Originally posted by inemosz People are encouraging gold buying, on this very mmorpg site. I lost my hope on this genre.
Maybe its because you dont understand it? Botting, gold farmers, and gold buyers is not that harmful to the economy of a game actually. Play the AH and you can destroy an economy very quickly and its very easy as well.
No...playing the AH in a healthy economy has no effect on economy.
I know sells in low 90s. But during weekends it drops to low 60s due to relentless undercutting and supply exceeding demand.
I'm just putting it back at 90. I buy at what's below (90-cut) and sell at 90. if it takes 2 weeks to sell it so be it.
Most "MMO entreprenuers" haven't got a clue how the economy really works.
Case in point was the post earlier alleging that "you just buy all of item X on the market and then resell it at 10x the price" which supposedly wrecks the economy. Somehow that buyer acquired a vast amount of gold to enable them to buy-up all the supply of item X. Somehow the supposed buyers of the item have enough currency to now buy the item at vastly inflated prices. Yeah, riiiight, and everyone suddenly had massive piles of gold to spend because... ?
The economy is not destroyed because you are reselling everything you bought for 100x more gold. The economy was already destroyed if everyone can actually afford to buy those items at the new price.
MMO economies are designed based on an estimated player activity (i.e. the average player will earn X gold per hour) and prices of NPC items, resource respawn rates and node density, etc. are all designed around that average number. It's an imperfect science and often has to be tweaked depending on how the game evolves. If you now add 1000 bots that do nothing but harvest resource nodes 24/7, the game design parameters are totally invalidated.
"The Court reaches the following conclusions on the basis of undisputed facts, construction of the EULA and TOU, and controlling Ninth Circuit law: Blizzard owns a valid copyright in the game client software, Blizzard has granted a limited license for WoW players to use the software
Which means that ANY program modifying the "copy" of World of Warcraft or any other game in the RAM is a copyright infringement. Any wall hack, speed hack, teleport hack etc. now not only makes you a despicable cheater, but is now actually against the law. Any unauthorized mod is a copyright infringement.
Which speaks to another point, gold farmers never do it by hand. How many times do you see "botters" in the world and know exactly what they are doing?
I view this the same way I viewed things when I played Rugby.
I was pretty good and trained real hard and was in the 1st team from the age of 17.
There were others who would cheat during training, like stop doing press-ups when the trainer was not looking at them.
They thought they were smart by avoiding the training.
They also couldn't understand why they never got into the 1st team.
I play a game for the whole experience, including the 'training' part.
Gathering resources for crafting or killing mobs/questing for experience is not only part of the game but it IS the game.
People that buy gold to try and evade parts of the game are missing the point of the game and are trying to shortcut it.
The same for sports, if you cheat you are missing the point.
It is like people that cheat in FPS games with aimbots and similar.
Totally miss the point of the game and playing.
Unfortunately they will never understand why because they were too stupid to understand it in the first place and are too stupid to understand it when is is shown to them.
"The Court reaches the following conclusions on the basis of undisputed facts, construction of the EULA and TOU, and controlling Ninth Circuit law: Blizzard owns a valid copyright in the game client software, Blizzard has granted a limited license for WoW players to use the software
Which means that ANY program modifying the "copy" of World of Warcraft or any other game in the RAM is a copyright infringement. Any wall hack, speed hack, teleport hack etc. now not only makes you a despicable cheater, but is now actually against the law. Any unauthorized mod is a copyright infringement.
Which speaks to another point, gold farmers never do it by hand. How many times do you see "botters" in the world and know exactly what they are doing?
Nice partial quote there.
"The Court reaches the following conclusions on the basis of undisputed facts, construction of the EULA and TOU, and controlling Ninth Circuit law: Blizzard owns a valid copyright in the game client software, Blizzard has granted a limited license for WoW players to use the software, use of the software with Glider falls outside the scope of the license established in section 4 of the TOU, use of Glider includes copying to RAM within the meaning of section 106 of the Copyright Act, users of WoW and Glider are not entitled to a section 117 defense, and Glider users therefore infringe Blizzard’s copyright. MDY does not dispute that the other requirements for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement are met, nor has MDY established a misuse defense. The Court accordingly will grant summary judgment in favor of Blizzard with respect to liability on the contributory and vicarious copyright infringement claims in Counts II and III."
