You left out “c) does not, in fact, have the power to make them go away.”
Is there any chance you could restate this in a more coherent manner?
Oh, I guess not. Question: if you don’t care if your post are comprehensible to other people on the board, why do you bother posting in the first place?
I think that this:
is saying that by banning farmers, Blizzard is rejecting the money farmers are paying them to use those accounts (the throwing money away part), and in doing so will lose the Chinese market entirely (the losing big money part).
So far reality doesn’t seem to bear this notion out.
Going against the flow here, I have to say I think Grossbottom has something of a point, wrt Blizzard and the gold farmers, only I’d put it a slightly different way. Going after gold farmers clearly consumes some non-zero amount of resources for Blizzard - they have to actually pay employees to do it, and not other more potentially useful things like game development. However many resources they are currently devoting to it, clearly they could choose to devote more resources and ban that many more farmers a month.
At some point, therefore, they’re obviously going to make a tradeoff - “well, the amount of goldfarming currently going on doesn’t currently seem to be interfering with gameplay to the extent that people are leaving in droves, and it would cost us X-ty thousand a year more to do <whatever else they may be able to do to crack down harder> so let’s not bother” kind of thing.
And if one were going to be machiavellian about it, you could claim that somewhere in that calculation might be “… and we get thirty dollars a pop from each goldfarming account every time we ban 'em and they pop up again, so lets never kill 'em off completely, just milk 'em for all they’re worth, eh?”
Obviously they’ve got a clear incentive not to let it snowball to the extent it pisses off their legitimate customers too much (after all, they get money from us each month too) but I can see where, even if they had the ability to drop goldfarming in its tracks, it might make financial sense to them to allow a little bit of it, and cream off as much of its profits as possible via repeated bannings.
I don’t see how you would ever prove that this was the case, however. I know as a programmer that often the things that your customers think are “dead simple - you ought to be able to put that in your product easily” are often, under the hood, no such thing. But it is a possibility.
Well, if that’s the definition, you win.
It strikes me as a sort of self-serving definition, though. I’m not sure you’d use that definition in other contexts.
If a boxer entered the ring wearing non-regulation shorts, would you say he was “cheating”? Even if the shorts don’t provide any particular advantage?
If the NFL makes a rule that says coaches can’t wear suits, is a coach who wears a suit “cheating”? Does a suit-wearing coach make his team play better?
A fixed game cheats the fans, who paid to see a fair game. (More directly, it’s a conspiracy to cheat punters, who don’t know the fix is in.)
As far as I know, there are neither punters nor spectators in WoW.
In any case, farmers aren’t ‘throwing’ the game - they’re not intentionally fighting badly, or dying when they don’t have to. In fact, according to the article, anyway - they’re better than most recreational players.
I suspect farmers also do less griefing than recreational players. Spending their time finding ways to ‘camp’ other players, for example, or spotting ‘geography bugs,’ would mean a loss of income for them.
Moreover, even people who buy characters are cheating only if WoW is a competition to see who can build the baddest characters.
If it is, it’s clearly cheating - just as a runner who paid to get a head start in the race would be cheating.
If it’s not, then it’s not - any more than (for example) playing a SimCity scenario is cheating, because you didn’t build the city from scratch.
In both cases, if the person doing it were doing it because they perceived some benefit from doing so, then yes: they agreed to do something, and they’re going back on their word. Your examples are deliberately chosen to be disanalgous, since, as you say, they don’t confer any advantage to the person behaving in this manner (which is not the situation wtih the farmers).
This thread is rife with examples of how this type of cheating hurts other people in the game. The other folks who use the auction house and who cannot buy the items at inflated prices are most comparable to the punters.
The fixed game also hurts those bookies who aren’t in on the fix. That’s sort of like how farming hurts Blizzard.
If you really need a more specific definition of cheating, we can probably make one. Cheating involves intentionally breaking the rules of a game in a way that devalues the game for others who are directly or indirectly involved in the game and that benefits the person intentionally breaking the rules of the game.
