Ah, OK, I generally take it as a default assumption, until proven otherwise, that any non-Doper teammate in an online game will be an idiot. That way, if they’re not, I can be pleasantly surprised.
I can’t answer for Blizzard, of course, but this is a roleplaying game. We engage fantastic creatures in epic battles, and when successful, the genre demands dragons have treasure.
Many, if not most, characters can make useful things–weapons, armor, potions, clothing, food, enchantments to improve gear, etc. Making that stuff can get pretty tedious, so people aren’t going to do it unless there’s some form of reward. Players want to trade among themselves, and virtual coin makes that easier.
The in-game economy is part of the draw of the game. People want to be able to buy, sell, and trade items amongst themselves. If you find an item you can’t use, you can trade it to someone who can. If one of your friends from offline starts up, you can give him good equipment to help him catch up. If someone in your party is being really helpful, you can reward him for it. Eliminating all player-to-player transactions would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
I think it ultimately boils down to the fact that stopping the mechanisms to which gold buying works would be more detrimental to the game than just letting it continue and enforcing it when they spot it. Sure, they could stomp it out completely just by removing the currency system, but crafting is a somewhat large part of the game, especially with some items such as alchemy flasks being incredibly useful in end-game content. It would require serious overhauling of the game to make it work, and such a change more players would rebel than be placated.
You could limit or regulate transactions, but here’s a small rundown of a few of the potential issues:
Okay, you can’t trade currency directly. Well, you’re going to piss of players with multiple accounts, for one, you’ll prevent people like me from sending my friends with low level characters helper money, which will probably incite a bigger revolt than gold buying does. Besides, without a currency, people will just start using a barter system, but that prevents characters without a trade skill from getting items, that will kill the casual game, since leveling trade skills takes time, especially without the auction house. Right now, 3-4 hours of quests a day and you can make progress, if they banned it, a lot more tedious. Besides, then you’ll just be paying the farmer for 20 Healing Potions instead of 200 gold, not much of an improvement.
Okay, then, how about we kill trades and only have in-game auctions? Well, then there’s abuses like putting up a potion for 1 copper and having your friend snipe it instantly, that’s effectively a “gift.” On the other hand, you can buy gold by paying your fee and then putting up some worthless items for 10k gold and having the farmer buy it, BAM gold trade.
Well, fine you spoil sport, have Blizzard regulate every transaction. Well… there are tons of servers going on, I’d argue that between all of them, the number of transactions per day is at least equivalent to the number of transactions in an average sized county, possibly in a state. Paying that many people to resolve transactions in a reasonable timeframe would be so expensive (and piss off so many players) it’s more economically feasible (in real life for Blizzard) to simply let gold buying continue and smashing it down when caught than to implement draconian measures. Remember, it’s not like the economy of a third world country is at stake here, it’s a game, and Blizzard only cares about the effects on the in-game economy so far as it affects their subscription revenue and sales, it doesn’t have to consider the cost of living, or personal welfare or anything, simply how pissed off players are. If they see it as more financially sound to stay the course than implement draconian measures despite the negative impact on the economy, then they’ll stay the course.
TLDR: Sure, they could stamp it out, but since the issue is their profits, rather than any player’s personal livelihood or well being, most solutions simply aren’t sound.
Why would Blizzard want to stop it? It’s good for low-progression players because it gives them a boost instead of quitting and it’s good for high-progression players because it gives them someone to sell their excess items to, which they can then sink out of the economy by buying other in-game status symbols. The real question is, why isn’t Blizzard the one doing it?
To help my understanding, how do the Chinese people farm the gold? You mentioned repetitive tasks. Does this mean killing a bunch of warthogs for hours (like the South Park episode)?
Yes, that’s one way. Killing certain monsters repeatedly will yield a predictable-within-a-range amount of gold per hour in coin or sellable goods. There are also numerous “daily” quests that reward a set amount of gold. A max level character can do those quests relatively quickly. Also, some characters gather crafting supplies…ore, plants, leather…to sell to other players via an in-game auction house.
That was my next question. Blizzard, of course, is in this racket for the money, so why aren’t they the ones selling gold? Wouldn’t their profits go through the roof, along with putting the illegal operators out of business, by cutting out the middle man and selling gold to players directly themselves? After all, they’re the only people who can generate all the gold they want for free.
There’s this little game I like to play in my head where I talk to a historical figure, like Shakespeare or Ben Franklin, and try to explain the modern world to them. It’s a fun little exercise, and it can help you put certain things in perspective. I’m sure I’m not the only person to do this.
Anyway, one thing I’ve never been able to explain to them is gold farming. It’s just too illogical, too insane, and based on too many assumptions about the fucked-up world I live in. I have this feeling that if I *could *ever get someone like Abraham Lincoln to understand a situation like that described in the OP, I’d have to kill myself.
Which is also one way gold farming ruins the game for other players not involved in it at all, and quite directly (besides the indirect, more abstract “it’s not fair !” argument, and the more concrete argument that it destabilizes the whole game’s economy).
