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EVE Online's Fight Against Currency Farmers
Massively has a writeup discussing the way CCP Games is battling ISK-farmers in EVE Online (ISK is the game's currency). The developers felt that merely banning sellers whenever they could was not enough, so they introduced a system where players could purchase game-time codes that could then be sold within the game to other players. Since players are unlikely to give up buying ISK voluntarily, CCP's thought is that they can at least keep the money and currency distributed among the real players. Some of the player-base has been critical of the plan, but it's becoming more and more popular as time goes on — and the old ISK-sellers aren't pleased.
Taiwan has recently been hit with a devastating typhoon. Some of the pictures show devastation similar to New Orleans after Katrina.
So, yeah, I'm glad I live here where I can worry about some schmuck in his basement spending his allowance on Eve Online and not over there where landslides are causing whole towns to disappear.
There was a supernova in NGC 1559 just a few days ago. Whole towns disappear? Try whole planets.
It's a big world, you know? Worrying about things that happen a thousand miles or a million light years away is just as much a luxury as spending your time playing some game.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The way I look at it is that basically you're working for 12-15 hours and the pay you get is $30, which isn't exactly impressive if you compare it with other jobs (i.e. if you take a weekend job every other week and use that money to buy play time.)
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant.
But trepidation of the spheres,
though greater far, are innocent.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Well, yeah... but that point could be made of just about any aspect of life, so is kind of moot. To say we shouldn't be concerned about X because of Y is a popular logical fallacy, or just subtle trolling :P
People get pretty pissed when you cheat in multiplayer - this includes RL games as well. If you actually publish a MMO, you would be pretty bloody concerned about it too. If the impression that your game was wide open to abuse spread, you would find yourself without players. For a one-trick pony like CCP that would be the end of the story.
CCP have successfully structured the "rules" of the "game" to make traditional gold farming uncompetitive. This is interesting from a sociological point of view as much as from the perspective of a gamer.
I think alot of farmers heavily exploited the duplicate bug with POS silo's.
After CCP closed the exploit (and pwned the players who abused it), ISK prices went up to 3-5 times the standard rate.
From about 12USD per 500mio ISK, to about 40 USD now.
It makes GTC worth it now, and i think it was CCP's plan all along (not that there's anything wrong with that).
Indeed. 12-13:00 GMT is in the middle of the day in Iceland, and doesn't clash with EU and US timezone players. Sure, you could have an 'out of hours' downtime, but ... well, there's a lot to be said for having daily D/T when everyone's fresh, alert and in work.
Personally, I never understood why someone would want to buy money in an MMO...
I've bought MMO money, and did it because I have already spent way too much of my life farming cash in meatspace for it ever to be fun in a game.
The absolutely last thing I want to do when I finally get some computer-based relaxation time is a pretend job. My gaming time is limited and I want to cut straight to the fun parts.
-- Nick "Hallo this is Beel Gates, und I pronounce weendows as
As someone who does buy money in an MMO, permit me to share with you why I do it - I've been playing EVE for something like 5 years now. Over that time, I've made a lot of ISKs, and have similarly blown up collossal chunks of the stuff, playing EVE. I'm currently involved in a fairly active PvP alliance, and am enjoying it immensely. But one of the things about PvPing is that fundamentally, it's a loss making activity - ships die, tend to be expensive, and it's quite rare to reclaim the cost from your combat activity (loot is profitable, but you need a lot of kills to replace one ship, as most 'loot' is destroyed).
So I have a secondary income stream, to finance combat activity - I do industry, and go ratting/missioning to make some isks, to buy new toys, to get back on the front line, which is where I'm have most fun.
However, 'going missioning' takes me time in game, and it's somewhat fun, but I enjoy getting into combat more. So for me, dropping about an hour of overtime pay on 60d GTC for resale, netting me 600mil isks, is equivalent to _not_ spending 20 hours running missions, and instead going and killing pigdogs.
I don't _like_ the real money for in game cash particularly - I think it's somewhat unfair. But none the less, as the option exists, I'll use it. EVE is one of the few games that is 'self balancing' there though - a bad pilot cannot buy the kind of advantage to stop them being a bad pilot. More, they get a bit of an edge, and someone else gets a nice killmail and a pile of valuable loot.
Now, if I were to lose my job, and end up with more EVE time, and less payscale, I'd probably change my mind about it - going the other way and 'playing for free'.
PVPing has to be a net negative, otherwise you have an exploit with friends killing each other and looting more than they lose in total.
The more rewarding (in terms of loot) you make PVPing the more incentive you provide for that "someone is going to kill you in 5 minutes" thing.