What destroyed gold selling in WoW is that WoW made gold easy to get. That and they reduced the price of everything. . Yes, there is gold selling in WoW today, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was. . Nice to see EQ2 and LotRO follow suit. . Gold was hard to get, and that make a real life cash market for gold.
I wouldn't have a problem with gold sellers... if it wasn't for the constant spamage of local chat in every bloody area in most MMO's. Hell, the bots even PM you these days >.< They never used to do that. That's a recent (last few years) development, as far as I remember. It's beyond annoying.
MMO's played: Ragnarok Online (For years), WoW (for a few weeks only), Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Eve, Allods, Shattered Galaxy, 9 Dragons, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Star Trek Online (Got someone ELSE to pay for it), Champions Online (Someone else paid), Dofus, Dragonica, LOTRO, DDO and more... A LOT more. I've played good AND bad. The bad didn't last long. :P
Originally posted by Amathe Originally posted by uquipu What destroyed gold selling in WoW is ......
Lol. Google "WoW" and "gold" and see how "destroyed" it is. You have to be kidding me. . No, not kidding. It's no where near as bad as it was. . Like many posters have said though, if they make $30 an hour at their job, it's worth paying for gold. They might not have much time and they'd rather not farm. . Back in the early days of wow, gold selling was rampant. Now it's not. . Blizz ruined the market by making gold lots easier to get.
The current generation of gimme it now with zero effort hooligans. The biggest thing I have against gold farmers is that they themselves are getting lazy. They would rather just hack into legitimate player's accounts and steal all thier stuff instead of farming for it. Anyone who buys gold or anything else from these cyber criminals is only hurting themselves.
QFT !
though i would add that their hurting the community, and condoning a criminal act, if not encouraging it.
Lol. Google "WoW" and "gold" and see how "destroyed" it is. You have to be kidding me.
.
No, not kidding. It's no where near as bad as it was.
.
Like many posters have said though, if they make $30 an hour at their job, it's worth paying for gold. They might not have much time and they'd rather not farm.
.
Back in the early days of wow, gold selling was rampant. Now it's not.
.
Blizz ruined the market by making gold lots easier to get.
Uquipu is right. The spammers still spam, the scammers still scam and the hackers still hack, but you only have to look at the prices they're asking to see how badly the gold selling industry has declined. Blizzard made gathering gold easy and (more importantly) they made it fun with repeatable daily quests that people actually want to do.
I use to be one of the anti-gold farmer crusaders (if anyone cares to look back a couple years in my post history)
I still don't agree with it BUT
I hate farmers and spammers. I hate getting spammed tells in whatever game I'm playing.
Recent est. figure 50-55% of US MMO players have purchased currency. (I don't have a readily available source) That feeds a lot of farmers and spammers in a lot of games. (for leeroy's sake you still get tells in SWG...for crying out loud I get tells in DAoC for plat...there literally is no escape)
The only solution I see as the problem has just become worse and worse over the years, is the game companies themselves just need to sell the currency. People are already buying it, (it's a billion dollar a year industry) and I would rather see the devs get the money then farmers. This way theoretically, more money is available for expansions & improvements.
I know this isn't a 100% fix but it's better then what we have now which is basically nothing.
edit
he only thing IMHO that has kept the gold market off balance is the poor quality of western made MMO's and the fact that there hasn't been a solid game since WoW & GW. This has kept them guessing and hopping around. The low production qualities and the near psychotically fickle western player has probably been pretty frustrating for them.
That... is an interesting idea that Dev's should at the very LEAST consider. However, it would only really be a temporary solution to the problem, as gold sellers would undercut the game companies price to make their own profits, driving the price of gold down to stupidly low worth. This, I think, would be inevitable, and is the ideas main flaw.
MMO's played: Ragnarok Online (For years), WoW (for a few weeks only), Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Eve, Allods, Shattered Galaxy, 9 Dragons, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Star Trek Online (Got someone ELSE to pay for it), Champions Online (Someone else paid), Dofus, Dragonica, LOTRO, DDO and more... A LOT more. I've played good AND bad. The bad didn't last long. :P
I think gold farmers directly profit from the persons need for instant gratification. Instant gratification is everywhere, and I bet you tons of people feel better when they get something they want, then and there. Consider it an immature, greedy, whatever.... instant gratification is probably much more common than we think.
