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Cracking down on the Gold farmers
Terridol
Member Posts: 123
I just read this article about the Devsat FF11 cracking down on the gold farmers in their game.
http://ff-fan.com/index.php?subaction=showfull&id=1150659799&archive=&start_from=&ucat=&
Comments
WoW does not have an in-game economy. Gold cannot buy the equipment worth having, players do not sell mounts, and players give their gold to NPCs to fix gear. The only thing remotely resembling an economy is herbs and potions which are traded for gold, so that that gold can be given to NPCs.
On the other side of the coin, people need to lighten up on the gold farming issue. Yes, gold farming causes inflation, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. That means instead of focusing on getting raw gold, one should focus on getting things that are traded for gold. If prices are inflated, they can sell it for more gold. If this process is followed by everyone, everyone would have more gold overall and fixed-costs (skills, mounts, whatever) would not be less of an issue. The real complaints about gold farming is those players eating up content/server space, which is more of a highlight of the world being too small or otherwise unable to handle the player load.
Of course, it also says something about the game when a poorly educated chinese worker can play 3-4 characters at once to make such farming so profitable. Script-assisted or not, it says something about the game.
Games I've played/tried out:WAR, LOTRO, Tabula Rasa, AoC, EQ1, EQ2, WoW, Vangaurd, FFXI, D&DO, Lineage 2, Saga Of Ryzom, EvE Online, DAoC, Guild Wars,Star Wars Galaxies, Hell Gate London, Auto Assault, Grando Espada ( AKA SoTNW ), Archlord, CoV/H, Star Trek Online, APB, Champions Online, FFXIV, Rift Online, GW2.
Game(s) I Am Currently Playing:
GW2 (+LoL and BF3)
I have never once heard a convincing argument about how farming items for real currency is detrimental to the economies of games.
Well farming causes both deflation of items on the lower end and inflation of higher value items because of increased wealth. It's a double punch against the average player who doesn't farm.
The average player needs good quality items to sell or trade in-game and those items are the ones that are commonly farmed and therefore lose value with an increased supply. This makes it more difficult for the average player to earn an in-game income.
The higher end rarer items then become inflated in price because of the increased wealth of farmers and those who support farmers by buying their gold, who are then willing to pay more for the best quality items. Those items are now pushed farther out of reach for the average player who plays the game normally.
"We feel gold selling and websites that promote it damage games like Vanguard and will do everything possible to combat it."
Brad McQuaid
Chairman & CEO, Sigil Games Online, Inc.
Executive Producer, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
www.vanguardsoh
The only effective way to deal with the problem is to ban players who buy gold.
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im to lazy too use grammar or punctuation good
Which would be pretty dumb of them to do, since those people obviously have enough money to keep paying for 1 or more subscriptions for a long time.
A Work in Progress.
Add Me
Same here.
People just like to have something to be against. Or an emotional crutch to believe when they see other people are doing better than them.
Personally I can't stand gold farming. I understand the reasons why people do it, but I hate it. I don't want to be on the same servers as gold farmers. You want my reasons? Here you go:
1. Gold farming (as said) drives up the cost of higher end items due to an in-game elite of people who can afford them, and it drives down the cost of lower end, common drop items making it nearly impossible for people to earn a profit off of selling their loot to other players.
2. I don't like the fact that just because someone has money to throw away on virtual currency, they can and do have better items and more money in general.
3. I hate seeing bots crowding the zones. The worst games I've ever seen this in are FFXI, Lineage 2, and World of Warcraft. They take up all the spawns and can make it nearly impossible to get anything done in the zone they're farming, including quests.
4. Go back to #2. The people who buy gold have more money to spend on buying high level gear. What this [b]can[/b] but does not always do (yes, I've seen it myself) is make it so that--especially at higher levels--only people with high end gear get into any special groups or raids. This usually starts 1 to 2 years into a game's lifespan and lasts the rest of the time. What ends up happening is that the only people who can get into these groups are people who:
The only real solution to this that would make everyone happy is to open up servers specifically for the trade, such as what SOE did with station exchange. This wouldn't stop the gold trade alltogether, but it would really slow it down. It would drive gold prices from people like IGE up tremendously on the non-special servers, which would be enough to convince some people to move to the game supported trade servers, slowing down the trade and further increasing prices on non-supported servers.
