Blizzard Drops the Hammer on Gold Farmers 245
evviva writes "Blizzard has kept its word and finally closed over one thousand accounts related to gold-farming and character sales. It was about time!" The post reads: "Over the recent weeks we have been investigating the activities of certain individuals who have been farming gold in order to sell it in exchange for real world currency. After researching the situation, we have issued permanent suspensions to over one thousand accounts that have been engaging in this practice. We do not condone such actions and will take decisive action as they are against our policy and damage the game economy as a whole.""
Intresting idea but reqiuires a rethink for design (Score:4, Interesting)
It is similar to the "exploits" in single player rpgs where a mob keeps respawning to give in theory infinite xp. If you got the patience to kill the same mob, go through the same conversation, clear the same dungeon again and again.
The problem is that most MMO designers are pretty clueless about basic economy (why do they insist on "repair" or whatever costs to get money out of the system instead of simple taxes?) but worse the few clever ones think that real world capatalism is the thing to emulate.
Small problem is that capatalism isn't much fun for the majority wage slaves. In real life the wage slaves ain't got much choice but in game they do. They can stop paying and find something else to do.
The problem is that unlike the real world it is very easy to calculate expenditure vs profit in an mmo. Weapon A costs so much but will allow me to gain that much profit in its lifetime that I make enough profit to buy a new one. In general the more powerfull a weapon the more costly but also the higher the return on investment. Result, in order to make a reasonable income you got to invest in good weapons meaning you have to do the money grind.
MMO's need to stop thinking they are single player games, they need to stop thinking that real world economics work in a fun enviroment.
Single player RPG economies are already screwed up enough. Or I am the only one swimming in unneeded and even unspendable money in games like Baldurs gate, Neverwinter Nights, Deus EX, Morrowind, etc etc. Add taxation and tax the high earners more. But at all costs avoid where a big enough group of superrich exists to ruin it for the rich. Or at least if you want this similarity of the real world add other things from the real world as well. REVOLUTION. Murderers and thiefs. Paternity suits and frivolous lawsuits.
But frankly there are so many problems to fix with the MMO scene. First they should figure out a way for a game to remain fun for month after month without betting on the "maybe I will have fun with just 1 more level" element.
But maybe a simple way of doing both is to decrease the reliance in combat on "super" weapons but instead make for a character depended weapon performance. Meaning that both a newbie and elite warrior use exactly the same weapon but the elite will just be better at it. No expensive gadgets needed then no need for gold to pay them. Focus on character development OVER gadget hoarding.
Hard? Well yes and no. Both EQ2 and WoW apparently have added more involved combat. Expand on this.
Re:Let it be. (Score:4, Interesting)
It would be even nicer if they did this in lieu of monthly subscription rates.
Re:Reasons to dislike money-farming in MMORPGs (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem in XI is that there were multiple ways of milking the cash cow - bot fishing and gil buying are the two most prevalent. While gil buying doesn't directly affect the economy (all of its effects are indirect - the theory being that if the gilsellers weren't camping the monsters, someone else would), bot fishing does, because the bot fishers will catch fish, and then, to save time, sell those fish to an NPC shop for pure profit. Instantly, there's more gil in the economy, so the value of gil is deflated.
Inflation comes in because the gilsellers are increasing the prices on their loot to help counter the effects of the deflation from bot fishers. Inflation also comes in because Square instituted a new auction tax which works differently from the old method - AH fees are now determined as a fixed percentage of the item's value. While this was intended to be a pricing control (it costs you more to list for me), people started just including the AH fee in their listing prices, and so the prices just kept creeping up. Others with plenty of money in their pockets would buy out the supply of rare items on the market and then relist them for a higher price.
I stopped leveling my Thief at Lv. 46 because the next piece of armor I needed would have cost me 650K, and so I needed to spend a while either earning money for it or learning crafts so that I could make it myself. This was about two months ago. I checked on the price Friday night, and it was running 1.5M. And from what I hear, this is not uncommon. One of the most in-demand armor pieces for heavy melee classes at Lv. 60 used to run 2M (because making it involved using a rare item dropped from a rare monster that takes a large party to beat). It's now 4M.
In the most recent patch, Square changed the fishing system to attempt to combat botters, but from what I've seen with my own eyes, the bot builders have already circumvented it. They recently banned 800 accounts claiming that part of them were for violations of the Real Money Trade clause of the AUP, but those accounts were of people who were MPKing other players who were interfering with their gilfarming activities. IGE has large groups of people on each server that are *plainly* identifiable as gilsellers (IE - a group of players all named Jerry* that sit 24 hours a day in one zone with a monster that drops an item worth around 1M), but Square does nothing. The fact that Blizzard's game has only been running for a few months and they've already nuked 50% more accounts is very telling to me.
