I dont know why people stress so much over gold farming in games like WoW. What is a billion gold going to get you in wow? Some AH epics that arent all that great. All of the good gear is bop and you need to run instances or arena to get them. You could always get enchants I guess but those are not exactly bank breaking either. The only thing I could really see people buying gold for is the flying epic mount. Why should this bother anyone? How does this hurt the economy of wow when there really isnt one anyway? The guy buys gold then gives it all to an npc. The economy (and I use that word lightly) isnt effected at all. Whether it was him out farming for it or some guy making crap an hour trying to get himself through college it doesnt matter. The money is still farmed and thrown away to an npc. In other games with a player run economy it may have an impact but in wow it makes no difference at all.
its a matter of principle why it bothers people.. wrong is wrong, whether or not it directly affects someone else. and it also unbalances the game. they arent meant to be " the guy with the most disposable income wins". as for flying epic mounts, it makes someone who works for it's accomplishment less. wouldnt it p[iss you off if you farmed and worked at it for weeks to get it and some 8 year old buys one with his moms credit card?
oh and yeah it doesnt really hurt WoW's economy, but it seriously screwed up FFXI's, and since the game wasnt instanced, all the good farmin areas and drop locations were overcamped by bots, so you had to buy the gear you want, with money you had to buy.
soe spent YEARS combating gold farmers in eq, very publicly. they even went after ebay once. this problem was rampant WAY before world of warcraft.
Well, I can agree with this (minus the unnecessary insults to the OP) that gold selling has been around a long time. I first ran into it in DAOC, and I believe that in the early days of UO, EQ and other games most RMT and character leveling services were being done by actual players of the games.
It wasn't until around the time of Lineage 2's launch that I started to see RMT become a big business, mostly run by farming shops in Asian countries and away from being small time player ventures based in the US and EU.
SWG's economy probably didn't really support the concept of RMT all that well, hence you saw little of it in your game. Also, organized RMT hadn't quite hit its stride in the early days, I'm betting today there is some going on.
As to the EVE example, not as good as it seems. While EVE does provide a legal way to purchase ISK, one quick scan of any gold selling site will find plenty of ISK for sale, and if you are in the rookie channel for any length of time you won't miss the gold selliing spam...happens very frequently.... (since its not moderated at all times)
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I have stated this before, but I think it is just as much blizzards fault as it is the sellers fault. I have played with players that have paid for PL services or bought gold over the internet. And no one in the guild was pissed. Why? cause they are usually 30 year old men with wife and child. that can only play maybe 2 hours a night. So we out lvl him and out sell heim and just make more money and xp then them. Now he is not a 19 year old kid that played 14 hours a day and is still buying gold to feed his respec addiction. This is a man that is playing a game specifically designed to be a time sink. Will he ever have epic gear NO, but if he can get to 70 and have alteast half way decent gear. he wont need the gear, but atleast he can play with his friends. YOu probably have a friend like that. One that ask you to help him in Scarlet Monastary and your like, "dude, i am way over lvl for that" Hes not asking for a PL, he wants to play with friends that aren't noobs is all. WoW and all MMOs are broken upon release. They are not casual player friendly, not in the least bit. So that just pushes casual players into buying money and PLs just to be able to "keep up with the jones's". I know LOTRO was going to impliment an offline xp feature that lvled your character according to how old your account was. I don't know if they ever introducted it but i thought that was great. Help out all the casual players and in turn remove some value away from PL services.
EQ, UO and DAoC were selling gold/plat before the public even knew about WoW. Go ahead and blame blizzard, the devil, or both if you think they are the same. Ebay banned EQ sells back in 2000, and playerauctions was formed because of that.