In time companies like IGE wouldn't be able to fully support games like that, and not to mention because the game companies themselves are supporting the trades, they'd making money off of it to put back into the game itself. It works for everyone.
Although I don't play it anymore, I still keep in touch with many people who play EQ2, and they all tell me that after the SE servers launches there has been a huge drop of botters and gold farmers on their servers.
Schutzbar - Human Warrior - Windrunner Alliance - World of Warcraft
Nihilanth - Kerra Paladin - Blackburrow - EverQuest II
XBL Gamertag - Eagle15GT
Farmers = money
they ban some just please the player base
I support banning anyone who buys or sells gold. Ban their accounts, suspend their credit cards, and maybe post a list of those caught doing it somewhere.
The only real solution I see to dealing with these farmers is to have people who spend large chunks of time in places that are condusive to farming, and then watch for the activity. They can set up procedures to avoid getting false positives (that is, players who are legitimately farming for their own stuff, not Bots or Chinese-type farmers who farm solely to sell items for off-site buying/selling.)
Online gaming companies need to attack this problem and keep attacking it until some more elegant solution is found.
This is the typical argument made as to why currency resellers are detrimental to the economy of games. But this argument is deeply flawed. Let's consider a few things about the economies of MMOGs.
First and foremost, you cannot use typical supply/demand and monetary flow arguments in a MMOG. MMOG economies are already inflationary. Money spawns constantly, and unless it is spent in some way in a money sink that developers have to counterbalance the creation of the money you will see typical patterns of hording and spluring appear. In a MMOG the presence of inflation is not indicative of any specific group performing inflationary practices. It is not a zero-sum system; the entire system is inflationary.
Secondly, and most importantly, in order to make the assertion that there is damage to the economy of a MMOG by people who buy in-game currency with real cash, you must provide scope and evidence. Burden of proof of an assertion rests in the hands of the person who makes the assertion. So where is your proof? What scope are we talking about? Are we suggesting that some significant percentage of players are involved in this? What percentage? Would those players be playing the game if they couldn't obtain their nest egg of cash? Would they instead farm items from the economy and horde/splurge in the same way?
This is where things start to really break down in the assertions. You cannot point to inflation and assert "it exists, ergo it is the cause of resellers". The system is inflationary, thus you must have inflation. So where is your proof? What is the basis for even the hypothesis?
Lastly, players who play "legitimately" (who do not buy or sell currency or items for real money) are constaly farming and hording cash and items. This is anthropologically wired in the human psyche...we hunt and gather. Any MMOG that uses items as a measure of capability, where items can be bartered between players, will find people hording currency and items for in-game resale. The oldest of "problems" in MUDs and MMOGs were campers who monopolized the most profitable spawns. This is the way the game is played. To suggest that the people who take what they earn in a manner such as this and operate through the middleman of a real-world currency system is to ignore the fact that this is what players do all the time regardless of how they use their winnings.
It is this last point that I bring up each and every time this argument comes up and there is actually a discussion in play. It has been my direct experience in any MMOG I've played that dramatically more people farm for resale in-game than not. And it is those farmers that deny me the ability to claim a spawn I'd like to kill for a quest of drop. To my knowledge, I've never encountered a bot or "gold farmer", and I base that experience directly on the fact that almost all the characters I've seen in the choice spots in any game I've gone to I have later seen selling that item in an in-game market/auction.
I find the entire argument about inflation ludicruous, because the entire system is a deeply flawed inflationary system. It's been my experience that the "abuse" of currency resellers has been extremely small in percentage to the "abuse" of normal farmers. I have more conflicts with real players, who undercut prices or monopolize items and spawns, than I ever have with Mr IBoughtGold who decides to toss a few thousand gold into a system that is already rife with inflation, abuse, and anti-competitive tendancies.
and
This is, in the end, what I think infuriates the majority of players who dislike the practice. Money buys you advantage. That's the way of the world. You don't have to like it, but there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.
Stop right there. You can't make everyone happy.
The elegant solution is to engineer a game that doesn't rely on cash or items as a measure of character ability. Short of that, you will never see an end to this practice.