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Simple way to Fix Gold/Power Level Services..
Lustmord
Member UncommonPosts: 1,114
Simply add to the Terms of Service that if someone submits a log report of you trying to sell gold or power leveling, they can legally charge $x from your credit card.
It wouldn't complete fix it, but it would certainly stop the /tell spamming.
It wouldn't complete fix it, but it would certainly stop the /tell spamming.
Comments
Currently Trying out:
EVE Online
Waiting For: Granado Espada
[Here's a list of all the games I've played and/or my computer specs to show how much more seasoned or technologically advanced I am than you.]
The idea of using an EULA to prohibit someone from those services is interesting, the problem is 2 fold however.
1) How do you ensure that the legalities of said actions are made without any loop-holes? The agreement must be made iron clad or someone will find a way around the ELUA and thus thwart your efforts.
2) How do you compensate for the loss of such a large population of gamers? It is known that there are large groups who do this for a living, by creating such a prohibition you, in essence, ostricize a majority of potential customers.
---
"I have never met a man so ignorant I could learn nothing from him"
People are naturally competitive, and like being the best. Some people see the journey included in their measure of status, some just see the end result.
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
People are naturally competitive, and like being the best. Some people see the journey included in their measure of status, some just see the end result.
I can see where that may apply to people. I'm willing to bet, though, that people have gone to these services, because its simply too boring to do it on your own.Sometimes the journey just isn't worth the tedium of doing it over and over in almost all MMOs.
The answer isn't to punish people who buy/sell gold. Its to entice people to play, imo.
edit: severe typo
People are naturally competitive, and like being the best. Some people see the journey included in their measure of status, some just see the end result.
I can see where that may apply to people. I'm willing to bet, though, that people have gone to these services, because its simply too boring to do it on your own.Sometimes the journey just isn't worth the tedium of doing it over and over in almost all MMOs.
The answer isn't to punish people who buy/sell gold. Its to entice people to play, imo.
edit: severe typo
The most common gold buying stories I hear are a. I didn't have time to keep up or b. I quit for a bit and felt behind. I do agree that making it more fun would make it less common, but I don't think it would fix it.
Laura "Taera" Genender
Community Manager
MMORPG.com
I could see Gold sellers resorting to hacking / Keylogging accounts and selling the gold from there, they would avoid the fines, still sell the gold, and throughly piss off another player in the process.
I think people buying toons/gold in the quantities that its being sold is indicative of how truly boring and broken MMOs have become.
Ya' know if I was a dev and people were going to outside services to enjoy my game I would feel ashamed. I would want to stop that practice, so people would feel they can compete without the gold services. There are people out there a lot smarter than me who I'm sure can come up with ways to do this. I don't get paid to do it. I'm not about to waste my time thinking about, because the MMO community doesn't seem to mind going out and buying gold. I just would not feel very prideful if I were a dev.
Its like going out to a steakhouse, but you have to bring you're own food because the steakhouse can't provide you with everything you need.
Players buy virtual currency.
Only way to stop / fix 'gold/pwer level services' as you put it is for the game maker to offer these services themselves.
Gold Sellers are the virtual drug dealers for the gaming world. They sell a product that everyone agrees is bad, but that people are still willing to pay for. The more difficult it is made to get thier product, the more money they make.
The only way to get rid of them is to stop the demand. This can only be done by removing the limitations on the gold/items that people want. The games have to be designed in such a method that people will not pay for these types of goods and services. Until that is done, people will pay for what they want, but cant get... and gold farmers will ruin the game, because it is worth money for them to do so.
Why is it that I don't see anything wrong with gold farmers? All they're doing is supplying demand.
How many gold selling companies do you think there are?
How many farmers do you think they employ in total?
How many of you buy gold?
So long as players demand the service of buying gold, companies will cater to that need.
In fact let's find out, please be honest - I'd really like to see the results.
Odd though that the modern game with the least amount of grind and the fastest level up time has also a huge amount of goldseller. So much infact that no day passes without me getting 1 or 2 gold seller advertising either by /tell or inbox. It is getting really annoying really fast and I do agree that at least these mass intrusive advertisement tactics should be countered.
Gold seller is the equivalent of cheat codes in other games with the difference that cheat codes, beside the use of 3rd party hardware like action replay cards and the like, are built in by the programmers themselves.
Both permit a player to reach higher levels in less time than normal and yeah, there will always be the person that wants to get to the top without doing the path, no matter how fun or unfun this path might be.
