This is the second time we've gathered for an RLMMO debate. Every week, we take a specific MMO game mechanic and do our best to prove, once and for all, why your opinions are wrong. Everyone gets one shot to state their case, and can only return if they need to defend their position.
We return this week to talk about gold farming (Collecting in-game currency or loot for the sole purpose of selling it for real money). Is it cheating, or is a legitimate way to catch up to your friends, when you simply don't have the time to kill eight million boars?
We also discuss the idea that a developer could destroy the market by selling the gold themselves. Will it be the end of our farming woes or will it just bring about new problems?
Once again, RLMMO members worldwide have gathered around the roundtable to settle the matter, once and for all.
Now, this looks like a radical view form someone like me, but hear me out.
The economy of many games, especially WoW where this runs rampant, are based on gotta-haves. In WoW, you have to have the better sword, the fastest mount, the best armor. Well, that costs a ton of gold. How do you get gold? Grinding, looting, and selling loot.
Well, to the casual player, gold is just something that is hard to get. The drop rates don't keep up with the need to improve your gear until you hit about level fifty. Even then, it's tough. Unless you're grinding like a freak, you can't afford a damn thing on the auction house. It isn't even a luxury anymore, you need better protection and more DPS to survive.
Now why are the prices so high? You would think that the auction house prices would have to be somewhat in line with what you can sell the item to a vendor for. Why? That's the "suggested retail price" set up by the developers. The auction house should match or be lower than NPC vendors. But they don't, plain and simple. Inflation in WoW is insane. The only way to survive if you're a casual player is to buy gold. Now some powergamers claim it's unfair because it favors those with cash. Sorry Bubba, I have a job and can't play 24/7. Paying ten bucks to get me enough gold to keep up is just the price I pay to play in my spare time.
Do you really want to know the reason the industry loathes gold-selling? They don’t get a time from it. If they really want to turn into the skid, they'd just start selling gold in-game for cheap and pocket every dime. Five bucks for two-hundred gold would cripple companies and put most out of business. A simple solution to a perceived problem.
To me it just sounds like bullshit. My problem's not with the gold farmers. I don't care who makes a profit off of this, I just don't want other players to have an advantage over me just because they can afford to throw away fifty bucks on some video game gold. Sure, some people are going to buy money and characters off of eBay either way. I don't think the solution is to encourage it, though. I think a lot more people would be suckered into buying gold if a screen popped up while they were logging in, offering cheap in-game currency (to undersell the gold farmers), cheap armor (to beat the eBayers), and maybe a cool new titles for your character (to milk the fanboys).
Hell, it'd be convenient, too! They already have your credit card number and your character information. They could have it ready by the time you logged in!
There's a reason SOE supports this idea. They'll make a fortune, and it'll only cost them the gameplay.
Well, this is the one silver lining I see to the "pay for frills as you go, base game is free" MMO model that SOE has been talking about, in that gold farmers would basically be frozen out.
But still, the same thing would take place. I am with you on thinking that it's unfair for someone with more money than you to be able to turn that into an in game advantage. But it's been going on, and will always go on. SWG has always had it bad with credit sellers, "Jedbay", etc. I know of people who paid over a thousand dollars to buy a Jedi. I spent seven months just to unlock mine, and then two months more to grind him. Fair? No. Reality? Yes.
I never bought credits in SWG, but did it in another game, where the money grind was too much to bother with for the time I had available.
In general, I agree with Shayde's analysis, so I won't re-hash it. The biggest problem that an MMO has with farmers, that I can see, is how they distort in-game mechanics. If you make money by camping a place where loot spawns, then the spawn point is dominated by farmers. Geo Cave, anyone? This simply can't be good for the overall experience of playing the game for non-farmers. And anything that reduces paying customer enjoyment of the game, in favor of third-party for-profit organizations, is bad. Bad.
So, I think an intelligent MMO recognizes that farming occurs, and designs systems to deal with it. SWG could have used a squad of specially chosen assassins that went around eliminating AFK campers and bots.
The problem I see is that, no matter how easy it is to make money, the seller of such items always seems to try to rip-off the buyer. I’ve seen items on WOW go for one to two thousand [gold]. People like to make up their own prices, and those prices are always 150% more then the item's worth. The only time I ever bought money was in SWG, and that was because it was hard to keep up. I have considered buying WOW gold, but people know [about the gold farmers], so they turn around and sell their items for even more gold just to grab a bigger piece of that person’s cash.