I have stated this before, but I think it is just as much blizzards fault as it is the sellers fault. I have played with players that have paid for PL services or bought gold over the internet. And no one in the guild was pissed. Why? cause they are usually 30 year old men with wife and child. that can only play maybe 2 hours a night. So we out lvl him and out sell heim and just make more money and xp then them. Now he is not a 19 year old kid that played 14 hours a day and is still buying gold to feed his respec addiction. This is a man that is playing a game specifically designed to be a time sink. Will he ever have epic gear NO, but if he can get to 70 and have alteast half way decent gear. he wont need the gear, but atleast he can play with his friends. YOu probably have a friend like that. One that ask you to help him in Scarlet Monastary and your like, "dude, i am way over lvl for that" Hes not asking for a PL, he wants to play with friends that aren't noobs is all. WoW and all MMOs are broken upon release. They are not casual player friendly, not in the least bit. So that just pushes casual players into buying money and PLs just to be able to "keep up with the jones's". I know LOTRO was going to impliment an offline xp feature that lvled your character according to how old your account was. I don't know if they ever introducted it but i thought that was great. Help out all the casual players and in turn remove some value away from PL services.
Being older than the other players isnt a excuse to buy ingame curency/items for real money.Buying ingame curency ruins the game's economy,and ofcourse I bet alot of people constantly heard people from their guild bragging about their items and gold (that they bought online),the bragging wouldnt bother me if they truly would have worked for it,and I mean working ingame.Also from personal experience most soo called older people are very arrogant and sneaky,wont go into details but there was alot of drama when my guild found out that a guy was buying stuff for RL and was bragging about it constantly.
Almost every video game can be exploited in some form or fashion. Any game which creates a currency is a target for gold farmers. I don't see a way that devs could create a MMORPG that did not create an environment which allowed gold farmers to work.
simply give less opportunities where "important " stuff could only be bought by huge sums of gold
that would be for example the epic mount in wow - make it a long questline where you collect the armor parts for the mount
or something similiar and there goes one reason to buy gold
im not saying that you would kill them completly but it would make a difference if money
would have less impact on your competitiveness less people would buy gold
If you have items that can be sold and gold to buy them you are going to have gold farmers and gold buyers. Anything that can be sped up via purchasing items rather than grinding is going to create a market.
The only way to stop them would be to take out gold, items, and housing out of MMORPGs.
There really is no way to stop it. The spam can be ignored or silenced, but the market exists. Even if they could completely wipe out gold selling sites people would still sell gold to friends or guild members.
I have stated this before, but I think it is just as much blizzards fault as it is the sellers fault. I have played with players that have paid for PL services or bought gold over the internet. And no one in the guild was pissed. Why? cause they are usually 30 year old men with wife and child. that can only play maybe 2 hours a night. I don't think this is an excuse to buy gold/levels. If you cannot spend the time it takes to level you should play a different game. I leveled up a 60, 70, and 53 in WoW and I have around that amount of time a night to play. I didn't buy anything during my time. So we out lvl him and out sell heim and just make more money and xp then them. What? Now he is not a 19 year old kid that played 14 hours a day and is still buying gold to feed his respec addiction. All buyers are committing the same illegal activity. Regardless of the motive, breaking the EULA is breaking the EULA. This is a man that is playing a game specifically designed to be a time sink. Will he ever have epic gear NO, but if he can get to 70 and have alteast half way decent gear. he wont need the gear, but atleast he can play with his friends. YOu probably have a friend like that. One that ask you to help him in Scarlet Monastary and your like, "dude, i am way over lvl for that" Hes not asking for a PL, he wants to play with friends that aren't noobs is all. This situation is completely different. Asking a guild member to run your character through a dungeon is not the same as buying levels. Buying levels breaks the EULA. Asking a guildmate for a dungeon rush is legit. WoW and all MMOs are broken upon release. They are not casual player friendly, not in the least bit. So that just pushes casual players into buying money and PLs just to be able to "keep up with the jones's". World of Warcraft is the so casual friendly it is ridiculous. If you've ever played EverQuest you know what I mean. Some MMORPGs do not allow players to level up solo and require groups to kill almost every mob in the game. World of Warcraft allows every character to level by themselves from 1 - 70. The feature of specs allows even healers to level with ease. Buying levels in WoW is not something Blizzard is forcing players to do. Your friend obviously should not be playing with you guys if he can't spend the time it takes to level and instead breaks the contract he signed. I know LOTRO was going to impliment an offline xp feature that lvled your character according to how old your account was. I don't know if they ever introducted it but i thought that was great. Help out all the casual players and in turn remove some value away from PL services. World of Warcraft has rested exp. This feature allows players who do not play often to save up exp while logged out in an inn. Players receive double experience while their rested exp remains. This feature greatly reduces the time it takes for players who are casual to level. I don't see why this system forces your friend to buy his levels. Perhaps he is too lazy to level up and play catch up with you guys? Either way it is wrong and your friend broke the rules.