So, it's more about Copyright and less about EULA.
EULAs are an extremely dodgy 'contract' and, aside from a few US game company shills, no-one would claim you can enforce much based on an EULA.
Copyright - yes - that is something most countries will support (because it's in the interest of almost everyone to do so) but an EULA based on US laws? No.
I would also hesitate to say "any" mod. Courts don't work that way. Case by case. And just because Blizzard gets a win in the US does not equal "world" either.
One other point - why is there this obsession with saying all Gold Famers are Chinese?
IIRC there was an article on a very large group of Gold Farmers operation in Montana. That's in Korea? (joke!)
Gold Farmers / Sellers are a business.
1/ If you have them operating in your game then your game design is the first thing you should look at. Why would people rather pay someone else to play the game to earn gold than do it themselves? If it was 'fun' (you know.... like in a game) they would want do it themselves.
2/ If you want to get rid of them make it non profitable to be there. Gold earnt / Time spent = less than break even income = not profitable = no gold sellers. Lots of ways to do that. One way might be to make your game more about game play and less about gear and loot.
EULAs should be invalid because they are 'contracts of adhesion', but, alas, the courts belong to corporations.
In any case, most of the arguments against gold buying seem to fail if games allow 'approved' dollar <-> gold exchanges within the game. No gold is being created here - people with lots of time to gather gold are making an exchange with people who have real-life $. I don't have a problem with that.
This genre going to it own tomb then raise up like mummy. lol
IMO , gold buyers not losers but cyber crime and sometime part of money laundering (i know there are some case but can't go detail) .
They are people that must be punish by the law .
The MMORPG publishers may try to blind they eyes but crime is still crime .
Personally , i think it time to remove trade system out of theme park MMORPG.
It don't have any role in nowadays MMORPG and become more game breaking element.
If it about alt character then you can share gold , item between character in same account through bank
or make alt accounts relate to your main account to help sharing item between characters .
so instead...a bitcoin-like throttled economy should be investigated. World's natural ressources (ore, plants etc) should be finite and set on certain cyclical and randomized spawns.
NPCs should only buy those resources, and reward gold. NPCs should only have a certain ammount of gold available, regenerating continuously ( a copper at a time).
Enjoy the bots that take all the resources and sell them to the NPCs and sell you the gold they made. They wont be grinding out mobs, they will just hover near resource nodes.
MMO games became just a grind. A grind towards the next shiny. There is no interesting, involving, emotionally touching, fun gameplay to be had. It's just work, you farm this dungeon X time to get new item. The fun comes from achieving something, not playing the game. And then, it soon becomes indeed a choice of "okay, I'm earning much IRL, so it's pointless for me to farm this shit for 10 hours when I can spend 1 hour of earnings to get it if I just buy gold".
Say, I'm playing XCom Enemy Within (Long War mod) right now. It's a strategy and tactics game. And I'd never pay IRL money to get, for example, more money (or resources) ingame, because it's FUN to earn money. in that game I do tactical missions (that I enjoy every moment of) and get loot I sell for money, and I get paid money for some of them too. That's how I get money and I love doing it! I don't play the game to achieve something, I play the game because it's enjoyable to play the game. And achievement is just part of the process (need X money to build a new item or new base facility).
See how it works? Paying IRL money to get money or resources in the game would be TO THE DETRIMENT of my pleasure in this game. It would break the balance, it would steal the enjoyment of fighting tactical missions with weapons and armor you have on you currently, it would just ruin the fun. However, in MMOs, it is earning money that is ruining the fun. You have to do shit X number of times over and over and that is not fun.