I have to be honest - I never cared for botters at all, but the way the economy is going, I may have to start using a bot to survive.
Re:Intresting idea but reqiuires a rethink for des (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, the people who make MMORPGs for a living have no idea about online economies.. but you, random dude on Slashdot, has all the answers. Why do we even bother studying anything? All the answers are on Slashdot!
He didn't offer an answer really. Merely some thoughts about the current systems and a few ideas for improvement. As for the professional MMORPG makers, name one that has done a better-than-mediocre job of creating an in-game economy. All of the games out there have very flawed systems, which is why we see so much of this stuff going on.
Disabling accounts in an MMORPG? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Intresting idea but reqiuires a rethink for des (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem with expanded-skill based combat is that you must account for lag, which while not as bad as it used to be is still a reality in most MMPORPG's. You can't rely upon the skill and timing of the player, because lag throws that totally off. You could do combat on the local machine, but then you have all sorts of security issues. So unless by skill you mean take the focus off of power leveling and gold hording and put it squarely on just power leveling, then this is unfortunately a no-go.
I do agree about the wage-slave problem, though. It isn't much fun. But if you take out leveling, gold/resource farming, then you can only progress through items and quests. And while quests can be nice, and do need to take an expanded role in games, there just isn't the resources to create enough quests for a group of people who may be playing 6 hours a day every day for a year. Player created quests would be better, but it seems like everyone who has done player-generated content over the years has gone seriously overboard with it (see 2nd life).
I'm not saying the current situation is ideal by any stretch of the imagination, I'm just saying that it is complicated.
Re:Disabling accounts in an MMORPG? (Score:5, Interesting)
The way these gold-farming rings work, the people who own the vast bulk of the accounts which were closed were not really playing the game.
For a given gold-farming ring, you have a number of accounts which are shared by several people. These people log in, farm gold for several hours, and then give all of the gold and items they received to a boss. The boss tabulates how much they received from a person on their shift and sells the items in-game for more gold (in WoW, this happens in the Auction House). When a customer purchases gold, the boss transfers the gold to the customer (either by trading with the customer, or as happens in WoW, through in-game mail). If one of the grunt farmers doesn't meet a quota on their gold-farming shift, they don't get paid. The grunt farming accounts, being shared by several people, are generally logged in 24/7. Even the individual characters are shared. They are powerleveled up without doing any quests, meaning they have substandard gear and make inferior opponents to regular players' characters; however, they are tailor-designed for farming whatever monsters make for the best farming.
The vast majority - if not all - of the closed accounts were involved with these gold-farming rings. That means that, with the possible exception of the bosses, it's very unlikely that a particular account was ever used by just one person to *play* the game. Since most of these rings are based in China, it's also unlikely that Blizzard will ever have to worry about somebody trying to sue them for the account closures.
Thank You Blizzard (Score:3, Interesting)
Economics 101 (Score:3, Interesting)
and damage the game economy as a whole
Really? Would anyone from Blizzard care to point to a healthy economy that is fueled by the lack of free trade? It's rather amusing to see how Blizzard's actions mirror the heavy handed use of power by those governments that are globally most despised. It'd be less far less funny if it weren't just a game (but, then, if it's just a game to them why are they being such dicks?).
Re:Even Playing Field (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a very very very hard problem. You don't see people making comments like "coal is inefficient, so why aren't you jokers using cold fusion?!?"
Economies (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the whole idea of buying extra cash for an online game just plain sucks. You should play these sort of games for fun. I played the demo of WoW for 2 weeks and did find it utterly boring - addictive, but boring.
They really do need to think about the economies - the better characters all have the best gear / weapons, and they basically hand it down to lower levels. You never see any low level people making stuff for high level creatures. Its all based around what gear you've got, your actual level is pretty pointless... I certainly felt no sense of acheivement leveling up.
People should be doing better things with their time then playing computer games for that long, to make money out of other people playing computer games. Blizzard are right putting a stop to that kinda thing, and I'm sure they'll make plenty of cash out of the game regardless of the money farmers.
Re:Even Playing Field (Score:1, Interesting)
Why? The makers of single-player RPGs have no difficulty making games that are fun to play without the level grind. Consider Morrowind - it's practically an MMORPG without the other players, it has the guilds, the exploring, boatloads of side quests... you can play it for months and never touch the "main story". And while becoming a powerful character and acquiring cool stuff is part of the fun, it's not all of it by any means.
I can have fun in Morrowind without spending a week killing the same kind of enemy in the same place over and over again. Why can't I have the same kind of fun in an online game? What's so inherently difficult about online games? Instancing basically turns them into single-party RPGs connected by chatrooms ANYWAY, and STILL the offline games are fun and the online games aren't!
Re:Too little too late (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Even Playing Field (Score:3, Interesting)