There were a lot in EQ around the Luclin era. I think WoW it's more noticiable because it has so many people playing and so there are more farmers in the game then any other game. If WoW didn't have such a large player base there would be less farmers.
I dont know why people stress so much over gold farming in games like WoW. What is a billion gold going to get you in wow? Some AH epics that arent all that great. All of the good gear is bop and you need to run instances or arena to get them. You could always get enchants I guess but those are not exactly bank breaking either. The only thing I could really see people buying gold for is the flying epic mount. Why should this bother anyone? How does this hurt the economy of wow when there really isnt one anyway? The guy buys gold then gives it all to an npc. The economy (and I use that word lightly) isnt effected at all. Whether it was him out farming for it or some guy making crap an hour trying to get himself through college it doesnt matter. The money is still farmed and thrown away to an npc. In other games with a player run economy it may have an impact but in wow it makes no difference at all.
its a matter of principle why it bothers people.. wrong is wrong, whether or not it directly affects someone else. and it also unbalances the game. they arent meant to be " the guy with the most disposable income wins". as for flying epic mounts, it makes someone who works for it's accomplishment less. wouldnt it p[iss you off if you farmed and worked at it for weeks to get it and some 8 year old buys one with his moms credit card?
oh and yeah it doesnt really hurt WoW's economy, but it seriously screwed up FFXI's, and since the game wasnt instanced, all the good farmin areas and drop locations were overcamped by bots, so you had to buy the gear you want, with money you had to buy.
Well why exactly is it so wrong? Just because a TOS that no one ever reads and no company truely enforces says it is? Why is this some moral issue for people? Why should anyone care about something that will never stop. We all know it will never stop. It has been like this and it will always be like this as long as the games are developed like they are.
My biggest question is why would it bother anyone what someone else does that does not effect them? In WoW it doesnt effect anyone. The gold farmers pretty much stay in azeroth farming the same crap they have been farming forever. We have already pretty much established in WoW there is no real economy to speak of so why do people get all worked up over nothing?
I did farm for the 5k gold for the epic mount and then I farmed some more so I could get the nether ray and then because I seem drawn to the pain of a wow grind I went and got the winterspring mount. I have done the worst rep grind in the game and it still doesnt bother me that people buy gold. Why should it? I could have bought gold but i refuse to spend real money for fake money. Thats just my view on it. Other people may say screw it and just buy the gold. It doesnt effect me at all. It doesnt effect anyone except the person shelling out the cash and its their choice to do so. I really believe people need to stop looking for things to bitch about. In this case it really doesnt matter.
On the flip side of this I played SWG back in the day and that game was completely driven by its player economy. Massive credit duping and farming did make that economy unstable at times. This is where I believe that buying credits is wrong. It has the potential to disrupt the entire economy thus effecting an "honest" players gaming experience. So its not that I am all for the buying and selling of in game curency just in the case of WoW and the other games like it it doesnt hurt anything because there is no economy to disrupt.
BTW how would I know and 8 year old bought gold with his moms credit card just by looking at him? Even if he told me why would I care? My grind remained the same regardless of what he did.
I agree with retro on this thread, but with a proviso. Since folks are going to buy/sell with real currency, why not offer the model to fund their MMO experience that way? Maybe not directly but give either sanction and a means to fulfill it (safe exchange systems and etc). The only problem with that is that the governments may tax you directly and your players. Which could be a problem... bleh!