And it's also repetitive and modular as fuck! Before, instances and dungeons and raids took hours to finish! You'd get a group and you'd spend a whole day there, going around, finding new stuff you didn't see before, arguing which routes to take... Even if in the end nothing dropped for you, it was still an adventure, and you liked the PROCESS. It's all gone now! Dungeons are several minutes long (like, no more than half an hour), they feel like a linear path from start to finish, there's no fun quirks like hidden quests or lootables or just interesting nooks and crannies... raids are the same, just maybe a bit longer (but nothing fundamentally different). The feel of adventure and quest is gone! And so, it all becomes "Grind". You don't enjoy the game anymore, you just grind to get something... so why do it in your free time, when you can just buy it and get past the grind?
PS:
Dungeon Finder completely ruined it. I remember I tried to get my wife to play WoW for me for like 2nd time and we were in that dungeon and she was like "oh cool plant" or "I want to skin all those crocodiles" and group just went on and died because she wasn't healing them (because she was lagging behind looking around the place and skinning monsters and looking at all the loot she was getting") and I said to her to try to keep up with us, and eventually she just got frustrated and said "fuck it I'm not playing with you anymore"...
And then I slowly got it that she's right.
The dungeons stopped being dungeons, people just expect to get this over with as soon as possible. Noone expects someone actually to play this as a dungeon - walk around the place, enjoy the scenery, look at all the stuff that's dropping, read monster names, read the chat for monster interactions, try to check all the corners for alternate routes....
Sadly its a booming business. They wouldn't do it if the didn't have customers and if they weren't making money. I know in Asia this is pretty big business. Over here I was shocked to find out how many people buy gold in games.
But a decision made on the basis that someone has more money than time is one I understand.
I think its more to do with people valuing their time MORE than the money.
If that's the case - the game is clearly not fun.
As IstrebiteI said:
"The dungeons stopped being dungeons, people just expect to get this over with as soon as possible."
That's a fault on the part of the designers.
On this subject: How's Neverwinter for Gold Farmers? When I saw the videos for that game I saw exactly what IstrebiteI described. Linear dungeons to be run through as quickly as possible. They even provided a trail of Fairy Dust IIRC?
Buying "golds" from unauthorized sellers is quite simply cheating.
It's a case of "I want to play this game, but I don't like the rules, so I'll just break them whenever and however I want." It's the ultimate expression of selfishness in a game primarily designed to be played with other players.
If a game is designed to work with currency selling as an integral part of the game, then the effect of RMT is less noticeable. But the activity of "gold sellers" trying to generate huge pools of game currency for resale inevitably has a negative impact on the game play experience and economy of an MMO.
It also increases the operating cost of the game significantly, because there is an increased demand for Customer Service to deal with hacked and stolen accounts, complaints of botting and cheating, etc. It also means that developers have to devote a chunk of time (and money) to build in additional security measures in all facets of the game, as well as developing sophisticated auditing tools to monitor illegal activity.
Clearly you haven't been following MMO design for the past 10 years or so. These games are designed to be all about the solo player experience, there's very little interdependence or need for other players, in fact they are just a more intelligent (sometimes) NPC which you really aren't expected to care much about.
So it isn't surprising that people do things like bot, or buy gold, because they are enhancing their playing experience, which is clearly part of the core game design. Why should they care what impact it has to other people, as long as they can live with it?
I definitely prefer MMO's with a mechanism to purchase gold legitimately, such as EVE, Wildstar and others. Like you said, gold selling behavior breeds all sorts of evil activities, from hacked and stolen accounts, credit card fraud and of course, diverting development resources away from improving game play to combat these evils.
But as others pointed out, as long as there are activities in a MMORPG that are perceived as a waste of a players time, and these can be circumvented by cheating the system, people are going to attempt it.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I honestly have better things to do with my life than grind for 8 hours what I can get for 20m of RL effort.
The bitchers and moaners about gold sellers and how cash shops have pop'd up because of this type of behavior are just spitting out anecdotal nonsense. It's all about time management and efficiency for me.
