There is always a way around these things. Rules can be bent etc.
Why would this be such a bad thing, if you buy the set of maxed out gear for level X and then you finally reach level X+1, now you have no cash to work with and will have to go grind for gold. Or what if you don't want the max gear for level X, so you get cash to have enough for max gear at lvl X, but it still won't be enough for that gear you've been eyeing on level X+2, you cannot do long term plans... Some of us like to plan ahead too.
And besides, who decides the value of the "max gear" for said level. If the value is "low" and it would be difficult to make, no one would craft it, so you effectively eliminate the crafters from the scenario and move the focus to NPC trading... Why would you want to go through the problem of creating something that is extremely hard and time consuming to make, when anyone could buy it for 10 cents, just because some dev decided so...
And besides, some mechanisms like these already exist in most games. You collect all sorts of tokens for example in WOW, at least you did. Which is a another set of currency that cannot be bought or sold. Many games have guild ranks in them. And guild ranks allow the players in the guild to buy stuff they could not buy if they weren't in that guild. For example in Warhammer Online, there is a guild tax, that goes into the guild treasury to buy guild stuff. In DDO, you have a whole other set of experience for the guild reknown that you accrue during gameplay.
And what does "for the HORDE" have to do anything written in this topic... You should check the spelling of the word, if you plan to machine gun it in a forum. It is HOARDING... Hoard is the correct word for this. I vote Alliance on this...
Basically the only way to eliminate all sorts of gold selling for real cash, is to just hand it out to everyone. For the monthly fee you get your 500k gold each month and you can always buy anything on the market. This would leave the gold sellers with nowhere to go, but it would pretty much deal a crushing blow to the game as well... Or for the game to sell gold to the players for a low price, so that the gold farmers couldn't really make a profit on it.
But people are weak and busy, so they go out and buy gold to make up for the time they could not play. Why is it such a big problem for you? There are always people who have better gear, or have more of something. I don't mind and neither does the majority of the public... The only problem is PVP when it comes to this. A game should more focus on skills and their correct use than gear. When the focus is on the gear, people will buy gold to get better gear.
The gaming companies should be on this, there is no way us players can do anything about this... For example of how this is fought in other internet based games. Take Hattrick for example, it is a game of soccer team management where you can buy and sell players. Player transactions that are out of the "ball park", are examined by the game moderators and they issue bans and other sanctions to the teams/managers in question if they sense any foul play.
The gold sellers are here to stay, they aren't going anywhere... Do I like it, no, but do I like the whole free market politics that is going on in the western hemisphere of the world, that's a no too. But the alternatives aren't much better. As long as we are people, someone will try walking the line between good and bad behavior. Be it that "weird kid in the class" or that crazy English man who built his castle hidden from sight because he found a loop whole in a law that prevented castle building in the region. And don't get me started on the whole Greek, Portuguese, Irish and USA situation...
The easiest way to stop gold farming, is to simply stop it.
Why are you making gold in an MMORPG?
to buy things your character needs, right? Do you need more gold than that? No, you don't.
So simply put caps on player gold, jsut like you do with Mobs that are low level.
When you gain enough levels, in many games the lower level mobs go grey. They no longer give you xp or drop loot or gold.
Why is that?
To stop you from getting powerful, and just slaughtering low level Mobs with one hit to level all the way to the cap. The game makes you go on to more challenging content.
Why not do the same with gold?
When you have enough gold for the armor you need, repairs, expendables, then you stop getting gold. You can't horde it, and farm it.
You will start to make copper pieces, until you spend the gold you have, or begin to need more because you need to upgrade armor, etc.
You can easily build in enough reserve so you can hand over a few gold pieces here and there to help out guildmates, lower level players, etc.
What about saving up for a big purchase like a Mount, or a Castle?
Easy. You simply choose from a menu what you are going to purchase, and a certain amount of your gold goes towards that purchase till it's paid off.
You still can't horde it, and sell it.
How would this cause the normal player that isn't a gold farmer any problems?
Remove gold from the game. There, problem solved.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
I'd be entirely fine with simply eliminating the direct player-driven economy. Gold, like everything else, bonds to the player on pickup. It cannot be given directly to any other character, period. It can be spent only at in-game stores, just as items that are found can be sold there. You get a sword drop? Sell it at the store. Want a sword? Buy it at the store. Items at the store are only available if other players are selling them there and prices are determined automatically based on the popularity of the particular item in any particular day. If there are lots of swords in stock and lots of people are selling swords, the price of swords drops for that day. They're rare the next day? Prices rise.
It entirely eliminates gold farming, item farming, etc. No need to limit anything, gold and gear simply become impossible to trade directly between players.
If I play a game where I can get a mount at level 40, but the mount costs about 4 times as much as I made off of looting corpses and selling loot from level 1-40, in all liklihood I'm going to pay a visit to ige.com and buy some gold. Sorry, but I'd rather pay real money to avoid having to spend hours doing some repetitive task just so I can have enough cash to buy the mount that I want.
If devs really want to curb gold-buying and gold-selling, perhaps they should look into deemphasizing the importance of currency in the first place by making mounts and armor obtainable only via completing some heroic feat within the game.
There are several problems with this solution as well as loopholes.
First, who is to say exactly what the cap on gold and items should be? If you have a cap on gold, but not every item, then players will simply trade items they can stack in large quantities as a replacement for gold (check the original Guild Wars as evidence of this).
Well, you'll probably just say to cap everything, right?
What happens if I want to go out and harvest a bunch of materials for crafting, or collect a bunch of specific items so I can make a bunch of another item for crafting? How would you appropiate limit this to make it not a hinderance on a player to do this? What happens if I would normally get that item for crafting, but I'm capped on my item limit, do I magically lose this item? That would be horrible to the player.
Next you have to think of it from a programming and balance standpoint. You have to decide how much of a limitation you would have on EVERY single item in the game or else it would be used as alternate currency. This is problematic and adding a lot of needless work to the game. Also, you'd have to have extra code in place to check various transactions still. As an alternate, a player could still receive limits on various items in place of currency, as well as the gold limit, to make the total amount of the transaction equivalent to how much gold the player would have bought normally.
So you'd probably propose a solution to this problem to put a total limit on value a player can have, a total summation of all their items and gold that prevents them from getting more items, right? Well, not only would the balance checks be a nightmare (how much is a single wooden arrow? What about a yew log? A diamond? What's the max limitation for a player on X progress that would deter them from buying gold? etc.) for the designers and coders, but you also have the problem where players will get to the point where they cannot progress altogether. A MMO would be pretty boring if you reached a cap and could no longer earn any items whatsoever. Sure, you could spend it on a mount or guild hall, but shouldn't those things also count towards your total monetary value limit too or else what's keeping a player from buying the gold and immediately using them towards those purchases in chunks as the gold seller trades items to them?
And here is where the loophole comes in. This method mostly targets the gold buyers and not the sellers. The sellers will simply keep the gold on multiple accounts so their total limitations will be much higher. They simply log on and trade those items to a player in chunks until they reach whatever gold amount they bought. They could do this over a course of time. While it does make it easier to track gold sellers (a single gold buyer would receive many transactions of various items, and the account would be flagged by the system) as well as slow the rate of gold sellers is it really worth all the hassle listed above to the player, designers, and programmers to go through all this trouble (and potentially limit subscriber numbers because a lot of the implementations would anger your players)?