there were farmers/sellers back in L1/UO days, soooo long before WoW ever showed up, and of course its a buyers fault, no one would farm in bulk and spend $$$$ on accounts unless they were making a profit in some way
EDIT* besides that i think all farmers are run by w/e company runs the game itself as a way for them to make more money
Does anyone else blame WoW for the gold farmers,bots and such.Before WoW came out I played quite afew MMOGs ,for exemple SWG,and didnt see 1 ingame curency seller or item seller.I am aware that items were sold on ebay but there wasnt any ingame publishing ... after abit of time since WoW came out we started seeing fluxes of bots and sellers spamming everywhere,wich ruined the gaming experience ... i play MMOGs to relax and have fun not to block a gold seller each 10mins.The problem is that to my knowledge only 1 MMOG has tryed taking some action agaisnt sellers and that is EvE online wich allows trading of GTCs for isk and it reduced the population of ingame curency sellers quite abit.Soo why havent other MMOGs tryed to stop ingame curency sales by adding some form of legal way for people to waste money on a virtual item (wich I think is stupid).
First of all games are not to blame.
Secondly, Farmers were already there before WoW came out.
Does anyone else blame WoW for the gold farmers,bots and such.Before WoW came out I played quite afew MMOGs ,for exemple SWG,and didnt see 1 ingame curency seller or item seller.I am aware that items were sold on ebay but there wasnt any ingame publishing ... after abit of time since WoW came out we started seeing fluxes of bots and sellers spamming everywhere,wich ruined the gaming experience ... i play MMOGs to relax and have fun not to block a gold seller each 10mins.The problem is that to my knowledge only 1 MMOG has tryed taking some action agaisnt sellers and that is EvE online wich allows trading of GTCs for isk and it reduced the population of ingame curency sellers quite abit.Soo why havent other MMOGs tryed to stop ingame curency sales by adding some form of legal way for people to waste money on a virtual item (wich I think is stupid).
You didn't play Lineage 2 then. Lineage 2 was about 100X worse than WoW for farmers. The best part was they would PK, grief and abuse players...who were their customers! Good times...when one of our high level (at the time) guild mates quit, we made him into a dedicated PK bot for farmers.
I've farm killed farmers in Hearthglen, but it was still never nearly as bad as Lineage 2. When I went back last November for a short WoW stay, I was quite sad that Blizzard had banned all the farmers...because they were the last of the world PvP.
Time and time again i explained how to stop gold sellers and account sellers and i shall say it one more time......
First cut off all trading of anything from player to player .......
Next all items must be sold and bought through a npc broker etc.....
Mmo companies would regulate all exchanges in such broker so no one could sell something for say ... a bear paw for 2000k gold to get money to another.... Another words reasonable trades.
And last no matter what you buy or sell only money can come from a broker in game npc to you.... Gold cannot be sold or bought or traded from a player and can only be spend through a broker.
Now account sellers...... No account can be sold so lets fix this one. Once you purchase your account you sign up your name etc....
Once you do you cannot change it or modify it at all...If an account is found to be sold to another..that account becomes banned permentally and they lose everything... that will stop account sellers
So if companies take my advice gold sellers would disappear....also companies should have workers look at the net like on ebay and these gold selling websites find account sellers and ban them!
Does anyone else blame WoW for the gold farmers,bots and such.Before WoW came out I played quite afew MMOGs ,for exemple SWG,and didnt see 1 ingame curency seller or item seller.I am aware that items were sold on ebay but there wasnt any ingame publishing ... after abit of time since WoW came out we started seeing fluxes of bots and sellers spamming everywhere,wich ruined the gaming experience ... i play MMOGs to relax and have fun not to block a gold seller each 10mins.The problem is that to my knowledge only 1 MMOG has tryed taking some action agaisnt sellers and that is EvE online wich allows trading of GTCs for isk and it reduced the population of ingame curency sellers quite abit.Soo why havent other MMOGs tryed to stop ingame curency sales by adding some form of legal way for people to waste money on a virtual item (wich I think is stupid).
