The game runs a calculation on the money and gear your character gives away, and receives. If you fall within certain levels, it looks like you are a gold sell or gold buy, then the game flags you as can be attacked by all players in the game, everywhere.
Lol, the first part is alright, but the second part is just plain stupid.... just read my solution :P
Not really, because legitimate players, not gold farmers, might transfer money, like guild leaders and so forth. They would be flagged just like a gold farmer, but you could talk to them and know they weren't a farmer, or see they are a guild leader, etc.
If they just say "me play game, go away" over and over, you kill them.
True for games, too. The thing is, it costs money to hire GMs to run after the 10% of the playerbase that indulges in gold farming/selling/buying. Those GMs cost money that cut into the Ferrari, hookers, and booze budgets of the CEO-nerds who run MMOs.
So you KNOW what is going to give.
Dealing with the gold farmers would require a lot of manual labor that could not be farmed out (sorry!) to some AI or bot that works for peanuts as opposed to minimum wage with benefits.
So the problem will persist.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Originally posted by SioBabble "10% of your soldiers take up 90% of your time". Old adage from officer training. True for games, too. The thing is, it costs money to hire GMs to run after the 10% of the playerbase that indulges in gold farming/selling/buying. Those GMs cost money that cut into the Ferrari, hookers, and booze budgets of the CEO-nerds who run MMOs. So you KNOW what is going to give. Dealing with the gold farmers would require a lot of manual labor that could not be farmed out (sorry!) to some AI or bot that works for peanuts as opposed to minimum wage with benefits. So the problem will persist.
If MMO games didn't ship with broken item oogling economies then most gold farmers would be outmoded. Right now, they're an essential part of most MMOs because of this. Just look at EVE by comparison, you can make everything in that game and lose it all, and your skills don't depend on them rather the items depend on your skills. If developers thought like that, then maybe most gold farmers wouldn't exist, but everyone wants the POKEMONZ gear set and drivel like that, as if that's the point of MMOs...
Sorry, I'm just tired of people blaming gold farmers for broken, exploitable economies.
I agree, the only real way to precvent or suppress the huge industry of gold farming is to establish the currency value yourself by offering In game currency for RL $$. I dont like it, but I suppose I prefer it over the illigitimate gold farming practice.
At least with the developers doing the currency sales there would be no or less...
1. Gold farming characters taking up high spawn spots
2. Less intrusive spam bots logging onto the game trying to sell currency
3. Less hacking the game and exploiting DUp bugs
4. Less hacking of accounts to sell off character belongings and then delete the characters
True for games, too. The thing is, it costs money to hire GMs to run after the 10% of the playerbase that indulges in gold farming/selling/buying. Those GMs cost money that cut into the Ferrari, hookers, and booze budgets of the CEO-nerds who run MMOs.
So you KNOW what is going to give.
Dealing with the gold farmers would require a lot of manual labor that could not be farmed out (sorry!) to some AI or bot that works for peanuts as opposed to minimum wage with benefits.
So the problem will persist.
If MMO games didn't ship with broken item oogling economies then most gold farmers would be outmoded. Right now, they're an essential part of most MMOs because of this. Just look at EVE by comparison, you can make everything in that game and lose it all, and your skills don't depend on them rather the items depend on your skills. If developers thought like that, then maybe most gold farmers wouldn't exist, but everyone wants the POKEMONZ gear set and drivel like that, as if that's the point of MMOs...
Sorry, I'm just tired of people blaming gold farmers for broken, exploitable economies.
SWG had a player driven economy before the NGE, and it still had gold farmers. Although you could argue that the SWG mission system provided a hole that the gold farmers could exploit. I think that the game's relative population probably has something to do with it, too...more players, more likely that gold farmers will find customers. Thus WoW is just rife with them. EVE, not so much. But then EVE is something of a niche game...you know, the games that the big moneymen are not interested in becasue they're not wildly profitable.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Honestly I think the best way to remove or diminish gold farmers is to make all items craftable and drive the economy towards the trade of resources instead of currency. Resource spawn locations can simply be randomized. All NPC's could drop low/medium end materials. This makes spawn camping much more about the game play then the "uber item" at the end.
