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."
Pwned. (Score:5, Funny)
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Prices? (Score:2)
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I'm curious as to whether or not the lack of access by gold farmers in the Far East has increased the real-world prices of commodities and currencies. If so, it opens the door to the duplication of the effect by man-made events.
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I'd imagine that they spiked...I know IGE, for example, changes it's prices all the time, so I'd be surprised if they didn't reflect the growing scarcity. I wouldn't think it would affect the sale of characters, and I'd imagine for WoW, that the coming expansion has already knocked the bottom out of the sale of high level items.
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Very interesting stuff here. I'll be watching more closely from now on, for sure.
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.
GW (Score:1)
1) Max level is 20 and reached quickly.
- If you just want to PVP, you can create a level 20 PVP character with max stats and items.
2) Equipment isn't the biggest deal; you'll usually be strong enough for the next area by the time you get there as long as you do most or all of the quests along the way.
- Some people like to pay for extra rare items with nicer looking skins (same s
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I think it's fair to say that Guildwars is the new Gentoo.
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I'm not a GW freak, I haven't even played it in several months. It just seems to be what a lot of people keep asking for when they talk about what they want out of an mmorpg.
Is it perfect? HELL NO! Hardcore, non-pvp mmo fans get bored quickly from the relatively small game world, and non-hardcore pvp'ers have a difficult time getting their skills to
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For example, one thing I've noticed is that they lend themselves well to a tension between a "balanced" or "specialized" team. If your team is too balanced (i.e. too generalized), your tactics will often not be extremely effective. On the other hand,
Gold farming is a sign your players are lazy. (Score:1, Insightful)
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At any rate, this earthquake won't matter in 2 months- gold earning rates are way up in the expansion, so prices will drop due to higher supply. Which is a good thing- I'm unwilling to farm at current rates for my flying mount, and its a little to pricey to buy the gold yet.
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Par
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Yawn (Score:1)
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I think this is pronounced "Apple press release".
I am probably a HORRIBLE person for this but... (Score:3)
I honestly dont' have much against the gold farmers themselfs, and I do feel bad about the people injured and those stuck with out communication, however I have to laugh at the tools that make this all possible, the people BUYING the gold.
Hey, "every one" complains about goldfarmers destroying the ingame economy, etc etc. however they wouldn't be able to DO that if it wasn't for the people buyign off of them.
and for those tools stuck with out their gold, I simply laugh at them
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In a way, you may be right. I think of people who spend RL money to increase their in-game power sort of the same way I think of people who use their extreme wealth to make friends.
On one hand, it's kind of sad, because it's likely that the rich person is either unable or unwilling to make the effort that most people do to develop a real friendship - like spending time with each other, listening to their i
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It is complete fantasy. RL wealth provides you time to play more often than people who have to go to work. Someone who can be at the computer 24/7 will always have an advantage over us poor schmucks who have to work. These games are inexplicably tied to real life, no matter how much you want them not to b
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Until.. the Nightfall? Right now Guild Wars: Nightfall is out. You don't have to pay a subscription to play it. And people buy the currency. Hrmm. And don't give me the whole "yea but with Guild Wars you don't buy monthly fees, you buy expansions" bit. You don't HAVE to buy the expansions to play -- and plenty of subscription based MMORPGS release expansions as often as Guild Wars -- EQ2 for example.
TLF
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Guild Wars. Enough said.
TLF
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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 t
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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
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You've got it backwards. MMOPRGs are contests to see whose time is the least valuable. Hiring a gold farmer is cheating.
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Seems pretty good for Blizz doesn't it? Seems like maybe that's the only reason it's not legal to do. It's good business for Blizzard to make it illegal. There are numerous other games where it is not il
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The most lucrative strategy for gold farmers is now key loggers installed via Active X plugins. They aren't honest people, they do not respect other players. However much you'd like to transfer the blame to their market, they are still vermin to be exterminated.
Of course, the ultimate blame rests with Blizzard, as they can track every transaction in game, and can punish every person who buys gold once the source account i
God no... (Score:1)
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If they wanted to rid themselfs of gold sellers I bet they could. The way(s) I would go about it are:
1) Watch accounts that tend to transfer gold around alot (specificly where they tend to transfer to large numbers of people, and rarely, if ever, recieve items back).
2) Pull chat logs on these watched accounts.
3) Create a search that will find common strings related to th
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2. I don't think that they keep chatlogs of all ppl, maybe only the suspicious ones
3. They are working on that, they have an internal spamfilter, but it isn't working well just yet
4. They do drop the banhammer often, last week they banned 105000 accounts for the good of the honest players.
It is profitable to ban misbehaving miscreants from the game to please the game experience for the honest customers.
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2) They DO keep chat logs,
Virtual goods for real money = new economy (Score:2, Insightful)
Clouds (Score:1)