Originally posted by DamonVile the people selling you the gold are the same people hacking accounts running bots and spamming chat. I don't care that they buy gold, I care that they support those people.
When you go to a sports game, do you buy a jersey because you're bored and not having fun? When you go to a concert, do you buy the shirt to help you enjoy the music more?
So in this example.. we're buying shirts from third party sellers a block away from the venue? Like the ones that say "Greatful Dead" or "Slipnot" on them?
Buying from authorized vendors is encouraged. Nowhere on my tickets does it say "Warning: Purchasing team gear may result in forfeiture of seats".
The discussion is about gold buyers, no? I know it;s easier to villify things and point fingers if you shift it to the sellers, specifically third party ones, but that's not the topic. GOOD SHOW! O7
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by DamonVile the people selling you the gold are the same people hacking accounts running bots and spamming chat. I don't care that they buy gold, I care that they support those people.
This.
When it comes to buying from third party sellers, I agree. Here's one of the login screen ads I had done a while back for EVE on exactly that:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by DamonVile the people selling you the gold are the same people hacking accounts running bots and spamming chat. I don't care that they buy gold, I care that they support those people.
This.
That's why IMO , the designers should remove the trade system.
I don't have any hate again gold buyer/seller . Tell the true , long ago i once buy and sell gold ,
Of course no bot while collecting gold , it mainly to pay part of the subs lol .and it ready long ago.
I can over look the bots (though when i never like them while still in the "business" because they make the gold price drop) ,
but hacking accounts is out of question .It pass the line so far that i can't accept anymore.
I didn't say all MMORPGs should remove the trade system , but theme park games all about collect item and self progress so it better to cut the trade.
In fact they ready cut a lot of the free to trade by using bound system.
But do it half is worst than remove it completely .
The instance theme parks not like old open world MMORPGs where things limited by re-spawn time ,
players run instances and stuff like something daily .
In those game , better to remove the trade system.
But i think people who want to buy gold to skip the game are good for business .
If you remove the trade and sell gold for them to buy then it will be huge income lol .
After all the games i played , those people always find way to "cheat" even if you ban them. Better give them what they want than clean the mess they cause.
Insert excuse why they can't get gear and need to buy gold.
Pretty lame imo..
Loser .. yes. Lame .. no .. because you can make money by selling stuff to them.
D3 let you do that before RoS, and i made enough to get RoS for free. I don't mind playing a game for free, and get some extra cash from playing. I don't *need* the cash but i have a lot less guilt spending AH money on gaming stuff.
The fault of "Gold Buying" is within the game and its developers. When a player finds his time in game is being devalued, then he will find a way to mitigate the problem, or quit.
During the peak of the competitive PvE scene in WoW:BC during the Muru wall, no amount of gold was going to get you the kill. Only the filthiest of backhanded tactics allowed premonition to take that world first.
Progress should be tied to feats of skill, not the stretching of ones wallet. Which is why I'm loving equalized PvE.
I honestly have better things to do with my life than grind for 8 hours what I can get for 20m of RL effort.
The bitchers and moaners about gold sellers and how cash shops have pop'd up because of this type of behavior are just spitting out anecdotal nonsense. It's all about time management and efficiency for me.
It's anecdotal nonsese that the people mass hacking accounts are doing it to supply gold to people buying it ? I'd love to hear why you think they're doing it then.
Buying gold from third party sites spports all the bad that goes along with it no matter how blind you pretend to be about it.
Losers is a strong word as you don't know these people, could be good people IRL who simply like to bypass grinds for whatever reason. Also why do people act like cheating in video games is something new?
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I used to buy gold when I played WoW. A friend had his own gold selling business and I would buy from him. Looking back, yeah it was stupid to buy and I regret doing it. My reasoning for it though was I did not have the time to farm the gold/mats needed to procure/make the reagents that were required of a person in a raiding guild. I certainly think it is stupid, and game makers should be more proactive in conrolling inflation. Again, I was stupid and will not do it.
