to stay at the table for 18 hours straight.
---
Games have rules. The rules for chess, checkers, acquire, dominion, hell even D&D, are not based on "the person with the most money or time wins".
When people try to play MTG and other CCG's like a money game, they quickly lose the ability to play with ordinary players and get stuck in their own brackets even at tournaments.
It's pretty disgusting.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Grinding is what makes the game fun. There is no sense of accomplishment if you have not put work into the game.
Going to go after a strawman here, but do you honestly believe that if they just gave everyone unlimited gold and experience the game would be better?
People may complain about it, but the "grind" is what gives the game meaning so to speak. Finding a rare item will have a lot more weight behind it if you have sunk a few hours into getting it. You cannot get a sense of achievement or accomplishment from something that you haven't invested any time into.
People who grind the raids don't generally like having to do the daily grind to fund their raiding though, no accomplishments to be had there ... only pure and utter grind.
I can only take the example of WOW where I start playing recently. For established MMO (aka : not the first weeks or evemn few first month) the target of opportunity for new player is lost to game the auction house. On WOW this is exarcerbed as everybody and their grandma have a twink or half a dozen on the realm where they most play, often with multiple profession. And if they do not, they have huge amount of gold. The NET effect is inflation on all goods. So, for example, some low level (15) items go off for 7 or 8 gold coins (and not that rare item either, like silver stab for disenchat) which at the level you want to get it to use it as roughly 150-250% of a REAL newbie total fortune depending on your secondary profession. So only twix buy them because they have the money. The net result is that you need to "farm" for hours some stuff to get the money, or jsut give up on it. Don't get me started on some of the superfluous stuff like mount (with 45 gold 100 to 200% the real money of a newbie at level 30 unless you never had to buy anything at all) or bags. I such circumstance, I can imagine why someboy would INDEED skip the boring part and try for sold money.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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My friend was once banned for buying gold while his computer was away for repair.
They held his account hostage for 4 weeks until a copy of his service receipt finally filtered up the chain of command.
If people are buying gold it's indicative the game has costs which are out of proportion with the rest of the gameplay experience.
They made a poor game design choice, and it's given rise to a third party market to correct it.
When will game designers learn to stop penalizing their customers and start listening to the community.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
So someone who's put the time in will be a more proficient player than if they'd just paid to pass that by.
This has nothing to do with Jagex IP-banning gold sellers, they always did that. The reason so many players left Runescape is that when IP-banning wasn't working, Jagex made a massively unpopular decision to remove a huge portion of the gameplay in order to stop the gold sellers.
Overnight, it became impossible to kill other players and take their items, to give gifts of any substantial value, to sell items for prices more than 5% away from a value assigned by Jagex, to have duels for worthwhile stakes, and to do a lot of other things that would take a lot explaining such as the World 66 Laws company.
Basically, they threw so much of the game away that a large portion of their playerbase quit (I'm guessing much more that the 10% of paying members mentionied in the article), overnight it went from being a Massive Multiplayer Online Game to being a Massive Singleplayer Online Game with chat features. Even if (like me) you didn't enjoy the player vs player part of the game, the changes were very bad news, as much of the economy was based around making supplies for player vs player combat.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
This has to qualify as some sort of limited Turing test, IMO.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
The gold farmer often hack other players and use game exploits to obtain their gold. They obtain gold outside of the game's mechanics. They are an outside force in the game between monster drops and marketing for gold.
Gold farmers increase the supply of money and therefore increase the price of everything. I've seen games where farmers have gone nuts and drove the price where it was impossible to earn enough gold through legitimate means to play fairly with people who have enough gold.
Worse, is that the gold farmers, especially those that use an exploit take away that area for normal players. No one can train or farm for gold legitimately, because a gold farmer has ruined the training area for everyone else*.
*An example would be a vacuum hack, which causes all items to be vacuumed into a hacker's inventory and far away from legitimate players.
Gold farmers also ruin the community, because they don't play to be part of the community.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
Hey, I like CCP's solution to this, in EVE, you can buy extra months of subscription, and sell them to other players, on the market, for Gold (ISK). I play the game for free, because I have enough isk to sell to folks who want more of it. Eve's economy actually works pretty decently, dudes get alot of use out of having extra isk, they can fly bigger ships, gamble more, pay folks for whatever they want. I always suggest to my friends that they buy three months of game time when they start playing, 1 month for themselves, and 2 months to sell to the market. Everyone gets on a nice, even playing field pretty quick that way, (and it's still cheaper than starting alot of MMO's). To ramble off topic for a while, market manipulation is incredibly easy in eve, I play for free because I spend about 3 hours a week looking over trades in three regional markets. I had to put in a bit of work to get enough money to afford it, but the cash I have is still chicken scratch (barely floating a billion isk, and most of it's tied up in one thing or another)
Pray tell why are the start corp channels awash in a sea of ISK-for-cash spam?
