Figures I’d want to add something right after I hit Submit. The above is all conjecture based on the idea that the company wants to eliminate RMT. My personal view is that you’re never really going to get rid of it, so a game should properly be designed such that 1) the impact on the game is minimized, 2) incorporate it into the game; as online music downloading has shown, a significant number of people would rather use the legal option as long as it’s easily available, or 3) make it a non-factor, such as in Planetside. Less stress for the company, more overall enjoyment for the players.
I tell you, it’s crazy, MMO companies do everything in their power to prevent members of the world’s largest and fastest growing consumer population from paying to use their consumer products 12 hours a day.
Because the MMO devs care more about the EULAs than they do about breaking into the largest potential gaming market in human history. Because that tiny slice of the North American/European market, man, that’s waaaay more important than busting in on the Asian market for the next twenty years. Lots more. Because MMO devs just, you know, they’re good people like that.
Because why be trillionaires when we can be millionaires, am I right?
Gold farmers, man. Ruining the games, man. That’s why I respect the EULA. Peace, out.
Those are actually some pretty interesting points. I can see especially the point that cracking down on a user is only a deterrent, whereas cracking down on a farmer actually slows the supply.
However, I think the comparison to the drug war is interesting in the contrast it provides. Drug users are addicted: it’s extremely difficult for them to give up the transaction. The suppliers (and here I’ll oversimplify for the sake of the analogy) would only have to give up a luxurious lifestyle if they walked away from the trade. Deterrence therefore works better on the suppliers than on the users.
With the game, it’s exactly the opposite. No buyer is addicted to WoW gold: if the transaction is ended, they just get a little less fun out of their leisure activity. For the sellers, though, it’s their livelihood. Deterrence is going to work much better on the buyer than on the seller in this case.
That said, if Blizzard is focusing their efforts on both buyers and sellers (the article made it sound as if buyers were being ignored), that does seem a reasonable approach to me.
In part my attitude may be an overreaction to the crazy racist anti-Chinese screeds I’ve heard from other players in the game, making me want to defend the farmers more than I probably should :).
Daniel
Well, according to the article, if I remember right, the farmers make about thirty cents an hour. So, for the three of them, $0.90.
I’m not sure I understand the part about “virtual property” belonging to Blizzard.
If I join up, create a character, and spend 2000 hours building up to level 70 (or whatever), that character still belongs to Blizzard? How much does Blizzard charge for this?
Can’t they just change the rules so an item that is earned by a player’s own effort rather than traded for is more… special, or something?
What’s really disturbing here is that there are Americans, apparently, who will pay others good real-life money to do the scutwork in an online computer game.
There comes a time when a culture finally slips loose of its moorings . . .
Blizzard asks you to pay about $12-$15 a month to use their computer networks and customer support staff to play games on. The computers remain Blizzard’s property, as does all the data on them. When you pay your monthly fee, they let you manipulate those computers in certain constricted ways. For example, you are allowed to change entries in databases such that the item record Festering Salad Fork of the Armadillo #10340596 is now associated with the character record Armaniman instead of with the characterrecord Bobbyjoe.
You are NOT allowed to make these changes if you’re doing so in response to real-world financial deals. They do that in order to keep their servers appealing to the masses of players.
This seems pretty standard. I might pay a fee to use a golf green, but if I’m out there practicing my yodeling, they might make me leave–especially if I signed an agreement not to yodel while there. They can do that even if I’m on the second-to-last hole of a game I’ve been playing all day long.
Daniel
Here’s the main problem we have with goldfarmers (we call 'em Gilsellers, or RMT) in FFXI:
There are certain monsters that drop highly coveted treasure, that only “pop” every once in a while (some every 2 hours give or take; some every 24 hours give or take; some once a RL week.) A couple of them have teams of RMT’ers camping on their spawn points 24/7 for weeks at a time. The RMT’ers also often use illegal 3rd party programs to get the claim on the monster before anyone else can do so, thereby monopolizing the monster and monopolizing the item that it drops. They can then sell the item to players for millions in game currency.
The items should (ideally) be available to any player who has the time, skill, and luck to camp the monster, kill it, and obtain the drop. Instead, the only way to get it is to basically support the Gilseller.
They are also notorious for MPKing anyone else in the area who tries to camp “their” monsters. (MPK = Monster Player Killing, manipulating monster AI to kill other players. We don’t have open PvP. MPKing is against the rules of the game.)