This is something that I believe gold farmers are aware of, and fully intend on exploiting. When someone see's all this awesome high level rare equipment in the auction going for 50k gold or whatever, someone can easily pull out a credit card, get that 50k gold and get that item from the auction house they oh so covet. No waiting, no grinding quests for the currency... and now they have it in their hands right then and there.
In the grand scheme of things . . in this big world . . out of everything in life . . who the hell really gives a shit about people buying gold? I don't buy gold. Hell, I don't even play MMO's at the moment because there's nothing worth playing, but in all honesty, no one should really care whether or not someone else buys gold.
Maybe that person has more of a real life than you do and yeah, they enjoy playing the game to some extent, but they don't want to be the MMO slave junkie that other people think it's OK to be. They don't WANT to waste their time grinding content that a bot or a sweatshop worker could do for them.
Yeah, I said it: grinding some of this craptastic MMO content is the equivalent of working in a sweatshop, with one exception: you're paying to endure this crap.
In all honesty, I don't blame people for paying someone else to endure the shite that some of these developers, nay, MOST of these developers dish out on a yearly basis.
The real problem is the quality of the content being developed and sold to people. These developers prefer quantity over quality and it shows in almost every game available today. People don't want to endure the low quality, high quantity content, so they pay someone else to do it for them.
Ones who say games are more fun now are those who never played before 2005 lol.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Most new titles I have played, Dev or GM's actually police people that buy gold. If they really wanted to stop it, they should figure out a way to stop Spam Bots. I know a few Developers have tried.
But the bottom line is, if people want to spend their cash on game money, I don't see a problem with it. It just means they quit the game faster and move on alot of the time, even when they are not caught, because they get bored, if they would've just taken the time to play the game, they might not be as bored.
There are plenty of games that are Free to Play with Item Malls, these Item Malls destroy the game in my opinion. So I can see why they don't mind paying the monthly fee, then buying from a Gold Farmer because they can only play for 2 hours a night, meanwhile, their whole guild is already maxed in everything, and they are so far behind that they want to get in on some of that action, but at 2 hours a day, they are afraid they will never catch up, so, they hire some help to help catch them up. Often times people these days forget that MMO's are social games, otherwise, we could just play a single player on our console. So for the working many, they want to be able to enjoy the game with their friends, and the only way is to be the similar in level. Afterall, you think your guildies are going to grind it for you while you are out working?
Let's talk market, you say that the market gets inflated due to gold buyers? I disagree, the market gets greedy because of the sellers, they put an item up for a huge price to see who will buy it. And when they see that they can steadily sell that type of item for that price, they keep throwing it up there, testing the market waters. Eventually, the item will cap, and then start to fall, falling even faster when you have more people throwing the same item up trying to undercut the original seller, until it gets so far down the market chain, that its more profitable to just sell them to a junk merchant. Then low and behold, those market masters jump back in and the item goes for sky high prices, only to fall over the next few days, weeks, months or a year. This has nothing.... to ..... do.... with.... Gold Buying. This is the natural cycle of a market, sure, Gold Buyers don't help the cycle, because they now have the money to spend on said market items, which just means that, they get bought, before the prices can fall, keeping the prices high, or even higher. To fix this, you just need to keep undercutting these sellers on the market, but you will need the supply to do it, if you keep the price low, because your able too, then those big sellers will have no choice to bring their prices down to sell said items, and therefore, maybe that casual gamer who doesn't play the long hours can actually afford to buy that item.
Point: The fun of the game is socializing with your friends, and if your friends who are usually to busy lining their pockets can't help you, then you have no choice but to find another way, either join a new guild who will help you, or "Buy a Friend or Game Money" There is truly no easy fix intend, the only real person this should matter to... is you. Do you feel like a cheater for doing it?
Maybe that person has more of a real life than you do
So someone chooses to play an easy videogame for "fun." Despite how easy it is - despite having gold, loot and levels practically thrown at them - it's still not easy enough. So they cheat, even though they don't have to cheat to play. And that somehow makes them a success at life.
I'd like to know at what kind of life. I face challenges before my first cup of coffee harder than playing games like WoW. Anyone who has to cheat at that, damn, just tattoo "fail" on their forehead and call it a wrap.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I played WoW, the gold was ridiculously easy to obtain, but I was still tempted to buy when I was working for my epic flying mount (back when it was ~5000 gold). I didn't buy any, though, and just mooched off my friends instead. When you want something really, really badly, you want it now. Some people justify spending dozens or even hundreds of real dollars to get what they want in-game. I'm not one of them.
