If the third largest gold seller is valued at 10 million, then the rmt market must be much smaller than many assume it is? Unless the number 1-2 are mega giants or number 4-50 are nearly as big as number 3?
$10 million is a lot of money, but at the same time no where near what some companies are claiming.
while this seems a reasonable methood of control, what do you do when some popular games out there dont have an auction house or any version of player controlled store? Anet tried to keep gold farmers at bay by leaving player controled stores and auction houses out of game..to make the game less attractive to farmers. Yet 4 years-three chapters and an expansion later..players till complain bout the lack of the auction house while watching gold farmer bots move in and out of Bergan Hotsprings and a few other well known bot areas.
the ONLY way gold farmers are gonna be stopped is if there is a federal law banning the sell of ingame money and items by companys or individuals other than copyright holders of the games themselves. Gaming companies have been pushing for this law for years but its not considered high priority in the federal legislations..probaby because the politicians wont be seeng any money from such a law
Even if true, the sale for 10 million is way overpriced. I dont think anyone who has a good sense for MMOs would feel they can recoup 10 million easily. Ah well, its their money
Like someone already said it here the problem is that there is no fear of getting caugth and most of the time the gain outweigths the possibility of loss, I know people who have bougth in game currency and only one has actually had a warning for doing it, not a ban a warning. You get the odd guy who is unlucky or goes overboard with buying services and/or currency and gets banned but most of the time the farmers spammers or gold holding accounts are the ones banned and those have no impact on the company selling the currency or on the players who have bougth it.
thats sick...what a waste of money, gold farming is such a scam, its like people buying porn instead of downloading it for free
Why is it a waste of money? Someone looked into the business, saw what it was making and how much it cost to run it and made the decision to buy it. This is how businesses operate.
They wouldn't have dropped 10 million on it unless they believed they could get it back. Of course, time will tell on that investment.
Perhaps you think it is a waste of money because of what was purchased as it seems like that money could be better spent.
Well, I have no love of Hummel figurines but apparenlty someone does and therefore a company makes and sells them.
I have no love of Motorcycles as I think them very dangerous but still people buy them.
And I suppose people purchase porn becuase they deem what they are buying has better quality or subject matter than some of the free stuff.
Business is about supply and demand. No more, no less.
And there is a demand for online currency. So many times I see players post "if they legitimize rmt I'm leaving". Well that's great and those people should if they find that they do not like the practice. But they are foolish to believe that suddenly the game will crumble because all the legit players are leaving as it is very, VERY clear that there is a huge market for it.
As long as players are able to trade anything between each other there will be rmt because some players don't want every part of a game it seems, they would rather spend a small amount to bypass this the parts they dislike.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
Even if true, the sale for 10 million is way overpriced. I dont think anyone who has a good sense for MMOs would feel they can recoup 10 million easily. Ah well, its their money
Or they know too well how much such a site can generate.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
This is actually pretty cool. May I ask what is cool about this? Shows you just how far gaming has come To me goldsites or farmer sites have nothing to do with gaming. They do catter to those who pretend to be gamers in my opinion which does not mean this is fact...keep that in mind. and I'm glad to see someone making 10 million off anything even if it is gold selling. I would if I could, and I'm sure you would do the same. I would never invest or buy anything that I know is ilegal. Gold selling/spamming has never 'ruined' my gaming experience as some people have put it in this thread, at the most it's just a minor annoyance, Personaly I see it as a annoyance, sometimes very minor, sometimes pure anyoing, I play the community game within a MMORPG, this means I communicate allot, sometimes guilded so in guildchat where no one bothers me but pure our guild talk, I could have private chats, but often I like to help others or just share stories of adventure´s give or ask for guidens into certain area´s, and when doing so in public, when people begin to spamchat goldadds every 10 seconds then it becomes anoying as it prevents us who are playing the game to have conversation, might , of course I could put the goldscammer on `ignore` but after putting goldspammer nr.20 in the ignore list within 1 hour of playing is again anoying, There are so many bad things due to goldfarmers, income lose for the gamecompany, people getting bored cause they don´t need to put any effort what so ever when buying gold from these type of sites, the ingame economy does suffer from it, to some not noticeble, for some very noticeble. People accounts being hacked, creditcard info stolen....etc....etc... and a simple mod (spam-me-not) can fix that. Sometimes the solution to deal with it is not that simple. I could care less if someone bought gold or sells it. Hey thats each persons own dissision, but I can´t help to look different towards a person who buy´s gold to play a game, regardless what ever reason or excuse they might use. I'm more than willing to put up with some spam so the dude in china can have a job (might be his only option) making the dude in the us rich. Who cares? I don't. I am not willing to put up with spam, regardless what type of spam, if it´s spam I don´t need it You can throw out the whole my economy is destroyed because of gold selling and buying, but I just don't buy that, there has to be other factors. Unless some rich guy goes out and spends like 100k on gold to control a servers entire economy then it seems unreal. Well I don`t believe the WHOLE ingame economy can be destroyed by it, but it can substant quite some damage, totaly depending on the greed-need and type of MMO. When it comes down to it, it's just a game for me and if someone can make some real world cash off it, then kudos to them. Thats the thing that will never change for me, the fact these are GAMES, and that is also the reason who I look different at those who buy gold from goldfarmer as they might have forgotten that it´s a GAME, and like I started my reply, I dislike it when people make money of of things that are against the rules or EULA´s, or in rl against the law. Edit - The only thing that bothers me is when they resort to embedding viruses into websites and banners just to rob peoples accounts. That's really messed up and not all people are tech savy and know how to avoid that type of stuff.
