Game Developers On Gold Selling 424
Eurogamer has an article which takes a look at how various game companies deal with gold spammers in their games. Some, like Mythic, take a hard stance, literally telling farmers and sellers to "go to hell." Others engage in an arms race to block such behavior, sometimes to the detriment of normal users. "In fact, a former Jagex source tells me that when Jagex banned all IPs connected to gold selling, 'they lost 10 per cent of their membership, and still haven't recovered in terms of numbers since they did it two years ago. Even though they have almost stopped gold selling in RuneScape, it has cost them two million active accounts; i.e. there were four million players, there are now two million players, of which less than one million actually subscribe.'" Still more companies are experimenting with real money trading (RMT) to at least establish some control and security over the situation.
Re:Why oppose it? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose it's for the same reason they can't sell the gold themselves.
Players who don't want to buy gold feel at a disadvantage and quit.
And when the majority quits, the game dies.
Economics rule. i.e. it is an economic rule (Score:2, Interesting)
In these games, time is the scarce resource, and maybe patience!
People sell their time (collecting gold or whatever) to people who want it.
The problem for the Game developer is that they do not have a real economy. (hey, just like the real world!) that is, the money created just appears and floats upward, whereas in a real economy it circulates, and is never "used up" (present circumstances excepted). Unless the game can simulate an economy successfully, then there will always be problems with currency in game.
This means work, or some simulation of it, which is by definition not that much fun. (software developer excepted, of course). So I would conclude that they are, um, wrong to ban external labour simulating in game labour. so far, the free market has proven to be the most efficient distributor of resources. well, till now, anyhow.
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Because if you could do that, anyone could have anything they wanted whenever they want it, and that's what makes a game shitty.
But gold doesn't get you everything you want, even now. MMO's almost never let you just buy the best items from gear. The only 2 avenues to getting the best gear in WoW are raiding and PvP - there are really no good items you can just buy. If you dumped 500,000 gold on my WoW character now, the only thing that would change is I would stop having to farm gold. My character wouldn't be better, no-one else would be affected - I'd just have more fun. Imagine if no-one needed to farm gold - you could just log on and start doing what you wanted to do.
PS - Get auctioneer and put in 10 minutes when you log on, you'll have plenty of money in no time. It's not like it takes any real effort.
I don't want to put in 10 unfun minutes when I log in. I don't want to NOT have fun when I play a GAME. I want to log in, have fun and then log off. Why do we need to do unfun things before fun things in MMO's? I do things I don't like in order to get things I do like in my everyday job. There's no boring, unfun grind in FPS or RTS games before you can start having fun.
Re:Why oppose it? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to say, I'm incredibly dubious of that bit about Runescape in the summary.
For a start, by what manner of confused mathematics does two million out of four million consitute 10 per cent? Or is the claim that they lost 10% of their paying subscribers, and then a whole ton of players who were not paying them any money anyway? In any case, I think this chart [mmogchart.com] should tell you everything you need to know about how well Jagex has recovered from this "setback". They've shown a considerable growth in the aftermath of the gold selling cull, because gold selling really was having a massively negative effect on the in-game economy. And a current Jagex source tells me that their non-subscriber membership has seen even greater growth. Quite a few of these players then do go on to subscribe. I'm honestly entirely confused as to how anyone could claim that this was somehow a loss for Jagex. In every MMO that I have played, any time the developers have taken action against gold selling, it has been an unequivocal win for the developers, for the players, and for the game as a whole.
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a really good description of an optimal reward-schedule for addiction. Of course, most (all?) people can't distinguish between addiction and fun, hence the huge popularity.
I tried to find a decent description of this on the web (I remember reading an old analysis of how to optimise the payback in slot machines that went into reward schedules) but failed. This [google.ie] is the closest that I could find. The main point it makes is that tedium is essential to addiction. It serves to highlight the non-tedious bits and space out the rewards randomly. Nice to hear a personal, non-clinical, description of it for a change.
