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Role Playing (Games) The Almighty Buck

Hunting Down Gilfarmers 141

Posted by Zonk from the rmt-ftl dept.
Milkman, over at 1up, revels in the discovery that gilfarmers are finally starting to fall in the battle with Square-Enix. Final Fantasy XI has always had a problem with these Real Money Trader pests, and the company has recently stepped up its efforts to eliminate the problem. From the article: "Is it difficult, time-consuming, and an absolute time and money sink to farm, camp and craft your way to profit in FFXI? Absolutely. But it's been made even harder due to the unbelievable inflation the game has suffered as of late. In reality, FFXI was in danger of becoming a gilfarmer's domain, practically owned and operated by RMTs until the recent purge, if it is indeed a purge. How else to explain the disappearance of gilfarmers across all servers in the last week? While we're still waiting to hear something official out of Square-Enix HQ, the writing is clearly on the wall for currency resellers worldwide."
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Hunting Down Gilfarmers More

Hunting Down Gilfarmers

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  • Riiiiight (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TubeSteak ( 669689 ) on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:47PM (#14632657) Journal
    We'll see how long that lasts.

    The thing about cockroaches, is that no matter how many times you purge your home, they'll come back.

    The only way to keep gilfarmers away, is to smack them down immediately (which risks false positives) or to change the economy so that their services are no longer profitable.
    • To clarify what I meant to say: You can purge your home of the roaches/gilfarmers, but unless you change or remove whatever drew them in, they will keep coming back.

      Kudos for the mass bannination, but the problem is only going to repeat itself. Even if they remain vigilant, the farmers might just try to come back and operate with a lower profile

    • Bingo: change the economy (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:49AM (#14633247) Journal
      An observation I've made long ago is that humans (at least the smart ones) do what works, and as a result any game gets the kind of gamers it "deserves". E.g., if a FPS rewards camping more than anything else, it gets swamped in campers. E.g., if a MMO rewards farming, it gets farmers. It's that simple.

      And doubly so when the game is a brain-dead exercise for the most brain-dead grinders. If the way to get ahead in the game is to be an obsessive-compulsive clicker willing to _work_ 8 hours a day on mind-numbing repetitive stuff (and pay each month for the privilege), yes, eventually some people will say "screw this, if I wanted more work, I'd do overtime and get paid for it." So they'll buy gold instead or cancel their account. It's that simple.

      That creates the demand.

      And conveniently most "me too" MMOs also create the supply. There's an abrupt differential in how much money you make per hour at each level. E.g., in WoW even a gray (junk) item dropped off a level 60 NPC is worth about 1 gold at the vendor (i.e., without even bothering with the auction house), while for a newbie 1 gold will pay for all your skills (trade skills included) and equipment up to level 10. E.g., in COH a level 50 can make more than 3 million per hour, money which you don't even need any more (no repairs, no more stuff to buy, etc), while for a new character 3 million will last you until level 35.

      So you have:

      1. a bunch of people who badly need gold (and face a non-fun repetitive grind of days, maybe weeks, to get it)

      2. a bunch of people who can easily supply a newbie's need for gold (in a tiny fraction of that time)

      So is it any surprise that a gold trade forms between the two? It's only common sense, not to mention elementary economics.

      Complaining about the "evil" gil farmers when the game creates that slope, sorry, it's just brain dead. It's like complaining that things slide down a water slide. ("Waah, things should have slid up hill, and it's such an evil world when they go downhilll instead!") Well, what did they _expect_ there?

      Want to make gil farmers go away? Well, yes, how about changing the economy then? Or for that matter, how about designing a game so it's fun for the casual gamer who plays it to relax after work, not to get more mind-numbing repetitive work?

      Heck, it _is_ possible to design a game without gold at all.

      E.g., look at Planetside. You're a soldier, so your tank or weapon are supplied to you for free. The balancing factors are your certifications (you don't get a tank if you're not certified to drive one) and the timer on some equipment (you have to play infantry a bit until you get your next tank, if you just drove your old one off a hill.) And unsurprisingly, there is no gold farming or trade whatsoever in Planetside. Go ahead, search ebay. You won't see gold or equipment for sale for Planetside.

      The same could work in a lot of other games. E.g., in COH, you don't even have equipment or such, you have new techniques or enhancements for your signature moves: it's a trivial exercise to re-design that to work basically as skill points gained at level-up, instead of being bought. E.g., in WoW, you don't even need to go that far: bump quest rewards up to be actually suitable for the quest's level (as opposed to getting a level 12 mace as reward for a level 30 elite quest), and you've just made money entirely unnecessary. Etc.

