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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.
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?
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.
I suppose it's for the same reason they can't sell the gold themselves.
Players who don't want to buy gold feel at a disadvantage and quit.
And when the majority quits, the game dies.
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.
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.
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.
I have to say, I'm incredibly dubious of that bit about Runescape in the summary.
For a start, by what manner of confused mathematics does two million out of four million consitute 10 per cent? Or is the claim that they lost 10% of their paying subscribers, and then a whole ton of players who were not paying them any money anyway? In any case, I think this chart should tell you everything you need to know about how well Jagex has recovered from this "setback". They've shown a considerable growth in the aftermath of the gold selling cull, because gold selling really was having a massively negative effect on the in-game economy. And a current Jagex source tells me that their non-subscriber membership has seen even greater growth. Quite a few of these players then do go on to subscribe. I'm honestly entirely confused as to how anyone could claim that this was somehow a loss for Jagex. In every MMO that I have played, any time the developers have taken action against gold selling, it has been an unequivocal win for the developers, for the players, and for the game as a whole.
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.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
Santa's suicide mission go!
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
~~~
Click here, you know you wanna!
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.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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)
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
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.
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!
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.
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? ]=-
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.
Model the game to make it easier to rob people who suddenly get lots of money.