You have to remember that Gold Seller owns the market to some extent. They are one of the reason that causes such high prices, regardless of the MMO we're talking about.
They purposedly increase the prices to create a demand of gold.....that's one of the main reason why Gold Selling is so succesfull, because we let them take control over the market.
It was either UO or EQ1 where gold selling started. Years ago, some guy had a bunch of PC set up in his apartment, like ten of them. They were all running bots. . It was legal back then. . The bots would farm gold and he would sell the gold for real money. He made thousands. .
There were no rules against it at the time because it was new. . Business men moved in, found that people living in 3rd worlds could get the gold more easily than a bot and you have what you have today. . Where there's a market, there will be business.
In my opinion, modern games have to a large degree stopped being games. They are just exercises in having. Having is fun, everything else, not so much. Thus can gold sellers make millions off of people paying to play games that they then pay more not to have to play.
I remember talking to people who played the original Everquest. They would talk about how there would be a boss and they would spend hours, even days camping that boss just to get what the boss had. First of all Hours of Camping sounds just as boring as hours of farming, but wheather you farm today in Wow or camped a boss for endless hours in EQ, it was all to "Get Stuff"
Games are what you make them. In WoW I know people who just like leveling alts. They enjoy the leveling process. Others Like doing Achievements. It isn't about Having for them it is about completing the achievments. There have always been people who are just into 'Having" but there are others now and then who like other things in games.
When you lump people all into one group (Such as stereotyping by saying people who play games now are just into having) you will always be wrong. Because there will always be exceptions.
I played the original EQ from beta til years after release. I sat through a damn 14hr Jboots camp and swore off ever doing something like that again.
I've bought gold exactly once and that was on a recent FtP game and to tell the truth it wasn't a bad experience and if I ever ran into another timesink like Jboots.. yea I'd buy again.
There's no excuse for buying gold other than laziness. At best gold-sellers annoy the legitimate players and at worst they destroy the economy of a game. Without exception, anyone who buys gold is a cheater and fully deserves to have their credit card scammed. It's the gold buyers who keep the gold sellers wrecking games. I certainly hope every gold buyer is caught or gets ripped off.
It's only a matter of time before the companies just start offering it themselves via RMT. Too much of a market for them to not get in on it.
I'm not sure that's going to happen actually, or else they would've done it long ago. What seems to be a new trend though is to mix P2Ps and Cash Shops.....that doesn't blend well together....
While I don't support any action that demeans the integrity of gameplay, the shareholders that are just looking for the almighty $ more than likely don't care. Look at the de-volution the MMORPG genre has experienced- it all goes directly toward more money and less effort/time. Do you really think that given enough time to desensitize the playerbase that we won't see this happen?
Gold selling/buying is nothing new. People did it back in the early games too. While I have always condemned it (and never done it), at least back in the early games I understood the players' motivations. Money was hard to come by then unless you were adept at high level crafting (which was not an easy thing to do), you were a masterful trader, or you were at the cutting edge of content where the items you sold were in very high demand. Otherwise, it would take a looooong time to raise the money just whacking things.
But nowadays, gold is much, much, MUCH easier to get. You have daily quests. Normal quests give more gold. More gold is dropped. Trading is much easier and you can even use add ons to help you with pricing. When I played WoW I had gold galore just from playing the game and I wasn't even trying to amass any. I swear they just throw gold at you constantly for almost anything you do.
Yet strangely, despite this, gold sellers have left the shadows, moved into the main stream and become a giant business.
I constantly hear how much "fun" games are, now that all that "not fun" stuff has been removed ( that "stuff" being pretty much everything I ever liked about these games lol). And yet, now that the games are easier, and getting gold is easier, I am amazed at how much gold selling and buying is going on. Why would anyone buy gold in games (or any of the other cheesy practices like powerleveling, faction farming, etc.) where it is absurdly easy to get items, coin and advancement already? Why would they need to do this if they are having so much *cough* "fun?"
By some estimates the gold selling industry's revenue is in the billions. So don't say that ah, it's just a few bad apples doing this. Nonsense. It's huge!