      And in FFXI's case, heck, they just need to get a brain and realise that the Japanese kind of "work simulator" is entirely the wrong game concept for the vast majority of us Westerners.
      • I think the real problem is that there are Levels.
        Think about this for a moment, your skill in the game is not directly linked to your real skills and abilities as a player.
        I see this all the time in ET:RW, where you have 3 star generals who still have no clue to what the objectives are, or how to defend them, who's xp is there just because they've put in the time into the game, and they lose all the time to those people who play for the objectives.
        It's no fun for either group, really.
        So back to my point, i
        • The problem is that in most MMOGs, there's no good way to measure the player's skill, either quantitatively or qualitatively. Puzzle Pirates manages to do this, but that's because all of the game actions that matter the most require the player to puzzle, and performance at the puzzle can be measured against all of the other players on the server. So you can have an "Expert" (relatively high experience level, can take many weeks to get there) at something who is rated "Able" (lowest performance rating), whic
      • Some of this I can agree with and some I can't. I have played FFXI for about 5 months, then cancelled my account. I couldn't deal with having to play for +5 hours straight just to get some gil or xp. It was fun and great when I started and the gil was easy to get and the xp was tough. I tried started another character to get that fun part back, until my clan got on to help me level, but they had their own missions to do. So I quit.

        Now I also play ET (Enemy Territory), and I like that because I can play for

        • How many times have you had a party member do nothing but collect XP? Well I say the XP should be distributed based on your actions (damage to mob/healing party) and your level.

          It would have to be a slightly more complicated method of distributing xp...
          Damage from mob would have to be a factor or there would be no tanks...
          and then back-up tanks would be virtually non-existant.
          It's annoying when a party member does nothing but collect xp...that's when you tell them to pay attention or you'll boot them.

      • Gold farming for low-level characters isn't really an issue in WoW. Quest rewards are typically pretty good for their level, and at the very least they're usually good enough to see you through to a higher level.

        Honestly, most people buying gold are level 60 themselves, and they could actually earn money QUICKER than most farmers if they put their minds to it (because they know how to play the game better than a guy who's just doing this as a crap job, and because they can find groups to get into high-end i
      • You completely avoided the point of any game: to be fun and challenging. You basically said that you can prevent gold farmers by making the game not challenging... well duh. I'm glad you're not a game designer.
    • Think creatively. If scripts can identify 90% of the farmers, then the remaining 10% can be investigated by admins who won't be overwhelmed trying to police 100% of the farmers. Once the admins get the upper hand, it no longer becomes worth it to the farmers and IGE, since high-level characters who do the farming are time-consuming to make.

      Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are inexplicably givin
      • Actually, your suggestion won't work in the Real World (TM).

        >Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts
        >of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are

        Individuals sometimes buy additional characters/accounts just for the sake of additional storage, some of which is used for AH'ing, some of which is used for general item storage. Of course these characters/accounts will have items flowing cheaply to (and from) them. This isn't illegal. Also, thi
        • Again, think creatively. If the mules are giving AND receiving, they won't get flagged. If the script looks for patterns over a week or two instead of a day or two, there will be fewer false positives. The scripts don't necessarily auto-ban accounts, but flag them for investigation. A human then looks at the account's usage patterns and statistics and makes a judgement call.

          Why would the threshold to prove a guild is legitimate be just one representative? If other players are reporting that so-and-so i

      • Example of a script, automatically look for characters raking in huge amounts of loot/cash. Then automatically narrow those down to the ones who are inexplicably giving away most of it for no aparent reason, or if they're getting something in return, the item(s) are disproportionately cheap for the value of the exchange.

        Actions like this just encourage more devious methods of money laundering. In FFXI, it is not uncommon for players to walk around with very very little gil, and have almost all their savin

        • The scrips looks for behavior over a week or two, not a day or two, mules won't get flagged because they give AND take.

          Disproportionately cheap can be a low threshold, and more importantly, the script looks for actions over a week or two. Repeatedly giving away large sums of gil because real money was involved, will get flagged. Repeatedly giving large sums of gil for cheap items, will get flagged.

          All human beings need sleep. Bots are against the TOS. Characters that aren't standing around doing nothing

  • Polluting the Experience (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SilentOneNCW ( 943611 ) <(moc.liamg) (ta) (nogardtnelis)> on Thursday February 02, 2006 @11:48PM (#14632660) Homepage
    I see this as a potentially game-threatening problem, not just for Final Fantasy XI, but every popular MMORPG on the market today. These farmers ruin the game experience, not just through their direct effect on the market, but also by polluting the gaming experience - many people play these games to escape the real world, and having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the realism that the game hopes to instill. I am curious as to what companies can do to combat this problem; not even the Warden (courtesy Blizzard Entertainment) can defeat farming accounts.
    • I'm supprised how many people dont want to put time into farming (and I can't blame them). That is why the RMTs will always be around, a simple supply and demand: as long as people want to be able to buy gil, then the marketers will be around to supply them.

      The only time I ever see this ending is when the game itself supports an exchange rate between the real world and the game world. Then people can put their money they earn IRL into the game to spend the same way they would if they were going to another

      • Then people can put their money they earn IRL into the game to spend the same way they would if they were going to another country (or pull money out to buy their groceries).

        Then the current farmers will find their jobs offshored to someplace cheaper so that the companies selling the game-money can undercut the current rate of the game company.

        • There is a limit to this, however. You can decrease farmers' hourly wages, but you can't decrease the per-hour charges set by the game designers. If gold farming makes less real-world cash than it costs per hour of farming, then the practice will die, even if the farmers are willing to do it for free. It starts to cost money to farm.