Your edit named one very important issue surrounding goldfarmer and their sites, but it doesn´t stop with their own sites, they use so many methods to gain acces to either gameaccounts or creditcardaccounts, I mean think about it, how many creditcards can one person have?, how many times do these goldfarmers or spammers get banned?, how many times do they simply return to the same game they got banned from? Also not saying that the company in OP is doing all this, but it does happen, and seeing how many of these goldsites there are I am sure some of them do pratice it in that way.
It might be possible to try and legislate gold selling out of existence, but laws in one country are not always universally accepted by others. Then there's the costly issue of enforcement, and I don't think I want our police tracking down gold selling criminals.
It might be possible to eliminate currency from the economy, but there's a good reason mankind invented fiat money, it is far more efficient in facilitating commerce, and most players enjoy the commercial side of an MMORPG.
Good game design would be probably the best way to go. Make the best items BOP only (a la WOW) so that currency can only be used for items that offer no real advantage (sounds a lot like the F2P model, eh?)
Or you could take the EVE approach and offer a company sanctioned method for players to obtain ISK when they don't have the inclination or time to farm their own. But this has not stopped gold spamming in EVE nor illegal ISK purchases, although CCP tries to catch folks who break the rules. (as I can attest to, they caught me a year after I bought some and took it back, however they missed my 2nd purchase)
There are no simple, one stop answers, other than to design the game so that players who have more time to play than others aren't rewarded disproportionally for that effort, hence creating the desire for players to cheat and catch up by using RL currency as an equalizing agent.
And yes, I don't think people who play more than I do should be rewarded. If it was up to me every MMO would limit everyone's play time to 2hrs a day, because that's all I can spare. (yeah, that's never going to happen, hence I make no apologies)
Edit, always forgetting to stay on topic. Yep, 10M for a website shows how much of a business this has become, and expect it to go up higher in the future.
Who the hell are you, and why should I care? Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
I think people confuse "illegal" with an action that you can be sued for in a civil court. Often people use the term illegal to describe something that can give rise to a lawsuit, and that's understandable because it's shorter and easier.
Also some things are BOTH illegal, and you can be sued for them, making it even more confusing.
If you walk into best buy and put a cd in your pocket and walk out with it, that's illegal. You can be put in jail for that.
If you promise a company you will buy their widgets, and you sign a contract to buy them, and they make the widgets for you, and then you change your mind and decide not to buy said widgets, that's not illegal. However you can be sued for breach of contract.
Even if you told the police you planned on breaching a contract, they wouldn't care. It's not illegal, and they'd say take it to civil court.
So selling virtual gold isn't "illegal". But it is something that can give a company the right to sue in civil court. Easier to just say it's illegal, but not accurate.
There are no simple, one stop answers, other than to design the game so that players who have more time to play than others aren't rewarded disproportionally for that effort, hence creating the desire for players to cheat and catch up by using RL currency as an equalizing agent.
That's one way to look at it, but I don't see it that way. I see it as completely fair and even.
No one is rewarded any more than anyone else if you base your character on hours. It takes, for example, approximately 50 hours to get your character to level X, give or take a few hours.
It doesn't matter if you do taht 50 hours in a week, or a year. Either way, it's 50 hours. How is that not fair?