Since most crafting/resource gathering trades already have some form of "surveying" the random spawns could be tracked down. This means that the person willing to work the hardest will find the rarest of spawns. if they only spawn a limited supply, then high end items will retain value and earned via legitimate means.
Since we have been discussing the legal gold farming on several post. I thought I would ask the question: How could a game company kill the gold farmer? This is my idea and not saying that this the perfect idea, but it is at least an idea. Every time you do quest, kill a monster, or sell an item on the vendor you are given status points, money, whatever. Those points can be either used via broker or NPC vendor only. Items on the broker are sanctioned by in game mechanics that value the item you placed on the broker. Value would be materials used for item, ability, special features and rarity. There would be two things that would be a downside. Could not send your points to an alternate character (But you could buy what ever item you wanted and give to your alt). Or when the broker got large amounts of the same item. How would the pricing structure be implemented by rarity?
Problem is, you're effectively removing the entire player economy. Lets say I farm copper (to make a simple example). Now, I create bars, which are worth say 20 status points. Now, I can only sell those for 20 status points, and thats it. My copper is exactly the same as everyone else's, at the same price, so I just wait and I'll get my points/cash.The same with the 'sword of uber-powerfulness
No bargins, no bulk discounts, no suprises.
It also ruins community, as you couldn't give items to your guildmates.
Most ways of getting rid of goldfarmers using ingame mechanics also ruin the game. The only way is via detection, and banning and things like controlling/limiting trial accounts. But the farmers will always find a way around it.
Thats why I said the market or item would change price because of rarity. So if you farmed copper and put 500 up there for 5 silver each. Then I come behind you then I could sell mine for 4 silver, but not 10gp each. You could only go +/- market pricing.
The only way to put gold farmers out of business is for players to stop buying from them. No amount of account banning/suspension is gonna do the trick (it would only slow them down at best) as long as there is a demand, people are gonna try to go around any kind of static safe guards you put in place. One way however is to follow the old saying "fight poison with poison", instead of fighting these gold farmers, instead cut them out of the deal by offering virtual game assets for sale yourself (the item mall method) or offer a way players can safely trade in-game assets (SOE went this way with their Exchange servers). Another methoid is to let the lawsuits fly and start doing IP domain bannings. This of course is a double edged sword, you're harming yourself by limiting your game to a certin geographical region and it DOESN'T really stop gold farmers coming in from China (since they all connect from certain US-based companies that offer them proxy servers to use). Another possibility is what is being implemented in South Korea right now that uses KSSN (Korean Social Security Number) as a required information to create a game account. Since you can only legally have 1 social security number without resorting to identity fraud (a serious federal felony) each player can uniquely identify themselves in in an mmo game.
All in all, there are many options that can be explored and implemented but none yet has a 100% chance of stopping the gold farmers/sellers.
How could a company kill a gold farmer? simple: run him over, use a gun, stab him, give out his address and let gamers do the rest, have a fat man sit on him etc. /sarcasm
Tbh you will never get rid of gold sellers, because there will always be gold buyers. All game developers should do is prevent gold sellers from spamming us, and ruining the economy by working around them. Even in games where gold/currency means absalutly nothing like guild wars for instance you get gold farmers because there are actually people stupid and lazy enough to still buy it.
But because in that game currency really doesnt matter (at least from what i have seen) it doesnt effect anyone as much as it does in other games.
WoW is a perfect example of what not to do, they put items in the game that you have to spend thousands of gold on, this encourages lazy people to buy gold online and it is lazyness since I play casually and still manage to get my mounts etc it just takes me a bit longer than someone who has more time to play. Instead what they should do is make things like mounts only available from quests no gold requirments.
They also have it so that you have to buy expensive pots, not sure if thats changed I got fed up of raiding ages ago, but that also encourages gold buying. And it is noticable on the rest of the server in this case because the gold buyers do not care what they pay therefore all the prices inflate and someone who plays the game honestly now has to pay hard to obtain (honestly) amounts of gold on items.