FFXI came out some time before WoW and always had a problem with "gilsellers" bots, etc etc
Time and time again i explained how to stop gold sellers and account sellers and i shall say it one more time...... First cut off all trading of anything from player to player ....... I would really dislike this. Games which do not allows player to player trading increase the hassle when trying to give items to alts and other players who are legit. I can see this as an option, but I really enjoy being able to freely trade amongst players. If other choose to exploit this system they should be punished, not me and every other legit player. Next all items must be sold and bought through a npc broker etc..... Perhaps change places like WoW's auction house into a more legit system? Perhaps the economy in a game could be manipulated more by the company who runs the game than the players who buy/sell. I think it would be interesting to try out an economy which preselected prices for items. That way leather could never be overpriced due to gold farmers able to purchase leather for amazing prices. Mmo companies would regulate all exchanges in such broker so no one could sell something for say ... a bear paw for 2000k gold to get money to another.... Another words reasonable trades. Although I just stated that a game run economy would be interesting I think that the broker system is flawed as well. How exactly would the broker work? Would it set a price range on all items ingame? Would this range stay the same as the game progressed? Would this discourage some players who enjoy playing the market. I know several users who love games like WoW because of the auction system. They buy low and sell high. Also, would you have to have staff members who watched the market and adjusted the price of items accordingly? Would this system merely turn into an NPC vendor that sold every item in the game if it was in stock? Would it lower the risk vs. reward of items? Again, I think this punishes legit players for the acts of gold farmers. I really like the AH in WoW and I hate that it is abused. And last no matter what you buy or sell only money can come from a broker in game npc to you.... Gold cannot be sold or bought or traded from a player and can only be spend through a broker. I do like the idea of players not able to give or trade gold. Again, though, some players really do enjoy this aspect for alts or other accounts. Limiting player's abilities to trade gold punishes legit players who enjoy twinking alts or merely starting new characters with money for spells. Now account sellers...... No account can be sold so lets fix this one. Once you purchase your account you sign up your name etc.... Once you do you cannot change it or mod ify it at all...If an account is found to be sold to another..that account becomes banned permentally and they lose everything... that will stop account sellers How would the company find sellers and buyers? Would companies watch IP addresses? What if I moved to another state? Would my account be deleted solely based on this factor? I can understand this, and WoW has done something similiar to account sellers. Basically WoW banned any account which split characters to multiple accounts and then those accounts switched IP addresses. So if companies take my advice gold sellers would disappear....also companies should have workers look at the net like on ebay and these gold selling websites find account sellers and ban them! Account and gold sellers would lessen with these restrictions, but I think actual players would decrease too. Basically the system you are brainstorming limits players legit and farmers alike. Also, how would the game companies find players on gold seller sites and ban them? They would have to start an account on the gold seller site and randomly target people? That seems unfair to me. I've registered for a gold seller site on an afternoon in order to find out the prices that gold is going for. I did not make a purchase, but I have the same status as those who have. I would feel robbed if a company banned me for being curious.
It's not wow. There were gil sellers in FFXI before WoW came along. There were doubtless gold-sellers in games before that.
Real faults, I think:
(1) Buyers. That's where the (real world) money is coming from to fuel it all I think. It's also where actual enforcement would need to start. Basically, if you banned someone from buying gold, people wouldn't buy gold. It's futile to ban some gold-seller account, as they can just create another. If you ban the buyer though, you hit them where it hurts and their lvl xxx 1337 warrior or whatever is gone forever.
(2) Game developers. They need to create systems where buying/selling gold is not something people feel like they need to do.
It didn't start with any 3D MMO, all of the sprite based MMO's had farmers / sellers ect
and there are some things that devs can do, but ultimately they cant just 86 everything that has to do with free trade just to make people behave right
in the end it always was and always is the persons fault who said, gee i wish i weren't so lazy to get *insert w/e here* i'd pay someone xxx if they'd do it for me, and like a light switch being turned on, boom, farmers were born
Comments
oh and yeah it doesnt really hurt WoW's economy, but it seriously screwed up FFXI's, and since the game wasnt instanced, all the good farmin areas and drop locations were overcamped by bots, so you had to buy the gear you want, with money you had to buy.
Well, I can agree with this (minus the unnecessary insults to the OP) that gold selling has been around a long time. I first ran into it in DAOC, and I believe that in the early days of UO, EQ and other games most RMT and character leveling services were being done by actual players of the games.
It wasn't until around the time of Lineage 2's launch that I started to see RMT become a big business, mostly run by farming shops in Asian countries and away from being small time player ventures based in the US and EU.