          Of course, if you make it cheaper to buy gold than game for it, you're going to lose a lot of revenue from people that would otherwise grind for it. So the trick is to find

    • Re:Polluting the Experience (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Simple: keep a set ammount of money in the gameworld. Closed economy. Allow banks to be taken over and money stolen, and require money to be transported instead of magically being at all your banks.

      Add dynamic events where certain players' hordes are likely to be broken into by npc bandits - but only if they control too much of the currency in his bank(s). Yeah, it might piss off some players - maybe they should pay the bank to hire more guards ;) Every coin in the game should be really in the game, be it i
      • I posted recently about something like this, and would love to see it. Try to model weather as accurately as possible, then the system will change when some mage calls down a hail storm. The amount of the gold is relatively fixed in the game, yes, but so are many other things. Someone can choose to become a baker, but he'll never own his own land or make enough to travel anywhere that way. Someone can decide to adventure for a living, but the odds of survival are dismal. Even if you become successful, sudde
    • I disagree- they're the only thing that makes the games playable. MMO companies keep coming out with games where I'm forced to spend hours or days grinding for cash. This is boring. The ability to buy gold is the *ONLY* thing that makes them playable for an extended time- it lets you skip the mind nullingly dull parts, and do only the fun parts. Until one of these dev companies wakes up and makes a game where you don't need to mindlessly grind cash, the gold farmers are the best thing thats happening
      • Until one of these dev companies wakes up and makes a game where you don't need to mindlessly grind cash...

        Ahem, cough, cough, City of Heroes, mumble...
      • ITs particularly bad in FFXI, where its hard to even get a group if you don't have near perfect equipment.

        As an elvaan 65 BLM, 56 SMN, 37 DRG and various other ~30 level jobs who has never had perfect equipment I have to say that you are wildly mistaken.

        I have never bought gil. I farm. I harvest. I mine. I craft. There are plenty of ways to make good gil without mindlessly grinding out for 8 hours.

        If you don't want to play the game the way it is, and feel the need to ruin it for everyone else by supporting
        • I farm. I harvest. I mine. I craft. There are plenty of ways to make good gil without mindlessly grinding out for 8 hours.

          I eat cherry-flavored shit, orange-flavored shit, kiwi-flavored shit, strawberry-flavored shit. There are plenty of ways to feed myself without eating shit. Oh wait...
          • I actually have fun farming, harvesting, mining and crafting. If you don't find a game fun then don't play. I wouldn't pay someone else to play all my chess games up to the point where all the pawns are gone so I can play the "really good parts". Bottom line: don't fuck it up for the rest of us.
      • So what you are really trying to say is that you want to have a character with the best equipment that money can buy without having to do anything to actually get it?

        You don't need the best equipment in the game to play and enjoy it, you just want the best equipment in the game so you can be "better" than other players.
    • having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the realism that the game hopes to instill.

      No, having a significant portion of players run the game as a business operation damages the fantasy that the game hopes to instill. It only helps the realism.

  • I'll tell you how to stop gilfarmers... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by joNDoty ( 774185 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:05AM (#14632727)
    Create a MMORPG that *gasp* doesn't allow character trading. Honestly, inventories could be treated just like single player RPG's handle it. The real fun of online gaming comes from the shared experience of the adventure, not trading loot.

    • Re:I'll tell you how to stop gilfarmers... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RingDev ( 879105 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:17AM (#14632776) Homepage Journal
      believe it or not, there are some of us who craft for the fun, reputation, and social atmosphere. Puting a stop to all tradable inventory pretty much kills any craft master.

      -Rick
      • I think that the game economy is a vital part of the experience; in the real world, economics is one of the major driving forces. To take that away crushes an entire section of the game, so the challenge is not to merely stop farmers, but to stop farmers in a way that allows the game economy to continue unimpeded.
      • Puting a stop to all tradable inventory pretty much kills any craft master.

        A game based on trading will always be susceptible to people making real money trades. There are ways to make it less profitable, but it will always be a problem unless you limit trading to NPCs. You could still do well as a craft master, but inflation and scarcity would be totally controlled by the server (a good thing, considering the alternative).
        • A game based on trading will always be susceptible to people making real money trades.

          Here's an odd thought... Why worry about the real life trades? I mean, it's still commerce. The buyer pays for an item (in this case virtual), and the seller provides it. AFAIK, there's no law against such trades, nor do I really see the big problem as long as the developers are not encouraging it. (Games where you have to pay real money for stuff just to keep up with the Joneses would definitely not be fun, so the develop
          • the economy dies because there arn't enough sink holes. the gold just rising up in total amount, and only gets traded between characters.

            they need a way to limit the gold "found" from no-where. or make useful things to spend gil on. i know scrolls in ffxi were insane sometimes. some were 10x cheaper in the store than the AH (its how i made money) and other times, 10x more in store than the AH.

            They need mroe services like maybe more hero party things (npc's) you pay for there use. would help with the p

            • Re:I'll tell you how to stop gilfarmers... (Score:1, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Progressive taxes, perhaps?
            • You mean like chocobo expenses (the price is dependent on how popular that rental location is... more popular, the more expensive)?