They also showed the worst way to get rid of the problem, by sticking shitloads of gold in to the economy. So now prices inflate even more which really ruins the economy specfically for new players. Crappy greens and blues cost 10g plus half the time, this is not an amount you will get easily before around level 58 when you can go to outland. Before TBC the same items cost a couple of gold.
Alot of people say that its because of a bad game design that you get these people quite frankly i think that is bullshit for the most part. As I said with my example of guild wars, currency means nothing hell even power leveling and what ever else these guys do is useless in that game, yet still people carry on buying gold.
I said for the most part since obviously you can encourage it like wow does by having all these items that are quickly obtained if you buy gold.
So in summary. Make having a lot of currency not a short cut for anything and you will discourage gold buying thus reduce gold selling. And also you can not get rid of gold sellers because their will all ways be the lazy noobs that buy gold.
I read that Runescape implemented what I believe is the best solution. First, no gifting of items or coin above a certain value. This would also prevent twinking which is a good thing since everyone should earn their way. Limit gifting to once every fifteen minutes per player. Second, all trades and auction house sales must involve items/coin of similar value within x amount of value range. This would require that the developer devote staff to maintaining and updating a current item value database for each server. Not that hard to do with most items but some rare and high demand items can fluctuate in price and you don't want to stifle a player economy by limiting what a player can get for rare or high demand items.
Not bad, but if you find your player base wants twinking it's easy enough to set it up for unlimited currency exchange within an account.
Your really looking at two points of attack here. One, is making sure your game code is tight enough to prevent botting. (yes I know that doesn't prevent someone from actually sitting there for 8 hrs and farming). Two is stopping the direct exchange of large amounts of cash between accounts. Note, this doesn't stop things like farmed items in the AH. But once you take away the simple currency exchange, that makes gold selling far less attractive.
One last thing. Personally I'd also hand out a 30 day ban to folks caught buying gold. They aren't invested in your community anyways so #$& 'em.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
The solution is quite simple and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
Gold Farming/Selling is a problem with the global economy. In India and other 3rd world countries the US dollor is worth a fortune. With their poor economy they can make more money selling gold in an MMORPG then almost all other jobs that are available to them in their country.
So, the solution is simple. Restrict MMORPG servers by region. Players from India cannot play on US servers just like players in the US cannot play on servers in Europe. It's easy enough for a game to have some sort of IP verification on startup that tells the server where the IP is originating from.
There are so many good ideas here. Most all of them would at least staunch the problem to some extent. The Macro-problem is... say it with me.... the game maker's don't want to stop the problem!
I don't know why. If any already-popular mmo implemented any of these ideas, they would probably see a 100% increase in subscriptions. Maybe there are actually more farmers that would unsubscribe than there are players?
I think the issue with the companies' reluctance to address the gold farming problem is that it cuts into their profit margin. Whether it's money spent on coding time or in game GM time, that's money out of their pockets. Unfortunately no one has been able to quantify for them the revenue lost from subs cancelled due to frustration with gold farmers and their effects.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
if they really wanted to stop gold sellers they can just cut out the middle man and sell it thems self that way the market stays in check cause you dont have people grinding for hours for the uber rare gear and then just selling it so they can make money from ther gold site developers could just code the gold out of nothing and sell it from ther site it would solve alot of problems
and this way you can moniter how much gold each person is aloud to by with checking ther acount to see if theyve boughten before and control how much they buy that way to market dosent offlow with gold making everything worthless
and again the wouldnt be any gold farming so this way all the items in game stay at a reasonble price for the none gold buyers to buy
One problem with that is that a good part of your player base objects to gold selling in general. The idea is to allow a player driven economy to grow freely, with out resorting to to artificial controls such as limiting how much gold an individual may have.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Make gold useless like in diablo 2, then make it so traded items get a 10% stat loss. This means one with ebayed gear loses to one who found there own gear and doesnt make trading totally useless.