EVE online is a perfect example of why this would never work. You have alliance funds, corp funds, personal funds, funds people use to play the market, funds used to buy ships and modules, and you need different ships and fittings for different situations. Imagine a hard cap on these items. THe economy, game, alliance would crumble. Personal fun would deteriorate "My carrier just got blown up, but because i could not have more than 1 billion isk, i am going to have to grind it all back up so i can afford another ship". Or "sorry guys, we can pay for sov this week cause some idiot bought a titan, and our cap was lowered due to it"
This idea is just horrid, especially if the game has a true player driven economy.
I'd be entirely fine with simply eliminating the direct player-driven economy. Gold, like everything else, bonds to the player on pickup. It cannot be given directly to any other character, period. It can be spent only at in-game stores, just as items that are found can be sold there. You get a sword drop? Sell it at the store. Want a sword? Buy it at the store. Items at the store are only available if other players are selling them there and prices are determined automatically based on the popularity of the particular item in any particular day. If there are lots of swords in stock and lots of people are selling swords, the price of swords drops for that day. They're rare the next day? Prices rise.
It entirely eliminates gold farming, item farming, etc. No need to limit anything, gold and gear simply become impossible to trade directly between players.
Originally posted by SuperXero89
If devs really want to curb gold-buying and gold-selling, perhaps they should look into deemphasizing the importance of currency in the first place by making mounts and armor obtainable only via completing some heroic feat within the game.
Brrrrr that are some awful ideas. It would just make mmorpg even more focused on grinding instances than it is now.
I would not play this kind of game.
Originally posted by SuperXero89
If I play a game where I can get a mount at level 40, but the mount costs about 4 times as much as I made off of looting corpses and selling loot from level 1-40, in all liklihood I'm going to pay a visit to ige.com and buy some gold. Sorry, but I'd rather pay real money to avoid having to spend hours doing some repetitive task just so I can have enough cash to buy the mount that I want.
Well if there are games that f.e. standard mounts are overpriced so normal player cannot buy it if he/she spends all of it's gold he earned till level t is possible to aquire mount then yeah it is bad design.
BUT for buying gold you should be banned in game.
Imho devs should adjust some prices in game especially on things like first mounts and some other stuff so player dont have to endlessly grind gold if f.e. he want to raid. Of course he have to earn it in game but well it should not be awful grind.
At same time make better tools fro discovering gold buyers and sellers and ban them mercilessly. Imo 'no mercy' policy for this kind of cheating.
As for OP idea- well NO , this won't work. Really It would not.
There are only two ways to stop it, one easy, one difficult.
Easy: Remove player to player trading of all kinds.
Not a popular option, but if the game is designed to not require trading then it would work. You could introduce a middle man system with NPCs, sell item to NPC for "fair price" and it then resells to players for a "fair price". Not just anonymous, but also can't be gamed by gold farmers.
Difficult: Make a closed economy.
If there is a finite amount of gold in the game then hoarding it will have consequences on the game. Introduce a tax system to the game where those that hoard gold are taxed more and in theory you could develop a system that punishes gold farmers and stimulates a true player economy. But that requires more than a little work, maybe a few economics experts
I understand you feel gold farming is bad , but your way suxs. like in eq2 i was lvl 34 but found a really rare and cool level 87 1h spear w/ cool effects for 175 plat, i bought it and put it in my bank for later i have not seen it for that price yet 600 plat is the going rate now.. your way would not allow me to buy it or keep it.. those kind of limits would not be fun .. good thought , bad way try again..
Level 34 with 175 plat in the bank? Sure you're not a gold buyer? I'm level 20 and have...er... 5 gold.
Maybe he won the goblin lottery? Those buggers are always out luring me to bet my hard earned silvers on winning the lottery. I've shelled out a small fortune to that little guy in Sinking Sands.....
Well that is just the dumbest thing i have ever heard, have you limited mind people never heard of alts, i and my wife have many and a few maxed level . lets see take max level and give plat to lower to make it easy for them to have what they need. yea gold farmer.. pls it like reading from the short bus paper here sometimes.. no thinking just type whatever passes through your little minds ..
you had to "print" the money yourself by getting the proper tradeskill. You need to mine the ores and then you can create the money. The ores were very limited and you were able to pvp in those mining zones (at least the mid/high end ones). Sometimes there were also strong monsters (dunno if bots can handle mobs fighting +potential pvp). The low lvl mining zones are of course highly sought after and its really difficult to get ores from there, and even if you manage to get ores, you'd need tons to make proper money (but its enough to get you some starter gear).
The only problem with this is the potential that guilds will claim those areas so only they can mine, but then again this encourages conflict and fighting. Maybe this only works for pvp focused games.
The simple way to stop gold farming is for the game company itself to provide it itself while at the same time make it dangerous for players looking for sources outside the game company. There are people who would "cheat" regardless, so why not sanitise the whole process in the source?
The simple way to stop gold farming is for the game company itself to provide it itself while at the same time make it dangerous for players looking for sources outside the game company. There are people who would "cheat" regardless, so why not sanitise the whole process in the source?
Look Eve online. CCP is selling gold(ISK) , at same time they do ban gold sellers/buyers.
Effect = still lots of gold farmers, bots ,etc
Companies selling gold only effect in companies making more money , while in game currency inflating even more becasue many players who would not buy from gold sellers (don't know how / where , are afraid to give their personal data to gold sellers ,etc) would buy from game owner.
Gold sellers still exist they just simpy undercut game company prices and are selling gold cheaper.
Inflation would hit gamers who don't want to / or cannot pay for gold.
Not to mention it would bring rl into game , break immersion ,etc
Horrid idea.
Will never play game where company is selling gold , and I will try to convince everyone I can to not play it either.
Company want mroe money = make game better to have better retention rate and attract more players and not get other soucrces of income by making game worse in process.
Well it is much more cheaper though to make store selling gold than actually make game better though...
1) Greater use of verification techniciques of Player Account ID Authentification (sorry but mmorpgs are a service > product and this makes sense ultimately for players and devs if you are investing a lot of your time/cash into a game I'd argue).
2) Buyers are going to buy because reiterating Simon Ludgate's emphasis on virtual economies & elsewhere:
TIME = MONEY
So it's more a question of out-selling the gold-sellers than preventing the gold-buyers (eg drugs). This solution proposed above is to BUY in-game cash or sub fees (eg EvE) from the developer or make the game more fun than to buy cash to skip "ahead" and again put the gold-sellers niche out of joint. This way the devs make the profit vs the gold-sellers, as ppl WILL buy gold, it's a question of who sells it.
3) Limiting the cash circulation works up to a point but more in terms of reducing the trivial places players can grind cash ie a complex crafting system is required to impact the economy so that eco-systems of players can take vested control of it.
4) I'd propose my own idea of some sort of reputation system for being able to buy/sell // influence the economy, even? RE: Islamic banking is a different model to look into.
