Because it distorts the game economy and pisses players off with the constant RMT advertising. And players who get their accounts looted or banned are less likely or unable to keep playing the game. I can’t speak for WoW since I don’t play, but it’s taken seriously as a problem in City of Heroes with quite a lot of effort put into keeping it down. And it is extremely unpopular with the players; presumably someone is buying, but considering how the price seems to keep dropping they seem to have problems finding buyers.
On your first suggestion, I think that would drive the (real world) price and demand of in game currency. Without an auction house, regular players would find it harder, not easier, to earn gold.
On your second suggestion, there is also a service called “leveling” (where a third party does the work leveling for you, including crafting, faction reputation, pvp scores, as well). This service is offered by many of the same buisnesses that sell in game currency. I am not sure all of the particulars (do they sell you a leveled account? do they level a character already existing on YOUR account?), but some players want to be ultra powerfull without all the hassle of actually working to make themselves that way.
Edit: Sorry. I was beaten to the point.
If gold farmers are making $30K I expect that what’s actually happening is that new farmers are flooding into the marker, increasing supply and bringing down the price.
I’d be surprised if they get to keep that all as salary.
Part of the problem is that “gold farming” is not against the rules of any MMO. There’s no easy way to separate a farmer from a regular player trying to earn gold by playing the game. The only bright line is with botters who use software to automate playing the game. But many gold farmers play the game without bots.
“Gold sellers” are also hard to detect in any game that allows players to trade among themselves. They might be found by careful analysis of trades made, but it can be hard to separate a seller from an established player being generous to friends.
“Gold spammers” are the easiest to detect and the simplest to prevent. I don’t see them as much of a problem in any game with proper chat/mail facilities.
The in-game economic effects are complex. Farmers deflate the prices of common goods on the auction house, because they generate a surplus compared to the demand (they only generate materials, they never consume them). Sellers inflate the prices of rare goods, because the players who buy the gold use it to buy rare goods (classic inflation via increase in the money supply).
Where else would it go, though? Their expenses are limited to a low-end computer, electricity, Internet connection, and a game account, all of which is pretty cheap compared to 30k a year. Taxes aren’t all that high in the Third World, and can be mostly avoided with a bit of corruption. Like the article says, most of the money stays in-country, so they’re not paying to a big corporate hierarchy in the First World. There might be local corporations that manage it, and the boss might get a disproportionate cut, but that would just drive down the median, not the mean (since the boss himself can still be considered a gold farmer, even if he doesn’t sit down in front of a computer himself).
I think it works more on a sweatshop model. The people doing the actual farming get a small hourly wage, while the owners/managers provide the internet connection, computers, game accounts, and sell the goods, possibly to a distributer, who then resells to the cheating gamers.
Pretty much. There was a good article on the topic a few years back (unfortunately I don’t remember the publication). The farmer would spend 10-12 hours generating gold, then get paid a fixed amount of money based on how much gold was collected. It’s a very small fraction of what the end user pays.
Of course, that was written back when the goldsellers really did use farmers. Now they just phish for account information and stripmine any they can access. Far more efficient than killing thousands of creatures for cash, and arguably better for the economy (existing wealth gets liquidated rather than introducing large influxes of generated wealth), if not for the players who were stolen from.
I think I saw the same article. I want to say it was about the time that Blizzard sued one of the gold seller companies…maybe IGN? But it was a long time ago and I don’t remember exactly.
Pardon my ignorance, but what is the point of earning gold if there’s not an auction? It was my understanding that that was the #1 use of gold in WoW.
The cite from the OP gives a range for monthly wages for the game workers as $121 to $349. Minimal by western standards, but apparently acceptable wages for unskilled labor in China.
It depends on the game. Even in WoW, there are certain items that are sold by NPCs for staggering amounts of gold. It isn’t possible to make that much money off quests and creatures alone, at least not in any reasonable amount of time. While some people are able to spend 16 hours a day in game, others can’t, and without an auction house gold earned is almost directly correlated with time spent in game. Goldselling would become more popular in such a case, because more people would look at the money = time equation and decide time was more important. Let the farmers do the work of generating the necessary money.