              You mean like the 1mil gil cost to get into some high level areas?

              You mean like the tax on everything sold through the AH, and the 10% tax applied to everything sold through bazaars in Jeuno?

              You mean like nerfing the NPC buy costs on items when they're being abused?

              You mean like being able to desynth items that you buy from vendors into raw ingredients to sell on the AH? That i

          • Re:I'll tell you how to stop gilfarmers... (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Eivind ( 15695 ) <eivindorama@gmail.com> on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:32AM (#14633048) Homepage
            The reason we care is because it forces everyone to buy Gil. The thing is, Gilfarmers greatly increase the amount of Gil in the game. More Gil means higher prices for the rare items.

            These higher prices aren't payable for normal players playing normally, because it'd literally take like years of playing to get the money.

            Yes, they could try to get the rare item themselves. A good idea ! Only, there's a problem: the area where the monster with the item spawns is camped by a dozens of chinese, your odds of ever actually getting to tackle with the monster, even assuming you're *also* willing to camp there for a week, are slim.

            So what are you to do ? Accept that the game is now split in three: One, normal players, that play with the weakest gear, and are prevented from meeting the most powerful monsters. Two: players who buy Gil and thus gets the best gear for no in-game investment. They can *also* still not challenge the most powerful monsters, since these are camped. And three: Campers and Farmers that have no interest in playing the game or contributing to the society, but only camp the monster that gives them the most Gil, or does the same farming-thing over-and-over-and-over for literally years.

            Can you see why this environment migth detract from the fun for someone ?

            • But why have monsters respawn? Why would you create a world where things keep getting killed and reappear in the same place, then expect some kind of realism to spring out of that initial, insane decision?
              • That migth appear a fair question, but actually, the reasons are pretty well-known;
                • If there's *no* predictable (or semi-predictable) way of finding a given monster, then this also means there's no way to find a monster for a non-gil-farmer.
                • A world where *all* monsters spawn randomly is a world where a high-level gamer spends most of his time swatting butterflies -- he has no way to find the more challenging mobs.
                • Lots of monsters have *stories* connected to them. The *stories* frequently involve *places*
                • Here's a few thoughts.

                  * Remove spawn camping from the game. Use only instanced environment for PvE combat.

                  * Require NPC interaction to get a 'quest' to open an instance or spawn das uber beast.

                  * Use collision detection. Farm scripter will have a much harder time automating the process if someone blocks their route.

                  * Control the economy similar to a real economy. The game server is like the Department of Treasury, they control how much new money is going into the game. The trick is they need to work on ways
                  • Use only instanced environment for PvE combat.

                    Works, for that particular problem, and some MMORPGs do exactly this. Has serious drawbacks though, even apart from the unrealism, and the fair question: If that's what you want, why not just make a single-player game with online-chat :-) (Ok, I realise that's extreme)

                    Require NPC interaction to get a 'quest' to open an instance or spawn das uber beast.

                    Doesn't work. Anything a normal player can do, a chinese gold-collector can also do. (I realize they don

              • They are games, not real life. The more realistic it is, the less of an escape it is. You can eliminate the problem of camping by instancing the difficult monsters, ala WoW.

    • The real fun of online gaming comes from the shared experience of the adventure

      Not for everyone. For a lot of people, the fun comes from the immersiveness. This means that yes, people want to engage in the mundane crap like creating and trading items, rather than buying these items from minimally-interactive merchants who seem able to pull them out of their... magic stock rooms.

      And moreover, there's a peculiar kind of feedback effect in the gilfarmers' favour. 'Shared experience of the adventure' game

    • maybe, but there are a lot of lazy people out there who are willing to play cash to get to the highest levels of the game with working for it.

  • Chinese New Year (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RalphtheDwarf ( 951661 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:12AM (#14632753)
    The lack of Gilsellers is a result of the Chinese New Year that started on January 29th. The RMT'ers have a week off to celebrate, as was the case last year. They'll be back before the weekend's end. There has been a noticeable change in NM (notorious monster) hunting on my server, and there's been a slight population hit as well. It's sad that my favorite game is so horribly infested by RMT'ers.
    • Looks like these farmers are so much better off than EA employees.

  • Damage is already done. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:17AM (#14632777)
    I play FFXI, and have been for the last year and a half. I've seen the economy turn to shit in that time. Prices have easily tripled, and in some cases, gone up by 50% in a week's time. I lucked out in getting while the going was semi-decent and invested in a way to make money. Now, anyone ending up on my server is completely economically fucked.

    There's been an outbreak of recent "I'm quitting the game" posts on Allakhazam (website dedicated to various MMORPG's) and the people quitting are the one's who were around for longer then me. I either knew them personally or knew of them, via the boards or meeting em in game. Almost all of them were upright folks who I got to know to varying degrees, and they were willing to help out me and others who has just started.

    So, since the higher level folks seem to be dropping away like Fox's good shows, people joining the game now and in the future look like they're screwed, economically and socially. The game has definitely stopped being as fun as it was, and what Squeenix is doing might not cure it.