Why, pray tell, are there veritable legions of macrominers laying complete waste to all high-sec belts?
No, CCP solved nothing; the only thing they did was get in on the action.
That's quality. Like some form of IRL denial of service attack. :)
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
runescape is a bad example; trades where shackled,prices where set up by jagex with no way around them. Of course that will make your customers run away! an MMORPG is nothing if the MM part is replaced with npc's! It's basically an RPG with chat system now.
I played MMOs like 12-15 years ago. They were as addictive back then as they are today. Eventually, I managed to shake that addiction naturally, and not it has no hold on me.
Don't get me wrong, I -want- to like it... I just can't sit there for hours straight doing the same mindless crap over and over.
Anyone who is in my position and has tried a 'high rate' pirate WoW server can tell you that it's a LOT more fun. (Less addictive, but more fun.)
Eventually, we'll get through the current group of addictees and everyone will be looking for fun instead of addiction. At that point, there's going to be a HUGE market for fun MMOs. In fact, there's probably already a pretty nice market as it is.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
tl;dr
No. If people are buying gold, it means that they want to feel like they won the game without actually doing anything to get there. It's no different then people using cheats in other types of games.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
It took until page 4 for TFA to get to the real point:
"that the only reason that this problem exists is that people purchase the gold, items, accounts or services from these [gold selling] companies. If no-one did it they would not be in business. If you purchase an item or service from one of these companies, you are as guilty as those that are 'botting', 'farming' or 'spamming'."
As long as people want to cheat and buy gold, someone else will find a way to sell it. The buyers often don't care that the money comes from hacked accounts or that it has a negative impact on the game. All they care about is getting something without putting in any effort to earn it.
I know that Blizzard's logs are detailed enough to figure out who a gold selling account transferred gold to. Those are the people that they should be targetting. Spending real money on gold isn't all that appealing if you know that a week later you'll have it all taken away and your account suspended for it.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
"Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users." ...still others (*cough* *cough* BLIZZARD *cough* *cough*) engage in mild disingenuity when they claim that they are against gold selling, but only engage in banning methods when the gold grinders are clearly using bots. (And even then, the response is so slow it's hard to recognize.)
Perhaps I'm ignorant, but when "gold seller A" pops up in main faction cities, using a randomized name, that toon MUST be logged into an account, no? And if that toon is logged into an account, they must be uniquely identified to the company, no? And if that same account is repeatedly flagged as goldspamming general chat, how hard would it be to flag that account (and the flagged chat) for human review, to be banned upon confirmation that it is indeed goldspam? And if account A is banned for goldspam, and accounts B, C, D, E, and F are also banned for goldspam, wouldn't you just consider a basic IP ban on accounts from that origin?
Further, when I see bots grinding and report them, I don't expect INSTANT response. That would be nearly ridiculous in a game with 11+ million players. However, when I come back the next night, and 3 nights later and they're still grinding the same area? That's silly.
-Styopa
more XP- less armor needed.
Very accurate post above. RuneScape is a shell of the game it once was, even if you didn't think much of it before. Free trading was removed and replaced with a system where Jagex decides the values of items - you can no longer "give" a friend anything of value, nor market items properly which was a huge feature of RS for some people.
Wow dude, go get some coffee and read the article before you go all 'FLAME ON'.
...is simple (at least for gold farmers, maybe not actual players).
It's probably not that hard to tell which accounts are the ones farming the gold. They're on 24/7 and doing nothing but making money and sending it to another account. Once you figure out which accounts are the "bank" accounts then just tag where they send their gold to.
Everytime a gold buyer gets money from a bank account, simply take the gold they got from them and send them a message with something along the lines of "The money you received was from a suspected RMT player. We are currently investigating this issue and will release the gold if the results of the investigation prove otherwise."
Now the player can't really complain that they bought the gold or else they'd just be admitting to it. However they basically gave away money for nothing and most likely wont be doing that again. Any attempts to ask about the status of the investigation will just be met with "the investigation is still underway and we have no ETA on its completion."
Once word gets around that buying gold is just a waste of money then players will stop (either buying gold or the game itself). Once players stop buying gold then the RMT will leave since they wont have any customers.
agreed.
"they lost 10 per cent of their membership"
"it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players,"
correct me if I am wrong, but 2 million out of 4 million would be 50%, correct?
If exchanging resources outside your game for resources inside your game is a problem, then your game is hopelessly broken. From the perspective of the game world, there is no difference between me selling a pile of gold to a client, and me giving a pile of gold to a friend.
Game designers should design healthy economies in their games, and stop generating money out of thin air and developing money sinks to try and remove it. This type of design is why many games have problems with hyper-inflation.