Eve solved this problem (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
I could use alternate ways to make money, but I don't find playing the auction house fun. In fact, I find it highly unethical. You're taking advantage of people who don't know what things really should cost. That's flat out wrong. And anti-gold farmers complain about my ethics?
Gold farmers -rarely- just straight up farm gold off of monsters. They use auction houses, they don't just take advantage of people not knowing how much something should cost, but they also have a tendency to inflate prices.
Take Final Fantasy XI. You don't get much gil from monsters, or from selling items (which makes me wonder how the gil is generated in the first place), but rather you make your money from selling goods on the auction house. In FFXI, gil sellers would camp NMs to get their loot to sell on the auction house for ludicrous prices. They essentially jacked up the prices for most rare loot items. The money they made from selling the items is then sold to players, which is used to buy the aforementioned up-priced item. If the player tries to farm the mob on his own, then he has to compete with the gil sellers (who were good at camping NMs) and other players looking for the mob. When Square finally put their foot down on gil sellers you saw a marked deflation in prices.
Mod parent up. (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm guilty of buying gold (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought 20k gold in WoW from a real-life friend so I could get a tundra mount.
The guy is under-employed yet has loads of time to play WoW. I'm in a well-playing job that saps a lot of my allegedly off time. So we both have what the other needs. An ideal situation. He needed real-life money to pay his car insurance. I got to help a guy out without the person feeling the shame of begging for a handout, and I got a cool mount that says I'm in-game rich (or in-game foolish)
What I find interesting is Second Life. In that "game" real-life to linden dollar exchanges happen all the time and it's sanctioned -- and there's not a lot of rich people in that world. Most people are still in-world poor because they don't want to spend real-life money on it. I'm amazed at how many people will camp in a place for one linden dollar for 15 minutes. My wife has a "job" as a night-club hostess that pays $75 linden an hour. The current exchange rate is around $260 lindens to a real US dollar!
As a Veteran Runescape Player... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll start by saying, whether or not it adds any credibility to what I write, I'm currently ranked in the top 8,000 players with a 2,109 total skill level and over 158 million experience points. You can do the math on the amount of time I've put into the game with 40,000-50,000 experience points that you can earn on average per hour...
They only got half the story with the part about the account bannings in RuneScape.
RuneScape has two levels of accounts, free to play, which is ad supported, and members, which is paid by a small monthly fee.
First of all, they did lose half their active accounts. However, they only lost ten percent of their members. This means that they mainly lost their free accounts, which as most of the members regard as a drain on company resources. So while they lost a lot of accounts, they lost the accounts they could afford to lose.
Besides the accounts that have active players, they also "lost" many thousands of gold farming accounts that were either bots or gold farmers selling cash. Those players and bots were taking up space that legitimate players were trying to use to get some enjoyment out of the game.
Also, the gold sellers were stealing accounts to sell the gold, items on the account and leave a pittance of junk to sell with the account itself. They were also using many stolen credit card numbers to pay for gold farming accounts, which caused Jagex even more problems in sorting. This wasn't just a ingame issue, this was something that in another year or two could cause the company to go bankrupt.
You can read more about their reasoning and their response at the article they wrote about it on their website: http://www.runescape.com/kbase/view.ws?guid=diary06
Now the question is what Jagex has left... I would say that in the changes that they made they really removed most the trolls and players who generally make your gameplay miserable. This leaves the players who are just in it for the fun. Personally, I find the average player to be much more mature and pleasant in the last year since they enforced those changes.
As the examples I see mentioned many times in the articles about high leveled executives or people with "real lives" being the ones to buy the gold, that might be the case in WoW, but it's certainly not the case in runescape. The gold buyers in runescape weren't the players who actually make your gameplay better, they were the kids, usually not even at the minimum age of 13 required to play, who generally went around making everybody else's lives miserable. I can say with much passion both "good riddance" and "don't let the door hit you on your way out."
As far as the loss of game features, Jagex is steadily bringing back replacements for the content that they had to remove, especially the player vs player content. There was a pvp area in every world which was a primary potential source for item/gold selling with the trade restrictions that they added, so they had to remove that area. That was the main source of discontent. To replace that there's now pvp worlds, which have proved to be massively popular as well as several other pvp minigames.