In addition, you are both paying 14.95 for teh exact same thing. The OPPORTUNITY to play the game 24/7, whenever you desire, whether that's 20 hours a day, or none. Again, completely fair.
If the third largest gold seller is valued at 10 million, then the rmt market must be much smaller than many assume it is? Unless the number 1-2 are mega giants or number 4-50 are nearly as big as number 3?
$10 million is a lot of money, but at the same time no where near what some companies are claiming.
The RMT market as a whole is huge. Most players in it are very, very small. The real size of it is hidden to you if you're American or European, though. I'll just throw out a few ideas which you may or may not believe.
1. You might have the commonly-held view of poor Asians trying to sell gold to rich Americans and Europeans. Bullshit. Most RMT outfits don't cater to the West. It would make no sense for them to do so because the Western MMO market is not nearly as developed (in terms of total users) as the Eastern markets.
2. Most sophisticated RMT outfits in Western MMORPG's are now invisible to players. That might seem like a contradiction, as you might link sales with spam advertisements, but at present, there are far more effective venues for hawking your products. In addition, products have changed. "Binding" (soulbinding or whatever you game calls it) is far from an effective mechanism. Using WoW as an example, I could fairly easily procure a character with best-in-slot for all of his gear. When everything was said and done, it would have my main's name, appearance, and be on my server, effectively replacing him. Some people will pay huge amounts for that kind of thing, believe it or not. Like a solid chunk of how much you earn in a month kind of amounts. The first rule of RMT: desperate nerds come in all shapes and sizes (of wallet).
3. RMT in the East is more sophisticated for a few reasons, so a lot of the worth lies there. First of all, the east fosters what is essentially a non-existent industry in the West. Gray market semiconductors (think DS flash carts, console mod chips, and a select few pieces of hardware for the PC). In the West, you buy shitty, half-baked bots from individual programmers (lol Glider). Believe it or not, bots in the East are available as a hardware solution, making it far, far more difficult to detect them. This means it's a lot easier to bot for things which bots can chase after (currency) and use your manpower to acquire "premium" goods (raid-equipped characters). Most RMT operations that deal with games like WoW haven't quite caught up to this level yet, though they're very close.
This sale, though, is not what it seems, if I'm right.
$10 million? No way. Don't get me wrong. You can make far more money with RMT over the longterm if you know what you're doing. However, when a group of investors buys something, they think they are buying _something_. Even if you consider virtual currency an asset, most RMT firms have very little of it on hand at any given time: gargantuan sums by the reckoning of individual players but relatively little in total cash value. So they're not buying that. Furthermore, unless things have radically changed, most of the RMT fronting sites do not directly control the actual outfits which produce what they sell. So there's very little in the way of capital goods that you're acquiring. So brand strength? Historically, we've seen very little consumer loyalty in RMT, and no brands have even persisted long enough to suggest to consumers that there is even a point in loyalty. What you're essentially left with is the contact network (their connections with their suppliers) that this site has built up. The only problem with that is the "industry" has been burned by collapses so many times that individual outfits have little love to the front sites they supply. So they spent 10m USD for a glorified middle-man operation whose contractors have very, very, very little loyalty. This is about the worst thing possible to invest in.
If this isn't outright bullshit, and there are real investors here, they've basically been had. I won't say outright fraud, but I would say a very healthy degree of misrepresentation as to the stability and longterm viability of a RMT company. Having dealt with the kind of people who run RMT companies, I really wouldn't put it past them to have one of their confederates pitch their company as a "great buy". Don't get me wrong. These guys will think they've made a smart buy for a while. This industry is very quick to burn people that don't understand it, though.
I don't even know why you'd go this route. There are far more profitable (and safer) routes, if you want to plunge into the Asian gray market.
Comments
The majority of members here rant and rave about microtransaction in games, yet the gold selling industry is growing like wildfire.
Statistically speaking there seem to be lots of hypocrites here.
If the third largest gold seller is valued at 10 million, then the rmt market must be much smaller than many assume it is? Unless the number 1-2 are mega giants or number 4-50 are nearly as big as number 3?