How’s that?
Daniel
To review:
-Players in WoW engage in head-to-head competition in fights. Those with the best equipment have an advantage. If you abide by the rules of the game, and your opponent doesn’t (e.g., your opponent breaks the terms of agreement and pays someone to give them better equipment), you’re likely to be at a disadvantage.
-Players in WoW engage in indirect competition to purchase products at the auction house.If you abide by the rules of the game, and your opponent doesn’t (e.g., your opponent breaks the terms of agreement and pays someone to give them more gold), you’re likely to be at a disadvantage.
-Players in WoW engage in cooperation with other players to defeat computer opponents. If your partner in this cooperation has intentionally broken the rules of the game by purchasing a character, they have not gone through the de facto tutorial in how to play the character that consists of leveling the character up; your enjoyment of the game is damaged by their incompetence.
Daniel
I would like to add:
-Players in MMORGS set goals for themselves, such as obtaining hard to get items or skills. (Rare crafting recipes, armor sets, elite mounts, “titles”.) If another player has broken the rules of the game and acheived these same goals through “power leveling” services, character trading, or online gold purchasing, it dimishes your own enjoyment of the game, considering the (not insignificant) time and effort usually involved in reaching your goal(s).
I agree completely. I play WoW, but I also hold down a full-time 45+ hour a week job, am a full time student, and I work out regularly. I fail to see how I’m “neglecting” myself if enjoy a little MMORPG in my spare time.
We’ll have to agree to disagree about that.
They were chosen to show why your statement, “The definition of cheating is intentionally breaking the rules, period,” is self-serving.
I’m not saying they confer no advantage; I’m saying they offer no advantage in the game.
For example, maybe coaches wear suits because they think it makes them look more professional. (I don’t know why they do it, but presumably there’s some reason for it.) The point is that wearing a suit doesn’t make it more likely their team will win. It doesn’t confer an in-game advantage.
I’m curious: does anyone ever say, “Thank God for Gold Farmers!” when they sell a Sword +2 for 10,000 gold?
I don’t understand how Blizzard is like bookies.
“Devalues the game for others” seems kind of lame. It’s subjective and ambiguous, for one thing. For another, people often feel like the game is “devalued” when they lose. (People have more fun when they win, than when they lose.) Also, it’s kind of verbose.
I’d suggest, “obtaining an advantage in the game by breaking the rules.”
Woah!
A week has 168 hours.
You’ve got the following hours filled:
-45 work
-40 school
-56 sleep (roughly)
That leaves 27 hours for eating, commuting, working out, and everything else.
WHAT free time?
Daniel
First of all, the reason I said “Western” was simply because I’m uneducated about how “Eastern” developers are doing in China. If you’re going to draw a comparison, then I expect you can provide cites? Can you find any evidence showing that an MMORPG made by an “Eastern” developer has more market share than WOW?
What exactly would be a significant share of the market in China? Sure, they have considerably more people that the US, but that doesn’t mean the size of the market grows comparatively. What percentage of Chinese citizens have access to the internet? How many of them have the disposable income and time to spend playing an MMORPG?
Yes, China is going to be a major player inthe gaming market in the future. But unless you can back up this “sliver” of the market number with hard numbers, you’re just spewing hot air.
Okay, you’re saying it does, that’s wonderful, I get that, but that doesn’t make you right. Your argument is based on premises that you have yet to back up and I’m not going to do your legwork for you.
Nice Strawman there. I could care less if people want to spend real money for gold in the game, they’re cheating themselves and I wouldn’t cancel my account over that. What you’re NOT addressing are the reprocussions of people doing this. When people buy gold, it causes inflation, which means for those of us who earn money without buying it have to work harder and longer to get the money we need to purchase certain items. Worse, many of these farmers gain money by camping specific spawn points for rare resources or rare monsters. This means that it’s harder for people playing legitimately to get those resources and the items dropped by those rare monsters.