Personally, what this tells me is that we have not seen the end of the trend whereby games are made easier. They obviously aren't easy enough if people feel they still have to bypass game play and shortcut to the part where they just have things for doing nothing. And this mantra of how much more "fun" games are now is belied by so many people doing everything possible to avoid the game play.
In my opinion, modern games have to a large degree stopped being games. They are just exercises in having. Having is fun, everything else, not so much. Thus can gold sellers make millions off of people paying to play games that they then pay more not to have to play.
Well, it's a numbers game isn't it?
If "so many" people did it in older games because they didn't want to spend the time crafting/earning money and there are more players than ever in these games AND presumably a greater portion of players who aren't crafters/don't want to spend time making money, then you are going to have more players willing to spend money and therefore gold sellers will rush to fill the need.
It's just that simple.
Like Skyrim? Need more content? Try my Skyrim mod "Godfred's Tomb."
The issues lies with part of a generation who started playing MMO's as teenagers and are now working adults. They think they can justify buying gold because they have less time, when in fact all it means is they take longer to achieve things in game, but are unwilling to accept that, so buy gold.
The issues lies with part of a generation who started playing MMO's as teenagers and are now working adults. They think they can justify buying gold because they have less time, when in fact all it means is they take longer to achieve things in game, but are unwilling to accept that, so buy gold.
Well it's because they have less free time so it takes more time to achieve anything and most people seem to admit that much. Which is why the market has changed toward a more casual-friendly market. So I don't think they are necessarily unwilling to accept that, most openly admit that much though very few admit to buying gold.
Comments
What destroyed gold selling in WoW is that WoW made gold easy to get. That and they reduced the price of everything.
.
Yes, there is gold selling in WoW today, but it's nowhere near as bad as it was.
.
Nice to see EQ2 and LotRO follow suit.
.
Gold was hard to get, and that make a real life cash market for gold.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Lol. Google "WoW" and "gold" and see how "destroyed" it is. You have to be kidding me.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I wouldn't have a problem with gold sellers... if it wasn't for the constant spamage of local chat in every bloody area in most MMO's. Hell, the bots even PM you these days >.< They never used to do that. That's a recent (last few years) development, as far as I remember. It's beyond annoying.
MMO's played: Ragnarok Online (For years), WoW (for a few weeks only), Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Eve, Allods, Shattered Galaxy, 9 Dragons, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Star Trek Online (Got someone ELSE to pay for it), Champions Online (Someone else paid), Dofus, Dragonica, LOTRO, DDO and more... A LOT more. I've played good AND bad. The bad didn't last long. :P
.
No, not kidding. It's no where near as bad as it was.
.
Like many posters have said though, if they make $30 an hour at their job, it's worth paying for gold. They might not have much time and they'd rather not farm.
.
Back in the early days of wow, gold selling was rampant. Now it's not.
.
Blizz ruined the market by making gold lots easier to get.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
QFT !
though i would add that their hurting the community, and condoning a criminal act, if not encouraging it.
Uquipu is right. The spammers still spam, the scammers still scam and the hackers still hack, but you only have to look at the prices they're asking to see how badly the gold selling industry has declined. Blizzard made gathering gold easy and (more importantly) they made it fun with repeatable daily quests that people actually want to do.
ok, here's my take on it.
I use to be one of the anti-gold farmer crusaders (if anyone cares to look back a couple years in my post history)
I still don't agree with it BUT
I hate farmers and spammers. I hate getting spammed tells in whatever game I'm playing.
Recent est. figure 50-55% of US MMO players have purchased currency. (I don't have a readily available source) That feeds a lot of farmers and spammers in a lot of games. (for leeroy's sake you still get tells in SWG...for crying out loud I get tells in DAoC for plat...there literally is no escape)
The only solution I see as the problem has just become worse and worse over the years, is the game companies themselves just need to sell the currency. People are already buying it, (it's a billion dollar a year industry) and I would rather see the devs get the money then farmers. This way theoretically, more money is available for expansions & improvements.
I know this isn't a 100% fix but it's better then what we have now which is basically nothing.
edit
he only thing IMHO that has kept the gold market off balance is the poor quality of western made MMO's and the fact that there hasn't been a solid game since WoW & GW. This has kept them guessing and hopping around. The low production qualities and the near psychotically fickle western player has probably been pretty frustrating for them.