SWG's economy probably didn't really support the concept of RMT all that well, hence you saw little of it in your game. Also, organized RMT hadn't quite hit its stride in the early days, I'm betting today there is some going on.
As to the EVE example, not as good as it seems. While EVE does provide a legal way to purchase ISK, one quick scan of any gold selling site will find plenty of ISK for sale, and if you are in the rookie channel for any length of time you won't miss the gold selliing spam...happens very frequently.... (since its not moderated at all times)
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I have stated this before, but I think it is just as much blizzards fault as it is the sellers fault. I have played with players that have paid for PL services or bought gold over the internet. And no one in the guild was pissed. Why? cause they are usually 30 year old men with wife and child. that can only play maybe 2 hours a night. So we out lvl him and out sell heim and just make more money and xp then them. Now he is not a 19 year old kid that played 14 hours a day and is still buying gold to feed his respec addiction. This is a man that is playing a game specifically designed to be a time sink. Will he ever have epic gear NO, but if he can get to 70 and have alteast half way decent gear. he wont need the gear, but atleast he can play with his friends. YOu probably have a friend like that. One that ask you to help him in Scarlet Monastary and your like, "dude, i am way over lvl for that" Hes not asking for a PL, he wants to play with friends that aren't noobs is all. WoW and all MMOs are broken upon release. They are not casual player friendly, not in the least bit. So that just pushes casual players into buying money and PLs just to be able to "keep up with the jones's". I know LOTRO was going to impliment an offline xp feature that lvled your character according to how old your account was. I don't know if they ever introducted it but i thought that was great. Help out all the casual players and in turn remove some value away from PL services.
EQ, UO and DAoC were selling gold/plat before the public even knew about WoW. Go ahead and blame blizzard, the devil, or both if you think they are the same. Ebay banned EQ sells back in 2000, and playerauctions was formed because of that.
Being older than the other players isnt a excuse to buy ingame curency/items for real money.Buying ingame curency ruins the game's economy,and ofcourse I bet alot of people constantly heard people from their guild bragging about their items and gold (that they bought online),the bragging wouldnt bother me if they truly would have worked for it,and I mean working ingame.Also from personal experience most soo called older people are very arrogant and sneaky,wont go into details but there was alot of drama when my guild found out that a guy was buying stuff for RL and was bragging about it constantly.
simply give less opportunities where "important " stuff could only be bought by huge sums of gold
that would be for example the epic mount in wow - make it a long questline where you collect the armor parts for the mount
or something similiar and there goes one reason to buy gold
im not saying that you would kill them completly but it would make a difference if money
would have less impact on your competitiveness less people would buy gold
If you have items that can be sold and gold to buy them you are going to have gold farmers and gold buyers. Anything that can be sped up via purchasing items rather than grinding is going to create a market.
The only way to stop them would be to take out gold, items, and housing out of MMORPGs.
There really is no way to stop it. The spam can be ignored or silenced, but the market exists. Even if they could completely wipe out gold selling sites people would still sell gold to friends or guild members.
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
There were a lot in EQ around the Luclin era. I think WoW it's more noticiable because it has so many people playing and so there are more farmers in the game then any other game. If WoW didn't have such a large player base there would be less farmers.
oh and yeah it doesnt really hurt WoW's economy, but it seriously screwed up FFXI's, and since the game wasnt instanced, all the good farmin areas and drop locations were overcamped by bots, so you had to buy the gear you want, with money you had to buy.
Well why exactly is it so wrong? Just because a TOS that no one ever reads and no company truely enforces says it is? Why is this some moral issue for people? Why should anyone care about something that will never stop. We all know it will never stop. It has been like this and it will always be like this as long as the games are developed like they are.
My biggest question is why would it bother anyone what someone else does that does not effect them? In WoW it doesnt effect anyone. The gold farmers pretty much stay in azeroth farming the same crap they have been farming forever. We have already pretty much established in WoW there is no real economy to speak of so why do people get all worked up over nothing?