Now, will the new updates likely satisfy the players who whined and complained in the forums for months after the updates? I don't think so. They wouldn't be satisfied with anything less than a return to the game as it was before the radical changes, but I sincerely believe that if Jagex did that then the game would not exist in another year.
Last point is that Jagex claims their new MMO that they're working on, MechScape, is designed in such a way as to minimize the hated grinding and to eliminate the need for gold selling. Needless to say, I'm very interested in seeing what they have to offer.
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
How many people do you think would pay extra money to get an extra queen in chess?
And yet, you can't. The rules of chess are designed in such a way that it is not possible, for example, to swap your queen for the other player's pawn. You can't go to a competition, play against a queen farmer, swapping all of your pawns for his queens, then go on to play against a normal player with nine queens (I assume; it's some years since I played chess at a competition - or at all, in fact). You can play a handicap game, where one person starts with fewer pieces, but only by consent of both players.
A well-designed game does not have such opportunities for cheating.
Here is some reality (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I work for a bank in full disclousure.
First off Gold Farming is really what we call "Foreign Trade". What you have in an MMO is a system where people manufacture goods and services at various costs.
You have an intrinsic value on your time. Looking at the US lets say your game time is worth $5 an hour (e.g. Given a choice of making $4.50 an hour working a second job you would instead play a game but given the opportunity to make $6 an hour you would work the second job.)
So lets say you can make 100 GP in an hour. Your manufactured good is $5 for 100 GPs.
Now the gold farmer comes in and his time is $0.35 and hour and can make the 100 GPs.
Right off the bat we can see you can go work the $6 an hour job AND get the 100 GP you normally would have, coming out ahead. This is the basis for what the real problem is, a system of Foreign Exchange Inport\Export.
Now you can make 100 GP an hour at $5 each hour (production cost) but the gold farmer can do it for $0.35 for 100 gold.) THE ARGUMENT YOU ARE ALL MAKING IS NO DIFFERENT THEN NIKE SHOES BEING MADE FOR .38 A DAY IN THAILAND VERUS MINIMUM WAGE IN THE US!
This is simply a problem (if at all) of cheap labor. The same problem we find in cheap "Made in China" products and the issues with that (Melemine, Lead, etc.) are reflected in the game world (Hacked accounts, bots, etc.). P.S. Accounts were getting hacked and stripped long before gold farmers so that point is moot.
I don't see anyone boycotting cheap "Made in China" goods, the cost is too good to pass up on. The same goes for time. The only people that protest "Made in China" are overpaid union types using a air ratchet putting on a bolt for $45 an hour and we can see how well their fantasy played out in the auto industry can't we?
Whenever you have an economy it will always gravitate towards "Better, Faster, Cheaper" where better usually = Faster and Cheaper. Time and time again we wax over the whole gold farming issue but most of us are hypocrites in this discussion.
If Gold is really nothing more then Time then effectively gold farmers are selling time... cheap. I once hired my neighbor's son to farming gold for me. $10 for $1000 gold. If he was in China you'd be pissed, my neighbor, not an issue.
Gold farming is nothing but a reflection of xenphobic hate and resistance to normal economics. I have bad news, most of us have an inflated view of our worth. A Mc. Donalds clerk isn't worth minimum wage. Period. Nothing more then an unsustainable goverment mandate that created a MASSIVE DEMAND for sub-minimum wage labor across the globe.
The very fact you have cheap gold also means the market is flooded with goods that would normally be scarce. Gold Farming causes inflation but the influx of goods far outpaces the inflation. When WoW first came out there were few purples in the AH. When the farmers came, I've never NOT found a piece of gear I wanted to buy. The inflation is kept in check that no matter how hard they try there are still only 24 hours a day and only X number of people farming. Productivity will platue and create a fixed exchange of time\gold\dollars. The only way to push productivity\better margin is through shady shit but that is a small % of the workforce. DAOC had it right with diminishing returns on camping locations (albiet in exp). If you can script something in a game, your doing something wrong in your game. Period.
