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Combating Gold Buying - what if
Psychow
Member Posts: 1,784
What if gold wan't transferable? It couldn't me mailed or traded. Would that stop gold seller/buyers? That would mean the gold is "stuck" on the toon that earned it.
Would that slow down the gold sellers?
So if account A is hacked, and has 500k gold, it can't be transfered to scumbag-gold-buyer account B. It can buy stuff, it can sell stuff...but the gold can't be transfered.
Comments
I had a similar idea years ago, with the exception that there was a hard cap on how much gold could be transferred per day. I don't think doing away with it entirely will work, there are times that you would want to give away gold, such as helping out new toons, but it ought to be a relatively small amount per 24-hour period. Anyone buying gold would have to get it a little at a time over weeks, most people wouldn't bother doing that.
Of course, today lots of games just sell gold themselves and really couldn't care less what anyone else does.
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A workaround for your idea would be to buy an inexpensive item with a hacked account for all of their gold. In order to stop this, you would have to stop the economy where you buy and sell things to other players.
I prefer occasional third party gold selling with a vibrant economy over the stifling that would be required to make what you describe work.
Ok, suppose you did this and it worked. But then you find out a secret that you didn't know. That more people are buying gold than will admit it. To a much higher degree that you imagine. What if as a side-effect of your anti-gold trading policy and the high number of buyers you killed you game?
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WoW monitors the mail system, and I have seen people banned for simply sending a large amount of cash through the mail before.
Now they use the AH to ferry gold around by posting worthless items for thousands and tens of thousands of gold. People will always find a work around.
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Then the developers would need to find a way to beat the work around. So say, if an item is sold on the AH that is so many standard deviations from the historical price, then that transaction is flagged and the gold is held until the investigation is complete.
10 linen cloth sells for 30k gold...flag.
I agree.
Though I'm completely against buying gold, I have to say I think colddog04 has it. players will find ways to abuse the system and get away with things. As a game, just do the best you can to limit the abuses; that's really all they can do.
When the game-determined currency becomes worthless or unusable for interplayer trade, the players will create their own currency to replace it. Your suggestion simply just makes the game more restrictive for the lrgitimate players... players will will eventually switch from the game currency to the player-assigned one.
That said, most games do have non-transferrable currency for the endgame content. It's usually in the form of faction points or quest points or a secondary currency obtained from whatever mindless, repetitive tasks people do in the game once leveling ends and they have more base currency than need for it.
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Yes, but, lets say the new player-created currencly is linen cloth. There is only so much bank space available. So there would, at some point, be a cap on how much player-created currency weath anyone would have. Not to mention they wouldn't have space to keep their real stuff the want to play the game.
And the legitimate players would still buy and sell their goods with gold they earned themselves as normal.
It can still be transfered with in sales so gold farmer A can sell to customer B by placing an Item in the AH, or whatever things get sold through, and making XXXX gold. It just adds another step.
The real question I have is, why do people care. Outside of the annoying chat issues, who cares about it. IT causes infaltion, but that will happen anyway.
I think many people make this into a way bigger deal than it is. I have seen no compelling data anywhere that strongly suggests gold farmers are the root cause of games problems.
I don't buy gold, but I don't care if someone else does. At its core it is no different than when the company offers items for money. Is it any different when the company sells you an item as opposed to when a gold farmer sells you gold and you buy the same item. It is still real money for virtual goods.
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Then you cannot use gold on a AH .. which will make it pretty point-less.
And if you do it, the gold seller will just sell items directly. It is essentially impossible to stop RM transaction if there is a supply and a demand.
There is also little reason to stop it. Just set up a RMAH and level the playing field.
Then they'll pick something rare (Runescape p-hat) or something that combines/stacks better (Asheron's Call - motes and keys). MMO gamers have been through this already in several games.
Creating a medium for exchange and then making it so it can't be exchanged is a strange design decision to begin with, but in scenarios where such a situation became present the players created their own currency. It's simply a bad way to try to solve the problem of 3rd party transactions, if for no other reason than how incredibly counterproductive it is.
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"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
This. If players can trade, they'll find a way. Your countermeasures should never inconvenience legitimate users. DRMs anyone?
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