That... is an interesting idea that Dev's should at the very LEAST consider. However, it would only really be a temporary solution to the problem, as gold sellers would undercut the game companies price to make their own profits, driving the price of gold down to stupidly low worth. This, I think, would be inevitable, and is the ideas main flaw.
MMO's played: Ragnarok Online (For years), WoW (for a few weeks only), Guild Wars, Lineage 2, Eve, Allods, Shattered Galaxy, 9 Dragons, City of Heroes, City of Villains, Star Trek Online (Got someone ELSE to pay for it), Champions Online (Someone else paid), Dofus, Dragonica, LOTRO, DDO and more... A LOT more. I've played good AND bad. The bad didn't last long. :P
I think gold farmers directly profit from the persons need for instant gratification. Instant gratification is everywhere, and I bet you tons of people feel better when they get something they want, then and there. Consider it an immature, greedy, whatever.... instant gratification is probably much more common than we think.
This is something that I believe gold farmers are aware of, and fully intend on exploiting. When someone see's all this awesome high level rare equipment in the auction going for 50k gold or whatever, someone can easily pull out a credit card, get that 50k gold and get that item from the auction house they oh so covet. No waiting, no grinding quests for the currency... and now they have it in their hands right then and there.
In the grand scheme of things . . in this big world . . out of everything in life . . who the hell really gives a shit about people buying gold? I don't buy gold. Hell, I don't even play MMO's at the moment because there's nothing worth playing, but in all honesty, no one should really care whether or not someone else buys gold.
Maybe that person has more of a real life than you do and yeah, they enjoy playing the game to some extent, but they don't want to be the MMO slave junkie that other people think it's OK to be. They don't WANT to waste their time grinding content that a bot or a sweatshop worker could do for them.
Yeah, I said it: grinding some of this craptastic MMO content is the equivalent of working in a sweatshop, with one exception: you're paying to endure this crap.
In all honesty, I don't blame people for paying someone else to endure the shite that some of these developers, nay, MOST of these developers dish out on a yearly basis.
The real problem is the quality of the content being developed and sold to people. These developers prefer quantity over quality and it shows in almost every game available today. People don't want to endure the low quality, high quantity content, so they pay someone else to do it for them.
Get over it.
Ones who say games are more fun now are those who never played before 2005 lol.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Very true.
They buy Gold so they can get ahead faster, for me that was never a goal.
I want to enjoy the game I'm playing for as long as damn possible lol.
I play to enjoy myself in a world outside of reality. Any sort of outside interruption breaks immersion for me.
If I want gold i'll get it myself.
A man or "gamer" should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
Most new titles I have played, Dev or GM's actually police people that buy gold. If they really wanted to stop it, they should figure out a way to stop Spam Bots. I know a few Developers have tried.
But the bottom line is, if people want to spend their cash on game money, I don't see a problem with it. It just means they quit the game faster and move on alot of the time, even when they are not caught, because they get bored, if they would've just taken the time to play the game, they might not be as bored.
There are plenty of games that are Free to Play with Item Malls, these Item Malls destroy the game in my opinion. So I can see why they don't mind paying the monthly fee, then buying from a Gold Farmer because they can only play for 2 hours a night, meanwhile, their whole guild is already maxed in everything, and they are so far behind that they want to get in on some of that action, but at 2 hours a day, they are afraid they will never catch up, so, they hire some help to help catch them up. Often times people these days forget that MMO's are social games, otherwise, we could just play a single player on our console. So for the working many, they want to be able to enjoy the game with their friends, and the only way is to be the similar in level. Afterall, you think your guildies are going to grind it for you while you are out working?
Let's talk market, you say that the market gets inflated due to gold buyers? I disagree, the market gets greedy because of the sellers, they put an item up for a huge price to see who will buy it. And when they see that they can steadily sell that type of item for that price, they keep throwing it up there, testing the market waters. Eventually, the item will cap, and then start to fall, falling even faster when you have more people throwing the same item up trying to undercut the original seller, until it gets so far down the market chain, that its more profitable to just sell them to a junk merchant. Then low and behold, those market masters jump back in and the item goes for sky high prices, only to fall over the next few days, weeks, months or a year. This has nothing.... to ..... do.... with.... Gold Buying. This is the natural cycle of a market, sure, Gold Buyers don't help the cycle, because they now have the money to spend on said market items, which just means that, they get bought, before the prices can fall, keeping the prices high, or even higher. To fix this, you just need to keep undercutting these sellers on the market, but you will need the supply to do it, if you keep the price low, because your able too, then those big sellers will have no choice to bring their prices down to sell said items, and therefore, maybe that casual gamer who doesn't play the long hours can actually afford to buy that item.