Some background reading on these interesting articles by Simon Ludgate at Gamasutra:
2) Buyers are going to buy because reiterating Simon Ludgate's emphasis on virtual economies & elsewhere:
TIME = MONEY
So it's more a question of out-selling the gold-sellers than preventing the gold-buyers (eg drugs). This solution proposed above is to BUY in-game cash or sub fees (eg EvE) from the developer or make the game more fun than to buy cash to skip "ahead" and again put the gold-sellers niche out of joint. This way the devs make the profit vs the gold-sellers, as ppl WILL buy gold, it's a question of who sells it.
Sure there will be always some people that buy and some ppl that sell.
You're wrong though. You cannot outsell gold farmers. If you set price of gold too low you will cause insane inflation , so gold worth will drop , so you will have to drop gold price even lower ,etc.
Besides gold farmers use bots, selling gold will be profitable for them anyway.
If you decide to fight with them "outselling" them. Then you will infate prices in game alot, gold will lose it's worth people, becasue of that people will need even more gold so they will still be tempted to buy cheaper gold sellers gold.
This will hit non-buying gold players, and make qq of forums. Devs will have to change those in-game prices they control , ppl will whine , economy will be borked.
What's left? Well you can limit gold sellers.
Like you also mentioned:
1) increased account security
2) strict gm moderation - it is frequently very easy to spot gold selling adverts , immediate bans for gold selling , ability for players to easily report gold sellers
3) change gathering resources methods to make writing bots scripts harder
4) build tools for gm for detecting suspicious gold transfers (big amount of gold for small worth item on ah, big amounts of gold sent by in-game mail , etc) and bots
5) gold buyers should not be prime objective but if detected = ban as well
Is it possible to marginalize gold sellers? Sure it is. Look at Lotro, I've been playing it for over a year until recently (like 2 motnhs ago) and I've seen maybe 2-3 times gold selling adverts or suspicious Ah items. Players playing other games and Lotro also saw that not many gold selling was going. To find website selling gold in Lotro also is harder than for similar popular games.
So I call it bollocks and it was proven in some games that devs is selling gold that it DOES not help.
Only real way is to spent resources to tighten security , hit gold sellers and make award system for players that denounce actual gold sellers.
Many mmorpg's devs don't do that because gold sellers = money for them from thousands of subscriptions.
Many people buy gold, it is no small minority issue. Now we all know it hurts games, but what we should not ignore is: the massive existence of gold buying is proof than something in the system of MMOs just went wrong.
In SWG in the old days I don't recall there was massive gold buying. And the reason was twofold: first you did not have such a highly goal oriented MMO, as today we have in the WOW era, where people are socialized always to grind for higher tier gear and higher stuff to compare themselves too. People were happy with what they were. But these WOW models put people into a greed and envy spiral, and suddenly the simple happyness of the adventure wasn't enough because the new type of MMOs incite peoples greed. Second, the full crafting system and the ability to just rent your lots gave everyone plenty of money to buy cool stuff. But in a controlled pseudo-socialis economy as in the themepark MMOs, people have only very few methods to legally make money. Adventuring usually pays piss poor, and only the mindless WOW-crafting remains, which just isn't everyone's thing.
Everyone who has played Ultima Online will know what I speak of when I talk of an open and creative economy. Sure, some will always chose the easy way to buy gold. But when there are fun and entertaining ways to get some money I am sure it would dry out a lot of gold buying desire. But in these narrowed MMOs like WOW, Rift and whatever, the entire economy sector is so greatly reduced, simplified and controlled, it leaves people few ways to make some ingame coin. And that is what is just wrong with MMOs these days and for what Gold Buying is just a symptom.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
The easiest way to stop gold farming, is to simply stop it.
Why are you making gold in an MMORPG?
to buy things your character needs, right? Do you need more gold than that? No, you don't.
So simply put caps on player gold, jsut like you do with Mobs that are low level.
When you gain enough levels, in many games the lower level mobs go grey. They no longer give you xp or drop loot or gold.
Why is that?
To stop you from getting powerful, and just slaughtering low level Mobs with one hit to level all the way to the cap. The game makes you go on to more challenging content.
Why not do the same with gold?
When you have enough gold for the armor you need, repairs, expendables, then you stop getting gold. You can't horde it, and farm it.
You will start to make copper pieces, until you spend the gold you have, or begin to need more because you need to upgrade armor, etc.
You can easily build in enough reserve so you can hand over a few gold pieces here and there to help out guildmates, lower level players, etc.
What about saving up for a big purchase like a Mount, or a Castle?
Easy. You simply choose from a menu what you are going to purchase, and a certain amount of your gold goes towards that purchase till it's paid off.
You still can't horde it, and sell it.
How would this cause the normal player that isn't a gold farmer any problems?
Here is an even simpler idea to stop gold farming,spamming,selling. How about guides (unpaid game help/police) police the servers for spammers and farmer bots. They can report to devs and for thier efforts get either payed subs (for subscription based games) or Swag from item shops (if FTP).
In my experience, the biggest problem is not having enough eyes on the ball. If Guides and Devs would monitor the game more the gold farmers/botters could be stopped without harming game play for the people that just want to enjoy the game and make thier own way thru it.
Many people buy gold, it is no small minority issue. Now we all know it hurts games, but what we should not ignore is: the massive existence of gold buying is proof than something in the system of MMOs just went wrong.
In SWG in the old days I don't recall there was massive gold buying. And the reason was twofold: first you did not have such a highly goal oriented MMO, as today we have in the WOW era, where people are socialized always to grind for higher tier gear and higher stuff to compare themselves too. People were happy with what they were. But these WOW models put people into a greed and envy spiral, and suddenly the simple happyness of the adventure wasn't enough because the new type of MMOs incite peoples greed. Second, the full crafting system and the ability to just rent your lots gave everyone plenty of money to buy cool stuff. But in a controlled pseudo-socialis economy as in the themepark MMOs, people have only very few methods to legally make money. Adventuring usually pays piss poor, and only the mindless WOW-crafting remains, which just isn't everyone's thing.
Everyone who has played Ultima Online will know what I speak of when I talk of an open and creative economy. Sure, some will always chose the easy way to buy gold. But when there are fun and entertaining ways to get some money I am sure it would dry out a lot of gold buying desire. But in these narrowed MMOs like WOW, Rift and whatever, the entire economy sector is so greatly reduced, simplified and controlled, it leaves people few ways to make some ingame coin. And that is what is just wrong with MMOs these days and for what Gold Buying is just a symptom.
I think this is a good analysis, even though you left out the impact of economic incitement for gold farmers, which became larger with the huge increase of "MMO-users" since WoW, compared to the days of games such as UO.
Makes me wonder if we already have crossed the point of no return when it comes to gold selling.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
Originally posted by Sulaa Originally posted by MumboJumbo
2) Buyers are going to buy because reiterating Simon Ludgate's emphasis on virtual economies & elsewhere: TIME = MONEY So it's more a question of out-selling the gold-sellers than preventing the gold-buyers (eg drugs). This solution proposed above is to BUY in-game cash or sub fees (eg EvE) from the developer or make the game more fun than to buy cash to skip "ahead" and again put the gold-sellers niche out of joint. This way the devs make the profit vs the gold-sellers, as ppl WILL buy gold, it's a question of who sells it.