Finally, stop developing boring games. I've stopped playing them myself... if I walk/run/do nothing for 10 minutes in a row in any game, I uninstall it and throw it away. If I hear that a game won't pass that test, I don't buy it. If game designers are concerned that players 'use up' their content too quickly, work to design content with high replay value instead of artificially dragging out the game to try and earn more monthly fees.
Until I saw this article I really hadn't given it much thought... but subtle changes they've made to WoW seem to have limited gold farming/selling in the game.
As we know, the best gear typically drops in instances or is gathered through pvp achievements, not stuff you can simply buy (unless you buy the whole account). The newest expansion only has 1 or 2 rep turn ins, whereas in the past just about every faction had a collectable (and tradeable) item that could be turned in for rep. Also, gold is easy to come by on it's own, daily quests can be completely rather quickly in most cases, and grind materials appear to drop in greater abundance.
The end result is the game has been made easier, but it's also taken away much of the alure gold famers may have had. Sure there are still some, there will always be a market.. but to be honest if you can only spend 30 minutes a day playing, it's still enough time to make around 100g.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I am a former "hard core" gamer, in my youth I spent many, many hours getting deeply immersed in game worlds. I can't do that anymore, because life puts other demands on your time when you grow up. So I don't play those games anymore. I enjoy games more casually. A quick game of Grid Wars or Zookeeper is good fun for me, and I just can't get into something like GTA or Final Fantasy, let alone games like WoW or Everquest.
The only way I think I could possibly justify sinking that much time into those games would be if it made me money somehow. It'd be nice if gold selling and item selling could be implemented in such a fashion that didn't detract from gameplay, somehow.
I don't see why making money from playing a game is inherently bad, though certainly much bad can come out of it, depending on how it's done.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I bought 20k gold in WoW from a real-life friend so I could get a tundra mount.
The guy is under-employed yet has loads of time to play WoW. I'm in a well-playing job that saps a lot of my allegedly off time. So we both have what the other needs. An ideal situation. He needed real-life money to pay his car insurance. I got to help a guy out without the person feeling the shame of begging for a handout, and I got a cool mount that says I'm in-game rich (or in-game foolish)
What I find interesting is Second Life. In that "game" real-life to linden dollar exchanges happen all the time and it's sanctioned -- and there's not a lot of rich people in that world. Most people are still in-world poor because they don't want to spend real-life money on it. I'm amazed at how many people will camp in a place for one linden dollar for 15 minutes. My wife has a "job" as a night-club hostess that pays $75 linden an hour. The current exchange rate is around $260 lindens to a real US dollar!
Make part of the game hunting down the paid players and robbing them. Take away the profit motive using the ability for the real players to innovate. This is what happens in real life. People work their whole lives saving their money in retirement accounts and the banks swoop in and rob them.
There is always a demand for currency, both in the real world and the games.
I have a respectable 60kg total over 3 servers in WoW. I can buy almost any item I want, but I can't buy the levels or the raid experience.
Think of it like this. If tomorrow Blizzard said that all mobs in the game will now suddenly drop 100x the amount of gold they have before guess what the prices of merchandise on the AH will do? I'd say about 100x increase. Anyone could suddenly go kill a mob and get 50g to buy a stack of potions or whatever at the old AH price.
People take the path of least resistance. In the world of MMORPGs, they buy Gold. In the real world, there's 2 choices.
1. For those that need instant gratification, they work at WalMart making $9/hour forever at a job.
2. For those that plan ahead they go to college, get a degree, and then make $30+/hour in a career.
MMORPGs are built almost entirely on instant gratification. You don't start a quest on level 2 and are still working on it at lvl 80. Instant gratification falls into the 'buy gold online' persona.
Why are people surprised/disgusted that MMORPGs attract the 'instant gratification' personalities, and then deliberately scold them for having those traits?
I'll start by saying, whether or not it adds any credibility to what I write, I'm currently ranked in the top 8,000 players with a 2,109 total skill level and over 158 million experience points. You can do the math on the amount of time I've put into the game with 40,000-50,000 experience points that you can earn on average per hour...
They only got half the story with the part about the account bannings in RuneScape.
RuneScape has two levels of accounts, free to play, which is ad supported, and members, which is paid by a small monthly fee.
First of all, they did lose half their active accounts. However, they only lost ten percent of their members. This means that they mainly lost their free accounts, which as most of the members regard as a drain on company resources. So while they lost a lot of accounts, they lost the accounts they could afford to lose.
Besides the accounts that have active players, they also "lost" many thousands of gold farming accounts that were either bots or gold farmers selling cash. Those players and bots were taking up space that legitimate players were trying to use to get some enjoyment out of the game.