  • I admit it (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I bought gil when I used to play FFXI. That game was seriously a timesink, I wanted to play with my brother, and unlike him didn't have unlimited time (I make $150 an hour, so I figured it would be better to spend $50 on gil than farm for 8 hours).

    That game was seriously a timesink, and it took forever just to get anywhere or do anything. I've since moved to WoW, and although I havn't even hit level 30 yet, I felt like I havn't needed to buy gold yet (although my bro did set me up with 5 gold and a couple p
    • I'm not ashamed to say I considered buying gold in WoW.

      Let's face it, time can be valuable. Especially in your case. I don't make nearly as much as you but even for me my time would be better spent working for money and buying that epic mount rather than working for in-game gold. In the end I stepped back and realized, geez, I'm considering paying real world money to get something in a game ... and my solution was to stop playing the game. But I can easily see how, if one doesn't want to quit the game,

      • Re:I admit it (Score:2, Insightful)

        by SquisherX ( 864160 )

        Let's face it, time can be valuable. Especially in your case. I don't make nearly as much as you but even for me my time would be better spent working for money and buying that epic mount rather than working for in-game gold

        Herein lies the problem. People dont even recognize that they are playing a game. Does getting that gold or item make the game more enjoyable? It simulates progression when there really isnt any at all. That level 60 character is having no more fun than the level 10, I would even

  • Good, I'm not losing my mind..... (Score:3, Funny)

    by ShyGuy91284 ( 701108 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @12:46AM (#14632881)
    I thought that the fact that Final Fantasy was the first thing that came to my mind with the term "gilfarmers" was wrong, and that this story Was about some odd form of fish....
  • The only MMORPG I've ever played that I really enjoyed is one that completely lacks any sort of crafting system. I am a total City of Heroes/Villains [coh.com] addict. The game is about enjoying the experience of playing, and there is a very limited amount of stuff to buy in-game: enhancements and inspirations. That's it, nothing else can be purchased in-game. No crafting, very little player-based economy and it was MMORPG of the year last yeat.
    • Crafting and an economy isnt the only thing CoH/V lacks, they also have no content. By level 14 you have experienced the whole game. Which "Game of the year award" are you talking about? The only one I saw started with something very similar to "there was almost no competition this year so this award defaults to COV".

  • But what will become of the children? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ian_mackereth ( 889101 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @01:11AM (#14632977) Journal
    This is handled very well in Cory Doctorow's short story, "Ander's Game"
    (Yes, the Cory from Boingboing)

    http://craphound.com/000187.html [craphound.com]

    (with links to a podcast version as well)

  • O RLY? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's a fairly well suspected secret that Square-Enix actually allows gilfarming, or at least their GMs do. There are plenty of stories of GMs refusing to take action against obvious gilfarming groups when they break the TOS, and then taking action against the people reporting the gilfarmers for minor infractions.

    (Stuff like gilfarmers repeatedly MPKing other players, those players calling a GM, and then the players being MPKed having their accounts suspended for breaking language rules by saying "wtf" or s
  • As long as there are game economies that allow you to make items, buy/sell items, and store bucketloads of cash, you will see farming done. In fact, of all of the many MMOs I have played (over a dozen, either in beta, live, or both) there have been problems with the economies, with the exception of CoH/V (which doesn't really have one.)

    I see one of the biggest problems being that, especially here in the U.S., there is a sense of entitlement. And you have to buy that entitlement.

    Players want to have stuff

    • Re:Game economies and the real world (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Hey, though I agree with you about most of your post, the tattoo remark was a bit irksome. Most people who get large tattoos take great personal pride in them, and I am not talking about the Tazmania Devil/Nike Swoosh/Tribal armband crowd. There is a difference between personal expression and pointless materialism. When I am dead, my car may get reposessed, but my tattoos are mine forever. /rant off

  • Farmers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by queenb**ch ( 446380 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:02AM (#14633128) Homepage Journal
    Seriously, a lot of that stuff is run by automated processes. I know a few guys that got real world rich of UO and EQ in that very manner. The trick is to make it so that it requires interaction with a live human or two or more in order to craft some of these high powered items. I know of several smaller privately run RPG game servers that have serious crafting components for those that choose to do so. You can also restrict raw materials. For example, if you want to make leather armor, it takes 10 hides. Now, you can't just walk over to another merchant and get 10 hides. You'll have to get them from a player who's been out hunting and who has the "skin animal" skill. He might only have one or two. You may end up having to buy hides from 7 or 8 people just to have the skins you need. Now you need metal too... You get the idea.

    You can stop the farmers if you design it properly from the get go.... Maybe not completely but at least keep it down to a dull roar.

    2 cents,

    Queen B

    • Re:Farmers (Score:2, Interesting)

      by RalphtheDwarf ( 951661 )
      That's not an entirely accurate assessment of the situation. Let me give you an example of what part of the problem is:

      Let's say there exists a dragon that drops a valuable item. This dragon spawns approximately once a real life day (randomly somewhere between 21 and 24 hours to mix it up and make sure it doesn't stay in the same time zone forever), and the item that it drops isn't guaranteed. This item is also highly sought after.