Sure there will be always some people that buy and some ppl that sell. You're wrong though. You cannot outsell gold farmers. If you set price of gold too low you will cause insane inflation , so gold worth will drop , so you will have to drop gold price even lower ,etc. Besides gold farmers use bots, selling gold will be profitable for them anyway. If you decide to fight with them "outselling" them. Then you will infate prices in game alot, gold will lose it's worth people, becasue of that people will need even more gold so they will still be tempted to buy cheaper gold sellers gold. This will hit non-buying gold players, and make qq of forums. Devs will have to change those in-game prices they control , ppl will whine , economy will be borked.
What's left? Well you can limit gold sellers. Like you also mentioned: 1) increased account security 2) strict gm moderation - it is frequently very easy to spot gold selling adverts , immediate bans for gold selling , ability for players to easily report gold sellers 3) change gathering resources methods to make writing bots scripts harder 4) build tools for gm for detecting suspicious gold transfers (big amount of gold for small worth item on ah, big amounts of gold sent by in-game mail , etc) and bots 5) gold buyers should not be prime objective but if detected = ban as well
Is it possible to marginalize gold sellers? Sure it is. Look at Lotro, I've been playing it for over a year until recently (like 2 motnhs ago) and I've seen maybe 2-3 times gold selling adverts or suspicious Ah items. Players playing other games and Lotro also saw that not many gold selling was going. To find website selling gold in Lotro also is harder than for similar popular games. So I call it bollocks and it was proven in some games that devs is selling gold that it DOES not help. Only real way is to spent resources to tighten security , hit gold sellers and make award system for players that denounce actual gold sellers.
Many mmorpg's devs don't do that because gold sellers = money for them from thousands of subscriptions.
Gold Sellers do not equate to more money for developers. Gold Sellers will use the cheapest method possible to generate that gold, that means using a trial account or hacking another user's account. They aren't going to create an additional, trackable account unless they have to. Gold selling costs game companies more than they make off of the gold seller accounts.
The only way to totally get rid of gold sellers would be to make gold selling worthless. Wizard 101 does it by not allowing player to player trades. Everyone uses an auction house or trading house system. It certainly gets rid of gold sellers, but I have no idea if the game has a thriving economy. They certainly have a thriving player base and they do not have gold sellers.
If you're willing to live with limits, then you could get rid of gold selling in any game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
In fifteen years of MMOs, I've yet to encounter a single game where generating wealth was difficult.
Nor have I ever seen a "simple way to stop gold sellers" thread that actually contained any answers :P
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
This idea would work maybe with WoW and WoW clones, but if we ever want to go back to any kind of actually enjoyable MMO experience I hope that it wouldn't work. After ten years of playing UO I can say that one of the most enjoyable and unforgettable experiences was the player-run economy. To think that future MMOs would do something like this and destroy all hope of ever having an economy like that would be a shame.
I'd say the main thing a company can and should do in regards to gold selling is be 100% aware and on top of any and all exploits related to gold duping and control how simple it is to actually farm gold. Unfortunately as technology has progressed it has become virtually impossible to stop botting completely, so perhaps as someone suggested.. perhaps having new account registrations jump through some hoops rather than having it be a simple process would divert some of the exploitation related to temp/trial accounts.
I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas that could limit gold farming that wouldn't completely destroy the MMO experience..
Gold Sellers do not equate to more money for developers. Gold Sellers will use the cheapest method possible to generate that gold, that means using a trial account or hacking another user's account. They aren't going to create an additional, trackable account unless they have to. Gold selling costs game companies more than they make off of the gold seller accounts.
The only way to totally get rid of gold sellers would be to make gold selling worthless. Wizard 101 does it by not allowing player to player trades. Everyone uses an auction house or trading house system. It certainly gets rid of gold sellers, but I have no idea if the game has a thriving economy. They certainly have a thriving player base and they do not have gold sellers.
If you're willing to live with limits, then you could get rid of gold selling in any game.
Well there is always something you can try to do about issues you descibed above. Ofc thing is if they'll be working. Anyway:
1.Put harsh money limits on trial accounts, and/or inability to trade with other players while on trial , etc
2.Better account security. Really there is no excuse for AAA mmorpg developers to not implement more security measures to accounts than simple login/pass. Just inspire, copy, license or whatever of many solutions used in electronic banking or even some forums(sic!).
Havent played Wizard 101 so cannot really say anything about solution they got there.
I am fine with limits as long as they don't limit player-crafting and dont screw economy.
Besides realisticaly speaking there will be always gold sellers, and if not gold sellers then item / resources / wahtever sellers unless you really put insanely harsh limits many players would not like.
I understand some companies that want to sell gold for rl money. Like every company they look a way to make more revenue. I will never personally agree to it, I will never play a game like that and will bash every game that goes that route. If all intertesting games go that route I will stop playing mmorpgs at all and will try to convince everyone I can to do same.
PS. There is even better way to get rid of gold sellers and create big opportunity for game devs to sell gold and items. Just get rid of player crafting totally while still having bind on aquire on all loot. Many players would buy alot of gold/items from game company to avoid grind for items/gold.
On the other hand that kind of mmorpg would be totally horrible.
There is no realistic or easy answer to Gold Farming. Every method that a game company could put down would be circumvented by somebody wanting to make rl cash for in game gold. If not the gold, then the resourses. Puting a resourse cap could impair progress or make the game an endless grind session to get resourses to proceed.
Monitoring transactions between players not only costs more time and money for the game developers, but violates privacy rites and could drive gamers away. For example: I give an alt 10 golds, what would stop a GM from banning me for violations? Nevermind the fact it is my alt? Or what if that alt isn't mine but a friend? Or what if I was just being nice to a newbie? All of these could get the banhammer if thought to be Gold Farming.
What can be done? Don't buy gold or resources may sound like the answer, but since we don't live in a perfect world that is not likely to have an effect. One good way would be to have the game companies sell the products or gold officially. They would make money and would cause people to turn away from Gold Farmers that spam channels. It still happens, but I have seen in games like Entropia Universe, LOTRO, and D&D Online have great in game purchasing systems and Gold Farming seems very minimal at best.
One good way would be to have the game companies sell the products or gold officially. They would make money and would cause people to turn away from Gold Farmers that spam channels. It still happens, but I have seen in games like Entropia Universe, LOTRO, and D&D Online have great in game purchasing systems and Gold Farming seems very minimal at best.
Lotro and D&D had very minimal Gold Farming BEFORE they went F2P and started item shops. So I don't know why you connect those things ?
Cannot say for Entropia Universe as I have not played them.
Selling gold is in few games, Eve Online beign best example. They sell gold (ISK) but that havent stopped gold farmers and bots. They are still good and dandy selling gold to players.
Item stores and gold selling DO NOT solve gold farmers/ bots.
Spam in channels is actually thing that is least important in gold farmers case.
The easiest way to stop gold farming, is to simply stop it.