Also, the gold sellers were stealing accounts to sell the gold, items on the account and leave a pittance of junk to sell with the account itself. They were also using many stolen credit card numbers to pay for gold farming accounts, which caused Jagex even more problems in sorting. This wasn't just a ingame issue, this was something that in another year or two could cause the company to go bankrupt.
You can read more about their reasoning and their response at the article they wrote about it on their website: http://www.runescape.com/kbase/view.ws?guid=diary06
Now the question is what Jagex has left... I would say that in the changes that they made they really removed most the trolls and players who generally make your gameplay miserable. This leaves the players who are just in it for the fun. Personally, I find the average player to be much more mature and pleasant in the last year since they enforced those changes.
As the examples I see mentioned many times in the articles about high leveled executives or people with "real lives" being the ones to buy the gold, that might be the case in WoW, but it's certainly not the case in runescape. The gold buyers in runescape weren't the players who actually make your gameplay better, they were the kids, usually not even at the minimum age of 13 required to play, who generally went around making everybody else's lives miserable. I can say with much passion both "good riddance" and "don't let the door hit you on your way out."
As far as the loss of game features, Jagex is steadily bringing back replacements for the content that they had to remove, especially the player vs player content. There was a pvp area in every world which was a primary potential source for item/gold selling with the trade restrictions that they added, so they had to remove that area. That was the main source of discontent. To replace that there's now pvp worlds, which have proved to be massively popular as well as several other pvp minigames.
Now, will the new updates likely satisfy the players who whined and complained in the forums for months after the updates? I don't think so. They wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a return to the game as it was before the radical changes, but I sincerely believe that if Jagex did that then the game would not exist in another year.
Last point is that Jagex claims their new MMO that they're working on, MechScape, is designed in such a way as to minimize the hated grinding and to eliminate the need for gold selling. Needless to say, I'm very interested in seeing what they have to offer.
When I was still gaming on a regular basis, I came up with the idea that in WoW a simple solution would be the following. Most if not all Gold sellers are using lvl 1 characters, and, most if not all use the words or combination of words, Gold, 1000, $xx.xx and some web address in their shout outs. By combining these variables with the current ability of people in game to tag players as spamming, it would be fairly easy to turn a character into a killable target if it passes a certain spam score. Let's say three spam tags and at least 2 key words. It then becomes a game to kill the Gold sellers.
The other thing would be to make it impossible for any character on a trial account, or under a certain minimum level from entering any city.
When Gold sellers have to pay $15 a month to create characters who have to be played up to level 10 before they can get into a city and keep getting killed the second they shout out, it becomes more of a cost then a benefit.
Oh, and to all you mages out there, and I am one, stop porting lvl 1 characters to cities.
flinging poop since 1969
I don't see anything contradictory in those two statements. The first statement values compassion, the second one doesn't value a game's rules. I disagree with the second one, but it's not contradictory.
You are correct that they aren't contradictory. However, they aren't exactly consistent either.
Grind is a way of content extension. Even if you have a lot of content like in most RPGs the tendency is to extend that content via grind.
And actually the grind itself does also serve a few other purposes. It allows for things to be rare. If while your grinding you find an BOE Epic, the WoW term for a very rare drop, it's fun because it almost never happens. But if you were finding BOP Epics every hour or so they would lose their meaning. (And yeah they devalued the hell out of Epics past 1.x but still.)
It also gives you a chance to get familiar with your classes abilities. Not everyone who plays MMOs are gaming savants. In fact most people are average gamers at best. They need that repetitive grind to teach them how to play.
The majority of the problem I see with the grind is making sure it is appropriate to the amount of content you have. When in WoW the level cap was 60 it was just about right. But when they expanded the level cap to 70 grinding up to 70 got very annoying in the 1-60 content. So they, eventually, made the 1-60 grind shorter and then people were ok with it again.
Eventually, we'll get through the current group of addictees and everyone will be looking for fun instead of addiction. At that point, there's going to be a HUGE market for fun MMOs. In fact, there's probably already a pretty nice market as it is.
Fun is a very relative term. While I do really understand why someone like you would prefer MMOs with less of a grind I hope you will understand that the grind does serve a purpose. And that to remove all grind in favor of non-stop fun would not be exactly the type of 'pure fun MMO' that you might think it would be.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
This sort of stuff, trading real world cash for virtual world goods, is only "bad" in subscription MMOs. "Pay per play" model games are designed to trade money for game performance (which is what is going on with buying gold) while subscription models trade time for performance. Or in other words, introducing "gold farmers" to that and it throws off the balance of the content. Instead of someone's carefully designed content taking 6 months to consume, with gold farmers in full force, they can do it much faster leaving the producer and game designers in a lurch.