An auction house alleviates the pressure by giving the 16-hour-a-day players incentive to share the money they’ve generated with players who have less time to spend in game without resorting to real-money channels.
But if you instead just changed the NPC items from a gold basis to an experience or quest basis, you eliminate the need for gold almost entirely.
This has been my experience with a lot of RPG-type games (such as the Diablo games, for example). Gold is good for when you’re starting up, and for purchasing consumables, but the best gear is almost always found in a dungeon somewhere. I know that purples and oranges are obtained at the end of a raid, so this policy is already partially in effect; still, I would think that instead of asking someone to come up with $X in gold, it would be better to require them to complete 10 hour-long quests. There is the issue of “levelers”, but how many people are going to turn over their account to a faceless person on the other side of the world?
Such a system would make it difficult to reward characters that have already reached the maximum level. They don’t gain experience anymore. Given WoW’s longevity, I’ll hazard a guess that most players have at least one maximum level character. They need something to do, and rewards to seek, so they’ll keep playing and paying those monthly subscription fees.
WoW and similar games have a significant number of players that feel the game doesn’t really get interesting until the endgame content–usually called raids. Everything they do from levels 1-85 is just preliminary. And it doesn’t take very long to reach maximum level for those that want to do so quickly.
Add to that certain genre expectations. People that enjoy the fantasy setting expect to gain some form of coin of the realm for their efforts. Taking that away would generate howls of protest.
I am not a raider. I have no interest in raiding, or doing some insane reputation/daily grind.
Other players are not interested in crafting. Or PvP. Or whatever. And each of our game preferences are just as “legitimate” as the other.
All of my possesions are either quest rewards, items I craft myself, or items I bought off the auction house.
Obviously, I go to the auction house because it either saves time, or to get something I don’t think I can get on my own. (Some crafting recipes calls for stuff that drops in dungeons.)
If and when I reach a point in the game (there is a point of diminishing returns) where I think I have done pretty much all I can, I’ll quit. Blizzard don’t want people quitting, so they let players trade amongst themselves: The auction house means I don’t have to spend time in a city spamming a trade channel (eg “LTB 2 Frozen Orbs, pst with your rock bottom price”), finding a buyer/seller, and arranging a meeting place. If I had to spend a couple hours every day doing that, it’s no longer fun, and I quit anyways.
Diablo II still has the same sort of economy; it’s just that the currency isn’t the gold piece. When people in Diablo II buy or sell items from each other, they mostly do so in runes (or gems, for small items), and you get runes (or gems) the same ways as you get gold in WoW: By grinding a bunch of dungeons. The only differences are that NPC vendors don’t sell things for runes, and runes in and of themselves are useful, but neither has all that much effect on the economy-- Yeah, someone looking to make a Heart of the Oak flail will trade to get a Vex rune specifically, but most trades involving Vexes are to people who just intend to eventually trade it for something else.
Right, but I think there’s a significant difference there. A person could play all the way through Diablo 2 at all difficulties and not have a need for a Vex rune. Whereas in WoW, there is a definite need for gold, which also function as the currency of the game. At least in D2 you’ve added an extra step to the transaction (go online to buy vex rune, then trade vex rune for the thing you want).
All online games end up with some sort of currency. Online Magic:TG has the event ticket. Attempts to eliminate all online currency would only result in driving away your players. The key is setting up the game to result in the “right” currency.
If you’re paying real money, you can get pretty much any item directly from the same folks who would sell you the rune. If anything, it’s more direct than “buy WoW gold with dollars, use gold to get the item you want”, since as I understand it many items in WoW can only be used by the first character to touch them.
Gold in WoW is pretty useless. You don’t need it for gear. You don’t need it for PvP. It doesn’t take much for afford your skills. Flying is a major sink, but you don’t really need to leave town ever either. I guess you need it for enchants, but then the question is, why do enchanters want gold?
They are logically going to be making most of that on the games whose devs don’t make much effort to keep them at bay. A game where bots are allowed to flourish and farms go un-nerfed is logically going to have less farming than one that is the opposite.