An excellent example was prior to the expansion when I needed Felcloth to make Mooncloth so I could make some powerful end-game items. The problem is, it only drops off of specific enemies in a few areas. Pretty much whenever I would go there to hunt the Felcloth, there were invariably the same characters there. They ALWAYS used the same patterns, NEVER responded to tells (meaning, they weren’t even human players), and it made it much more time consuming to hunt Felcloth because I was constantly stuck waiting for enemies to spawn and had to get my hit on it before they could steal it. It got to the point where it was easier to go earn gold some other way and buy it at the auction house. So now, I’m stuck spending my money on a market that the farmers pretty much have cornered and have deliberately inflated the price… so they can take the gold that I just spent on the Felcloth and sell it.
So here was my choice… frustratingly hunt Felcloth, and have it take at least twice as long as it should, were there not so many bots around. Or, earn money some other way, spend it on the Felcloth, and contribute to server inflation. Even worse, because the gold farmers already know all the good places to earn some nice money, that even made the second option rather frustrating. Can you SEE how it makes the game less enjoyable?
Players complain about it for the reasons above and I have, in fact, known players who have cancelled their accounts, or at least changed servers, because inflation and farming got too bad. Further, it scares off potential new players like the one upthread who had been thinking about it playing but changed his mind because of this discussion. The only reason the survival of gold farmers is minimal now is because of the enforcement. They’re constantly banning thousands of accounts and finding ways to make it more difficult to use the bots that gold farmers use. If they stopped that, inflation and camping would be MANY times worse than it is now to the point that I (and I’m sure many of my friends) would get sick of it and quit.
I’m sure they do, just as they say, “Thank God for dishonest boxers!” when they pocket the gambling wins from a thrown game.
Honest bookies are going to get less business when fights are commonly thrown, because gambling becomes a less attractive pasttime. Blizzard is going to get less business when their rules are commonly broken, because playing the game becomes a less attractive pasttime.
Look, you’re the one that was insisting on a more detailed definition to exclude ludicrous and irrelevant examples. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
At any rate, people might feel the game is devalued when they lose, but there’s a tremendous difference between losing against a player who follows the rules and losing against one who doesn’t. Can you see that difference?
So you think a boxer who throws a match isn’t cheating?
Daniel
How do you get 40 hours for a full time student? The only time I ever spent nearly that much was during mids and finals. I work full time, am a full time PhD student, and work out 10-12 hours a week, and I still have time to get in about 10 hours of playing a week, with almost no play time on the weekend. Of course, I only get about 4-5 hours of sleep a night, but hey.
Never the less, it can cause folks to stop playing a game and cancel their subscriptions. Blizzard realises this, thus tries to crack down to some extent on things that may drive a customer away.
Well, if I lose, I would like to lose on my own lack of skill or “earned” gear…
You’re missing the point. Stopping gold-farming is just like upping security to prevent hackers. The only 100% sure-fire way to prevent someone from getting into your system is to NOT have a connection to the outside world… but then you lose essential functionality. It is the same way with gold farming. They can modify certain game mechanics to reduce their ability to use bots and to camp, but just about any that would do that would destroy the essential functionality that makes the game fun. Blizzard is in a hard situation of minimizing the ease of gold farming, and maximizing flexibility, and the key point where these two meet is entirely subjective.
For instance, in just about every major patch, they make changes to how the interface can be modified and what functions can be accessed with macros. Obviously, if they locked down a lot of this stuff, it would make gold farming a lot harder, but people would be furious if they didn’t have ways to modify their interface. Similarly, they can lock down the scripting ability of macros, but players would be furious because there’s plenty of legitimate uses for macros like changing gear sets, casting buffs, etc. If I had to manually change each piece of my gear every time I went from Healing to DPS to FR to Riding, I’d get sick of it. Then I’d either get stuck doing a menial process or simply not collecting the different sets which would drastically, either of these would make the game significantly less fun.
