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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.
Some players want it. In my experience, most hate it.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
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.
Even though it won't be as good as T7, T7.5, or whatever the heck gladiator gear is available this season, you can get some pretty decent stuff by purchasing the materials and finding a trustworthy smith/tailor/leatherworker/jewelcrafter/enchanter. In fact, one of the better maces in the game, is a player made item, the hardest part is obtaining the titansteel.
Of course, there are mounts to be had for achivements, and life is a lot easier with riding skill maxed out.
Gold is definitely an important part of WoW's economy, and having a fast mount to run around areas such as Storm Peaks (with Ulduar coming out soon), Icecrown, and other places makes it actually fun.
To parse that very badly written sentence, you need to know that Jagex calls subscribers 'members' and free players 'non-members'. What the article is trying to say is that is that they lost about 10% of their paying customers and 50% of their non-paying ones.
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I'm sorry but most of the market destruction on my realm is from no-lives who farm up everything then undercut with auctioneer until crafteds pull in less than 1/4 of their mat costs.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
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.
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Second Life has problems with these suits and the courts...
"Problems" as in "Frivolous litigation"... it's stated in the Terms of Service what the Linden Dollar is meant to be and I don't see how text of the terms can be considered illegal, unless you know of some court precedent or piece of legislation I don't.
1.4 Second Life "currency" is a limited license right available for purchase or free distribution at Linden Lab's discretion, and is not redeemable for monetary value from Linden Lab.
http://secondlife.com/corporate/tos.php
I believe you are probably referring to the Bragg v. Linden Lab case in which forced arbitration was ruled out (Also featured on Slashdot). It had more to do with "land ownership" rather than the "limited license right" associated with the "Linden Dollar". The ratio decidendi of this decision has enough significant differences for it to not influence the legal underpinnings of the Linden Dollar, so I'm not really sure about the basis of your opinion unless I've missed something.
There's actually a logical solution to the issue of those with lots of time but little money, and those with lots of money but little time, in the same game. In EVE Online, players can purchase game time (PLEX - Pilot License EXtensions) for real-world money, for about the cost of the standard subscription. They can then sell these in game on an open market - monitored by CCP to prevent abuse, but with pricing based on supply and demand - to other pilots (i.e. the ones with the time to make in game cash). Everybody wins - if you like playing a lot, you never have to pay for your subscription. If you want to be able to sign on at any time, buy a battleship, get into a huge fight, log off at the end, and do it again whenever you get the chance... well, you can do that too, and the game sanctions it.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...