Why are you making gold in an MMORPG?
to buy things your character needs, right? Do you need more gold than that? No, you don't.
So simply put caps on player gold, jsut like you do with Mobs that are low level.
When you gain enough levels, in many games the lower level mobs go grey. They no longer give you xp or drop loot or gold.
Why is that?
To stop you from getting powerful, and just slaughtering low level Mobs with one hit to level all the way to the cap. The game makes you go on to more challenging content.
Why not do the same with gold?
When you have enough gold for the armor you need, repairs, expendables, then you stop getting gold. You can't horde it, and farm it.
You will start to make copper pieces, until you spend the gold you have, or begin to need more because you need to upgrade armor, etc.
You can easily build in enough reserve so you can hand over a few gold pieces here and there to help out guildmates, lower level players, etc.
What about saving up for a big purchase like a Mount, or a Castle?
Easy. You simply choose from a menu what you are going to purchase, and a certain amount of your gold goes towards that purchase till it's paid off.
You still can't horde it, and sell it.
How would this cause the normal player that isn't a gold farmer any problems?
Interesting idea….but I think there would be too many unintended consequences to capping a player’s purchasing power in a game.
You can’t play the market because you have no capital to spend.
You can’t take on an investment project to turn a buck because….you have no capital to spend.
You can’t stock up on a certain commodity and sell it for profit….because the system will have diminishing returns on sales after some arbitrary cap.
What your forgetting is that in many of these games, being able to farm a hot commodity or take advantage of market parity IS the way many players get a leg up on finances….which allow them to gain xp faster through the consumables and other things that is available to purchase.
In my opinion, the way you remove Gold Farmers is you price them out the market by lowering the demand for gold. You can do this 2 ways……either up the amount of gold that drops on monsters or you reduce the average daily cost it takes to play the game (cost for repairs, consumables, armor, weapon, etc.)
If you do this, players will have plenty enough gold to buy all the things they want (and have some in the bank for an opportune purchase if it presents itself) and have no reason to drop hundreds & thousands of dollars on in game currency.
Here are a few different games for comparison purposes….
Ultima Online had a very little demand on gold, after your character has reached skill/level cap. You could replace the items you lost in PvP throughout the day in a hour or two of PvEing…no big deal. While I wasn’t a hardcore player that played 30-40 hours a week…..I still made enough money that I was able to buy a nice house and had plenty of money to do anything in the game that I wanted (within reason). I never once purchased gold from ebay, and I ran into only a few folks in my 4 years playing that purchased in game gold for real money.
On the other side of the fence, Lineage 2 was your traditional Korean grinder that was made in mind of whole guilds farming resources for 1 person. Because of this, item & gold drops were VERY stingy and a player would easily run a net deficit after purchasing consumable powerups and hunting for a few hours. Many Western MMO players prefer to play solo, and as such….nearly every person I knew that played Lineage 2 at some time (or many times) purchased in game currency with real money. Some players did it on a monthly basis. Ultimately the Gold Farmer issue was SO bad it’s essentially put the final nail in the coffin for the Western servers.
So the lesson in all of this is that the higher demand for gold a game has, the higher probability there will be a gold farmer moving in to satisfy that opportunity.
There is no realistic or easy answer to Gold Farming. Every method that a game company could put down would be circumvented by somebody wanting to make rl cash for in game gold. If not the gold, then the resourses. Puting a resourse cap could impair progress or make the game an endless grind session to get resourses to proceed.
Monitoring transactions between players not only costs more time and money for the game developers, but violates privacy rites and could drive gamers away. For example: I give an alt 10 golds, what would stop a GM from banning me for violations? Nevermind the fact it is my alt? Or what if that alt isn't mine but a friend? Or what if I was just being nice to a newbie? All of these could get the banhammer if thought to be Gold Farming.
What can be done? Don't buy gold or resources may sound like the answer, but since we don't live in a perfect world that is not likely to have an effect. One good way would be to have the game companies sell the products or gold officially. They would make money and would cause people to turn away from Gold Farmers that spam channels. It still happens, but I have seen in games like Entropia Universe, LOTRO, and D&D Online have great in game purchasing systems and Gold Farming seems very minimal at best.
Game companies selling their own items & currency ONLY detracts the Gold Farmers IF the price point is lower than what is profitable by the botters.
In other words, if a game company sells 1 gold for 1 United States Dollar....but a farmer can sell that same 1 gold for HALF a Dollar, there will still be a market for farmers.
IF the game company is able to sell the game currency at a LOWER price than it is profitable for a botter to run the opperation...then you've effectively undercut the gold farmer and removed the opprotunity for them to be in the market.
Comments
This just doesn't hold water at all...
There is always a way around these things. Rules can be bent etc.
Why would this be such a bad thing, if you buy the set of maxed out gear for level X and then you finally reach level X+1, now you have no cash to work with and will have to go grind for gold. Or what if you don't want the max gear for level X, so you get cash to have enough for max gear at lvl X, but it still won't be enough for that gear you've been eyeing on level X+2, you cannot do long term plans... Some of us like to plan ahead too.
And besides, who decides the value of the "max gear" for said level. If the value is "low" and it would be difficult to make, no one would craft it, so you effectively eliminate the crafters from the scenario and move the focus to NPC trading... Why would you want to go through the problem of creating something that is extremely hard and time consuming to make, when anyone could buy it for 10 cents, just because some dev decided so...
And besides, some mechanisms like these already exist in most games. You collect all sorts of tokens for example in WOW, at least you did. Which is a another set of currency that cannot be bought or sold. Many games have guild ranks in them. And guild ranks allow the players in the guild to buy stuff they could not buy if they weren't in that guild. For example in Warhammer Online, there is a guild tax, that goes into the guild treasury to buy guild stuff. In DDO, you have a whole other set of experience for the guild reknown that you accrue during gameplay.
And what does "for the HORDE" have to do anything written in this topic... You should check the spelling of the word, if you plan to machine gun it in a forum. It is HOARDING... Hoard is the correct word for this. I vote Alliance on this...
Basically the only way to eliminate all sorts of gold selling for real cash, is to just hand it out to everyone. For the monthly fee you get your 500k gold each month and you can always buy anything on the market. This would leave the gold sellers with nowhere to go, but it would pretty much deal a crushing blow to the game as well... Or for the game to sell gold to the players for a low price, so that the gold farmers couldn't really make a profit on it.
But people are weak and busy, so they go out and buy gold to make up for the time they could not play. Why is it such a big problem for you? There are always people who have better gear, or have more of something. I don't mind and neither does the majority of the public... The only problem is PVP when it comes to this. A game should more focus on skills and their correct use than gear. When the focus is on the gear, people will buy gold to get better gear.
The gaming companies should be on this, there is no way us players can do anything about this... For example of how this is fought in other internet based games. Take Hattrick for example, it is a game of soccer team management where you can buy and sell players. Player transactions that are out of the "ball park", are examined by the game moderators and they issue bans and other sanctions to the teams/managers in question if they sense any foul play.