From time to time they make good changes to what can be modified in the interface and manipulated with macros so that I can either do new things, or do things I already do, better. Sometimes, they lock stuff down harder, and it’s frustrating when I have to re-DL my UI-mods and redo my macros. Still, it’s not nearly as bad as having Gold Farming completely out of control or not having any of that ability at all.
Sure, Blizzard makes money from all of the accounts that the Gold Farmers keep making. However, you also have to realize that every time an account with high level characters (which are necessary to make large amounts of gold) gets banned, they have to spend time to relevel, which slows them down. Further, even if it were an incentive, there’s a point of balance for maximum profitability. If Gold Farming gets out of control, players quit playing, and gold farming becomes less possible, so they stop making new accounts, and Blizzard loses money. If Gold Farming completely goes away, obviously, they’d lose some money from the accounts.
The other part that hasn’t been mentioned is the drain on the physical resources. During peak hours, only so many players can be logged into a certain server at a time; thus for each Gold Farmer that is logged on, that’s one less legitimate player. Also, your regular legitimate player probably averages a few to several hours a day, while a Gold Farming account is on close to 24 hours a day. All of this means higher bandwidth consumption, more servers, more maintenance which results in a higher cost for the product. Thus, if a regular player pays the same amount per month, but is only playing 20% of the time (over 33 hours a week, which I’m sure is generously high for an average), then for Blizzard JUST to break even, the Gold Farmers have to recreate their account at least 5 times (probably more like 10-15), then when you take into account the players it costs them because of the increased price of the service, and players quitting or not even starting because of the side effects of the Gold Farming, the cost grows even higher.
If there is no potential advantage to be gained, why are they regulated? You’re assuming that there will be regulations in place for things that don’t affect the game; to be honest, I don’t know what things are regulated in boxing, but if shorts color or brand is among them, I’ll be very surprised. If shorts are mentioned anywhere in the rules for boxing, it’s probably to do with the fact that you can’t hide, say, a hypo needle to jab your opponent with during a clinch.
That depends; is there a logical reason for the rule? On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be.
But let’s go with this. The NFL decides to, for no clear reason at all, declare that coaches can’t wear suits. If a coach then chooses to wear a suit after being made aware of the rule change, then yes. He is breaking the rules and he is subject to disciplinary action.
The big assumption in this post overall is that sports regulators and MMO companies routinely make rules that, if they are broken, confer no direct advantage on the person breaking said rules. Reality in most cases is that if a person is not gaining an unfair advantage, there’s no need to make a rule about it. It doesn’t matter if a boxer wears white, red, or plaid shorts. It MIGHT matter if the shorts were made of a highly reflective material and could be used to redirect lights into the opponent’s eyes. In such a case, color wouldn’t be regulated, but material might be.
Thank you, this list, in and of itself, is good enough to explain the unintended consequences of Gold Farming. The only one I would like to add is kind of like a Rule 2b:
Players also engage in indirect competition over looting rare, non-instanced monsters and resources. Gold Farmers who create scripted bots to find all the best monsters and/or resources in a specific area makes it more difficult for legitimate players to either farm the resources themselves, or earn gold to purchase said items at an inflated rate in the Auction House.
I agree with Grossbottom that Blizzard is failing to stop gold farmers for economic/PR reasons, rather than technical ones. I’ve created a thread over here to discuss the technical problems in catching gold farmers.
Specifically, I claim that it’s easy to catch gold farmers because they have a very conspicuous pattern of value transfers. They always give money away unilaterally. You don’t have to stop farming macros. You don’t have to stop them from getting items. All you have to do is catch when they transfer value to another player. Since Blizzard controls the world, there’s no way to do an in-game value transfer without their knowing about it, so that’s where they can catch you.
I wound up making a GD-ish post in your new thread, since I didn’t see the edit before then. If you want to keep that discussion over here, I can repost it here.