IGE On Why Power-Leveling Is Like Day Care

simoniker writes "In a rare interview with the COO of MMO item-selling giant IGE at Gamasutra, topics discussed include the ownership of in-game items, why gold selling can be a "great business opportunity" for Chinese suppliers, and why power-leveling (paying other players to increase your character stats) is something IGE will be moving into." From the article: "Clarke also noted that, in pure economic terms, paying people to level your character is 'a market which tends toward commoditization.' Of course, those handing over their character have 'a high degree of sensitivity' to what's happening to their virtual avatar — the COO quipped: 'It's almost like day care... you'd be amazed how much they check in.'"

Just enjoy the ride

I don't understand why folks don't just enjoy leveling up. It's part of the fun. Power leveling is like wishing your life away. It's not like the developers put all the good stuff in at the higher levels and just offer garbage in the beginning...

Re:Just enjoy the ride

I'd agree with you if it's your first character in a game. However if it's a re-roll then the levelling process can be VERY tedious. I've gone through the barrens on 3 characters in WoW, and I'd be happy to NEVER do that again. I don't agree with power-levelling, but I can understand the desire to let someone else do the grunt work for you...

Re:Just enjoy the ride

I've never understood this mentality. If the game isn't any fun, don't play it and do something that is fun instead. Basically, if one thinks a game is the most dull, repetitive time sink ever (which a lot of them are) maybe paying a monthly fee to pay someone else to do the "work" is a horrible waste of money. By paying someone to powerlevel a character, the power-levelee is just admitting they've fallen victim to an enormous bait and switch: the odd concept of "end-game." The really mind-numbing thing is that the end-game is almost always just more and more grinding! People are paying a monthly fee to pay someone else to level a character only to do the same thing all over in the end-game. Stupid consumerism, yay!

I play an MMO that is notorious for it's lack of end-game (City of Heroes). I play it because I enjoy it (a concept apparently foreign to many-a-player), not to prove anything to anyone, gloat about my uber-high level characters, or make money in some zany e-bay scheme. The entire concept of games being fun is lost on a large portion of the MMO community because they're too competitive to realise they aren't having any fun (or even playing the game, I guess).

Re:Just enjoy the ride

It depends on the game.

I do droks runs in guild wars for a few reasons. I've not only been the runner, but been ran by others myself. In guild wars the lvl cap is 20. You are free to change your secondary class as much as you want. But you cannot change your primary class. This means there are several other builds you could try out. However, before Factions, it took a very long time to get where the good stuff was. Droks armor is highest in stats (not best skin/but AC rating), plus the skills trader has more advanced skills.

If you've already played the game through say 4-5 times then doing it again and again for each new character type is boring and painful.

And before factions, we were limited to 4 characters per account. Which meant you had to delete your old ones before trying out different classes. Guild wars isn't a level grinder like most other RPG games. After you hit 20, that's it. You just focus on better skill combos and different areas. Why make the players go through the entire noob areas again?

If you look at factions, this is what the game devs did. They made it so you can level up to 20 in two days with 3000+ XP quests. In GW1 it took week(s) at 250-500XP per quest.

And finally, running is a quick, not always easy, way to make some money. They have nerfed all the good farming areas and made it so money is much harder to aquire. Granted green/gold drops help, it's a pain trying to do player-player trades. In one droks run I make 10-15k in 35 minutes. When a full suite of nice looking (15k) armor cost me 150k it's still hard work.

And if you're wondering, playing with skills and builds is what it's all about. I just got my ele to do 2,672 damage in one spell hit. (4x-668 damage to lvl 5 guys). =)
http://www.linuxlogin.com/public/2672damage.jpg [linuxlogin.com]
BTW, that's wine 0.9.19 running a test this morning. Why health bars overlap.

look, I'm not that old...

but I have no idea what you just said.

Re:Just enjoy the ride

Usually it is enjoyable the first time up. After that it becomes very tedious. Not that I would ever pay for this service, but I can understand why people would do it.

"Day care" attitude not surprising

People who use power-leveling services are in somewhat of a quandry: on one hand, they want to be the best (even if it means hiring someone to do all the work for them) but on the other hand they're worried about being ripped off (understandably) and losing their character/avatar/items/gold etc. Basically, their desire to be the best is at war with their obsession over the game and how horrible it would be to lose stuff due to a scam.

Then there's the amount of money invested in the service, which is usually a couple hundred dollars. Combine those two and it's not surprising to hear that they check in often.

-Parallax

Enough with the analogies

The world of online games is chock full of people trying to be clever by seeing how they can draw analogies to the world before online games. Or be even more clever by trying to be the first to spot something "totally new!" Get over yourselves!

I'm just going to say it.