The gold sellers are here to stay, they aren't going anywhere... Do I like it, no, but do I like the whole free market politics that is going on in the western hemisphere of the world, that's a no too. But the alternatives aren't much better. As long as we are people, someone will try walking the line between good and bad behavior. Be it that "weird kid in the class" or that crazy English man who built his castle hidden from sight because he found a loop whole in a law that prevented castle building in the region. And don't get me started on the whole Greek, Portuguese, Irish and USA situation...
Remove gold from the game. There, problem solved.
The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.
I'd be entirely fine with simply eliminating the direct player-driven economy. Gold, like everything else, bonds to the player on pickup. It cannot be given directly to any other character, period. It can be spent only at in-game stores, just as items that are found can be sold there. You get a sword drop? Sell it at the store. Want a sword? Buy it at the store. Items at the store are only available if other players are selling them there and prices are determined automatically based on the popularity of the particular item in any particular day. If there are lots of swords in stock and lots of people are selling swords, the price of swords drops for that day. They're rare the next day? Prices rise.
It entirely eliminates gold farming, item farming, etc. No need to limit anything, gold and gear simply become impossible to trade directly between players.
Played: UO, EQ, WoW, DDO, SWG, AO, CoH, EvE, TR, AoC, GW, GA, Aion, Allods, lots more
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If I play a game where I can get a mount at level 40, but the mount costs about 4 times as much as I made off of looting corpses and selling loot from level 1-40, in all liklihood I'm going to pay a visit to ige.com and buy some gold. Sorry, but I'd rather pay real money to avoid having to spend hours doing some repetitive task just so I can have enough cash to buy the mount that I want.
If devs really want to curb gold-buying and gold-selling, perhaps they should look into deemphasizing the importance of currency in the first place by making mounts and armor obtainable only via completing some heroic feat within the game.
There are several problems with this solution as well as loopholes.
First, who is to say exactly what the cap on gold and items should be? If you have a cap on gold, but not every item, then players will simply trade items they can stack in large quantities as a replacement for gold (check the original Guild Wars as evidence of this).
Well, you'll probably just say to cap everything, right?
What happens if I want to go out and harvest a bunch of materials for crafting, or collect a bunch of specific items so I can make a bunch of another item for crafting? How would you appropiate limit this to make it not a hinderance on a player to do this? What happens if I would normally get that item for crafting, but I'm capped on my item limit, do I magically lose this item? That would be horrible to the player.
Next you have to think of it from a programming and balance standpoint. You have to decide how much of a limitation you would have on EVERY single item in the game or else it would be used as alternate currency. This is problematic and adding a lot of needless work to the game. Also, you'd have to have extra code in place to check various transactions still. As an alternate, a player could still receive limits on various items in place of currency, as well as the gold limit, to make the total amount of the transaction equivalent to how much gold the player would have bought normally.
So you'd probably propose a solution to this problem to put a total limit on value a player can have, a total summation of all their items and gold that prevents them from getting more items, right? Well, not only would the balance checks be a nightmare (how much is a single wooden arrow? What about a yew log? A diamond? What's the max limitation for a player on X progress that would deter them from buying gold? etc.) for the designers and coders, but you also have the problem where players will get to the point where they cannot progress altogether. A MMO would be pretty boring if you reached a cap and could no longer earn any items whatsoever. Sure, you could spend it on a mount or guild hall, but shouldn't those things also count towards your total monetary value limit too or else what's keeping a player from buying the gold and immediately using them towards those purchases in chunks as the gold seller trades items to them?
And here is where the loophole comes in. This method mostly targets the gold buyers and not the sellers. The sellers will simply keep the gold on multiple accounts so their total limitations will be much higher. They simply log on and trade those items to a player in chunks until they reach whatever gold amount they bought. They could do this over a course of time. While it does make it easier to track gold sellers (a single gold buyer would receive many transactions of various items, and the account would be flagged by the system) as well as slow the rate of gold sellers is it really worth all the hassle listed above to the player, designers, and programmers to go through all this trouble (and potentially limit subscriber numbers because a lot of the implementations would anger your players)?
EVE online is a perfect example of why this would never work. You have alliance funds, corp funds, personal funds, funds people use to play the market, funds used to buy ships and modules, and you need different ships and fittings for different situations. Imagine a hard cap on these items. THe economy, game, alliance would crumble. Personal fun would deteriorate "My carrier just got blown up, but because i could not have more than 1 billion isk, i am going to have to grind it all back up so i can afford another ship". Or "sorry guys, we can pay for sov this week cause some idiot bought a titan, and our cap was lowered due to it"
This idea is just horrid, especially if the game has a true player driven economy.
Brrrrr that are some awful ideas. It would just make mmorpg even more focused on grinding instances than it is now.
I would not play this kind of game.
Well if there are games that f.e. standard mounts are overpriced so normal player cannot buy it if he/she spends all of it's gold he earned till level t is possible to aquire mount then yeah it is bad design.
BUT for buying gold you should be banned in game.
Imho devs should adjust some prices in game especially on things like first mounts and some other stuff so player dont have to endlessly grind gold if f.e. he want to raid. Of course he have to earn it in game but well it should not be awful grind.
At same time make better tools fro discovering gold buyers and sellers and ban them mercilessly. Imo 'no mercy' policy for this kind of cheating.
As for OP idea- well NO , this won't work. Really It would not.
There are only two ways to stop it, one easy, one difficult.
Easy: Remove player to player trading of all kinds.
Not a popular option, but if the game is designed to not require trading then it would work. You could introduce a middle man system with NPCs, sell item to NPC for "fair price" and it then resells to players for a "fair price". Not just anonymous, but also can't be gamed by gold farmers.
Difficult: Make a closed economy.
If there is a finite amount of gold in the game then hoarding it will have consequences on the game. Introduce a tax system to the game where those that hoard gold are taxed more and in theory you could develop a system that punishes gold farmers and stimulates a true player economy. But that requires more than a little work, maybe a few economics experts
Well that is just the dumbest thing i have ever heard, have you limited mind people never heard of alts, i and my wife have many and a few maxed level . lets see take max level and give plat to lower to make it easy for them to have what they need. yea gold farmer.. pls it like reading from the short bus paper here sometimes.. no thinking just type whatever passes through your little minds ..
I liked the money system in the game wakfu ...
you had to "print" the money yourself by getting the proper tradeskill. You need to mine the ores and then you can create the money. The ores were very limited and you were able to pvp in those mining zones (at least the mid/high end ones). Sometimes there were also strong monsters (dunno if bots can handle mobs fighting +potential pvp). The low lvl mining zones are of course highly sought after and its really difficult to get ores from there, and even if you manage to get ores, you'd need tons to make proper money (but its enough to get you some starter gear).
The only problem with this is the potential that guilds will claim those areas so only they can mine, but then again this encourages conflict and fighting. Maybe this only works for pvp focused games.
The simple way to stop gold farming is for the game company itself to provide it itself while at the same time make it dangerous for players looking for sources outside the game company. There are people who would "cheat" regardless, so why not sanitise the whole process in the source?
Look Eve online. CCP is selling gold(ISK) , at same time they do ban gold sellers/buyers.