I personally think "gold sellers" are a nuisance only because they generate a cacophony of noise in public spaces and communication channels. There is a reason why we have ad-block on web browsers where now we need such a thing in these games. However, I don't think using the "banning hammer" is the right approach where the smarter idea is to make progression less depending on storing up a huge pile of gold and more about giving worthwhile experiences win or lose. A great game should be able to allow someone who is "a pauper" and "a prince" to consume the same content if they are both skilled players.
Ok, I work for a bank in full disclousure.
First off Gold Farming is really what we call "Foreign Trade". What you have in an MMO is a system where people manufacture goods and services at various costs.
You have an intrinsic value on your time. Looking at the US lets say your game time is worth $5 an hour (e.g. Given a choice of making $4.50 an hour working a second job you would instead play a game but given the opportunity to make $6 an hour you would work the second job.)
So lets say you can make 100 GP in an hour. Your manufactured good is $5 for 100 GPs.
Now the gold farmer comes in and his time is $0.35 and hour and can make the 100 GPs.
Right off the bat we can see you can go work the $6 an hour job AND get the 100 GP you normally would have, coming out ahead. This is the basis for what the real problem is, a system of Foreign Exchange Inport\Export.
Now you can make 100 GP an hour at $5 each hour (production cost) but the gold farmer can do it for $0.35 for 100 gold.) THE ARGUMENT YOU ARE ALL MAKING IS NO DIFFERENT THEN NIKE SHOES BEING MADE FOR .38 A DAY IN THAILAND VERUS MINIMUM WAGE IN THE US!
This is simply a problem (if at all) of cheap labor. The same problem we find in cheap "Made in China" products and the issues with that (Melemine, Lead, etc.) are reflected in the game world (Hacked accounts, bots, etc.). P.S. Accounts were getting hacked and stripped long before gold farmers so that point is moot.
I don't see anyone boycotting cheap "Made in China" goods, the cost is too good to pass up on. The same goes for time. The only people that protest "Made in China" are overpaid union types using a air ratchet putting on a bolt for $45 an hour and we can see how well their fantasy played out in the auto industry can't we?
Whenever you have an economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper. Time and time again we wax over the whole gold farming issue but most of us are hypocrites in this discussion.
If Gold is really nothing more then Time then effectively gold farmers are selling time... cheap. I once hired my neighbor's son to farming gold for me. $10 for $1000 gold. If he was in China you'd be pissed, my neighbor, not an issue.
Gold farming is nothing but a reflection of xenphobic hate and resistance to normal economics. I have bad news, most of us have an inflated view of our worth. A Mc. Donalds clerk isn't worth minimum wage. Period. Nothing more then an unsustainable goverment mandate that created a MASSIVE DEMAND for sub-minimum wage labor across the globe.
The very fact you have cheap gold also means the market is flooded with goods that would normally be scarce. Gold Farming causes inflation but the influx of goods far outpaces the inflation. When WoW first came out there were few purples in the AH. When the farmers came, I've never NOT found a piece of gear I wanted to buy. The inflation is kept in check that no matter how hard they try there are still only 24 hours a day and only X number of people farming. Productivity will platue and create a fixed exchange of time\gold\dollars. The only way to push productivity\better margin is through shady shit but that is a small % of the workforce. DAOC had it right with diminishing returns on camping locations (albiet in exp). If you can script something in a game, your doing something wrong in your game. Period.
Unlike the real world there is not a central bank or governments that can shape the inflation and control deflation of currency. What MMOs need is to legitimize the RMTs and tax them to all hell. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING PER THE IRS: BARTERED TRANSACTIONS ARE TAXABLE. Literally when you buy gold you are trading money for service (some states do not tax services) but if MMO currency is considered an asset with a value then it is a taxable transaction. Keep that in mind when you think about the rights to your digital "assets". I'll trade you the "Sword of Doom" for 400 Gold + 22 GP in tax. The IRS
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You can keep 'grind' for getting rares without requiring it to level up. In fact, Guild Wars has done just that.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
...embracing the unavoidable?
I think it is a good thing. But I would never link my ingame currency to any of those debt-based currencies (like the dollar) or (totally fake) nothing-based currencies (like the euro).
I would link my ingame currency directly to gold. Thereby stopping it from going down with the rest of the "real" world (debt-based) economy.
I would even print warehouse bonds (= paper money, same as the old, gold-based dollars) so they could be used in the real world.
Oh, and to avoid people gaming the software, the whole ingame economy would be controlled by a server-side-only interface/api, developed with the same methods that high-security banks develop their systems with, and with as little api complexity as possible (to avoid accidental bugs.)
And then I'd watch, how it takes over the dollar, as a more reliable normal every-day currency. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
...are you thinking the same thing that I'm thinking, Pinky? ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
and look up "literal" in the dictionary.
