Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Virtual Currency Market 53
miller60 writes "Telecommunications outages from Tuesday's earthquake in near Taiwan have disrupted the market for virtual currency from MMORPGs, with market leader IGE and other major online sellers reporting inventory and delivery problems. The market for the real money trading of game assets is highly dependent upon suppliers operating 'gold farms' in China and other Asian countries. With Internet access from Asia limited, these suppliers are apparently having trouble logging into games to make deliveries of gold and accounts. Online markets for the sale of game assets have grown in recent years, despite heated debates about the practice among gamers."
Gold farming is a sign your game is broken (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it is a sign that the game is too tedious or that there are too many times sinks in order to actually play the game.
Collecting gold and loot should actually be the fun part of the game. Not the actually sitting around with your treasure or spending it on items that are required for you to have fun.
In games that require leveling, the disparity between players is quite large and a level 1 player can't see the same content as level 20 and the level 20 can't see the same content as players at 60. This is a discouragement for casual players who don't have the ability to spend 10+ hours per week in the game.
Personally, when it ceases to be fun I quit the game all together. It just isn't worth the effort or my money. While others (who have more money than they should) pay gold farmers to actually enjoy the game without effort.
Personally the last MMOG that I really enjoyed was Shadowbane because it was more about PvP rather than sitting around killing mobs to get to the next level and Shadowbane's leveling wasn't that grueling either and the power disparity between levels wasn't that huge.
But I still think Ultima Online has the best system of advancement with skills rather than levels and players were all pretty much equal in terms of time sinks. Sure there was gold farming, but to me killing monsters and raiding dungeons was just as fun as actually have property in the game.
Of course you could always craft items for a living which made things interesting too.
On a side note... There is a debate that the Taiwan earthquake has also caused a reduction in spam or botnets. I've notice an extreme drop in my levels on various email accounts and according to digg [digg.com] the number of tracked bots dropped from 500,000 to 400,000.
Of course it could be the influx of new computer or kids home for the holidays fixing their parents.
Gold farming is a sign your players are lazy. (Score:1, Insightful)
If MMOs have taught me anything, it's that in whatever sphere of life you are in, even one where every person starts out equal, there will be people who are just too fucking lazy to do anything for themselves. Witness the beggers hanging around cities on any WoW server you choose.
Utterly pathetic.
Virtual goods for real money = new economy (Score:2, Insightful)
Which would you rather do, build furniture on an assembly line in Shanghai or grind in WoW/CoH/EQ/SWG/$fav_mmo for gold and items? This isn't to say the practice is free of flaws or negative impacts, but I'd say its better for gaming as a whole because it allows far two different vertical markets to be engaged and allows the third (people who enjoy time spent grinding) to stay in the game. If the unofficial pressure valve (short cuts) didn't exist I'd imagine that the content would have to be changed to stay relevant, and that would upset a large number of people who like the repetitive and predictable nature of these games. I've noticed that, in general, companies like to have more customers rather than fewer.
Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but... (Score:3, Insightful)
I mentioned guild wars, you said it wasn't an MMO....MMO vs. CO RPG.. Let's split some more hairs...
People who play MMORPGS do so for selfish reasons.
They want to save themselves time because their time is more valuable to them than their money. This is none of your business.
Actually, you're wrong. Let's use WoW as an example, since it is the largest MMO in the world. In WoW bots get banned very quickly. So far, only real human farmers can pull off gold farming without getting banned. And these people are hardly hurt ethically. In the countries many of them live in the American dollar is still quite valuable. They manage to make some American money and probably do quite well for themselves. Secondly, you are wrong about the way this affects the in-game economy. Because everyone can sell their items equally nobody really loses out. Inflation does exist, but if anything it makes some parts of the game easier because there is more money in the game. Such as respecs. It costs 50g to respec once you hit the max amount. It used to be a lot of gold. Now it's not so bad. In some way we have the farmers to thank for that. Your points on the economical effects and their ethical impacts is largely irrelevant except for the respec factor. All the good gear is obtained through instance runs and raiding -- not through the AH. If you need materials you can farm them yourself, or as you have already said, buy them even cheaper now that someone else has taken it upon themselves to do it for you. If anything the gold farmers are making it easier for us.
Explain to me why it makes sense that you can sell gear at lowered prices or buy your gear at hugely inflated prices? It sounds like you're saying the same gear sells low for one person and high for another, merely because the other person is a gold farmer. Absurd.
Nope, they don't. They don't exactly hurt any community except other gold farmers, which I imagine you wouldn't be against.
Indeed.
Why would you? You know who else deserves no sympathy? The company who allows it to happen. Again, using WoW as an example: Blizzard has banned hundreds of thousands of accounts for using bots. I can't remember the last time I saw an actual farming bot in WoW. I see plenty of bots advertising their sales on the chat channels, and they get banned almost immediately. Poof, another free trial account is banned. There is only one thing Blizzard needs to do IMHO, and that's restrict free trial accounts from using the general chat function until their free trial expires. That should solve a good deal of the advertising problems.
Re:I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, farming thorium at rich thorium veins on a 24/7 basis, forcing all other players out of the area because you dominate it, that isn't selfish? I mean, even though you're just farming it for 'in game' money, that's not different than a gold farmer? It's the same thing. You cannot expect players to not be selfish in an MMO just as the same goes for life. Except in life people are selfish for themselves and their extended family which is an extension of themselves. And of course their friends and other social structures. You'll find players who aren't, but don't expect that to be the norm.
No, the economy is not tailored. It adapts. You are making a mistake if you think a game economy will ever be free of the same vices as a real economy. Artifical impositions on the economy by the company who runs the game will never work. They simply, logically, cannot do anything about it. So I guess all I am saying is get used to it, because it's here to stay. If you can't beat em, join em.
Last I checked money grew on trees in the real world too. It's call agriculture.
Haha. "Intended market value". That's a good one. Really, come on, it's not even reasonable to assume it is possible for a company to control the market like that without, like I mentioned earlier, artificial impositions. Which would destroy the immersion factor. Across various WoW servers items go for different amounts, even though they aren't farmable by gold farmers. But wait, OH NOES, they aren't all at the "intended market value." You act like you have a grip on economical theory. I don't see it.
This is why I play games like Doom 3 on Hardcore? Games like Halo on Legendary? Don't act like you know me.
As far as a game deviating from the intentions of the developers, I can easily logically defend that. An MMO is an amorphous dynamic entity. The developers pick a starting point and say "GO" and the game evolves. Aside from them fixing things which would abort the evolution and development of the game, such as rampant hacking and cheating, the game largely takes a course defined by the PLAYERS, not the developers. If the players don't like the game, it doesn't exist. The developers merely have to find a state that agrees with the playerbase and expound upon it, as they have done and continue to do with games like World of Warcraft.
TLF