Restrict IPs to only allow players connecting from a specific area. Let's say your game was released in Europe, then only allow European IPs. That should take care of most gold farmers -_-
Originally posted by Gkarn Originally posted by DeaconX I'm not really sure how it would work - this is an idea I haven't played with too much as of yet but if you completely remove 'currency' from a game and instead evoke some sort of barter system or perhaps based on 'reputation credit' where players earn credit with merchants through their deeds. We as human beings are used to the idea of 'money' but reall, money is worthless and just about useless paper and coin with value set upon it only because our society declares it so. So imagine a world without such currency where you are as 'wealthy' as your reputation allows you to be through your conquests and deeds. Just a thought.
Thats the point I was trying to get across. Food for thought though.
Just make it like CoH where you get "influence" that (If I remember correctly) you can't trade, the only thing you can trade are salvage (which are usually worthless) and aspirations which are small temporary bonuses, rendering the effort for gold farming pretty much worthless as well.
but heres another idea of mine that i think can stop gold sellers make all items in game crafted by real players and the loot you get from mobs to mainly be resouirces and gems so players control everything and ther is no reason to poinlessly grind for one item sence its crafted by real people
Originally posted by O'Deion you can trade and buy influence but heres another idea of mine that i think can stop gold sellers make all items in game crafted by real players and the loot you get from mobs to mainly be resouirces and gems so players control everything and ther is no reason to poinlessly grind for one item sence its crafted by real people
Plus, don't make common materials hard to come by. Because you know gold farming firms would just shift focus from gold to resource materials in no time.
And to the person that stated that EVE Online is a niche game. 190K+ subscriptions makes it not a niche game, sorry. And again, my point still stands, since you can make everything in the game that you can use with your skill sets, and your skill sets define how well you do in the game, then it kills off any incentive to gold farm or even bot. The only part of the EVE economy that comes close to being heavily botted is mining, and that's often handled by players simply hunting the mining bots.
Eve for instance, I have created research alts that will bring me a good income even when I'm not online. Combined with a trade alt I make plenty of money with very little time investment so I can spend my time PvPing, what I enjoy doing. Now I don't have to play every day or, *gasp* even every week, yet I still make all the money I need and enjoy the game just as much as someone who enjoys ratting / missioning / mining to make their money. I'm sure there's people who make tons more than I do with just as little effort simply because they are more creative than I am.
Make buying money not matter.
It doesn't matter that my opponent is in a 10km/s Faction / Snake Set Vagabond when I'm in a T2 Rapier. He's dead. For the non eve players: My rock still beats his extremely sharp and shiny scissors. If I'm not in a Rapier? I don't engage him. The point is, even if someone does fit out a ship with more expensive gear than I am willing to, there are still ways to defeat him. Counter with a different ship, engage him with superior numbers, etc... if none of those options are available, get the hell away. It can never go your way all the time, that would be boring.
Further, I have no interest in the expensive ships in Eve, not because I don't want to spend the time or the money to get them, only because I have a lot more fun flying smaller ships that also happen to be cheaper. The point: I don't need the biggest and most expensive item to have fun.
Comments
Lol, the first part is alright, but the second part is just plain stupid.... just read my solution :P
Not really, because legitimate players, not gold farmers, might transfer money, like guild leaders and so forth. They would be flagged just like a gold farmer, but you could talk to them and know they weren't a farmer, or see they are a guild leader, etc.
If they just say "me play game, go away" over and over, you kill them.
KK.... You win
But still, if your no.1 and your flagged for pvp, it wont matter lol, you can better just ban.
"10% of your soldiers take up 90% of your time".
Old adage from officer training.
True for games, too. The thing is, it costs money to hire GMs to run after the 10% of the playerbase that indulges in gold farming/selling/buying. Those GMs cost money that cut into the Ferrari, hookers, and booze budgets of the CEO-nerds who run MMOs.
So you KNOW what is going to give.
Dealing with the gold farmers would require a lot of manual labor that could not be farmed out (sorry!) to some AI or bot that works for peanuts as opposed to minimum wage with benefits.