      That would make this item pretty darn valuable, wouldn't it? There is at most
      • This is solved fairly easily. Make said dragon very very difficult, to the extent that it requires many individuals with some of the best armor on to defeat. The majority of RMTs that I've seen around are decked out in some of the crappiest gear that I've ever encountered. I am unaware of the number of people that they can organize to take the dragon down, but I imagine that it would require more people than they have on at any point in time.

  • Real economy? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Max Threshold ( 540114 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:10AM (#14633152)
    Why not make a game with a real economy instead of one where gold comes from the hacked and dismembered corpses of innocent woodland creatures? Put a fixed amount of cash into circulation, and issue more as needed via NPC merchants.
    • If you have in a game a real economy with limited resources, it will break even faster when new players join. Either they will have a hard time to come up with money because none is available, or the resources made available for them are taken by high level players. No fun in both situations.

      In the end, creating money all the time is the only way to give a fair start to new players.
      • Then give a little bit of money to new characters, and put a limit on the number of new characters [with money] that can be created on an account within a given time period.

        Creating money all the time does not give a fair start to new players. As the amount of money in circulation grows, trading prices are inflated. New and casual players, whose income is fixed by cash drop rates, find it harder to obtain the cash needed to buy crafted items and rare drops from wealthy and powerful players. Increasing

        • Gold farmers in WOW deflate the economy.
          • They would deflate the NPC economy, where prices are fixed. But DAoC has a comprehensive system for trading between players, with searchable consignment merchants. That economy has become inflated, and it makes things worse because it keeps more money changing hands between players rather than going into NPC sinks.
    • Ultima Online began that way. I played it back during the beta test. The NPC vendors were not gold-sinks and could only buy resources at fixed intervals. Resources also only reappeared once they were taken out of circulation by NPC's. Also, there was no "vendor trash" like in WoW, vendors would not buy worthless items. The only way to get money was from tougher monsters, or buy selling farmed items to higher-up players.

      The result of this was that there were very few powerful or rich players, almost everyo

  • Just like Law Enforcement -Do Sting Operations (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Set up sting operations. Buy gil from IGE and then ban the accounts that come forward to give you the gil. Alternatively buy the gil from the person and then flag the account so you can see with whom they are trading items/gil. Pretty soon you will be able to see within reason the network of buyers and sellers. Proceed to ban all of the sellers and warn all of the buyers (or ban them, I'm a little more understanding as to their motivation). Repeat as necessary.

    Buying 2,000,000 gil is only $37.95 on IGE righ

  • Kill the farmers (Score:3, Interesting)

    by king-manic ( 409855 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:32AM (#14633212)
    make gold irrelevant. Like diablo 2, gold was mostly meaningless. make all the good items bind on pickup and have no more gold sinks, make it quests. For instance instead fo 80 gold to buy a mount, make it a quest that takes 1-5 hours. instead of making your castle require upkeep in gold, make it so you have to spend a X amount of time doing administration (in the form of little games you play for a certain amoutn of time). Make gold available and make it variably avaialble based on how much is in the system, if it starts hoarding gold, make a tax system that robs anyone who hoards it. Got 1mil gold well the kingdom of astermouth will force you to tithe 10% of the first 100,000 20% of the next 400,000 and 30 of the next 500,000. Make it so having those amounts will be hard to force farmers to do more admin work. And deduct your taxes at random (say no more then X times in a period of X days totalling the entire amount. So for a 30% tax, you can take onyl a total of 30% in a 1 mo period but it's taken at random and calculated at random. may 5th it calculates, 16th 19th, 25th it withdraws a third of what the calculation woudl be) all of sudden hoarding gold seems stupid, farming it it not all that worth while. They wont' go away but at least you've made thier lives very difficult.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • basically make it like WoW... which has its own very publicised gold farming and RMT issues themselves. Even Diablo had hackers who duped gold so your idea doesnt work very well.

        Dupes are bugs, their a problem outside of what I proposed, and Wow has gold farmers because gold is still very very useful. Item farming not so much because everything is bind on pickup. Another idea would be a commodity system where items that are farmed a lot lose value, promoting everyone hunting something different. Add supply

  • Inflation is natural in Online Games (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LKM ( 227954 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @02:43AM (#14633232)

    As long as gamers can create "money", for example by farming gold, the amount of money (or assets bought by the money) in circulation will increase, which will deacrease the value of the money.

    There's only one way to solve this: Have a more or less fixed amount of money in circulation. Don't let gamers create money. Only create money if the population increases.

  • Blaming the economy isn't the solution. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iluvitar ( 140189 ) on Friday February 03, 2006 @04:25AM (#14633534) Homepage
    I think the point that most people are missing, is that the economy of FFXI has components similar to many of the solutions suggested by posters above. You can't just assume that the inflation of all the items is due to the fact that gilfarmers are 'farming' gil. In actuality, gilfarmers in FFXI don't really contribute as much gil to the system as the fishbotting problem did. The rapid inflation of rare items (like Haubergeon+1, Juggernaught, Nobles/Aristocrat's Tunics. etc etc) are due to both the massive RMT that takes place, and the declining server populations.