Point: The fun of the game is socializing with your friends, and if your friends who are usually to busy lining their pockets can't help you, then you have no choice but to find another way, either join a new guild who will help you, or "Buy a Friend or Game Money" There is truly no easy fix intend, the only real person this should matter to... is you. Do you feel like a cheater for doing it?
So someone chooses to play an easy videogame for "fun." Despite how easy it is - despite having gold, loot and levels practically thrown at them - it's still not easy enough. So they cheat, even though they don't have to cheat to play. And that somehow makes them a success at life.
I'd like to know at what kind of life. I face challenges before my first cup of coffee harder than playing games like WoW. Anyone who has to cheat at that, damn, just tattoo "fail" on their forehead and call it a wrap.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
You have to remember that Gold Seller owns the market to some extent. They are one of the reason that causes such high prices, regardless of the MMO we're talking about.
They purposedly increase the prices to create a demand of gold.....that's one of the main reason why Gold Selling is so succesfull, because we let them take control over the market.
It was either UO or EQ1 where gold selling started. Years ago, some guy had a bunch of PC set up in his apartment, like ten of them. They were all running bots.
.
It was legal back then.
.
The bots would farm gold and he would sell the gold for real money. He made thousands.
.
There were no rules against it at the time because it was new.
.
Business men moved in, found that people living in 3rd worlds could get the gold more easily than a bot and you have what you have today.
.
Where there's a market, there will be business.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
I remember talking to people who played the original Everquest. They would talk about how there would be a boss and they would spend hours, even days camping that boss just to get what the boss had. First of all Hours of Camping sounds just as boring as hours of farming, but wheather you farm today in Wow or camped a boss for endless hours in EQ, it was all to "Get Stuff"
Games are what you make them. In WoW I know people who just like leveling alts. They enjoy the leveling process. Others Like doing Achievements. It isn't about Having for them it is about completing the achievments. There have always been people who are just into 'Having" but there are others now and then who like other things in games.
When you lump people all into one group (Such as stereotyping by saying people who play games now are just into having) you will always be wrong. Because there will always be exceptions.
I played the original EQ from beta til years after release. I sat through a damn 14hr Jboots camp and swore off ever doing something like that again.
I've bought gold exactly once and that was on a recent FtP game and to tell the truth it wasn't a bad experience and if I ever ran into another timesink like Jboots.. yea I'd buy again.
There's no excuse for buying gold other than laziness. At best gold-sellers annoy the legitimate players and at worst they destroy the economy of a game. Without exception, anyone who buys gold is a cheater and fully deserves to have their credit card scammed. It's the gold buyers who keep the gold sellers wrecking games. I certainly hope every gold buyer is caught or gets ripped off.
It's only a matter of time before the companies just start offering it themselves via RMT. Too much of a market for them to not get in on it.
I'm not sure that's going to happen actually, or else they would've done it long ago. What seems to be a new trend though is to mix P2Ps and Cash Shops.....that doesn't blend well together....
While I don't support any action that demeans the integrity of gameplay, the shareholders that are just looking for the almighty $ more than likely don't care. Look at the de-volution the MMORPG genre has experienced- it all goes directly toward more money and less effort/time. Do you really think that given enough time to desensitize the playerbase that we won't see this happen?
Well, it's a numbers game isn't it?
If "so many" people did it in older games because they didn't want to spend the time crafting/earning money and there are more players than ever in these games AND presumably a greater portion of players who aren't crafters/don't want to spend time making money, then you are going to have more players willing to spend money and therefore gold sellers will rush to fill the need.
It's just that simple.
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
The issues lies with part of a generation who started playing MMO's as teenagers and are now working adults. They think they can justify buying gold because they have less time, when in fact all it means is they take longer to achieve things in game, but are unwilling to accept that, so buy gold.
Well it's because they have less free time so it takes more time to achieve anything and most people seem to admit that much. Which is why the market has changed toward a more casual-friendly market. So I don't think they are necessarily unwilling to accept that, most openly admit that much though very few admit to buying gold.