Roses are red Violets are blue The reviewer has a mishapen head Which means his opinion is skewed ...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley
Comments
Most "MMO entreprenuers" haven't got a clue how the economy really works.
Case in point was the post earlier alleging that "you just buy all of item X on the market and then resell it at 10x the price" which supposedly wrecks the economy. Somehow that buyer acquired a vast amount of gold to enable them to buy-up all the supply of item X. Somehow the supposed buyers of the item have enough currency to now buy the item at vastly inflated prices. Yeah, riiiight, and everyone suddenly had massive piles of gold to spend because... ?
The economy is not destroyed because you are reselling everything you bought for 100x more gold. The economy was already destroyed if everyone can actually afford to buy those items at the new price.
MMO economies are designed based on an estimated player activity (i.e. the average player will earn X gold per hour) and prices of NPC items, resource respawn rates and node density, etc. are all designed around that average number. It's an imperfect science and often has to be tweaked depending on how the game evolves. If you now add 1000 bots that do nothing but harvest resource nodes 24/7, the game design parameters are totally invalidated.
Which means that ANY program modifying the "copy" of World of Warcraft or any other game in the RAM is a copyright infringement. Any wall hack, speed hack, teleport hack etc. now not only makes you a despicable cheater, but is now actually against the law. Any unauthorized mod is a copyright infringement.
Which speaks to another point, gold farmers never do it by hand. How many times do you see "botters" in the world and know exactly what they are doing?
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I view this the same way I viewed things when I played Rugby.
I was pretty good and trained real hard and was in the 1st team from the age of 17.
There were others who would cheat during training, like stop doing press-ups when the trainer was not looking at them.
They thought they were smart by avoiding the training.
They also couldn't understand why they never got into the 1st team.
I play a game for the whole experience, including the 'training' part.
Gathering resources for crafting or killing mobs/questing for experience is not only part of the game but it IS the game.
People that buy gold to try and evade parts of the game are missing the point of the game and are trying to shortcut it.
The same for sports, if you cheat you are missing the point.
It is like people that cheat in FPS games with aimbots and similar.
Totally miss the point of the game and playing.
Unfortunately they will never understand why because they were too stupid to understand it in the first place and are too stupid to understand it when is is shown to them.
Nice partial quote there.
"The Court reaches the following conclusions on the basis of undisputed facts, construction of the EULA and TOU, and controlling Ninth Circuit law: Blizzard owns a valid copyright in the game client software, Blizzard has granted a limited license for WoW players to use the software, use of the software with Glider falls outside the scope of the license established in section 4 of the TOU, use of Glider includes copying to RAM within the meaning of section 106 of the Copyright Act, users of WoW and Glider are not entitled to a section 117 defense, and Glider users therefore infringe Blizzard’s copyright. MDY does not dispute that the other requirements for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement are met, nor has MDY established a misuse defense. The Court accordingly will grant summary judgment in favor of Blizzard with respect to liability on the contributory and vicarious copyright infringement claims in Counts II and III."
So, it's more about Copyright and less about EULA.
EULAs are an extremely dodgy 'contract' and, aside from a few US game company shills, no-one would claim you can enforce much based on an EULA.
Copyright - yes - that is something most countries will support (because it's in the interest of almost everyone to do so) but an EULA based on US laws? No.
I would also hesitate to say "any" mod. Courts don't work that way. Case by case. And just because Blizzard gets a win in the US does not equal "world" either.
One other point - why is there this obsession with saying all Gold Famers are Chinese?
IIRC there was an article on a very large group of Gold Farmers operation in Montana. That's in Korea? (joke!)
Gold Farmers / Sellers are a business.
1/ If you have them operating in your game then your game design is the first thing you should look at. Why would people rather pay someone else to play the game to earn gold than do it themselves? If it was 'fun' (you know.... like in a game) they would want do it themselves.