I have sympathy for the individual gilsellers, I’ve talked to a couple who had some English skills and their job isn’t an easy one. But they need to make their quota of gil, or else the family goes hungry, and they don’t care that they’re making the game harder for the people who play it for fun.
True. But if you made up the song you’re yodeling, they don’t get to steal the song, as well as kick you off the green. Even if you composed the song while playing on their green.
You might do well to educate yourself on the issue before spouting off like this.
Blizzard does care about breaking into the Asian market. And they have broken in to the Asian market. They are not trying to stop Chinese people from playing, there are more Chinese WoW subscribers than American or European, and they are a huge source of revenue for Blizzard.
The way World of Warcraft works is, you buy a DVD-ROM with the game software on it, and install it on your system. If you live in North America or Oceania, you get a copy of the software that is only localized for those areas. So Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, Australians, Indonesians, Malaysians et cetera have software that gives them access to North American and Oceanic servers. When the game was first released, Oceanic servers did not exist, on the server I played on, there were “two shifts” of players, the second shift was primarily Australian/Malaysian and several of the biggest guilds on the server were Malaysian or Australian.
When you install and set up WoW, if you have a copy sold in NA/Oceania, you don’t have the option to play anywhere else. You can pick a North American server or an oceania server, period. You can’t pick European or Chinese servers.
If you buy a copy of the software in Europe, you can select European servers. The European servers mirror the North American ones. WoW servers are identified by names having to do with game lore (characters are unique to the servers they are created on.) There is a North American Magtheridon server and a European one, totally separate and the two worlds never meet.
What Blizzard is trying to stop is Chinese players who use North American/Oceanic copies of the game to play on those servers in order to farm gold and sell it for real life money.
Blizzard has no problem whatsoever with the Chinese players who buy the Chinese-localized versions of WoW and play on the Chinese servers. In fact, there are something like 3.5m paying customers who play on the Chinese servers, at least 1m more than there are on the North American servers.
It’s not actually against the EULA for me to get on a European or Chinese server. However, Blizzard doesn’t like it and they try to prevent it by not selling European copies of the game in North America and vice versa. The easiest way for an American to play on a Euro server is to have a friend in Europe buy the game retail there and ship it to the United States. Although I’m sure the professional gold farms have a much more expedited way to take care of the localization issue.
So your post is pretty much off base. Blizzard does realize the potential of the Asian market. Any one who casually follows the MMORPG business has noted the almost fanatical devotion of South Korean and Chinese players to certain MMORPGs, Blizzard has capitalized on that. What they don’t like, is Asian players getting North American copies of WoW and playing on North American servers to sell said gold to Americans.
As to the question of whether or not the Chinese government should step in. I don’t know, I guess that would depend on the standards for working conditions in China. I do think the Chinese government has bigger problems than people working 12 hour shifts in computer chairs. For example this link (not for the faint of heart) shows images and tells the story of Chinese who have been kidnapped and enslaved, forced to work in brick factories under unimaginable conditions.
That’s disanalogous, since the song exists in your head, and your head isn’t their property. Let’s say, instead, you picked some of their grass and wove a basket, and then tried to sell the basket to another golfer. Not only could they kick you off the green, but they could the basket, since it’s made from their property.
Daniel
There are many items in WoW that can’t simply be bought, and must be earned. The problem is at some point that you depend on the economy.
Let’s say for example that you’re trying to craft a rare and powerful sword. Well, all of the individual components of that can be farmed, but perhaps not by craftsmen of your type; perhaps you need other crafters to make things for you. Essentially you must buy the items. This costs gold, and gold decreases in value because of gold farmers. This means you must spend much more time earning money because currency is devalued.
Or, perhaps, you want to get a rare and powerful item from raiding (big group dungeons) or heroic instances (smaller groups). If people in the group bought their characters at level 70 from farmers, your play is diminished as they won’t be skillful and knowledgeable. Nobody wants to train someone to play when they should have put in their time, but there’s no real way to distinguish one from the other without experience with that individual. Or, a guild group that pays for gold will be able to use lots of consumable items for little time commitment, giving them an advantage. Progression through the server’s bosses is a point of pride and essentially shows the value of raid guilds. If you get there first, if you kill certain bosses, you are considered serious. Buying gold in this case is basically like athletes using steroids. It ruins the game for everyone.