Here we go again.
literally - 2 : in effect : virtually - Merriam Webster
However, as we read in the article, the first and more popularly accepted definition is, in fact, correct:
literally - 1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually
I keep thinking it would be fun within the game to have the developers target known and confirmed gold spammers (this has to be done completely reliably) and mark them with a unique and characteristic stigma visible to all. The gold spammer would then be subject to attack by any and all players in game, and when killed, would drop a great item (or gold) that could only be obtained through killing a gold spammer. It's just a thought, there are many problems with this idea (what if a player were wrongly identified as a gold spammer? It will happen) but gold spammer hunts could be a fun and widely played aspect of an MMORPG that exercised such a policy. People would be arranging to buy gold to identify spammers just to kill them (in some games). Their business could shrivel on the vine depending on how actively other players hunt them. I see something like the mob scenes in old Frankenstein movies carrying torches and pitchforks.
Maybe I have too much faith in people or something? But my first thought was, "Who the hell WOULD pay anything for an extra queen in a game of chess, or for some extra letter E's in Scrabble?"
I just don't see what the big "thrill" is in winning a game, when you know you didn't do so by the same rules your opponents were playing by?
That's like rejoicing in victory in a war where your enemy came after you with flyswatters and you mowed them all down with tanks.
If you threw in financial motivations to win, then I might understand it. (Let's say, for example, winning this Scrabble tournament would give you a quick $25,000. Then, I bet a LOT of people might be happy to pay a few bucks under the table for some spare, choice letter tiles.) In that case, you're talking about the money becoming the primary motivator, NOT the sense of achievement itself that would come with winning.
But generally, with a game like WoW, you don't get PAID to play well. You PAY for the privilege of using it in the first place!
Model the game to make it easier to rob people who suddenly get lots of money.
You can keep 'grind' for getting rares without requiring it to level up. In fact, Guild Wars has done just that.
There are always different ways to do different things. I just gave one example of where the grind can be used. Others:
While grinding a pathing mob comes your way and your forced to fight 2 things at once. (Or more, you get the idea.)
While grinding on a PvP type server you run into hostile PCs. (And trust me I'm not a fan at all of griefing/ganking/whatever you want to call it. I believe that, and have implemented systems in my old NWN modules, there are ways to fix that problem but the point is more about grinding putting you 'out there' subject to PvP actions.)
And I think something important that I did not mention. Grinding itself is viewed by some as fun. The right kind of grinding really. Parts of the AQ40 gate opening event grind was...awful in WoW. I got as far as making 'the Bobber' when I called it quits. (TBC was about to hit.) However there were a number of fun parts of the grind that gave the whole questline itself a very epic feeling.
I'm not looking to defend all MMO grinds. Rather just pointing out that I think that 'grinding' has a bit more nuance than most people fully understand.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What MMO were you playing in 1994?
Addiction: I don't think that word means what you think it means...
There is no stopping real money trade. The best you can do is regulate it so people don't get screwed. Eve Online achieved this by allowing players to buy and sell time cards in game.
You're right that it's screwed up that players have to put in obscene amounts of time to get the items legit. That gets people aggravated, as it probably should. Since players can't change the game design, bots & farming seem like a readily available solution, but you're right in saying that such a solution has its own problems.
So if you wanna keep playing, you're stuck either way.
I've played a bunch of non-RPG online games (a few of the browser-based ones), and I notice a similar pattern, not quite as intense, but definitely still very noticeable.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I found this a while back: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement :)
The variable reward/schedule reinforcement describes WoW to a T. It's part of the reason why I stop playing for extended time periods - occasionally, I do remember that WoW is nothing but a 3D chat interface designed for maximum addiction. Other times, I just give in.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I really enjoyed "playing the auction house" while I was playing WoW. In the end, it's the only road to building massive wealth. I had an important role in a largish endgame WoW guild, even as an undergeared player. I was the guild market-watcher; basically, my mission, along with the "morning guy," was to keep the guild bank afloat. I played as a full-time "logistics" grunt, making sure that everyone had the mats, faction items, and raw gold they needed to spend more time raiding and less time doing character maintenance of various sorts. And, I stress, I enjoyed it at least as much as the raiders enjoyed raiding; I got most of the social value in terms of chatting and reciprocal appreciation, without worrying about running my own character up to a "best-in-all-slots" template (although, when I quit, I had a couple characters almost as well-geared as the high-DKP, 3-raids-a-week-come-hell-or-high-water folks).