2/ If you want to get rid of them make it non profitable to be there. Gold earnt / Time spent = less than break even income = not profitable = no gold sellers. Lots of ways to do that. One way might be to make your game more about game play and less about gear and loot.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
EULAs should be invalid because they are 'contracts of adhesion', but, alas, the courts belong to corporations.
In any case, most of the arguments against gold buying seem to fail if games allow 'approved' dollar <-> gold exchanges within the game. No gold is being created here - people with lots of time to gather gold are making an exchange with people who have real-life $. I don't have a problem with that.
Now the gold-seller spam is another issue...
Enjoy the bots that take all the resources and sell them to the NPCs and sell you the gold they made. They wont be grinding out mobs, they will just hover near resource nodes.
The gold selling bots - extreme annoyance.
The people who buy gold with real money from 3rd party gold sellers are:
-Disrespectful to the developers and players of the game
-Lazy
-Destroying the game's economy
Originally posted by Arskaaa
"when players learned tacticks in dungeon/raids, its bread".
MMO games became just a grind. A grind towards the next shiny. There is no interesting, involving, emotionally touching, fun gameplay to be had. It's just work, you farm this dungeon X time to get new item. The fun comes from achieving something, not playing the game. And then, it soon becomes indeed a choice of "okay, I'm earning much IRL, so it's pointless for me to farm this shit for 10 hours when I can spend 1 hour of earnings to get it if I just buy gold".
Say, I'm playing XCom Enemy Within (Long War mod) right now. It's a strategy and tactics game. And I'd never pay IRL money to get, for example, more money (or resources) ingame, because it's FUN to earn money. in that game I do tactical missions (that I enjoy every moment of) and get loot I sell for money, and I get paid money for some of them too. That's how I get money and I love doing it! I don't play the game to achieve something, I play the game because it's enjoyable to play the game. And achievement is just part of the process (need X money to build a new item or new base facility).
See how it works? Paying IRL money to get money or resources in the game would be TO THE DETRIMENT of my pleasure in this game. It would break the balance, it would steal the enjoyment of fighting tactical missions with weapons and armor you have on you currently, it would just ruin the fun. However, in MMOs, it is earning money that is ruining the fun. You have to do shit X number of times over and over and that is not fun.
And it's also repetitive and modular as fuck! Before, instances and dungeons and raids took hours to finish! You'd get a group and you'd spend a whole day there, going around, finding new stuff you didn't see before, arguing which routes to take... Even if in the end nothing dropped for you, it was still an adventure, and you liked the PROCESS. It's all gone now! Dungeons are several minutes long (like, no more than half an hour), they feel like a linear path from start to finish, there's no fun quirks like hidden quests or lootables or just interesting nooks and crannies... raids are the same, just maybe a bit longer (but nothing fundamentally different). The feel of adventure and quest is gone! And so, it all becomes "Grind". You don't enjoy the game anymore, you just grind to get something... so why do it in your free time, when you can just buy it and get past the grind?
PS:
Dungeon Finder completely ruined it. I remember I tried to get my wife to play WoW for me for like 2nd time and we were in that dungeon and she was like "oh cool plant" or "I want to skin all those crocodiles" and group just went on and died because she wasn't healing them (because she was lagging behind looking around the place and skinning monsters and looking at all the loot she was getting") and I said to her to try to keep up with us, and eventually she just got frustrated and said "fuck it I'm not playing with you anymore"...
And then I slowly got it that she's right.
The dungeons stopped being dungeons, people just expect to get this over with as soon as possible. Noone expects someone actually to play this as a dungeon - walk around the place, enjoy the scenery, look at all the stuff that's dropping, read monster names, read the chat for monster interactions, try to check all the corners for alternate routes....
If it destroys a games economy or is as a result of botting, hacking etc, rather than simple farming then it irritates me.
But a decision made on the basis that someone has more money than time is one I understand.
I think its more to do with people valuing their time MORE than the money.
If that's the case - the game is clearly not fun.
As IstrebiteI said:
"The dungeons stopped being dungeons, people just expect to get this over with as soon as possible."
