Your house is your property. My character’s in-game possessions are not property. If your house is burned down by your neighbour, you have legal recourse. You may sue for damages. Assaults on your property are subject to penalty under criminal law.
In contrast, when I’m playing EVE Online and my ship gets blown up by some ganksquad, I have no recourse. They are subject to no penalty (barring various game mechanics that they willingly deal with). My heavy assault cruiser is worth about $75 (I think - I don’t keep track of what currency sells for much), but if it’s nerfed it might suddenly be virtually worthless, and again I’d have no recourse.
I will, however, consent to paying taxes on my in-game income under one condition: that I can pay the taxes on my real life income in in-game currency. Hey, if it’s real enough to tax, then it’s real enough to count as payment.
Most articles on game and computer sites and in their offline publications ignore the incredible difficulty any tax agency would have taxing items that haven’t been monetized. The IRS should collect from those who do monetize their game playing - that is income - although it probably isn’t a good use of limited resources.
You’re confusing propert tax and income tax. The Fed and the States have many ways to tax you. Property taxes rise with increasing values, but you’ll pay no income (capital gains) tax on your home until you decide to sell (even then, there is a certain threshold of gain that is excluded from income on the sale of your primary home).
Whereever I go, I’m a level 40 killing creatures that give me no XP and no worthwhile treasure. Why should I go someplace I don’t have a flightpath to?
105k in one month is not a paltry number no matter how many subs you have, i firmly believe Blizzard is trying as best as they can to combat the gold sellers, and while i doubt they can stop it losing that many accounts and inventory has got to hurt them a bit.
Yep–assuming all of those accounts were paying the $13/month amount, that means Blizzard is losing over $1,300,000 a month with this move.
Of course, if those accounts all purchase new copies of the game and continue their activities, Blizzard stands to earn about $5,000,000 through this move. It’s a gamble!
One of the big things to remember and another reason to avoid leveling services and their ilk. Many such services use leveling accounts in their posession as gold mules. That way it cannot be traced back to the gold seller because the people moving the gold look like hundreds if not thousands of typical players.
So, a question. I dislike cheating in games for many of the reasons given already, but I’m not convinced that cheaters destroy the economy. Don’t they instead just raise prices for buyers AND sellers, leading to general inflation? I’m not sure that I’d have nearly as much money as I do were it not for folks willing to pay 20 gold for a holiday shirt pattern (which was apparently way underpriced, given how quickly it sold), and I’m not sure they’d be willing to pay as much were it not for gold farming.
I don’t play this games but I think there is a logical flaw here. The problem is that the equivalent of salary in this world doesn’t change. Gold is made by selling things but also by doing things. You have to do things like make more stuff or kill more monsters to buy the equivalent items.
That’s an interesting point. The thing is, though, I get my items to sell by killing monsters, and the vastly inflated prices at the AH mean that I have a lot more money than I’d otherwise have.
True, it devalues the gold I get directly from monsters, but I’m not sure that that is a large percent of the cash I end up with in the game anyway.
Dorkness, one of the other problems with gold farmers is that they crowd out people who are farming for legitimate reasons. They’ll always be in the best farming areas, meaning more competition for the rest of us or having to farm in a less desireable spot (as a mage, farming for essences of water thanks due to crowding in Felwood), so it’s harder for players to find the drops they’re looking for, sometimes forcing them to buy it off the AH. A lot of them are hunters too, and hunter tracking is a pain to compete with. There’s also been areas where the drops have been altered due to excess farming, Scarlet Monastery graveyard comes to mind. It’s just harder overall for regular players to earn cash thanks to these guys. And I’ve heard horror stories about these guys in instance groups.
And the next rogue to ask me this is getting hit upside the head with a frozen muffin. I love my class I love my class I love my class…
Even if your goods also go up in value gold farmers are on 24/7 doing absolutely nothing other than pumping gold into the economy, theres just no way you can keep up.
It’s not just the farmers who make instances a terror (though they are pretty friggin’ shocking), but people who use auto-levelling services often don’t know how to play their class. They’re not interested in the mechanics of playing the character, they’re just in it for the phat lewts. Which means when they do get to the high-end instances, you’ve got squishies who over-aggro, healers who don’t know how to care for your main tank and tanks who can’t hold the fucking aggro. Which means wipe city more often than not, because a good instance run is about every class playing their role properly.
Y’all are raising good points. Of course, I’m probably gonna be pretty bad in end-run instances as well, given how rarely I play :o. On the rare occasions that I go itno an instance, I warn folks that I’m not terribly experienced and am happy to get their feedback, and I do respond to it (more AoE? Less? Happy to oblige!). But that’s different, I guess, from folks who are decked out in purple who don’t know what they’re doing.
A good EVE player can make that in an hour or so.