Gold farming, loot farming and power leveling suck the fun out of all MMOs. I don't care if someone is making a living off of it, I don't care if it is so commonplace that most players accept it and even use these services and I don't care if you think I am being snooty. Don't sit there and whine about a broken economy... DEMAND that it be fixed!

Re:I'm just going to say it.

That's got nothing to do with the game economy, that has to do with the real economy.

How do you plan on fixing that?

Want to stop gold farming and powerleveling?

If you really want to stop gold-farming and power-leveling you have to design your game in a way where skill, rather then time invested, is the primary attribute that determines advancement in your game. Consider (for a moment) that you're using a Mouse/Stylus or Wiimote to draw Runes onto your screen in order to cast or choose your combat action, with this setup you can have hundreds of possible actions you could perform at any given time; if rather then 'auto-blocking/resisting' you have to draw the appropriate block/parry rune or the correct counter spell rune there (suddenly) is far more skill involved in the game. In a game like this you might consider the experience a person collects to gain a level as a trial before further training. Equipment (in a system like this) is almost un-necessary thus gold suddenly takes a back seat, and powerleveling is useless because higher level spells would require more complicated runes (which would be difficult to draw quickly, in the correct situation, without the practice from leveling).

Re:Want to stop gold farming and powerleveling?

Congratulations, you have just created a game that no one would want to play! There are games that exist that require skill to play...they are called FPS. We are talking MMORPG...and WoW actually does do a very good job of making it so that farmers aren't really a big deal. The best drops are things that you can only get when you are in a group with other people running instances. You can not sell these things so they are meaningless to the economy. These items are much better than things you can purchase. People still buy gold because they like a shortcut. And even in FPS, people use cheats to get ahead. In your game they would just get a program that recorded mouse movements so that they could create the runes with a single click thus removing all skill from the game other that the small amount of strategy left (which will already be figured out what is the best thing to do and probably be scripted).

There is only one way to curtail (and that is the best you can do) gold farming/selling greatly. And that is to ban the people who BUY the gold. The gold sellers will always come back with new characters to sell gold. But if their market is too afraid to buy because they will be banned, then they can't make a profit and go find something else to do.

Dont Trust IGE and Their Offspring sites

Just so you know, IGE are also the people who own the QJ/PSPupdates sites who have also tried to buy out sites like PSP News [dcemu.co.uk]. The QJ sites charge 3 dollars a week to forum users so they can remove ads/popups (which firefox moves ok), Like IGE they are buying out the competition, the recent buy was a Podcasting site, they have also Paid Homebrew coders Like Fanjita for exclusives and threatened Legal proceedings against PSP Homebrew sites who didnt link to them for the release. For the "premium forum acess" QJ people get money off vouchers for other sites owned by IGE. All in all a real scam network

Right observation, wrong motivation

It's almost like day care... you'd be amazed how much they check in.

He makes it sound like people are checking in because they love their characters like they love their kids. I think a more accurate assessment is that they're checking in to make sure they aren't getting ripped off.

Clarification

Powerleveling isn't necessarily paying someone else to buff your stats, but rather using "unlimited resources" to gain exp and thus levels faster.
For example, to buy a load of mana potions to be able to spam your strongest spells early on and repeatedly, at prohibitive costs for a standard character of that level.
Some people make calculations as to the exact best way to level, "normally" and by powerleveling. Knowing which mob has a good respawn rate compared to how much time it takes to kill it compared to how much exp you gain from it.

Surely sometimes the fastest way to level includes different players who party with you so you get some of their earned exp.

The point still stands that games that force you to grind are probably not that fun, but rather just addictive.

People who buy from IGE are spoiled morons.

Powerlevel services, huh?

You'll get a level 60 character you have no clue how to play, and you'll have trouble finding a party to go to any instances after you gain a reputation for being an idiot who wipes your party. That is, if you can find a group in the first place. Likely, people won't party with you since they've seen your character running around in a bot-like manner and an inability to speak English. Your character will likely already have a bad reputation, in other words, because people who have seen your character will assume you're a botter/gold farmer.

You'll also probably be in crappy level 45 greens that are not befitting of any Level 60 character. You can be guaranteed that any lucky blue or purple BoE drops acquired by your character would have been sold off by the guy running your account, along with most of your money. You won't have any BoPs from instances in many cases, and even if your character had managed to get them, they probably would have been sharded and again... sold for money by the gold farmer running your account.

A good player can get a character from 1-60 within 3 months for their first character, 1 month for alts. That's for a normal person with a full-time job. A good, smart level 60 player can get 4/8 Tier 1 epics nowadays within a month after that. A good, smart level 60 player can earn a lot of gold from a couple 5 man runs a week. There is no need to pay some gold farmer to power level your character, and certainly no need to buy money from IGE or similar slimeball organizations.

Power leveling makes for horrible players.