$10 million is a lot of money, but at the same time no where near what some companies are claiming.
thats sick...what a waste of money,
gold farming is such a scam,
its like people buying porn instead of downloading it for free
http://acominos.evony.com <- if your bored at work
while this seems a reasonable methood of control, what do you do when some popular games out there dont have an auction house or any version of player controlled store? Anet tried to keep gold farmers at bay by leaving player controled stores and auction houses out of game..to make the game less attractive to farmers. Yet 4 years-three chapters and an expansion later..players till complain bout the lack of the auction house while watching gold farmer bots move in and out of Bergan Hotsprings and a few other well known bot areas.
the ONLY way gold farmers are gonna be stopped is if there is a federal law banning the sell of ingame money and items by companys or individuals other than copyright holders of the games themselves. Gaming companies have been pushing for this law for years but its not considered high priority in the federal legislations..probaby because the politicians wont be seeng any money from such a law
Even if true, the sale for 10 million is way overpriced. I dont think anyone who has a good sense for MMOs would feel they can recoup 10 million easily. Ah well, its their money
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
Rich people just don't know what they are getting into...
Like someone already said it here the problem is that there is no fear of getting caugth and most of the time the gain outweigths the possibility of loss, I know people who have bougth in game currency and only one has actually had a warning for doing it, not a ban a warning. You get the odd guy who is unlucky or goes overboard with buying services and/or currency and gets banned but most of the time the farmers spammers or gold holding accounts are the ones banned and those have no impact on the company selling the currency or on the players who have bougth it.
Why is it a waste of money? Someone looked into the business, saw what it was making and how much it cost to run it and made the decision to buy it. This is how businesses operate.
They wouldn't have dropped 10 million on it unless they believed they could get it back. Of course, time will tell on that investment.
Perhaps you think it is a waste of money because of what was purchased as it seems like that money could be better spent.
Well, I have no love of Hummel figurines but apparenlty someone does and therefore a company makes and sells them.
I have no love of Motorcycles as I think them very dangerous but still people buy them.
And I suppose people purchase porn becuase they deem what they are buying has better quality or subject matter than some of the free stuff.
Business is about supply and demand. No more, no less.
And there is a demand for online currency. So many times I see players post "if they legitimize rmt I'm leaving". Well that's great and those people should if they find that they do not like the practice. But they are foolish to believe that suddenly the game will crumble because all the legit players are leaving as it is very, VERY clear that there is a huge market for it.
As long as players are able to trade anything between each other there will be rmt because some players don't want every part of a game it seems, they would rather spend a small amount to bypass this the parts they dislike.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Or they know too well how much such a site can generate.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Your edit named one very important issue surrounding goldfarmer and their sites, but it doesn´t stop with their own sites, they use so many methods to gain acces to either gameaccounts or creditcardaccounts, I mean think about it, how many creditcards can one person have?, how many times do these goldfarmers or spammers get banned?, how many times do they simply return to the same game they got banned from? Also not saying that the company in OP is doing all this, but it does happen, and seeing how many of these goldsites there are I am sure some of them do pratice it in that way.
It might be possible to try and legislate gold selling out of existence, but laws in one country are not always universally accepted by others. Then there's the costly issue of enforcement, and I don't think I want our police tracking down gold selling criminals.
It might be possible to eliminate currency from the economy, but there's a good reason mankind invented fiat money, it is far more efficient in facilitating commerce, and most players enjoy the commercial side of an MMORPG.
Good game design would be probably the best way to go. Make the best items BOP only (a la WOW) so that currency can only be used for items that offer no real advantage (sounds a lot like the F2P model, eh?)
Or you could take the EVE approach and offer a company sanctioned method for players to obtain ISK when they don't have the inclination or time to farm their own. But this has not stopped gold spamming in EVE nor illegal ISK purchases, although CCP tries to catch folks who break the rules. (as I can attest to, they caught me a year after I bought some and took it back, however they missed my 2nd purchase)
There are no simple, one stop answers, other than to design the game so that players who have more time to play than others aren't rewarded disproportionally for that effort, hence creating the desire for players to cheat and catch up by using RL currency as an equalizing agent.
And yes, I don't think people who play more than I do should be rewarded. If it was up to me every MMO would limit everyone's play time to 2hrs a day, because that's all I can spare. (yeah, that's never going to happen, hence I make no apologies)
Edit, always forgetting to stay on topic. Yep, 10M for a website shows how much of a business this has become, and expect it to go up higher in the future.
Who the hell are you, and why should I care?
Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
I think people confuse "illegal" with an action that you can be sued for in a civil court. Often people use the term illegal to describe something that can give rise to a lawsuit, and that's understandable because it's shorter and easier.
Also some things are BOTH illegal, and you can be sued for them, making it even more confusing.
If you walk into best buy and put a cd in your pocket and walk out with it, that's illegal. You can be put in jail for that.
