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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.
I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon. I know a lot of people who spend extra time making money so they can play for free (supplying the ISK in exchange for the GTCs). It creates a nice exchange system.
A 2 month GTC will cost you around 600-650M isk. With a proper setup and the right skills you can easily make this within 12-15 hours (2-3 days of semi casual playing.) - 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.)
Still, if you don't have the money and you do want to play the game, it's a nice way to keep your account(s) running. I definitely think that the GTC trade has made things less interesting for gold miners and that's a good thing. The Eve economy is good, in fact better than most other MMORPGs I've been playing.
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.
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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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Men reckon what it did and meant.
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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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are they doing this on the ISS ? I was just wondering about the "space" tag on this article.
I don't know that much about WoW, but this sort of market manipulation happens in EvE as well. But it's usually not as big a deal, because the economy is so decentralized. If someone's relisted all of the red widgets in a system, there's a few thousand other systems I can look in. Plus because players have so much control over the production of most items in game, producers will notice the relisting, and will increase their production of that particular item. It self-corrects pretty well.
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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?
What you describe is the old system.
In the new system, every 30 days of GTC time is converted into a PLEX, an in-game item. The in-game item can be sold on the regular in-game market. When it's used, it adds 30 days to your account.