I did farm for the 5k gold for the epic mount and then I farmed some more so I could get the nether ray and then because I seem drawn to the pain of a wow grind I went and got the winterspring mount. I have done the worst rep grind in the game and it still doesnt bother me that people buy gold. Why should it? I could have bought gold but i refuse to spend real money for fake money. Thats just my view on it. Other people may say screw it and just buy the gold. It doesnt effect me at all. It doesnt effect anyone except the person shelling out the cash and its their choice to do so. I really believe people need to stop looking for things to bitch about. In this case it really doesnt matter.
On the flip side of this I played SWG back in the day and that game was completely driven by its player economy. Massive credit duping and farming did make that economy unstable at times. This is where I believe that buying credits is wrong. It has the potential to disrupt the entire economy thus effecting an "honest" players gaming experience. So its not that I am all for the buying and selling of in game curency just in the case of WoW and the other games like it it doesnt hurt anything because there is no economy to disrupt.
BTW how would I know and 8 year old bought gold with his moms credit card just by looking at him? Even if he told me why would I care? My grind remained the same regardless of what he did.
I agree with retro on this thread, but with a proviso. Since folks are going to buy/sell with real currency, why not offer the model to fund their MMO experience that way? Maybe not directly but give either sanction and a means to fulfill it (safe exchange systems and etc). The only problem with that is that the governments may tax you directly and your players. Which could be a problem... bleh!
-- Brede
there were farmers/sellers back in L1/UO days, soooo long before WoW ever showed up, and of course its a buyers fault, no one would farm in bulk and spend $$$$ on accounts unless they were making a profit in some way
EDIT* besides that i think all farmers are run by w/e company runs the game itself as a way for them to make more money
It’s is always the game developers fault. There are things they could do to stop this, they just couldn’t be bothered.
First of all games are not to blame.
Secondly, Farmers were already there before WoW came out.
It startet with with Lineage 2 by the way.
I've farm killed farmers in Hearthglen, but it was still never nearly as bad as Lineage 2. When I went back last November for a short WoW stay, I was quite sad that Blizzard had banned all the farmers...because they were the last of the world PvP.
Time and time again i explained how to stop gold sellers and account sellers and i shall say it one more time......
First cut off all trading of anything from player to player .......
Next all items must be sold and bought through a npc broker etc.....
Mmo companies would regulate all exchanges in such broker so no one could sell something for say ... a bear paw for 2000k gold to get money to another.... Another words reasonable trades.
And last no matter what you buy or sell only money can come from a broker in game npc to you.... Gold cannot be sold or bought or traded from a player and can only be spend through a broker.
Now account sellers...... No account can be sold so lets fix this one. Once you purchase your account you sign up your name etc....
Once you do you cannot change it or modify it at all...If an account is found to be sold to another..that account becomes banned permentally and they lose everything... that will stop account sellers
So if companies take my advice gold sellers would disappear....also companies should have workers look at the net like on ebay and these gold selling websites find account sellers and ban them!
FFXI came out some time before WoW and always had a problem with "gilsellers" bots, etc etc
Doktar - 70 Troll Priest - Perenolde
WoW was no where near the first, nor near the worst for gold selling, the game was too easy mode, and still remains too be
and you aint gunna stop human lazyness and dependancy on others, no matter how badly or good you design a game, there's always a way around it
It's not wow. There were gil sellers in FFXI before WoW came along. There were doubtless gold-sellers in games before that.
Real faults, I think:
(1) Buyers. That's where the (real world) money is coming from to fuel it all I think. It's also where actual enforcement would need to start. Basically, if you banned someone from buying gold, people wouldn't buy gold. It's futile to ban some gold-seller account, as they can just create another. If you ban the buyer though, you hit them where it hurts and their lvl xxx 1337 warrior or whatever is gone forever.
(2) Game developers. They need to create systems where buying/selling gold is not something people feel like they need to do.
It didn't start with any 3D MMO, all of the sprite based MMO's had farmers / sellers ect
and there are some things that devs can do, but ultimately they cant just 86 everything that has to do with free trade just to make people behave right
in the end it always was and always is the persons fault who said, gee i wish i weren't so lazy to get *insert w/e here* i'd pay someone xxx if they'd do it for me, and like a light switch being turned on, boom, farmers were born