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.

Comments

Re:Gold selling is a good idea

[MozzleyOne]

Because if you could do that, anyone could have anything they wanted whenever they want it, and that's what makes a game shitty.

But gold doesn't get you everything you want, even now. MMO's almost never let you just buy the best items from gear. The only 2 avenues to getting the best gear in WoW are raiding and PvP - there are really no good items you can just buy. If you dumped 500,000 gold on my WoW character now, the only thing that would change is I would stop having to farm gold. My character wouldn't be better, no-one else would be affected - I'd just have more fun. Imagine if no-one needed to farm gold - you could just log on and start doing what you wanted to do.

PS - Get auctioneer and put in 10 minutes when you log on, you'll have plenty of money in no time. It's not like it takes any real effort.

I don't want to put in 10 unfun minutes when I log in. I don't want to NOT have fun when I play a GAME. I want to log in, have fun and then log off. Why do we need to do unfun things before fun things in MMO's? I do things I don't like in order to get things I do like in my everyday job. There's no boring, unfun grind in FPS or RTS games before you can start having fun.

Re:Gold selling is a good idea

[smallfries]

That's a really good description of an optimal reward-schedule for addiction. Of course, most (all?) people can't distinguish between addiction and fun, hence the huge popularity.

I tried to find a decent description of this on the web (I remember reading an old analysis of how to optimise the payback in slot machines that went into reward schedules) but failed. This is the closest that I could find. The main point it makes is that tedium is essential to addiction. It serves to highlight the non-tedious bits and space out the rewards randomly. Nice to hear a personal, non-clinical, description of it for a change.

Eve solved this problem

[bigmacd24]

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)

Re:Gold selling is a good idea

[Talderas]

I could use alternate ways to make money, but I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost. That's flat out wrong. And anti-gold farmers complain about my ethics?

Gold farmers -rarely- just straight up farm gold off of monsters. They use auction houses, they don't just take advantage of people not knowing how much something should cost, but they also have a tendency to inflate prices.

Take Final Fantasy XI. You don't get much gil from monsters, or from selling items (which makes me wonder how the gil is generated in the first place), but rather you make your money from selling goods on the auction house. In FFXI, gil sellers would camp NMs to get their loot to sell on the auction house for ludicrous prices. They essentially jacked up the prices for most rare loot items. The money they made from selling the items is then sold to players, which is used to buy the aforementioned up-priced item. If the player tries to farm the mob on his own, then he has to compete with the gil sellers (who were good at camping NMs) and other players looking for the mob. When Square finally put their foot down on gil sellers you saw a marked deflation in prices.