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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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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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%)
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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"?
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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.
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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.
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Developers being cocks? Sorry, I actually facepalmed when I read that. I take it you've never played an MMO? Gold selling thrives in MMOs because, at the end of the day, there is one fundamental truth that applies both in and out of game: (some) people are stupid. Gold selling has a noticeable and significant negative effect on the game. Sometimes this means they've got their bots out keeping a given zone completely barren of mobs, so that any actual players who want to do anything in the zone are unable to do so. Sometimes it means that the gold sellers flood the auction house with the items they have farmed up, meaning that any legitimate player who wants to sell some items for a bit of gold can't do so because the going rate for those items is so low that they can't turn a profit. On the flip side, the people who have bought gold now have so much money that the market price for other (non-farmable) items goes through the roof, meaning that honest players can't afford the things they want. Gold selling absolutely ruins the in-game economy, which makes the game a lot less fun for everybody, and that means the developers lose subscribers. That is why.
In fact, in recent years, things have got even worse. As the developers get better at spotting the behaviour of the gold sellers' farming bots, the gold sellers change tactics. Instead of targeting the game, they target the players - through various trojans and keyloggers and whatnot, they compromise a players account, strip it bare of gold and items, and then sell the proceeds on to other players. Of course when the player discovers this, they immediately go crying to the devs demanding that their items and gold be restored. The dev company then has to spend god knows how much on employing extra customer support staff to deal the player's own lax account security. That is a direct cost to the dev company caused by gold sellers. The claim that the developers are being cocks by protecting the interests of both themselves and the players is laughably ignorant.
Allow me to finish up with a little personal anecdote. An acquaintance of mine in WoW once had his account compromised by gold-sellers. I don't know how, since he's usually a fairly tech-savvy person, but everyone slips up once in a while. The gold sellers stripped his character completely clean, took everything he had, and passed it on. When he finally got his account back, and was waiting for his items to be restored, you know what his first response was? He went straight to the gold sellers and bought some gold, to cover what he had lost. Yup, he went to the very people who had stolen his (imaginary) gold, and paid them real money to get it back. And he never once made the logical connection that the people who had taken his stuff were the same people he was dealing with. The average person really is that stupid.
It's only a minority that actually does buy gold, so you can't even claim that "players want it". But when the developers have to fight an uphill battle against both the gold sellers and that stupid minority, so that they can improve the game for those very same players, you do have to have a bit of respect for what they do.
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The problem is it creates an uneven playing field. Players who can afford to spend real money buying gold get ahead of those who cannot, until it creates a situation where you pretty much have to pay for gold to keep up with the other people in your guild or spend many, many hours grinding. At that point you realise that either you are spending far too much money on the game or far too much time grinding the game and cancel your subscription.
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TFA:
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...
That's not what TFA says at all. I should report you for ellipses abuse.
What the article actually said was that once instance of banning gold buyers and sellers bumped 10% of their users; since then, their efforts have further reduced their player base to about half of what it once was.
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.
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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.
No, the net result is that you can sell a level 15 green-quality sword for 2-3 gold instead of for 20 silver. People with high level characters think nothing of paying a few gold to kit out their latest alt, which means that it's very easy to make gold fast as a lowbie. Hell, stacks of copper ore sell for 20-30g on some servers. My wife recently started her first Alliance-side character, it's now level 23 and has well over 50 gold.
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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.
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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?
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