I've played MMORPG's for years (from EverQuest, to Dark Age, to WOW these days) and it becomes very easy to tell the difference between a player who paid for power leveling services (or just had a friend power level them, as was the case in EverQuest and DAoC more often than not) and someone who actually played the game from level 1 to MaxLevel. Almost without fail, the person who was power leveled has no clue how to play their character and knows nothing of common game concepts (pulling, tanking, whatever). Worse still, it usually results in players who have no respect for the other people on the server. It's not uncommon for power leveled players to "ninja loot" (steal an item that drops for a party, then immediately leave the group) and cause other forms of grief to others.

These types of players end up getting a bad reputation eventually, so it becomes easier to avoid them; however, it's still a giant pain in the ass, especially if you're trying to get a group together to do something and you need to fill a spot with someone you haven't played with before. You take a huge risk when you invite a random person along to go do a quest or complete an instance. Will they know how to play their character or will they suck and end up causing the group to die and have to start over multiple times?

There will always be people who just aren't good at playing their character, but usually anyone who plays from 1 to 60 (or 50 or whatever) becomes at least decent at their role. Power leveling services compound the problem by introducing even more crappy players into the world, and that's the main reason why I hate them. I'm not fond of the gold-buying services either, but they aren't as big of a problem. If someone spends a couple hundred bucks to buy 10000 gold so they can go buy whatever it is they want, it's no skin off my back.

The unfortunate thing about IGE is that Blizzard will probably not try to solve the problem with litigation. If Bliz took IGE to court, and IGE won (thus proving in-game items and currency are owned by the player), services like these will blossom overnight and there will be nothing Bliz or anyone else can do about it. So instead, Bliz will just keep trying to track the farmers down and ban them, which is a never-ending battle.

Aaul

Interview? what interview?

Did anyone actually read the article? It doesnt read like an interview at all. After reading the first paragraph, i knew that this was going to be simplified down to the level of "clueless n00b". I tried to skim and read ahead, but couldnt find anything but a few quotes spliced in here and there. Im not going to read 4 pages of gold farming 101, so can someone actually reprint the interview here? I simply couldn't find it.

It's a market force to improve games.

The viability of powerleveling/goldselling/etc as a business is directly proportional to how much of the game is simply not fun for players.

The real solution is not to try and enact policies and game systems to make powerleveling difficult, but instead to design the game to make it undesired. If a leveling/farming market springs up, that's your cue that this is an area of the game which needs reinventing as something that players actually _enjoy_ doing.

Another Analogy

Wouldn't it be more like,

"Leaving your child with a felon who runs a crack lab, and if the felon gets busted you lose your child and all parenting rights forever"

Since if your character is caught hacking/botting/being power leveled it can get the account banned.

Does IGE have a garuntee in case the charcter is banned?

powerlevelling is good.

Powerlevelling is good, because it lets people play the part of the game they enjoy, and that's what gaming is all about.

I know some people don't like it, they say that people don't work to get their character to level 60 or whatever is max.
I say that's a lie, i say people choose to work at their job, instead of doing what many consider a chore (ingame) to get those stats.

If you have 3 friends playing WoW and they're all maxxed out, but because you just started in a lawfirm,
it'll take you half a year to get there, or it'll take you half a days paycheck to be able to play with your friends, I know, what I'd choose.

And as many people have already pointed out, they can't buy skill anyway, so why on earth are you whining about it?
powerlevelling is the only way people with jobs can stay in the competition.

This on the other hand can be used by any gamer before joining up on an mmorg: You should look at what people offer on ebay,
there you will see which parts of the game that are boring.
Nothing in game would be for sale unless it's either difficult to get or boring to get.
If enough people want something which is obtainable there will be a market for it.
Nobody wants boredom, so it feels unfair when others can buy their way around it, but you didn't do it.

i foresee games where everything is for sale for real (possibly also ingame) currency. When you realize you only need that one crystal to finish your monolithic spaceship of doom, you pull out a menu, and purchase it, without ever leaving the game OR you decide to spend 5 days getting to chasing your goal if you like to go adventuring for stuff, either way it will mean that people can play the game as they want to.

Second life is already doing this to some extent, although in many ways i'm not sure whether to call it a game.
I foresee much more of this, including games where it's much easier to do product placement and the likes, if can live with that, you save 2$ a week.

I must admit, i myself am somewhat annoyed with char building, there's a reason i refer to it as grinding, i'm sure you know the term.
I love doing pk (or pvp if you want) because that's the place where you're facing human adversaries.
It is also my experience, from various games, that killing mobiles is not proper preperation for fighting players, although it can help getting group fighting tightened up.

from a foreign aid point of view, this is one of the ways you'll be able to give money directly to the poor people of poor nations. Don't be mislead, those are the people working the sweatshops. The only big problem I see, is that people don't make requirements to those they buy services from, i guess i'd prefer to buy my chars Max Havelaar style.'

anyways, i'm heading off topic, cyas and i hope you'll think about why it is people will pay to avoid parts of a game.

