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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.
Yup, pretty much they made a system better than ISK farmers could do. They win the fight :)
Unfortunately they still bring their servers down in the middle of aussie prime time every night, so won't be collecting my money.
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This sounds a lot like what Puzzle Pirates did with "doubloons": a second in-game currency, used to buy game badges (i.e. subscriptions), which you can purchase with real money or trade on a market for the main in-game currency (pieces of eight). Players with more money than time can buy doubloons and sell them for POE; players with more time than money can collect POE and trade for doubloons to extend their subscriptions.
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Every (successful) MOG that I know of has this problem, and most of them go rampaging off down the wrong track: waggling their banstick at anyone who does things that actual humans will inevitably do.
Prohibiting real world trades is both laughable futile, and self destructive. Companies that do it are punishing their paying players and themselves: it's truly lose-lose. I'm glad to see that CCP have finally figured this out, and stopped punching themselves in the balls.
The question that I have is: why did it take them so long to get smart, and why wasn't this designed in from the start?
It's not a trite question. So many MOG developers seem to plan to fail, by assuming that they can control how their (paying) playerbase chooses to play the game and interact with each other. News flash: if your game is actually successful, then you'll have so many players that you will not be able to police them manually. That is a good thing, and a situation that you should aim to reach.
This covers security and exploits, account trading and sharing, and real world transactions. If your game has enough players to pay your salary, it has enough players that someone will exploit or explore any mechanism that you provide, and they will come up with their own alternatives to any mechanism that you don't provide.
If they get hurt through real world trading, then there's no point in you whinging that it's prohibited. It was going to happen, and it will continue to happen until you suck it up and give them a better alternative.
You can either design on this basis - i.e. plan for success - or you can play catch up, paying money to patch the game while losing subscriptions across your entire playerbase as you go - from those who hate the "exploits" that you left in, and those who hate having their "exploits" taken away as you remove them one at a time.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Why? So new players could never possibly catch up?
One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.
One of the key reasons why MMOs eventually crumble was always inflation and the problem associated with it for new players. You wanted to have X. X costs 2000 $money when you start. So you start hacking and playing and finally you have 2000 $money. By that time it costs 4000. You continue the grind, you have 4000. It costs 8000 by now. Will you continue? Or notice that you'll NEVER have the money to buy it and play with the "big boys"?
Inflation has never hurt gold sellers. Quite the opposite, inflation drove people to them because they noticed they couldn't get the money they need with normal means (i.e. farming themselves), they pretty much had to buy money from goldsellers to get whatever they wanted to have.
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It is something that EVE Online gets *almost* right.
The limitation that markets are only region wide means that there are a few dozen markets within hi-sec. Plus goods have to be physically moved, which means that goods can gain/lost value solely on distance.
Where EVE Online gets it wrong is the 0.01 ISK undercutting due to region-wide buy orders.
(Buy orders should change offered price based on distance from the buy order actual location. Even for region-wide buy orders. This would allow more competition and allow smaller buyers to compete against the big sellers because there would be more niches where the smaller buyers could offer a better buy price.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I have 4 accounts to play Eve online. I was involved with a friend that participated in trading items and accounts for real money. I had no idea it was going on and because of my close workings with him within our corporation, my accounts were banned and CCP has not taken the time to listen to my side of the story.
I still have 3 petitions opened and one has been responded to with a senior GM stating the one account will remain permanently banned.
They have become rabid in their persuit of stopping the RL money issues and innocent people are being harmed. I consider Eve one of my hobbies and after 3.5 years they arbatrairly destroyed that work.
If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you.
When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.
Inflation happens when the ratio of money (ISK) to stuff you can buy (resources) increases. You can accomplish this by increasing the supply of currency while keeping the number of resources the same, or by maintaining a constant supply of currency but decreasing the number of resources. Either way, your 1 ISK buys a smaller number of resources than it did before. To buy the same number of resources, you will have to pay more ISK.
So ship destruction is an inflationary process. But it's actually even more inflationary than that, because you get an insurance payment in ISK when your ship blows up. The insurance money is not provided by other players; it is magiked into the game by an NPCs. The supply of resources decreases AND the supply of ISK increases, all at the same time.