That's a fault on the part of the designers.
On this subject: How's Neverwinter for Gold Farmers? When I saw the videos for that game I saw exactly what IstrebiteI described. Linear dungeons to be run through as quickly as possible. They even provided a trail of Fairy Dust IIRC?
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
Clearly you haven't been following MMO design for the past 10 years or so. These games are designed to be all about the solo player experience, there's very little interdependence or need for other players, in fact they are just a more intelligent (sometimes) NPC which you really aren't expected to care much about.
So it isn't surprising that people do things like bot, or buy gold, because they are enhancing their playing experience, which is clearly part of the core game design. Why should they care what impact it has to other people, as long as they can live with it?
I definitely prefer MMO's with a mechanism to purchase gold legitimately, such as EVE, Wildstar and others. Like you said, gold selling behavior breeds all sorts of evil activities, from hacked and stolen accounts, credit card fraud and of course, diverting development resources away from improving game play to combat these evils.
But as others pointed out, as long as there are activities in a MMORPG that are perceived as a waste of a players time, and these can be circumvented by cheating the system, people are going to attempt it.
The ends really do justify the means.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I honestly have better things to do with my life than grind for 8 hours what I can get for 20m of RL effort.
The bitchers and moaners about gold sellers and how cash shops have pop'd up because of this type of behavior are just spitting out anecdotal nonsense. It's all about time management and efficiency for me.
This.
The discussion is about gold buyers, no? I know it;s easier to villify things and point fingers if you shift it to the sellers, specifically third party ones, but that's not the topic. GOOD SHOW! O7
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
When it comes to buying from third party sellers, I agree. Here's one of the login screen ads I had done a while back for EVE on exactly that:
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Loser.
Insert excuse why they can't get gear and need to buy gold.
Pretty lame imo..
That's why IMO , the designers should remove the trade system.
I don't have any hate again gold buyer/seller . Tell the true , long ago i once buy and sell gold ,
Of course no bot while collecting gold , it mainly to pay part of the subs lol .and it ready long ago.
I can over look the bots (though when i never like them while still in the "business" because they make the gold price drop) ,
but hacking accounts is out of question .It pass the line so far that i can't accept anymore.
I didn't say all MMORPGs should remove the trade system , but theme park games all about collect item and self progress so it better to cut the trade.
In fact they ready cut a lot of the free to trade by using bound system.
But do it half is worst than remove it completely .
The instance theme parks not like old open world MMORPGs where things limited by re-spawn time ,
players run instances and stuff like something daily .
In those game , better to remove the trade system.
But i think people who want to buy gold to skip the game are good for business .
If you remove the trade and sell gold for them to buy then it will be huge income lol .
After all the games i played , those people always find way to "cheat" even if you ban them. Better give them what they want than clean the mess they cause.
Loser .. yes. Lame .. no .. because you can make money by selling stuff to them.
D3 let you do that before RoS, and i made enough to get RoS for free. I don't mind playing a game for free, and get some extra cash from playing. I don't *need* the cash but i have a lot less guilt spending AH money on gaming stuff.
Money is the root of all evil, whether it's real or not.
The fault of "Gold Buying" is within the game and its developers. When a player finds his time in game is being devalued, then he will find a way to mitigate the problem, or quit.
During the peak of the competitive PvE scene in WoW:BC during the Muru wall, no amount of gold was going to get you the kill. Only the filthiest of backhanded tactics allowed premonition to take that world first.
Progress should be tied to feats of skill, not the stretching of ones wallet. Which is why I'm loving equalized PvE.
It's anecdotal nonsese that the people mass hacking accounts are doing it to supply gold to people buying it ? I'd love to hear why you think they're doing it then.
Buying gold from third party sites spports all the bad that goes along with it no matter how blind you pretend to be about it.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
Roses are red
Violets are blue
The reviewer has a mishapen head
Which means his opinion is skewed
...Aldous.MF'n.Huxley