The Power part of Power-leveling

Perhaps a small part of the appeal of power-leveling (what a meme!) is that you are paying someone else to do stuff for you. You get to be the boss. It's a power relationship that might not otherwise exist in a gamer's real life.

In fact, I'm trying to think of things in my life that I could "outsource". Aside from coding, which I actually like to do, I don't have many opportunities to hire someone. I have no need of a gardener, or a babysitter, or even a dog walker. I take a cab sometimes, but that's different from hiring a driver. So as pitiful as it may be, paying someone in China to play videogames is one of the few ways that I could exercise direct economic control; to appease my inner capitalist, as it were.

Very interesting.

Gil Sellers Are Evil Incarnate

Around December of 2005 gil sellers were killing prices on the Auction Houses of Final Fantasy XI. Prices were outrageously high. Not long after SquareEnix banned several hundred players and removed several billion gil from the game. After that prices returned to normal. A few months later I noticed some characters with funky names running around a zone farming mobs. They were moving like a highly trained squad. This was not typical player behavior. Their names were something like "BK1A, BK1B, BK1C" and so on and so forth. I asked around on my Linkshell about it and they told me they were gil sellers.

Around that time wierd things started to happen in the AHs. Prices on items that players would normally put up there in order to make money were dropping rapidly. Someone was undercutting prices like crazy, and outrageous amounts of items were flooding the AH also. Take Fire Crystals for instance. Crystals are the basis of the crafting system of FFXI, without them you cannot craft at all. A stack of 12 Fire Crystals would normally sell for 8,000 gil were undercut to 1,000 to 2,000, and you'd see 60+ stacks on the AH. You'd think that a drop in price for these items would be a great thing, but for players who sell crystals on the AH to make money its a bad things. It makes it harder for players to make money needed for upgrading armor and weapons, and otherwise being able to buy other crafting materials. The overall economy suffered as a result and is just now starting to recover.

To combat gil sellers SE implimented a number of countermeasures. The servers, all 32 of them, have packet sniffers which watch for bot programs that snif packets watching for NMs to pop. Now, there is a delay between the initial packet sent from the server to the client announcing the pop of the NM so that bot programs can't claim it first before the players can.

Another countermeasure they did was to put an EX (Exclusive) flag on certain items dropped by NMs associated with popular quests. EX items cannot be sold on the AH or traded. Characters can only have one RARE flagged item in their inventory. This includes personal inventory, MogSafe, and Mog House storage. You can store then in the delivery box by sending them to yourself. Many quest items dropped by mobs and NMs have both the RARE and EX flags.

Lastly, the amount of gil that can be sent to any character via the delivery boxes is limited to 1 million gil. All of this is common knowledge.

Now that Chocobo Raising has been implimented and Chocobo Racing is just around the corner now comes the issue of rampant gambling. Gambling has been in FFXI for a long time thanks to the /random command. It lets you do a dice roll. Typically gil sellers aren't involved the in this form of gambling because Chinese gil sellers don't like drawing too much attention to themselves. However, gambling on Chocobo Races could easily be exploited by gil sellers. SE must decide to impliment a game-supported gambling system for the races or risk having gil sellers run even more rampent than they already are.

Re:Time is money

What I would like to see from blizzard is a feature where if you are on your 2nd character and you already have a level 60, then you have the option of purchasing rested XP from the innkeepers in major cities. Like, check into a room, and you have full rested XP, they could even pro-rate it, based on how far from fully rested you are.

Re:Do you want to get rich, or do you want to get

Speaking of which, isn't he still wanted by the FBI over the child molestation charges, along with the embezzling of funds?

Re:Time is money

a few bits to use in a game

1 9 houses of magic (say 20 levels of each)
2 each casting/feat requires Scryon of X amount (+ each level of each house requires a base amount of Scryon per day with mild to major damage if you don't have it)
3 each person has a preset amount of Scryon toxicity (causes a max level of Scryon that you can have)
4 each group has a Common Scryon Pool (so you could end up with a single house level 2 character that has a massive Scryon level banking for a group of 20-30)
5 balance the spells/feats so defensive spells are cheaper (earth water space life houses have 2/3 the cost of fire air time death houses with the mind house having 25% extra on top [plus needing to be max on six houses to even see mind house spells])
6 have certain characters that are blind to magic but come in handy to the Uber Player (like a farmer that raises crops that just happen to have 8X the normal Scryon or
a priest that has a chapel that is in a NO MAGIC ZONE) sort of like the HP concept of "muggle"

in short put stuff in the game for the new characters and the old ones