Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
F2P and Gold Farming
Paradigm68
UncommonPosts: 890Member
I answered this in another post and thought it deserved it's own post:
What impact does the f2p model have on the gold farming industry?
When you think about it the f2p model has essentially usurped the gold farmer in their own game, selling advantages to their own game. Given a publisher's access and ability to custom tailor their offerings (as opposed to gold farmers who deal primarily in the coin of the realm) it stands to reason that no third-party gold farming company could compete.
So can anyone who is playing a game that use to be sub based and is now f2p talk about any impact it's had on gold farming in your game? Like spambots, macro-ers, etc...
To add: What about the impact of how devs deal with goldfarmers and buyers. The traditional argument that they don't want to ban paying customers is not relevant in a f2p model.
Comments
Wherever and whenever someone wants something there will always be a farming system. Weither its gold items or whatever there will always be someone willing to pay a price and as long as someone is willing to pay there will be a gold farmer.
Even though I didn't play the game but I'm sure there was farmers in Games like Guildwars and other Free to play models.
Dunno how much of an impact it made on it or not. Free to play games seems alot easier as the farmer doesn't need an acutal subscription just a bot and go.
There's this interview of a Professional "Chinese" Gold Farmer from Markeedragon that was posted last year. The person talks mostly about how Gold Sellers makes their money mostly from P2P, while it's very hard in F2Ps. Decent interview.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWvHcoqru7I
There was a very recent article that talked about the risks for gold farmers as prices go down on gold. If a company is seeling cash shop items or gold, they are effectively fixing the prices against those sorts of downturns. This is good for the gold farming business that undersells the company.
Now, some companies sell things that aren't available from game play. So that's that on that, right? Well, maybe, because some companies will sell things in bulk at reduced rates. RKTers can buy at that reduced soct and sell between that and the higher prices.
So there's a lot of questions to be asked and answered before you can say anything one way or the other, and it varies with each company.
But if you remember the deal with Farmville, and the private, invite only deal rooms they were running for big time, thousand dollar spenders, you might ask yourself how close the companies might have their elbows to those of the gold farmers and RMTers. But keep in mind that every company probably has their own, unique view of it all.
Once upon a time....
If you want to believe that gold farmer. Or even Markee Dragon who was, maybe still is, one himself.
Once upon a time....
From personal experience, there are still gold farmer in f2p games, but there are alot less in f2p games.
Since people that want to buy gold can just buy from the game company safely and not worried about getting banned.
Wether you agree with what he does or not ( I personally don't, and I've only saved this video as I don't bother for any other of his vids), he does give a few interesting information about the "inside" of Gold Selling, why and where it works, and also to some extent, how to reduce it's impact. He even mentions how to prevent Account Theft from Hackers (often used by Gold Farmers to save time) by talking about the method WoW Taiwan used, which is to force players to change password every month with a different one (cannot use a password that has already been used too I believe).
As far as I'm concerned, I think all the information in that video IS reliable, even if you may not agree with the interviewer and the content of his videos in general.
You're welcome to your own opinion, of course.
Once upon a time....