If you promise a company you will buy their widgets, and you sign a contract to buy them, and they make the widgets for you, and then you change your mind and decide not to buy said widgets, that's not illegal. However you can be sued for breach of contract.
Even if you told the police you planned on breaching a contract, they wouldn't care. It's not illegal, and they'd say take it to civil court.
So selling virtual gold isn't "illegal". But it is something that can give a company the right to sue in civil court. Easier to just say it's illegal, but not accurate.
That's one way to look at it, but I don't see it that way. I see it as completely fair and even.
No one is rewarded any more than anyone else if you base your character on hours. It takes, for example, approximately 50 hours to get your character to level X, give or take a few hours.
It doesn't matter if you do taht 50 hours in a week, or a year. Either way, it's 50 hours. How is that not fair?
In addition, you are both paying 14.95 for teh exact same thing. The OPPORTUNITY to play the game 24/7, whenever you desire, whether that's 20 hours a day, or none. Again, completely fair.
Guess I need to brush up on my Chinese.
Well the solution is
1. BARTER, mmo's should not have currency...
or
2. The Darkfall way..fully lootable corpses..no one will wanna buy gold to lose it to a pvp pro beggar..
The RMT market as a whole is huge. Most players in it are very, very small. The real size of it is hidden to you if you're American or European, though. I'll just throw out a few ideas which you may or may not believe.
1. You might have the commonly-held view of poor Asians trying to sell gold to rich Americans and Europeans. Bullshit. Most RMT outfits don't cater to the West. It would make no sense for them to do so because the Western MMO market is not nearly as developed (in terms of total users) as the Eastern markets.
2. Most sophisticated RMT outfits in Western MMORPG's are now invisible to players. That might seem like a contradiction, as you might link sales with spam advertisements, but at present, there are far more effective venues for hawking your products. In addition, products have changed. "Binding" (soulbinding or whatever you game calls it) is far from an effective mechanism. Using WoW as an example, I could fairly easily procure a character with best-in-slot for all of his gear. When everything was said and done, it would have my main's name, appearance, and be on my server, effectively replacing him. Some people will pay huge amounts for that kind of thing, believe it or not. Like a solid chunk of how much you earn in a month kind of amounts. The first rule of RMT: desperate nerds come in all shapes and sizes (of wallet).
3. RMT in the East is more sophisticated for a few reasons, so a lot of the worth lies there. First of all, the east fosters what is essentially a non-existent industry in the West. Gray market semiconductors (think DS flash carts, console mod chips, and a select few pieces of hardware for the PC). In the West, you buy shitty, half-baked bots from individual programmers (lol Glider). Believe it or not, bots in the East are available as a hardware solution, making it far, far more difficult to detect them. This means it's a lot easier to bot for things which bots can chase after (currency) and use your manpower to acquire "premium" goods (raid-equipped characters). Most RMT operations that deal with games like WoW haven't quite caught up to this level yet, though they're very close.
This sale, though, is not what it seems, if I'm right.
$10 million? No way. Don't get me wrong. You can make far more money with RMT over the longterm if you know what you're doing. However, when a group of investors buys something, they think they are buying _something_. Even if you consider virtual currency an asset, most RMT firms have very little of it on hand at any given time: gargantuan sums by the reckoning of individual players but relatively little in total cash value. So they're not buying that. Furthermore, unless things have radically changed, most of the RMT fronting sites do not directly control the actual outfits which produce what they sell. So there's very little in the way of capital goods that you're acquiring. So brand strength? Historically, we've seen very little consumer loyalty in RMT, and no brands have even persisted long enough to suggest to consumers that there is even a point in loyalty. What you're essentially left with is the contact network (their connections with their suppliers) that this site has built up. The only problem with that is the "industry" has been burned by collapses so many times that individual outfits have little love to the front sites they supply. So they spent 10m USD for a glorified middle-man operation whose contractors have very, very, very little loyalty. This is about the worst thing possible to invest in.
If this isn't outright bullshit, and there are real investors here, they've basically been had. I won't say outright fraud, but I would say a very healthy degree of misrepresentation as to the stability and longterm viability of a RMT company. Having dealt with the kind of people who run RMT companies, I really wouldn't put it past them to have one of their confederates pitch their company as a "great buy". Don't get me wrong. These guys will think they've made a smart buy for a while. This industry is very quick to burn people that don't understand it, though.
I don't even know why you'd go this route. There are far more profitable (and safer) routes, if you want to plunge into the Asian gray market.