When a gold farming squad is out harvesting crafting supplies, forget about getting your own. They’ll be camping every node and have gank teams ready to murderize anyone who would dare harvest some and reduce their own output by 1%.
Same with the mobs - they’ll find which zone and which monsters output the best loot/effort and monopolize them. No, you can’t get any - they’ll run a train on you if you try.
See above about destabilizing the economy - if they made it so that rich (rich IRL I mean) players could just buy gold, then the price of every item would increase in turn. Which would hugely shaft poor players who don’t want or can’t afford to buy gold, and couldn’t buy anything anymore. I’m guessing there are more casual players than hardcore cheaters out there, in WoW at least. Other MMOs may have different player bases.
Beyond that, there’s another factor in play: WoW is designed and controlled so that players have to play for ever. There are tons of subtle mechanisms in place to ensure just that, but forcing people to grind for their stuff is a large part of it. There’s little percentage in letting a completely new player reach top dollar & top gear the day he signs up: he’ll just grow bored and leave.
By comparison, an old player who’s reached top dollar the hard way has an incentive to stay - because he’s already sunk so much time in his character, leaving the game would turn it into wasted time (yes, it already is and that reasoning amounts to throwing good time after bad - but the human mind works that way).
It’s pretty sneaky and exploitative, but there you go. That’s the MMO business model in a nutshell.
There’s also a worse aspect of gold selling that even more directly impact players, namely account hacking. Generally this is done to strip any valuables off a character and use the stolen accounts as mules or farmers. So we’re not even talking about abstract things like destabilized economies. There are real victims here.
Some MMO developers do sell in-game privileges and money, but it isn’t well liked among gamers. With the current system, a lot of gold gets moved back and forth with real-life transactions but there’s always the threat of the banhammer. People who buy or sell gold openly get banned and there’s always the implicit threat of losing your precious character so anyone with a lick of sense keeps such a purchase secret. This creates the polite fiction that, well, gold buying happens, but not all that much – I never hear about it, my guildmembers don’t talk about it (at least in-game), et cetera.
Nobody wants to play World of Who-has-the-most-moneycraft. The status symbol of rare items, raid gear, etc. comes from the impression of exclusivity. If anything can just be bought for real-life coin then it becomes boring. And, of course, the big gold-movers that unstabilize the economy on a particular server can be mass banned, easy-peasy, no questions asked, for violating the terms of use.
Yup. The guild I’m in has had numerous players get their accounts taken over, gear stripped off them, sometimes raiding the guild’s bank as well, and then one or more of their characters is kept and used to farm stuff - either sent into a dungeon the character is capable of soloing to farm up some valuable item that comes from there, or out mining ore, etc. It’s easy to stop them if they raid the guild bank, because that gets noticed. It’s hard when the player is taking time off from the game but left auto-pay on, and the characters quietly leave the guild - gold farmers could strip those characters bare and have days to months to use the characters to farm stuff with, all on some unknowing player’s dime.
My husband has seen swarms of players flying in semi-formation during off hours of the game, swooping down to get nodes of ore, and making it near-impossible for anyone else to get the needed ore. Then you go to the auction house and prices for ore are through the roof.
There is a questionable assumption in the Western gaming world that, if you charge people money for in-game advantages, they’ll flip out and stop playing. What makes this questionable is the result of the recent pay-to-win changes made in Battlefield Heroes (learn more here.) I don’t think that game is very representative of the old school gaming scene, but you can see similar things going on with TF2 and back in Battlefield 2, both remained extremely popular. The rationale being that it actually mitigates player’s failures, since they can dismiss losses as resulting from someone paying-to-win and feel better in victory because they beat someone who paid-to-win. Sort of like how people don’t really get upset when buddy shows up at the range with $1000 golf clubs. Admittedly, those are all skill-based gameplay instead of progression-based gameplay, like WoW.
WoW gold farmers distort the WoW economy, but only to the advantage of traditional time-sinking players. It’s for the same reason cheap Chinese labour is a boon to the Western world. It depresses the prices of items in-game in real terms. The problem is that a ton of WoW players are trying to generate in-game wealth in the old fashion “farming” method, whereas what they really need to do is provide services for other players. For example, back during my 10 week time with WoW, I made more money than I could ever spend doing three things: selling tanking services, auction house price flipping, and a gold raids. One ZG gold raid made me like 15,000 gold. I was set. (Though admittedly, that was a particularly profitable raid since that raptor mount dropped and sold for the gold cap or so.)
Account hacking is definitely the main problem.
Quoth Alessan:
Me too, except when I do it, it’s usually either Sherlock Holmes, or a random ancient Roman.
They were beating them here, though.
What’s a gold raid?
Also called a “gold PuG” or “GPuG” it’s when all of the loot obtained is sold to the highest bidder.
I still don’t get it. Who gets the gold, the other four players? Is there a loot master? I’d assume BoP items that no one needs are still only going to go for the vendor price - I guess it would work better if you bring an enchanter. Huh, interesting.