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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.
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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.
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!
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.
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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 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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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)
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?
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
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