Knowing what things "really should cost" is a fundamental prerequisite for capitalistic success. Add to that "how to make things cost what they ought to cost," and you've got a future on Wall Street. Don't belittle the skill; appraisal is a respected talent in any sphere, because it requires a fair bit of knowledge about both the object in question and the markets available for that object. The other thing to realize is that at the upper end, a very significant amount of economic activity goes on through established relationships between interested parties, not the auction house or even the public channels. It's simply smarter to make predictable deals on high-end goods and services than to wait it out on the open market, hoping to get lucky and find some high-level person fishing around in need of a quick cash bolus. My job was not just, "put everything on the market at a price, and wait to see what sells;" it involved prediction of highs and lows, and getting onto the market when maximum profits could be accrued. By keeping in touch with a circle of tradeskillers, I could estimate the best time to dump a high-level load of ore or cloth; by watching the open market and looking at the newbie trade goods, I could figure out when a fresh wave of newbies were drilling their way up toward the middle levels of their tradeskills, which would be when I could both clear out my less-valuable goods, and make first contact with more rising players. Add to that some watching for underpriced rares (icing on the cake), and direct deals made with people building "twinks" for various levels of battleground play (sprinkles on the icing, as it were), and you have an idea of what I was doing for the three years I played. Probably the most bot-like thing I did was use several alts to check for some rare vendor items in a few places; occasionally, I would monopolize those resources pretty thoroughly, but that's peanuts compared to leaving a bot sitting around zapping a quest mob every 10 minutes for hours on end, pulling out a heap of rare drops that would subsequently show up in a public channel or the AH, grossly mispriced.
Let me say this clearly. Don't you dare lump me in with the gold farmers. I was playing the markets to win, but I had no hidden agenda. I was KNOWN as the supplier for my guild, people knew I was interested in turning a profit, and we all got along just fine, for the most part. I hope, for your sake, that you were using an intermediary to pay for anything you purchased (you didn't just GIVE them your CC info, did you?), and that you didn't give them your personal account information, no matter what.
[ACisRanting=FALSE]
One of the things I discovered when I broke the addiction is that it's actually more fun when a game has a finite life cycle. I can now play a fun and massively less addicting new game every 3 months for the monetary price of playing an MMORPG.
The social and addiction prices are not measurable.
"When people try to play MTG and other CCG's like a money game, they quickly lose the ability to play with ordinary players and get stuck in their own brackets even at tournaments."
Myself, I'm an MtG player who's starting to get into the lower rungs of the tournament scene
What exactly do you mean by 'money game'?
Paying the crazy quantity of money to buy tournament-caliber cards?
The 'stuck in their own brackets even at tournaments.' part I'm not clear on the meaning of either.
You need to shell out to play competitive tournament MTG (generally), sure.
How do they "lose their ability to play with ordinary players?".
Do you mean that some players end up being ultra-competitive a-holes? I don't doubt that that happens, but I say 'not necessarily'.
Do you mean that the competitive tourney players' decks simply outclass the noncompetitive players', leading to unfun games? Yeah, can happen.
However:
* I find myself maintaining separate nontournament decks for purposes like these (and because they have cool themes)
* Some tournament forums, specifically Standard, place restrictions on your card pool. A quality Standard deck versus an average deck with a fairly unrestricted card pool can still be interesting. (Of course, a quality deck with an unrestricted card pool would whoop ass)
Skilled cardgame players are still going to beat unskilled players; it's not solely a factor of the
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
But you can't get that comfortable steady stream of income on a fun MMO where people play for a few months and then quit. You can on an addictive MMO though.
At the end of the day, nobody makes a fun MMO, because a fun MMO isn't as profitable as an addictive one. Fun MMO's are, well essentially the multiplayer portion of any regular game.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
I never understood why the game makers just go don't go "buy" the gold from the gold sellers and remove the gold from the game and contest the charge on paypal. Do that enough and the gold sellers will stop making real money and the in game gold just vanishes. This solves both the farming gold issue and the issue of people who find hacks in game to dup gold. So long as some one is willing to buy the gold for real money, then there will be some one willing to sell it. You've got to remove the ability of the gold sellers to make profit.
Meridian 59 was around in '96, can't think of anything earlier.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=Nordrassil&n=nekidexplorr
level 14 through exploration- NO gear
(ok, 6 quests completed,before I decided to make it completely masochistic)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I still wonder why game developers don't just add in-game currency as an item in their malls/stores. Granted, it could screw up the game's economy if no counter-balances are set up, but it would make outside currency selling an unviable business, cater to players who can't spend time farming for gold, and clean up chat channels of tradetalk spam considerably. just my 2 coppers' worth of opinion.
Sold gold isnt usually farmed, its stolen from hacked accounts.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
While I did experiment briefly with Merdian 59, Sierra's The Realm was the one I was addicted to.
I said 12-15 years because I didn't remember the exact date. 13 years is well within that timeframe.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
How many people do you think would pay extra money to get an extra queen in chess?
And yet, you can't. The rules of chess are designed in such a way that it is not possible
(...)
But how are MMOs designed? A level 1 player cannot compare to a level 100 player.
It's the MMO business model. Reward people for spending time in a way that keep them subscribed for as long as possible.