So the problem will persist.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
If MMO games didn't ship with broken item oogling economies then most gold farmers would be outmoded. Right now, they're an essential part of most MMOs because of this. Just look at EVE by comparison, you can make everything in that game and lose it all, and your skills don't depend on them rather the items depend on your skills. If developers thought like that, then maybe most gold farmers wouldn't exist, but everyone wants the POKEMONZ gear set and drivel like that, as if that's the point of MMOs...
Sorry, I'm just tired of people blaming gold farmers for broken, exploitable economies.
I agree, the only real way to precvent or suppress the huge industry of gold farming is to establish the currency value yourself by offering In game currency for RL $$. I dont like it, but I suppose I prefer it over the illigitimate gold farming practice.
At least with the developers doing the currency sales there would be no or less...
1. Gold farming characters taking up high spawn spots
2. Less intrusive spam bots logging onto the game trying to sell currency
3. Less hacking the game and exploiting DUp bugs
4. Less hacking of accounts to sell off character belongings and then delete the characters
Torrential
Torrential: DAOC (Pendragon)
Awned: World of Warcraft (Lothar)
Torren: Warhammer Online (Praag)
If MMO games didn't ship with broken item oogling economies then most gold farmers would be outmoded. Right now, they're an essential part of most MMOs because of this. Just look at EVE by comparison, you can make everything in that game and lose it all, and your skills don't depend on them rather the items depend on your skills. If developers thought like that, then maybe most gold farmers wouldn't exist, but everyone wants the POKEMONZ gear set and drivel like that, as if that's the point of MMOs...
Sorry, I'm just tired of people blaming gold farmers for broken, exploitable economies.
SWG had a player driven economy before the NGE, and it still had gold farmers. Although you could argue that the SWG mission system provided a hole that the gold farmers could exploit. I think that the game's relative population probably has something to do with it, too...more players, more likely that gold farmers will find customers. Thus WoW is just rife with them. EVE, not so much. But then EVE is something of a niche game...you know, the games that the big moneymen are not interested in becasue they're not wildly profitable.
CH, Jedi, Commando, Smuggler, BH, Scout, Doctor, Chef, BE...yeah, lots of SWG time invested.
Once a denizen of Ahazi
Honestly I think the best way to remove or diminish gold farmers is to make all items craftable and drive the economy towards the trade of resources instead of currency. Resource spawn locations can simply be randomized. All NPC's could drop low/medium end materials. This makes spawn camping much more about the game play then the "uber item" at the end.
Since most crafting/resource gathering trades already have some form of "surveying" the random spawns could be tracked down. This means that the person willing to work the hardest will find the rarest of spawns. if they only spawn a limited supply, then high end items will retain value and earned via legitimate means.
Problem is, you're effectively removing the entire player economy. Lets say I farm copper (to make a simple example). Now, I create bars, which are worth say 20 status points. Now, I can only sell those for 20 status points, and thats it. My copper is exactly the same as everyone else's, at the same price, so I just wait and I'll get my points/cash.The same with the 'sword of uber-powerfulness
No bargins, no bulk discounts, no suprises.
It also ruins community, as you couldn't give items to your guildmates.
Most ways of getting rid of goldfarmers using ingame mechanics also ruin the game. The only way is via detection, and banning and things like controlling/limiting trial accounts. But the farmers will always find a way around it.
Thats why I said the market or item would change price because of rarity. So if you farmed copper and put 500 up there for 5 silver each. Then I come behind you then I could sell mine for 4 silver, but not 10gp each. You could only go +/- market pricing.
The only way to put gold farmers out of business is for players to stop buying from them. No amount of account banning/suspension is gonna do the trick (it would only slow them down at best) as long as there is a demand, people are gonna try to go around any kind of static safe guards you put in place. One way however is to follow the old saying "fight poison with poison", instead of fighting these gold farmers, instead cut them out of the deal by offering virtual game assets for sale yourself (the item mall method) or offer a way players can safely trade in-game assets (SOE went this way with their Exchange servers). Another methoid is to let the lawsuits fly and start doing IP domain bannings. This of course is a double edged sword, you're harming yourself by limiting your game to a certin geographical region and it DOESN'T really stop gold farmers coming in from China (since they all connect from certain US-based companies that offer them proxy servers to use). Another possibility is what is being implemented in South Korea right now that uses KSSN (Korean Social Security Number) as a required information to create a game account. Since you can only legally have 1 social security number without resorting to identity fraud (a serious federal felony) each player can uniquely identify themselves in in an mmo game.