I do not see an easy way out of this. Gold sellers are too many at this point and they are getting bigger and bigger... I really wonder how much of a market they can grow up to as I got several different companies advertise their "services" to me.
Either an international legislation is needed, to once and for all determine the legal status of these practices OR the companies will have to legalize the practice and bring it in-house.
Both are preferable to the current shark-ridden black market.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
One thing I noticed in Burning Crusade is you make TONS of money in Outlands lvls 60-70 so at least just goin about my usual business I'll have flying mount money in no time without having to resort to insane grinding/auction-house jockeying.
I think there are only 3 ways to stop it..
1. Kill the people selling it.
2. Kill the people buying it.
3. The company sell it themselves.
People are naturally competitive, and like being the best. Some people see the journey included in their measure of status, some just see the end result.
I agree with this. If farming gold was made fun and people enjoyed doing it, ity will satisfy a larger majority, but there will still be those who dont enjoy this new way of farming, and those that will farm and still buy gold to push themsevles ahead of the competition.
Take Lineage2 for example, if you were new in that game its still pretty hard to get financially up and running, and the fact that better equiptment = faster leveling and more gold means anyone who isnt in the best is being really inefficient. The development team has brought in ways to make the grind easier for new people with trade-ins etc for weapons and so on, but if you compare some guy trading-in and getting high end NG items by level 20, and some guy who bought a few million adena and bought top D grade, you have an incredible performance difference between the two. One step further and you have a guy who buys gold AND takes advantage of the trade-in system and you get someone who not only has instant gold to buy the best, but a cost effective way of saving it for even better items later on.
Breaking a TOS and being Illegal are 2 different things. As there are no penalties linked to the TOS beside "termination of your account". It is not gonna work.
What I meant is that gold selling be made a criminal activity, punishable with hefty fines or even jail. THEN you would see the disappereance of such services for good.
You cannot stop the people from buying gold as you cannot stop the people from using cheat codes, it is built in human nature. It does not matter if the game is super fun or super easy or what not. People WILL cheat.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
Currently playing:
LOTRO & WoW (not much WoW though because Mines of Moria rocks!!!!)
Looking Foward too:
Bioware games (Dragon Age & Star Wars The Old Republic)
The only way to stop it really is to make cash no drop and no trade and regulate the economy. So Basically if you want to do any type of trade between players you have to use an NPC system like the AH or something similar and then on top of that you regulate the prices in the AH. That way they can't mail gold to someone, they can't have a person buying something put up a rock for 100000000000g and then go and buy it to give him his gold. It would make it way to difficult to transfer gold. But that would also make it hard for regular players.
The best game with the least amount of Gold selling problems was Asheron's Call 1. Money in that game was completely worthless for the longest time. And what really made it difficult was money had weight and so you could only hold so much money at a time.
What AC1 used was a barter system for many years. There wasn't really a set currency that people would accept. Later on some items became more like a currency (Platinum Scarabs, Motes, Shards, Singularity Keys, etc) but really even those were subjective in their value to each person. Usually if you had a great item you would ask for something you needed. This worked great as it then involved more of the community because the person who wanted your item might need to get the item you want from someone else.
So until a new MMO implements a heavily regulated economy (which will hurt some players who like to play the economy) or scraps the cash portion of the economy and implements a random generated item system where people will need to barter and trade (like AC1) then we will just need to accept the Gold sellers as a part of our economy. Because even if the company implements it themselves and offers it for cheaper then the gold farmers can, buying gold would still be part of the economy. (and yes they can offer it much much cheaper then the farmers can offer it, just look what happened on Vanguard, I heard from some friends that there was a gold duping exploit on the game and prices on gold went from 30 dollars or so for 1g to $3 for 100g. They can't make a profit on that type of revenue, especially if you pair it with account bans and needing to purchase new accounts.)
Currently playing:
LOTRO & WoW (not much WoW though because Mines of Moria rocks!!!!)
Looking Foward too:
Bioware games (Dragon Age & Star Wars The Old Republic)
Hey,
I have a simple idea but its pretty radicle.
PLAYERS, SHOW SOME SELF RESPECT, GET IN TOUCH WITH THE FACT THAT ITS JUST A VIDEO GAME AND DON"T BUY F*CKING GOLD
That should pretty much "fix" the problem.
Its never gonna happen though, way to easy and puts the burden on the self control of the individual. Everyone keeps trying to blame the farmers and ask the game companies to take care of a problem the players are creating.