Scrabble and chess can only be compared with FPS and RTS games. You keep nothing from the previous game except knowledge and skill as a player.
I lost my sig.
Gold selling is a joke in WAR. Mythic has basically solved the problem by making BOE epics below rank 40 only about 4-5 ranks better than their blue or green counterparts. Not only that, but many of them are terribly itemized. Like it's epic, but has the same strength and weapon skill as the blue and just tacks on 20 Willpower so you get some .5% extra spell disrupt chance. There's nothing to buy in the game save a 15g mount. You'll have 20g at rank twenty, even if you buy every green rvr vendor item for which you qualify and dye most of it; just turn in your do Scenario X and Kill 20 players quests which are in every Warcamp (where everyone hangs out anyway at low ranks, they are by the RVR lakes and have the flight masters in them).
At rank 40 what can you buy with tons of gold that others can't? Super rare dyes that many people don't even like (like Uglu Grey and Skull White; people do like Chaos Black but it's dropped in price somewhat since 1.2).
You can afford more epic talismans than most people. People normally have 5 tali slots (you can have 7 in most cases, 8 in an extremely rare case). The only talis worth anything anymore are wounds and strength due to changes to scavenging (other epics hover in value between 20-50g, +18 and +19s anyway). Toughness also arguably has value, but I rarely see any made or sold. Suppose you can afford whatever you want, vs. people buying the +16 5 day talis and a few epics, on average you'd have 9-12 more of your primary stat than another player. That's 9-12 out of 700-1100. Most profession buffs range around +100 to a stat, so we're talking about a pretty small number here. +16, 5 day talismans go for 10-40g depending on the stat and last for 5x24 hours of actual play time (they don't tick down while you're offline). They'll last even hardcore players nearly 2 weeks and a month or two for a really casual player.
Potions are dirt cheap, I'm still using the ones I dropped 40g on a month ago. 20x1 hour long liniments are maybe 10g (these would be the WOW equivalent of flasks). The only expensive ones are the ressurection potions (15-20g per), and high rank guilds can use their guild standard to res. All healing professions have a decent res now since WPs (and presumably DoKs) got theirs shortened.
BOE set pieces do sometimes go for a lot on the AH, but if you don't already have the other pieces to go with it you are sometimes better off with a blue or a different, theorectically lower, set piece in its place. Plus more of them drop than are actually needed so you can pretty much sell or trade the one not for your class that you lucked out and got for the one you need. Many guilds also just stack these in the guild bank and hand them out as people reach the appropriate rank and gear level to use them. I've not paid for a single one, though I will probably pony up for Conq belt the next time I see one available. Otherwise I have every single one for my main through Dark Promise (the current top end, well, I don't have Warlord or Invader boots, don't think I've ever even seen Ironbreaker ones and couldn't equip the former regardless - I suppose most of my legitimate stash of cash would go towards buying a pair if they ever popped up, but I'd not be much poorer in my game enjoyment if I never got the chance).
To sum up, gold is currently being spammed hard by spammers in WAR and the price seems to be around 7-9 bucks per 1000 gold (that is more gold than most people will spend in 6 months), down from 15 bucks a month ago. At rank 30 and above killing 25 players is worth 1.75g for a quest turn in, basically you get these quest turn ins not by farming, but by doing the RVR that is the point of the game anyway; i.e. what you're already doing! Gold just isn't a problem in WAR unless you want to buy really expensive dyes, there's just nothing else to spend it on.
I fully support RMT where ever it has no detriment to other players progress. In some games farmers make the game unplayable due to open persistant worlds and hogging a certain mob or boss. I think to some extent WOW has this pegged by making looting even and instance based.
I had a great RMT experience in EVE this weekend, the company I dealt with to provide 1.5billion ISK went to some extrodinary lengths to launder the money I received. I was given a location to go to and advised to travel light. I was greeted on approach to the location by a small fleet of frigates and a battleship who escorted me to a final location before we got there we were wiped out and podded by another group. I was informed to regroup and we again met the same group I was given 5 soft targets to destroy all worth various amounts totalling 1.5bil with no resistance as a bonus I was reimburst a T2 Frigate and full set of higher quality implants via a corporation contract with a thank you mail from their CEO. I had fun and my discretion is totally assured. Excellent value for $15. EVE is taking a step in the right direction with PLEX meaning peopole can trade real money for game money and game money for subscription extension, the only problem is the exchange rate stinks.
RMT is a love hate affair the games where farmers spam chat channels etc annoy me if I want the services I know where to look but it is scary how professional some of the services are, top league players and guilds being able to pool resource to create a massive money making machine and the conditions in which some of them work in are dire but I have also seen organisations running very professional office based outfits aswell. If I'm not mistaken IGE is one such company. Theres a pretty intersting documentary on google videos about RMT