Or, gold farmers also seem to like getting in groups and going into dungeons with others. Just last night we had someone who kept causing trouble - aggroing stuff all over the place, getting us killed, and who kept trying to get us to hurry. Finally he died and I refused to res him until he told me he was going to stop aggroing. He couldn’t answer. The only English he apparently spoke was “res pls”. Either he was a gold farmer or an eight year old, and given that he was in a guild with only him in it (a sign of being a farmer, as guildless characters are often farmers, they use this as camoflage), I’d bet gold farmer.
Gold farmers cheapen the whole fun of the experience. Plus, the spam is horrible! Imagine getting tells 5 or 6 times an hour that take up your whole visible chat log. Recent changes by Blizzard have reduced the spam but the spam and gold farmers go hand in hand. After all, they have to keep changing their websites and can’t advertise their wares too publicly or they get shut down.
Then, on top of that, keyloggers are used on WoW-related websites to hack accounts so they can be stripped and the gold resold.
I’m not saying China should step in, but, the prevalent attitude within respectable guilds is that buying gold or characters from China is unacceptable, and buying them locally (high level characters being sold is common in raid circles) is at least not encouraging the spam/hacking but is still stupid. I can’t fault them for making a buck but it’s a skeevy industry. I’d still sell my account if I quit the game though, after all it’s hard to pass up what would be likely in the $500-$1000 range for my account (I raid).
They already have rules like that in place. Most regular magic items in WoW are BoE (Bind on Equip) which means that the magic item isn’t locked to the player unless he actually wears it. If you just pick it up and carry it around you can sell it or trade it away to someone else later. But many of the most powerful items are BoP (Bind on Pickup) which means that the item is locked to the player as soon as he picks it up, whether he wears it or not.
The Times articles describes a scheme that the farmers worked out to get into the BoP market. Essentially they would serve as tour guides in high-level dungeons, letting their clients pick up any BoP treasure that dropped. But they abandoned it after a trial run when they determined they couldn’t make as much money as they could by just farming BoE treasure and selling it.
To a large degree I always felt that while gold farming sucked and ruined the game for many people, WoW made it almost impossible to get top-level stuff without actually going out and getting it yourself (the one exception would be buying a character like fluiddruid’s who had raided.)
I’m a business owner and have several lucrative investments, I make enough money that I could buy 20,000 gold pretty easily without hurting myself seriously financially and I’d more or less be “set” within the game.
But that just never appealed to me in WoW, because in WoW, when I started playing, you had to raid to get good stuff. I first started playing MMORPGs back with the release of Everquest, largely because the other hobby of mine I’d obsessed over (war gaming) had started to die off and it was becoming nigh-on-impossible to find people to play a good game with.
In Everquest, a huge portion of top-level raid gear could be traded and worn and reworn by people over and over. In that game, it was highly tempting to buy platinum online and use it to purchase gear in game, because you genuinely could get some awesome gear that way.
However, as the game progressed more and more gear became “NO DROP” (meaning once your character had it in its inventory, you could never give it to another player) so that was less appealing. However, it was still tempting to buy a lot of the old gear that wasn’t retroactively made NO DROP, because you could deck out a level 1 character (termed “twinking”) in gear designed for level 40-50+ characters and they’d wreck havoc on monsters leveling up (in EQ twinking received a mix reception, some established players despised people who excessively twinked out low level characters.)
When I first started playing WoW, I liked that when I ran instances, most of the gear was Bind on Pickup, meaning it couldn’t be bought or sold through the auction house. It devalued gold to me early on, because the nicest gear was in instances, and couldn’t be bought and sold. My first character was a druid, and when I got around level 40 I realized I had nowhere close to the 90 gold required to buy a mount (that lets you move around faster) and was tempted to spend $50 and buy 300 some gold to buy it and a few other things. But I eventually decided that wasn’t worth it and just continued saving (and using natural run-speed enhancers) and eventually I had enough gold to get the mount, and later on I was able to make enough (900 gold) to buy the fastest mount available.
After a few months at level 60, I’d gotten all the gear you could from small instances, and started raiding. Raiding requires a ton of consumeables and I was tempted yet again to buy gold to facilitate easier consumeable accumulation. Instead I started playing the AH, buying low and selling high. And eventually I had something like 24,000 gold and financed a huge portion of my guild’s consumables that way. So while I saw gold as having value, I felt it wasn’t as useful as a lot of people seem to think, because the best gear was only available through raiding. To relatively casual players, some of the epic items sold on the AH were worth buying, but to a raider almost all of them just weren’t any good.