All in all, there are many options that can be explored and implemented but none yet has a 100% chance of stopping the gold farmers/sellers.
How could a company kill a gold farmer? simple: run him over, use a gun, stab him, give out his address and let gamers do the rest, have a fat man sit on him etc. /sarcasm
Tbh you will never get rid of gold sellers, because there will always be gold buyers. All game developers should do is prevent gold sellers from spamming us, and ruining the economy by working around them. Even in games where gold/currency means absalutly nothing like guild wars for instance you get gold farmers because there are actually people stupid and lazy enough to still buy it.
But because in that game currency really doesnt matter (at least from what i have seen) it doesnt effect anyone as much as it does in other games.
WoW is a perfect example of what not to do, they put items in the game that you have to spend thousands of gold on, this encourages lazy people to buy gold online and it is lazyness since I play casually and still manage to get my mounts etc it just takes me a bit longer than someone who has more time to play. Instead what they should do is make things like mounts only available from quests no gold requirments.
They also have it so that you have to buy expensive pots, not sure if thats changed I got fed up of raiding ages ago, but that also encourages gold buying. And it is noticable on the rest of the server in this case because the gold buyers do not care what they pay therefore all the prices inflate and someone who plays the game honestly now has to pay hard to obtain (honestly) amounts of gold on items.
They also showed the worst way to get rid of the problem, by sticking shitloads of gold in to the economy. So now prices inflate even more which really ruins the economy specfically for new players. Crappy greens and blues cost 10g plus half the time, this is not an amount you will get easily before around level 58 when you can go to outland. Before TBC the same items cost a couple of gold.
Alot of people say that its because of a bad game design that you get these people quite frankly i think that is bullshit for the most part. As I said with my example of guild wars, currency means nothing hell even power leveling and what ever else these guys do is useless in that game, yet still people carry on buying gold.
I said for the most part since obviously you can encourage it like wow does by having all these items that are quickly obtained if you buy gold.
So in summary. Make having a lot of currency not a short cut for anything and you will discourage gold buying thus reduce gold selling. And also you can not get rid of gold sellers because their will all ways be the lazy noobs that buy gold.
Your really looking at two points of attack here. One, is making sure your game code is tight enough to prevent botting. (yes I know that doesn't prevent someone from actually sitting there for 8 hrs and farming). Two is stopping the direct exchange of large amounts of cash between accounts. Note, this doesn't stop things like farmed items in the AH. But once you take away the simple currency exchange, that makes gold selling far less attractive.
One last thing. Personally I'd also hand out a 30 day ban to folks caught buying gold. They aren't invested in your community anyways so #$& 'em.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
The solution is quite simple and I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.
Gold Farming/Selling is a problem with the global economy. In India and other 3rd world countries the US dollor is worth a fortune. With their poor economy they can make more money selling gold in an MMORPG then almost all other jobs that are available to them in their country.
So, the solution is simple. Restrict MMORPG servers by region. Players from India cannot play on US servers just like players in the US cannot play on servers in Europe. It's easy enough for a game to have some sort of IP verification on startup that tells the server where the IP is originating from.
There are so many good ideas here. Most all of them would at least staunch the problem to some extent. The Macro-problem is... say it with me.... the game maker's don't want to stop the problem!
I don't know why. If any already-popular mmo implemented any of these ideas, they would probably see a 100% increase in subscriptions. Maybe there are actually more farmers that would unsubscribe than there are players?
I think the issue with the companies' reluctance to address the gold farming problem is that it cuts into their profit margin. Whether it's money spent on coding time or in game GM time, that's money out of their pockets. Unfortunately no one has been able to quantify for them the revenue lost from subs cancelled due to frustration with gold farmers and their effects.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
KILL THE BUYER
*3 weeks and not 4 weeks because one might cancel for the 4 weeks.