Buying any sort of money in a game ruins that game for everyone. It’s cheating, but like a few others have mentioned, if you want to keep up with everyone, but lack the cash, and the time to get that cash, it leaves little to no options. Not only that, but buying gold gives a huge advantage to the crafters. They are able to buy what they need to either grind up, or buy what they need to make whatever items so they can sell for profit. This is where gold buying hurts the most.
Crafting itself doesn't cause gold to come into the game. Usually, crafters pay the most into the money sinks, so they are responsible for money leaving the game. It is the credit farmers that cause money to be minted in the game. The more money that is minted, the more inflation you get.
It can cost a lot to start a crafting business, and some simply do not have the time to grind out that gold. In this case, gold buying allows crafting to be accessible to more people, which is a good thing. It is a bad thing only if the gold came from some guy in Asia just grinding gold out. Of course, buying that gold creates the opportunity for the guy in Asia to farm. A system is needed to weed out the farmers but allow free trade between the actual gamers.
That's why I like in-game lootables that you can sell for gold to NPC. If it is easy enough to get these, then what's the point of buying gold, other than just laziness? Granted, people will always try to farm them, but if enough people can get there hands on them, what's the point in buying gold? Really, there is no easy solution a dev can provide because, in the end, the solution lies with the honesty of the players themselves.
The only real detriment caused by gold farming is the alleged side effects on the in game economy and the fact that players who can afford to buy gold don't have to put as much time into the game to get the same things that others spend hours getting.
For the first point, I think that making the economy entirely player-controlled provides a good solution. For the second, I think we would all agree that no one wants to spend hours grinding, so if the game maker insists on including a grind in the game, then being able to skip that grind is a good thing.
The good things about gold farming include the elimination of some grinding, some fun and easy kills and people with a language barrier to interact with, and the feeding of poor Chinese families. As I said above, no one wants to grind, so eliminating that in any possible is good as far as I am concerned. Second, having a big group of players who speak a different language adds a global feel to the game. I loved killing French people in SWG and I loved to interact with and kill farmers in WoW. It just adds an extra cultural element to the game somewhat. Finally, the people doing the farming are mostly poor Chinese people who get this job as an alternative to low paying manual labor so they can help feed their families. Granted they should be paid more than they are, but that is just a whole separate debate on the human rights of China. I like the idea of being able to skip a numbing grind for a few bucks with the side effect of a poor family being fed.
They'd have to sell it for practically nothing to beat the farmers. At the moment, you can buy gold in WoW for about twenty cents a piece. Say Blizzard cuts that price in half, to make sure all farmers are forced out of the market, then you'll have people buying fifty pieces of gold for five bucks. If they offered prices like that, poor as I am, even I'd have to buy a little.
Plus, most of these farmers are kids that are just trying to make a little more money for their families. It's not forced onto them. Whose to say they wouldn't work for a lot less? It still beats starving to death
Plus, this gives companies that ability to create the supply and demand. It would take virtually no work at all, on their part, to slow drop rates and increase the amount of gold they sell that month. You can't tell me these companies are above doing something like that.
But it isn't the farmer who is setting the price. Big companies who buy the gold from the farmers set the price. Their profit margin is obscene. You do realize that THEY pay a farmer less than a penny a gold, don't you?
Gold has been crazy high, or dirt cheap (I was buying at five bucks for two-hundred). Sure, the farmers are a pitiable lot, but it's the IGE's of the world who would go out of business.
Still, no company has the right to bitch when they know damn well they can either ban farmers and chase their tails.. or just put them all under in a second. They'd be making money instead of spending it to fight farmers.
Ubaigold? The demand will never end. Undercutting the supply is their only solution.
Even if there were no Chinese gold/credit farmers there would be other players who would spend their gametime farming. I'm sure some of them would do it just to make an in-game profit and not to sell the proceeds on eBay or through private transactions. Before long the wealth would be concentrated in the hands of these players and their friends, and possibly in guilds organized around this purpose.
In short, not a lot would change -- there would still be some players with lots of free time profiting from those that don't, and lots of farmed cash in the economy to offset the "legit" cash earned by those playing at a more leisurely pace. But since most of the visible, organized, for-pay farmers are -- OMG!! -- foreigners, people some of bring the same sort of intensity to the issue that they do when talking about the US/Mexico border.
Personally if Player X is helping Comrade Credit Farmer feed his family while Player Y has the time to spend five more hours a week farming to achieve the same virtual standard of living, I don't have a problem with it. All we really have to sell is our time anyway.