The only real use I saw for gold when the expansion came out would be buying the new flying mounts. Boy was I wrong, for whatever reason Blizzard introduced a ton of extremely good stuff that you could essentially get through the AH. Some of the tailoring and blacksmithing items were extremely high-quality and if you had the gold, you could buy all the materials needed to craft them and have one made in a day, whereas a player who doesn’t have a ton of gold would have to slowly acquire the raw materials themselves over many weeks. So in a way gold farming is probably at its most damaging right now, even though Blizzard has significantly stepped up efforts to put a stop to it.
There was a high-end Horde raiding guild on my server that offered to take people to their 40 man raids and give them high-quality items for gold. For example at the time the second toughest raiding instance in the game was Blackwing Lair; on the Alliance side of the server (where I played) a lot of raiding guilds including mine had had BWL on farm for a long time before the release of the next raiding zone. But with the Horde side being so depressed population wise, raiding guilds were fewer in number and harder to get in; so many Horde players were left with no real opportunity to get top-end gear. The Horde guild in question took advantage of that by “selling” breastplates off the last boss in BWL for say, 3,500-5,000 gold (the price was primarily based on the demand, lesser played classes breastplates were sold at a lower price.) Apparently a good number of Horde players took advantage of the offer, although the system has mixed results because the players only had to pay if the item actually dropped, which was not guaranteed.
nod
In FFXI they’ve done something similar. In response to gilsellers, the company made many formerly-valuable items Exclusive, which is basically the same as BoP. It can’t be sold or traded, once it goes into your inventory it’s yours until you drop it.
This has helped a lot with a lot of items, but with some of the very very good very high level EX stuff, the RMT’s are basically acting as merc groups. They kill the NM, and in exchange for currency will let you be the one to claim the item (if it drops).
Well then why don’t you educate me as to why Blizzard doesn’t just stop them from logging on to Western servers at all? Because they have inalienable server rights in fairyland? Or because they can’t figure out how to block accounts originating in China from logging on to certain servers? I mean, you can’t seriously be suggesting that having acquired a regional DVD format via Fed Ex, they can now dictate to Blizzard’s server farm what’s up and what isn’t.
Pimpin’ their way to glory, old son. And god bless, you know, no one I’d rather see be the next Bill Gates than a game dev, Trip Hawkins excepted.
But maybe I’m wrong and maybe you’re right. So why don’t you, Martin Hyde, educate me as to why if, as you say, Blizzard really doesn’t want them there…
…they’re still there?
(Answer! Because every pimp needs a ho. Check nearby reflective surface for further details.)
What exactly is your point, Grossbottom? And is it possible that you could state it plainly, instead of trying to be “funny” about it?
Or maybe because some folks want to play while working in China, and some folks have American friends that they’d like to play with? The weird and snide attitude-laden conspiracy theory you have going just doesn’t make much sense.
Daniel
True enough. The more players who realize they could lose their account and all the time and money they’ve invested in it for buying a measly $10 worth of gold, the less of a market the farmers will have.
Still – and here I’m venturing into theoretical territory – it seems to me that the best market the farmers could have isn’t a lot of players who buy a few bucks worth of gold every now and again, but a few players whose time is more valuable than their money, and so see more worth in spending $500 all at once on gold or a character than spending the time actually playing. It’s a very small percentage of the playing population, to be sure, but wealthy enough that the farmers can make a living off only a few transactions a week.
Ban the players as Blizzard might, a few will usually come around again, especially when you’re talking about a game that’s well into its mature phase as WOW is. Newbies are going to perceive themselves as being well behind the game, and those whose time means more to them than money have more perceived incentive to buy an artificial boost to get them caught up with those who’ve been playing a while. It’s also harder to catch newbies and warn them about the dangers of buying gold beforehand; while most of the veteran community is savvy about RMTs, it’s surprising how few newbies learn about them from anyone other than the gold farmer companies themselves.
I must admit, again, that this is all assertion, as I don’t have numbers or cites, but it seems logical enough.
(One small favor this article has done me: I’m currently experiencing a lull in my hobby/gaming activity, and I’ve been contemplating finally loading up WOW. Instead, I think I’ll stick with Guild Wars for now. 
)