Effect = still lots of gold farmers, bots ,etc
Companies selling gold only effect in companies making more money , while in game currency inflating even more becasue many players who would not buy from gold sellers (don't know how / where , are afraid to give their personal data to gold sellers ,etc) would buy from game owner.
Gold sellers still exist they just simpy undercut game company prices and are selling gold cheaper.
Inflation would hit gamers who don't want to / or cannot pay for gold.
Not to mention it would bring rl into game , break immersion ,etc
Horrid idea.
Will never play game where company is selling gold , and I will try to convince everyone I can to not play it either.
Company want mroe money = make game better to have better retention rate and attract more players and not get other soucrces of income by making game worse in process.
Well it is much more cheaper though to make store selling gold than actually make game better though...
I've seen a combination of good ideas, imo:
1) Greater use of verification techniciques of Player Account ID Authentification (sorry but mmorpgs are a service > product and this makes sense ultimately for players and devs if you are investing a lot of your time/cash into a game I'd argue).
2) Buyers are going to buy because reiterating Simon Ludgate's emphasis on virtual economies & elsewhere:
TIME = MONEY
So it's more a question of out-selling the gold-sellers than preventing the gold-buyers (eg drugs). This solution proposed above is to BUY in-game cash or sub fees (eg EvE) from the developer or make the game more fun than to buy cash to skip "ahead" and again put the gold-sellers niche out of joint. This way the devs make the profit vs the gold-sellers, as ppl WILL buy gold, it's a question of who sells it.
3) Limiting the cash circulation works up to a point but more in terms of reducing the trivial places players can grind cash ie a complex crafting system is required to impact the economy so that eco-systems of players can take vested control of it.
4) I'd propose my own idea of some sort of reputation system for being able to buy/sell // influence the economy, even? RE: Islamic banking is a different model to look into.
Some background reading on these interesting articles by Simon Ludgate at Gamasutra:
Virtual Economic Theory: How MMOs Really Work
Part 1:
The F-Words of MMORPGs: Fairness
Part 2:
The F-Words Of MMOs: Faucets
Part 3:
tbc...
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
Sure there will be always some people that buy and some ppl that sell.
You're wrong though. You cannot outsell gold farmers. If you set price of gold too low you will cause insane inflation , so gold worth will drop , so you will have to drop gold price even lower ,etc.
Besides gold farmers use bots, selling gold will be profitable for them anyway.
If you decide to fight with them "outselling" them. Then you will infate prices in game alot, gold will lose it's worth people, becasue of that people will need even more gold so they will still be tempted to buy cheaper gold sellers gold.
This will hit non-buying gold players, and make qq of forums. Devs will have to change those in-game prices they control , ppl will whine , economy will be borked.
What's left? Well you can limit gold sellers.
Like you also mentioned:
1) increased account security
2) strict gm moderation - it is frequently very easy to spot gold selling adverts , immediate bans for gold selling , ability for players to easily report gold sellers
3) change gathering resources methods to make writing bots scripts harder
4) build tools for gm for detecting suspicious gold transfers (big amount of gold for small worth item on ah, big amounts of gold sent by in-game mail , etc) and bots
5) gold buyers should not be prime objective but if detected = ban as well
Is it possible to marginalize gold sellers? Sure it is. Look at Lotro, I've been playing it for over a year until recently (like 2 motnhs ago) and I've seen maybe 2-3 times gold selling adverts or suspicious Ah items. Players playing other games and Lotro also saw that not many gold selling was going. To find website selling gold in Lotro also is harder than for similar popular games.
So I call it bollocks and it was proven in some games that devs is selling gold that it DOES not help.
Only real way is to spent resources to tighten security , hit gold sellers and make award system for players that denounce actual gold sellers.
Many mmorpg's devs don't do that because gold sellers = money for them from thousands of subscriptions.
Many people buy gold, it is no small minority issue. Now we all know it hurts games, but what we should not ignore is: the massive existence of gold buying is proof than something in the system of MMOs just went wrong.
In SWG in the old days I don't recall there was massive gold buying. And the reason was twofold: first you did not have such a highly goal oriented MMO, as today we have in the WOW era, where people are socialized always to grind for higher tier gear and higher stuff to compare themselves too. People were happy with what they were. But these WOW models put people into a greed and envy spiral, and suddenly the simple happyness of the adventure wasn't enough because the new type of MMOs incite peoples greed. Second, the full crafting system and the ability to just rent your lots gave everyone plenty of money to buy cool stuff. But in a controlled pseudo-socialis economy as in the themepark MMOs, people have only very few methods to legally make money. Adventuring usually pays piss poor, and only the mindless WOW-crafting remains, which just isn't everyone's thing.
Everyone who has played Ultima Online will know what I speak of when I talk of an open and creative economy. Sure, some will always chose the easy way to buy gold. But when there are fun and entertaining ways to get some money I am sure it would dry out a lot of gold buying desire. But in these narrowed MMOs like WOW, Rift and whatever, the entire economy sector is so greatly reduced, simplified and controlled, it leaves people few ways to make some ingame coin. And that is what is just wrong with MMOs these days and for what Gold Buying is just a symptom.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Here is an even simpler idea to stop gold farming,spamming,selling. How about guides (unpaid game help/police) police the servers for spammers and farmer bots. They can report to devs and for thier efforts get either payed subs (for subscription based games) or Swag from item shops (if FTP).
In my experience, the biggest problem is not having enough eyes on the ball. If Guides and Devs would monitor the game more the gold farmers/botters could be stopped without harming game play for the people that just want to enjoy the game and make thier own way thru it.
Work hard Play Harder
I think this is a good analysis, even though you left out the impact of economic incitement for gold farmers, which became larger with the huge increase of "MMO-users" since WoW, compared to the days of games such as UO.
Makes me wonder if we already have crossed the point of no return when it comes to gold selling.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. - Carl Sagan
You're wrong though. You cannot outsell gold farmers. If you set price of gold too low you will cause insane inflation , so gold worth will drop , so you will have to drop gold price even lower ,etc.
Besides gold farmers use bots, selling gold will be profitable for them anyway.
If you decide to fight with them "outselling" them. Then you will infate prices in game alot, gold will lose it's worth people, becasue of that people will need even more gold so they will still be tempted to buy cheaper gold sellers gold.
This will hit non-buying gold players, and make qq of forums. Devs will have to change those in-game prices they control , ppl will whine , economy will be borked.
What's left? Well you can limit gold sellers.
Like you also mentioned:
1) increased account security
2) strict gm moderation - it is frequently very easy to spot gold selling adverts , immediate bans for gold selling , ability for players to easily report gold sellers
3) change gathering resources methods to make writing bots scripts harder
4) build tools for gm for detecting suspicious gold transfers (big amount of gold for small worth item on ah, big amounts of gold sent by in-game mail , etc) and bots
5) gold buyers should not be prime objective but if detected = ban as well
Is it possible to marginalize gold sellers? Sure it is. Look at Lotro, I've been playing it for over a year until recently (like 2 motnhs ago) and I've seen maybe 2-3 times gold selling adverts or suspicious Ah items. Players playing other games and Lotro also saw that not many gold selling was going. To find website selling gold in Lotro also is harder than for similar popular games.