Unlike the real world there is not a central bank or governments that can shape the inflation and control deflation of currency. What MMOs need is to legitimize the RMTs and tax them to all hell. TECHNICALLY SPEAKING PER THE IRS: BARTERED TRANSACTIONS ARE TAXABLE. Literally when you buy gold you are trading money for service (some states do not tax services) but if MMO currency is considered an asset with a value then it is a taxable transaction. Keep that in mind when you think about the rights to your digital "assets". I'll trade you the "Sword of Doom" for 400 Gold + 22 GP in tax. The IRS
Torches and Pitchforks (Score:2, Interesting)
I keep thinking it would be fun within the game to have the developers target known and confirmed gold spammers (this has to be done completely reliably) and mark them with a unique and characteristic stigma visible to all. The gold spammer would then be subject to attack by any and all players in game, and when killed, would drop a great item (or gold) that could only be obtained through killing a gold spammer. It's just a thought, there are many problems with this idea (what if a player were wrongly identified as a gold spammer? It will happen) but gold spammer hunts could be a fun and widely played aspect of an MMORPG that exercised such a policy. People would be arranging to buy gold to identify spammers just to kill them (in some games). Their business could shrivel on the vine depending on how actively other players hunt them. I see something like the mob scenes in old Frankenstein movies carrying torches and pitchforks.
Model Robbery Better (Score:3, Interesting)
Model the game to make it easier to rob people who suddenly get lots of money.
Re:Eve solved this problem (Score:3, Interesting)
And I am a complementary example to parent of this post.
I buy GTCs and sell them to people like the above. I have a full time job, I go to the gym regularly, and have a girlfriend. (I know, blowing two stereotypes!) So my time is at more of a premium than my money. Also, I used to do a lot of grinding for in game money (ISK) and got sick of it.
So now I buy my ISK from players with game time cards purchased directly from CCP (EVE's developer company). Some poor college student gets to play without real world dollars, I get ISK and don't have to devote 20 hours a week to it.
Further, the ISK isn't magicked into existence by CCP directly, rather it's magicked into existence through players using normal game mechanics, such as killing mobs as it were. So the market isn't destroyed by it. It's actually a win-win-win scenario.
Which is why it's so strange that people still buy ISK from third parties. The prices aren't worse, you're incredibly likely to get caught, and there's a way to buy the ISK that won't get you banned.
...what? (Score:1, Interesting)
I really enjoyed "playing the auction house" while I was playing WoW. In the end, it's the only road to building massive wealth. I had an important role in a largish endgame WoW guild, even as an undergeared player. I was the guild market-watcher; basically, my mission, along with the "morning guy," was to keep the guild bank afloat. I played as a full-time "logistics" grunt, making sure that everyone had the mats, faction items, and raw gold they needed to spend more time raiding and less time doing character maintenance of various sorts. And, I stress, I enjoyed it at least as much as the raiders enjoyed raiding; I got most of the social value in terms of chatting and reciprocal appreciation, without worrying about running my own character up to a "best-in-all-slots" template (although, when I quit, I had a couple characters almost as well-geared as the high-DKP, 3-raids-a-week-come-hell-or-high-water folks).
Knowing what things "really should cost" is a fundamental prerequisite for capitalistic success. Add to that "how to make things cost what they ought to cost," and you've got a future on Wall Street. Don't belittle the skill; appraisal is a respected talent in any sphere, because it requires a fair bit of knowledge about both the object in question and the markets available for that object. The other thing to realize is that at the upper end, a very significant amount of economic activity goes on through established relationships between interested parties, not the auction house or even the public channels. It's simply smarter to make predictable deals on high-end goods and services than to wait it out on the open market, hoping to get lucky and find some high-level person fishing around in need of a quick cash bolus. My job was not just, "put everything on the market at a price, and wait to see what sells;" it involved prediction of highs and lows, and getting onto the market when maximum profits could be accrued. By keeping in touch with a circle of tradeskillers, I could estimate the best time to dump a high-level load of ore or cloth; by watching the open market and looking at the newbie trade goods, I could figure out when a fresh wave of newbies were drilling their way up toward the middle levels of their tradeskills, which would be when I could both clear out my less-valuable goods, and make first contact with more rising players. Add to that some watching for underpriced rares (icing on the cake), and direct deals made with people building "twinks" for various levels of battleground play (sprinkles on the icing, as it were), and you have an idea of what I was doing for the three years I played. Probably the most bot-like thing I did was use several alts to check for some rare vendor items in a few places; occasionally, I would monopolize those resources pretty thoroughly, but that's peanuts compared to leaving a bot sitting around zapping a quest mob every 10 minutes for hours on end, pulling out a heap of rare drops that would subsequently show up in a public channel or the AH, grossly mispriced.