-----
WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
Of course, while there's lots of good ideas here, (that would certainly be effective) they all assume one thing.
That the developers really want to stop the gold/item trade. I don't think that's really the situation in many cases.
Why? Because gold/item buyers frequently tend to be very loyal, long term, multi-account subscribers and its hard for them to turn it down.
Who the hell are you, and why should I care?
Congrats! You are a victim of Trollstar!
if they really wanted to stop gold sellers they can just cut out the middle man and sell it thems self that way the market stays in check cause you dont have people grinding for hours for the uber rare gear and then just selling it so they can make money from ther gold site developers could just code the gold out of nothing and sell it from ther site it would solve alot of problems
and this way you can moniter how much gold each person is aloud to by with checking ther acount to see if theyve boughten before and control how much they buy that way to market dosent offlow with gold making everything worthless
and again the wouldnt be any gold farming so this way all the items in game stay at a reasonble price for the none gold buyers to buy
One problem with that is that a good part of your player base objects to gold selling in general. The idea is to allow a player driven economy to grow freely, with out resorting to to artificial controls such as limiting how much gold an individual may have.
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
~Omar Khayyam
Make gold useless like in diablo 2, then make it so traded items get a 10% stat loss. This means one with ebayed gear loses to one who found there own gear and doesnt make trading totally useless.
Restrict IPs to only allow players connecting from a specific area. Let's say your game was released in Europe, then only allow European IPs. That should take care of most gold farmers -_-
Thats the point I was trying to get across. Food for thought though.
Just make it like CoH where you get "influence" that (If I remember correctly) you can't trade, the only thing you can trade are salvage (which are usually worthless) and aspirations which are small temporary bonuses, rendering the effort for gold farming pretty much worthless as well.
you can trade and buy influence
but heres another idea of mine that i think can stop gold sellers make all items in game crafted by real players and the loot you get from mobs to mainly be resouirces and gems so players control everything and ther is no reason to poinlessly grind for one item sence its crafted by real people
Plus, don't make common materials hard to come by. Because you know gold farming firms would just shift focus from gold to resource materials in no time.
And to the person that stated that EVE Online is a niche game. 190K+ subscriptions makes it not a niche game, sorry. And again, my point still stands, since you can make everything in the game that you can use with your skill sets, and your skill sets define how well you do in the game, then it kills off any incentive to gold farm or even bot. The only part of the EVE economy that comes close to being heavily botted is mining, and that's often handled by players simply hunting the mining bots.
-- Brede
Multiple ways to earn money.
Eve for instance, I have created research alts that will bring me a good income even when I'm not online. Combined with a trade alt I make plenty of money with very little time investment so I can spend my time PvPing, what I enjoy doing. Now I don't have to play every day or, *gasp* even every week, yet I still make all the money I need and enjoy the game just as much as someone who enjoys ratting / missioning / mining to make their money. I'm sure there's people who make tons more than I do with just as little effort simply because they are more creative than I am.
Make buying money not matter.
It doesn't matter that my opponent is in a 10km/s Faction / Snake Set Vagabond when I'm in a T2 Rapier. He's dead. For the non eve players: My rock still beats his extremely sharp and shiny scissors. If I'm not in a Rapier? I don't engage him. The point is, even if someone does fit out a ship with more expensive gear than I am willing to, there are still ways to defeat him. Counter with a different ship, engage him with superior numbers, etc... if none of those options are available, get the hell away. It can never go your way all the time, that would be boring.
Further, I have no interest in the expensive ships in Eve, not because I don't want to spend the time or the money to get them, only because I have a lot more fun flying smaller ships that also happen to be cheaper. The point: I don't need the biggest and most expensive item to have fun.
How? They can do what ffxi is doing. They are making major strides. And it shows in the AH prices:
http://www.playonline.com/pcd/topics/ff11us/detail/2701/detail.html
"Do not fret! Your captain is about to enter Valhalla!" - General Beatrix of Alexandria
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