So I call it bollocks and it was proven in some games that devs is selling gold that it DOES not help.
Only real way is to spent resources to tighten security , hit gold sellers and make award system for players that denounce actual gold sellers.
Many mmorpg's devs don't do that because gold sellers = money for them from thousands of subscriptions.
Gold Sellers do not equate to more money for developers. Gold Sellers will use the cheapest method possible to generate that gold, that means using a trial account or hacking another user's account. They aren't going to create an additional, trackable account unless they have to. Gold selling costs game companies more than they make off of the gold seller accounts.
The only way to totally get rid of gold sellers would be to make gold selling worthless. Wizard 101 does it by not allowing player to player trades. Everyone uses an auction house or trading house system. It certainly gets rid of gold sellers, but I have no idea if the game has a thriving economy. They certainly have a thriving player base and they do not have gold sellers.
If you're willing to live with limits, then you could get rid of gold selling in any game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
In fifteen years of MMOs, I've yet to encounter a single game where generating wealth was difficult.
Nor have I ever seen a "simple way to stop gold sellers" thread that actually contained any answers :P
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
This idea would work maybe with WoW and WoW clones, but if we ever want to go back to any kind of actually enjoyable MMO experience I hope that it wouldn't work. After ten years of playing UO I can say that one of the most enjoyable and unforgettable experiences was the player-run economy. To think that future MMOs would do something like this and destroy all hope of ever having an economy like that would be a shame.
I'd say the main thing a company can and should do in regards to gold selling is be 100% aware and on top of any and all exploits related to gold duping and control how simple it is to actually farm gold. Unfortunately as technology has progressed it has become virtually impossible to stop botting completely, so perhaps as someone suggested.. perhaps having new account registrations jump through some hoops rather than having it be a simple process would divert some of the exploitation related to temp/trial accounts.
I'm sure there are plenty of other ideas that could limit gold farming that wouldn't completely destroy the MMO experience..
Well there is always something you can try to do about issues you descibed above. Ofc thing is if they'll be working. Anyway:
1.Put harsh money limits on trial accounts, and/or inability to trade with other players while on trial , etc
2.Better account security. Really there is no excuse for AAA mmorpg developers to not implement more security measures to accounts than simple login/pass. Just inspire, copy, license or whatever of many solutions used in electronic banking or even some forums(sic!).
Havent played Wizard 101 so cannot really say anything about solution they got there.
I am fine with limits as long as they don't limit player-crafting and dont screw economy.
Besides realisticaly speaking there will be always gold sellers, and if not gold sellers then item / resources / wahtever sellers unless you really put insanely harsh limits many players would not like.
I understand some companies that want to sell gold for rl money. Like every company they look a way to make more revenue. I will never personally agree to it, I will never play a game like that and will bash every game that goes that route. If all intertesting games go that route I will stop playing mmorpgs at all and will try to convince everyone I can to do same.
PS. There is even better way to get rid of gold sellers and create big opportunity for game devs to sell gold and items. Just get rid of player crafting totally while still having bind on aquire on all loot. Many players would buy alot of gold/items from game company to avoid grind for items/gold.
On the other hand that kind of mmorpg would be totally horrible.
It is like this:
There is no realistic or easy answer to Gold Farming. Every method that a game company could put down would be circumvented by somebody wanting to make rl cash for in game gold. If not the gold, then the resourses. Puting a resourse cap could impair progress or make the game an endless grind session to get resourses to proceed.
Monitoring transactions between players not only costs more time and money for the game developers, but violates privacy rites and could drive gamers away. For example: I give an alt 10 golds, what would stop a GM from banning me for violations? Nevermind the fact it is my alt? Or what if that alt isn't mine but a friend? Or what if I was just being nice to a newbie? All of these could get the banhammer if thought to be Gold Farming.
What can be done? Don't buy gold or resources may sound like the answer, but since we don't live in a perfect world that is not likely to have an effect. One good way would be to have the game companies sell the products or gold officially. They would make money and would cause people to turn away from Gold Farmers that spam channels. It still happens, but I have seen in games like Entropia Universe, LOTRO, and D&D Online have great in game purchasing systems and Gold Farming seems very minimal at best.
Lotro and D&D had very minimal Gold Farming BEFORE they went F2P and started item shops. So I don't know why you connect those things ?
Cannot say for Entropia Universe as I have not played them.
Selling gold is in few games, Eve Online beign best example. They sell gold (ISK) but that havent stopped gold farmers and bots. They are still good and dandy selling gold to players.
Item stores and gold selling DO NOT solve gold farmers/ bots.
Spam in channels is actually thing that is least important in gold farmers case.
Interesting idea….but I think there would be too many unintended consequences to capping a player’s purchasing power in a game.
You can’t play the market because you have no capital to spend.
You can’t take on an investment project to turn a buck because….you have no capital to spend.
You can’t stock up on a certain commodity and sell it for profit….because the system will have diminishing returns on sales after some arbitrary cap.
What your forgetting is that in many of these games, being able to farm a hot commodity or take advantage of market parity IS the way many players get a leg up on finances….which allow them to gain xp faster through the consumables and other things that is available to purchase.
In my opinion, the way you remove Gold Farmers is you price them out the market by lowering the demand for gold. You can do this 2 ways……either up the amount of gold that drops on monsters or you reduce the average daily cost it takes to play the game (cost for repairs, consumables, armor, weapon, etc.)
If you do this, players will have plenty enough gold to buy all the things they want (and have some in the bank for an opportune purchase if it presents itself) and have no reason to drop hundreds & thousands of dollars on in game currency.
Here are a few different games for comparison purposes….
Ultima Online had a very little demand on gold, after your character has reached skill/level cap. You could replace the items you lost in PvP throughout the day in a hour or two of PvEing…no big deal. While I wasn’t a hardcore player that played 30-40 hours a week…..I still made enough money that I was able to buy a nice house and had plenty of money to do anything in the game that I wanted (within reason). I never once purchased gold from ebay, and I ran into only a few folks in my 4 years playing that purchased in game gold for real money.
On the other side of the fence, Lineage 2 was your traditional Korean grinder that was made in mind of whole guilds farming resources for 1 person. Because of this, item & gold drops were VERY stingy and a player would easily run a net deficit after purchasing consumable powerups and hunting for a few hours. Many Western MMO players prefer to play solo, and as such….nearly every person I knew that played Lineage 2 at some time (or many times) purchased in game currency with real money. Some players did it on a monthly basis. Ultimately the Gold Farmer issue was SO bad it’s essentially put the final nail in the coffin for the Western servers.
So the lesson in all of this is that the higher demand for gold a game has, the higher probability there will be a gold farmer moving in to satisfy that opportunity.
Game companies selling their own items & currency ONLY detracts the Gold Farmers IF the price point is lower than what is profitable by the botters.
In other words, if a game company sells 1 gold for 1 United States Dollar....but a farmer can sell that same 1 gold for HALF a Dollar, there will still be a market for farmers.
IF the game company is able to sell the game currency at a LOWER price than it is profitable for a botter to run the opperation...then you've effectively undercut the gold farmer and removed the opprotunity for them to be in the market.