I did my share of aimless credit farming in SWG during the bleak and lonely months after the NGE kicked in, and most of the other farmers and profiteers I hung out with were regular players more into the economic sim than the "challenge" of killing thousands of mobs. Yet everyone's quick to blame the oppressed Chinese guy while giving a pass to the perpetually grounded high school students and entrepreneurial gamers trying to recoup the money they've wasted on subscriptions.
First, no matter how cheap company offers gold, the black market will still offer it cheaper. Look at Second life. Lindens sell Linden Dollars directly to customers, but still there is a market for "china farmers" there too. They are not farming but they are playing Stock exchange with money they buy and sell. Also, as Publisher you can't set cheap price, because you will have situation, where players will buy gold from you instead of farming themselves, and at same time you will introduce large amounts of gold into game which will eventually turn you into china farmer yourself, through destroying economy yourself.
Second, this what i will propose, will create hate in this tread. And that is taxes. Not the taxes you have to pay in RL so someone eventually gets rich (banks, state, etc.) but taxes as money sink.
How would it work? Every monday at 8 am of server local time, the amount of gold you own will be written in database. On next monday 8am, new value will be written and and difference on these 2 amounts will be evaluated. Now, every player will pay 10% (15%, 20% or 30%) tax on difference. Example: he had 1000 gold, now he has 2000g, difference is 1000 and he pays 10% which is 100g.
It may sound stupid at first, but it is essential, because you have a money sink that hurts just these gold hoarders, not the people who craft or buy stuff. At same time you can implement roleplay factor, where npcs come to you to collect tax, and if you fight them off you do not have to pay it, but you are getting to be fugitive.
I know i know... RL has taxes, we do not need taxes in games, but we have to find way to take gold out of the game.
The MMO economy is one that should try to mirror real currency economies in some logical way.
That sounds simple. It isn't. Real economies are not perfect economies. They are not populated by people who follow all of the rules. There are black markets, Mobs, gangs, and plenty of illegal industries that are all components of our economy.
Okay, so what is my opinion and how would I attempt to manage an economy that people naturally try to find ways to circumvent?
Currency dupe bugs and things of that nature need to be found and dealt with BEFORE the game goes live if possible. I myself truly like the idea of a game taking over the outside currency market themselves by becoming the seller but to be quite honest, I don't think that will work.
Why? Well if the game company is selling the currency then what would be the limits? At least with the current system of currency farmers you have some restriction in place now that are working.
What are they:
#1 the monthly fee to run the farmer account
#2 So long as no bots are used, then someone has to be physically playing the character and that also costs real money.
#3 Supply and Demand. If a farm company has less currency then you want to buy on the server you are on, then you have to wait for the order to be filled.
#4 Greed. The more money a farm company can get away with charging the more they WILL charge.
Add all of that together and you have some form of blackmarket that does balance itself even if it works on the fringe or outside of the rule of the game. If the game company itself decides to sell the currency then there is nothing in place to provide balance. That would mean you would have to create artificial limitations that would on one hand provide currency cheap enough to the public so that it would not be worth it for private vendors to attempt the market and on the other hand provide that same currency at a high enough price that it is not bought up so readily that it creates market floods.
If you create market floods then the economy will never be reliable BUT if you can devise a way to monitor the economy and then regulate your artificial limitations to the price you sell the currency at, then a game company would be only smart to take over the blackmarket so that it could increase its profit margin and control how the economy fluctuates to some degree.
I honestly do not see currency blackmarkets as a real threat to anything because it mirrors the type of economy we live in. I think the current cookie cutter economy systems work well and that the blackmarket vendors serve their purpose as well. I do believe that if you found an equation that was like a finger on the pulse of the economy such as: take the low average or maybe even minimum average price of 3 common daily required goods (food, potions, etc) plus the price of 3 crafted weapons, plus 3 crafted armor pieces, plus 3 of each major vendor category and divide the total by the number of items to get your base economic control number.
That number can then be used in a simple equation to determine the health of the economy and what the standard sale rate should be. If the number goes up, that is inflation and you must sell currency at a higher price until the economy leveled out again.
I am sure if one of you know an economist or maybe a statistician then there is most likely some equations out there that can be applied to this.
Anyway, as you can see I am bored enough to type a load of crap. Hope it helps but forgive me if it is a little bungled. I have had a bad stomach flue that has had me tossing cookies for two days and I have had zero sleep in that time as well.
I'm not used to WordPress, and I had to go in by hand and add all those <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">, <br />, etc. by hand. I have no idea what most of these things mean, either. I just kept messing around with them until it came out looking how I wanted it to.
So, if you notice any problems with it, just let me know. I expect there'll be a few...
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