I was reading the World of Warcraft forums in Gamefaqs.com (because the official forms were/are down for maintenance or something) and noticed a distressing trend.
Now, both my friend and I were pretty confident jackasses wouldn’t be screwing around with the economy by selling money/items in real life for real money. Blizzard appeared to take a hard line about this, and we expected nothing short of learning the lessons of virtually every MMORPG that came before World of Warcraft. Unfortunately I’m already seeing problems brewing:
The main contention is Chinese Goldfarmers. These are players who communicate in Chinese; they have level 60 characters and camp high-yield areas to get as much gold as possible. They then sell the gold on e-bay, $1 for 2 gold is the going rate I heard. This is SUPPOSED to be forbidden to do in the game, but people are getting away with it anyway. :mad:
Then there are the COD scammers. In the game, you can send stuff via a mail system. You can also charge C.O.D. (so if you were selling something to somebody who coudn’t immediately pick it up or something). What these scammers do is send the victim a letter with something like ‘free gold’ or ‘here’s that money I owe you’, but set a COD for something like 100 gold. Someone who is not paying attention may accept, draining their account of the cash (and 100 gold is a LOT of money in this game).
I guess the great irony of all of this is the sucess of the goldfarmers has driven the COD scammers to prey on them. Since goldfarmers are loaded and often have a limited understanding of English, COD scammers can suck huge quantities of funds out of them.
Sheesh, what’s next, a WoW equivalent of the Nigerian bank scam? “My town in Westfall erupted in chaos and I need you to hold this chest of gold coins for me…”
Just currious, but do you know how much gold does the average player gets per day in WoW? And how many people are playing - I know it is a couple hundred thousand. Just trying to figure out the size of the WoW G.D.P is from the conversion rate you gave to dollars.
I don’t know what an “average” player can pull goldwise in a day. It depends on what you find, and that depends on your level. The most I ever made on an item I found (at level 40) is 7 gold by selling it in the Auction House. Other items, found by players in the 55-60 lvl range, can sell for 2 or 3 hundred gold.
Gold pieces in this game actually have a pretty high value (well, right NOW they do). For instance, a mount (which increases movement speed) costs something like 100 gold, and many players have to save up several levels before they can even get it so that they have enough money for one.
Right now, the economy in the game functions fairly well, because the game supply of gold is regulated by the fact that when a player sells something to a vender, the money gets taken ‘out of circulation’. But since selling stuff to other players is generally more profitible, the overall supply of money starts to bloat. Think of goldfarmers as politicians minting more money. The result is inflation. Soon the gap between what an NPC vendor will give you for an item and what a player will give you will be so great, hardly anybody will bother selling to the vendor because they could earn 200x more selling it to another player. This prevents money from leaving the economy, leading to more inflation. This inflation hurts newer players, who are limited in their ability to gather a significant amount of money, and the only way they can have a hope of being part of the economy is to contribute to making it worse, by going on Ebay and spending $50 to get 100 gold in the game; goldfarmers in China whose primary means of income in real life is playing World of Warcraft and selling in-game gold to other real life players.
MMORPG economies have always fascinated me. Has Blizzard stated how they intend to keep prices stable? Or do they just hope squashing exploits and suing real-world sellers will be enough? (I doubt that it will be.)
Ahem… sorry, didn’t mean to mock you or denigrate your complaint. That was just funny as hell.
Anyway, my two cents is that if it’s starting to impact the real world, or vice-versa, then it ain’t a game no mo’. And of course there’s always the “how serious should a game be?” debate. I’m reminded of the poster who said that on one online game he and his friends decided to become brigands. They would ambush people and impose a non-trivial penalty (a “death” that was laborious and time consuming to recover from) on anyone who didn’t fork over the goods. Their victims complained to the sysadmin that this behavior was too close to REALLY being brigands.