    When somebody quits, they don't quit with all their gil. They give it to their friends, in hopes that their friends can use the gil to jump ahead and get those items they truly wanted (Astral Earring, Juggernaught etc). This leads to less people in general holding the same total amount of gil. Obviously the prices of items will go up in this situation.

    Solutions like taxes have been implemented in FFXI for a long time now. Large (10%) taxes on bazaar sales, on all auction house sales in Jeuno/Tavnazian Safehold, increasingly demanding chocobo fees (5k/chocobo for a 3 minute ride is normal), Dynamis, Limbus etc are all money sinks that are implemented with the sole purpose of sucking gil out of the system to try to control the average gil holdings of all the people left on the server. As with all solutions, people get away with tax evasion (bazaaring in starting nations or in open fields), direct trading, etc, but the solutions are still implemented with varying success.

    The problem with gil farmers in FFXI lies in the fact that they monopolize NM/HNM's and become the sole source of rare items deemed fundamental for normal play or crafting synthesis, and then abuse the discrepencies in supply and demand to make huge profits of gil that they later RMT back to players. Somebody suggested making crafting require absurd amounts of materials as a solution. Some recipes in FFXI require 8 ingredients (that may or may not be stacked, requiring intense travelling) of varying rareness or origin, multiple craft sub-skills, etc.

    It's not like WoW where gilfarmers just sit there killing monsters and collect the gold that they drop. No mob in FFXI (goblins dropping 5gil/kill) is worth farming like that (better to farm beehive chips in giddeus and HQ beeswax for hundreds of k worth of gil on the auction house). And, almost all mobs worth killing require at least 6+ people to do it (either for experience points, or camping HNM).

    To counter this, Square-Enix started to move away from HNM centric loot distribution, and towards instanced battles, with participation rates determined by how many beastman seals you could collect (not so common), and then later with more fights with participation rates determined by how many Kindred Seals (even less common) you could collect. These were the right direction in the end, and they implemented fixed interval fights ENM's that proved rewarding and fun. These are really good changes and any FFXI gamer that has experienced the effects of these will tell you they add to the enjoyment of the game.

    The problem almost all FFXI->WoW converts complain about is that it takes too much effort to get items in FFXI with little gain. Almost all the items in the game worth getting are the results of huge collaborations of team effort (and organizational nightmares). This is the part that seems to separate the average WoW gamer and a true FFXI junkie. The WoW convert detests investing insane amounts of time/effort into the game without quick rewards/satisfaction, while the FFXI junkie will not have it any other way.

    In FFXI you camp kings for 3-9 hours/day (rotating times so it might be 3pm - midnight today, and in 3 days the spawn windows could be 3am to 9am) for the 'chance' to be able to fight (150+ people in a tiny zone trying to claim a mob that pops every 21-24 hours at 30 minute intervals and 12-18'ish people get to fight it for 15 minutes to an hour) and out of that chance, the 1/11 chance that t

    • The problem almost all FFXI->WoW converts complain about is that it takes too much effort to get items in FFXI with little gain. Almost all the items in the game worth getting are the results of huge collaborations of team effort (and organizational nightmares). This is the part that seems to separate the average WoW gamer and a true FFXI junkie. The WoW convert detests investing insane amounts of time/effort into the game without quick rewards/satisfaction, while the FFXI junkie will not have it any ot

  • Some thoughts from a "hardcore" FFXI player (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03, 2006 @04:54AM (#14633603)
    I'd consider myself a "hardcore" FFXI player. I've got one job at level 75 on the Odin server and another getting very close. I'd estimate my weekly play-time to be in the 15-20 hours range for an average week. It's been blatantly obvious since November or so that *something* has been changing in the dynamic between GMs, RMTs (real money traders) and other general griefers.

    First of all, just to clarify what I mean by "farming" in this post. Farming is not, in itself, an illegitimate activity, or against the terms-of-service. If you want to make some money in FFXI, farming is one of the most reliable ways of doing so. Run out to a zone where you can kill the mobs easily and quickly and where the mobs drop items that you can sell on for good money. The longer you stay there farming, the more money you make. As you will need a lot of high value items in FFXI, some of them from quite an early level, most players will spend a lot of time farming at various points. "Farming" only deserves its negative connotations when it is done with the express purpose of exchanging the gil made for real-world money.

    Although I haven't bought gil myself (despite extreme temptation on a couple of occasions), I'd estimate the proportion of players who have at about 25%, mostly for when they've wanted an expensive, one off item that's essential for their job (the Haubergeon for melee jobs is the classic example). I'd also estimate that maybe 10% buy gil on a regular basis (as in, several million gil per month). I've no hard evidence to back this up... just observations of how many people seem to be able to get by with little or no farming, acquire expensive items at a suspicious rate and so on. To be frank, anybody levelling Ranger or Ninja at a rate of more than one or two levels per week is almost certainly buying gil, unless they started with a vast amount of capital.

    Now, for a long time, this had been widely known and the situation had been more or less stable. There was a constant, but managable, level of inflation in the game. Most players looked down on people suspected of buying gil and nobody would actually own up to it, but it wasn't significantly unbalancing the game and those who didn't buy gil could generally get along just fine without it. However, in October/November, IGE started a series of price-cuts on gil. I'd only been monitoring their prices since August or so, but I'm told that price-cuts up to that point had been relatively minor and relatively evenly spaced. At the start of October, 2 million gil would have set you back about $50-60.