Let me say this clearly. Don't you dare lump me in with the gold farmers. I was playing the markets to win, but I had no hidden agenda. I was KNOWN as the supplier for my guild, people knew I was interested in turning a profit, and we all got along just fine, for the most part. I hope, for your sake, that you were using an intermediary to pay for anything you purchased (you didn't just GIVE them your CC info, did you?), and that you didn't give them your personal account information, no matter what.
[ACisRanting=FALSE]
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
I know I've personally wasted hours, probably days, boredly surfing the web and chatting on MSN; what's the difference between that and doing what amounts to the same in an MMORPG?
Or wasted many, many hours reading /.?
I've played WoW for a long time now, but I play with people I like, and like to chat with, and I like to explore the world and go on the quests. I think that some people would find it truly boring, but it's fun and relaxing for me. Some people like to knit, or collect stamps, I play WoW.
I've never understood the need to grind for gold. What do you get for it? You might be able to buy slightly better gear, but so what? So you can kill the monster a little faster? I haven't found that I can't do something that I want to do (an instance for example) or go somewhere I want to go. If I've got a problem (monster X is too hard for my alt shaman), I ask a higher level guild-mate to tank for me.
The only time I've wanted more money is trying to get a flying mount. I got it eventually anyway, just later than other people did. And I'll eventually get an epic flying mount, but there's no rush.
Re:Gold selling is a good idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Not when you have hundreds (thousands?) of people doing constant BottomScans for bargains. I've fumble-fingered an auction like that before, and by the time I was able to get to the screen that would let me cancel, it had been bought.
What makes it unethical is that it encourages behavior that is non-optimal for everyone involved. If I take advantage of an accidental bargain and keep the profit, it creates a situation where the person who accidentally sold it might get upset and, depending on how they handle that upset, they might try to get people to harass me (I've heard of people being kicked out of guilds for dumber things). I might be amused by their responses (like the guy who essentially told me to fuck off despite the fact that he was losing something like 20 silver in order to recoup at least 6000 gold from his mistake), but some people can be incredibly obnoxious, leading me to eventually having to add them to the ignore list, which could lead to situations where I wind up not joining a group with the idiot, and on and on.
Further, it encourages other people to take advantage of those accidental bargains, leading to the same potential for acrimony, but among more parties, which leads to a generally more annoying environment for people who just don't want to deal with dramahol.
Oh, I suppose that having a few extra gold can be considered a positive, but really - if stuff you can buy with in-game gold is going to compensate for a toxic atmosphere in the community, why bother playing an MMO in the first place? Clearly the community is not worth much.
Contrast that with an environment in which, at the least, you'll almost always have someone saying, "Hey, thank you for being a decent person about that" at the least and, in several cases, I've had people send the items back to me (*after* paying the COD to get it back) with a note saying that since I was a decent person, I deserved the item and hey, it's a lesson learned to be more careful. There won't (usually, with that one idiot being the exception) be any acrimony, and who knows, maybe other people will behave like mensches when they have the chance, also. Sure, you don't have the few extra gold, but really - if the other person hadn't made a mistake in the first place, you wouldn't have it anyway, so it isn't like you actually lost anything.
When one course of action greatly increases the risks of negative outcomes and another is generally neutral at worst but extremely positive at best, I'd say that's pretty much ethics in a nutshell, no?