    By early-December, 2 million gil was down to $30. This was already having a significant impact in-game. The price of many of the "premium" items, such as the Haubergeon, Scorpion Harness and Peacock Charm had doubled. In early October, the prices of those items were 2 million, 4.5 million and 8 million respectively. By the start of December, 4 million, 8 million and 15 million.

    Then came the Christmas-sale. Suddenly, IGE were selling 4 million gil for about $22. Lots of idiots who got cash for Christmas ran right out and spent it on gil, tempted by the insane prices. Of course, this was a pretty futile exercise, as inflation immediately went insane. The three items above peaked at 12 million, 19 million and 32 million respectively during the week between Christmas and New Year.

    Now, the big problem was what this meant for the people who didn't buy gil. See, when people buy themselves gil for Christmas, it's not because they want to use it to pay for their food or ammo costs for the next few months, or to level a craft. It's because they want a big, shiny premium item. So the inflation was confined almost entirely to the highly desirable items in question. The number of hours that an "honest" player would need to farm for to afford one of these items had pretty much quadrupled overnight. For the first time, those who didn't buy gil were at a real, almost insurmountable disadvantage. This was nothing less than an attempt by IGE to sieze outright cont
    • 2000k @ 20.00 on Midgardsormr, which is down from 24.00 a month ago.

    • While I do not doubt your thoughts, there is one point that did not seem accurate:

      "To be frank, anybody levelling Ranger or Ninja at a rate of more than one or two levels per week is almost certainly buying gil, unless they started with a vast amount of capital."

      That seems a lot low, to me. If you find a good party to group with (full of people that know what they are doing), know where to go and what mobs to grab, you can gain one level every 2-3 hours barring accidental linkage induced death. I kno

      • "To be frank, anybody levelling Ranger or Ninja at a rate of more than one or two levels per week is almost certainly buying gil, unless they started with a vast amount of capital."

        What he's saying there isn't that someone who levels multiple times in a week is buying gil (I do it all the time), but that someone who levels a RNG or NIN as their first job (aka not having tons of funding from another high level job) is most likely buying gil, due to the extremely high costs of those jobs. I spent about 1mill
  • If wow emphisised crafting over drops i think a few problems would be fixed...
  • I was hoping this would be a story about 'posses' going out and about hunting down and PKing known gold farmers.

    Darn.
  • square enix undercuts the gillfarmers so badly that they cant turn a profit anymore.

    why bother to spend the time to farm that 1mil gil when anybody can buy it straight from square for $5?

    gilfarmers die off and square turns a nice profit.

    win/win
    • ... not to flame but... um. NO. The problem with inflation in FFXI recently is because gil prices got disgustingly LOW. Basically if you make a million gil sell for $5, it's worth $5. If you make a million gil sell for $10, it's worth $10. So by making the money CHEAPER, your DEFLATING the VALUE of gil. Which basically leads to where FFXI is. Gil can be bought for so low, that what used to cost 8 million a month ago now costs 24 million. Remember, the people setting prices are the players. So if th

  • I believe I could stop gold farming today, right this minute. (I'm only familiar with WoW, however). Here it is: don't allow large sums to be received through the mail from sources that don't receive anything in return. Put it on a timer, so that the farmer doesn't work around it by simply sending many smaller shipments; scale the value to the respective level. I guess lvl 60 characters might be legitimately receiving 100 GP from their guild mates, but if that amount is going to anyone under lvl 30 ov
    • First red light while I'm reading this:

      I believe I could stop gold farming today, right this minute

      No problem that's existed for over 10 years can be solved in under a minute. Let's go deeper tho.

      Perhaps the reason this hasn't been implemented is not that there's a secret agreement between gold sellers and the game makers, but because things are in fact more complex then your making it?

      Here it is:

      don't allow large sums to be received through the mail from sources that don't receive anything in re


      • Last night, because my friend is on dialup

        I'm willing to concede that I don't have the kind of friends that give away leet loot to my starting characters. I had a hard time conceiving that anyone would; but you give a counter-example.

        And btw, I wasn't suggesting necessarily banning those characters, just disallowing the attempt. And in your case, I'm not sure that disallowing "in-person" gifts would be an issue--I think there'd be enough time involved in coordinating a meetup that it would make it to

  • ...it's the prohibition.

    The reward from farming is largely the result of the artificial search costs created by deeming it illegitimate. If you made gold farming open and accessible, the profit on the activity would drop, fewer would engage in it, and the obnoxiousness factor would become negligible.

    No one would send spamming tells, because everyone would know where to go to turn gold into cash and vice versa. Also, to limit some rich kid's ability to make the game inherently unfair, just have periodic ra
  • How about creating a progressive tax with an exponential curve? The more gold you have stowed away, the more the game gov't gets every day. Perhaps with the more tax you pay, you could gain some sort of prestige or privalige or something, so that a normal rich gamer would not be straight robbed.

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