Gold Farmers: Hate ‘Em?
How much do gold farmers bother you? Game designers sometimes have to make decisions because we know gold farmers will be present in a game. Usually these decisions don’t negatively impact normal gameplay, but often it’s a choice between two possible designs, and one is chosen over the other because part of its merit is that it either negatively impacts gold farmers or encourages them to stay out of the way of normal players. How much do you care if you notice bots or players farming gold? Do you only care if it interrupts your gameplay?
Even though they barely make any physical difference to me I really don’t like them. The tells and in game mails really annoy me to no end.
In EQ2 they actually effected my game play as they were frequently in the areas I wanted to be and chain pulling.
This is one of the reasons why I miss trade based economies. We should all go back to the tunnel and shout about trades! Not really but it does have merit.
It would be neat to go back to a game economy where trades were a big deal and currency was scarce and not as valued. I suppose they’d just farm the items though. At least they’d have to interact to trade.
The only times I really care are when my gameplay is impacted directly either by spamming my chat/mail or by making it more difficult for me to gain xp or loot. The fact that someone is farming gold/items and selling it to someone else I really don’t mind. People have sold things in games to other players for real money since the MUD days.
The part that really annoys me is that if they’re camping a rare spawn only to sell off the drop. If someone was perma-camping a rare but I knew they were going to use whatever dropped I’m bothered much less by that even though it is impacting my gameplay to the same extent.
I only care about the spam. But I hate advertising on tv, radio, and other parts of the internet also. In general, I see gold farmers as performing a public service in the same way as any other actor meeting demand in a market..
I loathe them whether I encounter them or not, but with a special actinic passion when I run across them in-game. I could put forth a cogent argument as to why, but I can’t be bothered right now so instead I’ll just leave it as an unsupported statement. You didn’t say we couldn’t!
Gold farmers who then in turn sell it to make a profit or work for a company that makes its profit based on selling gold/items: despise greatly.
/begin_rant_about_in_game_economies
I believe a game system should be implemented where the players don’t get an option to manipulate the auction house. If you want to sell something, you sell it to a merchant at a set price and there is code that then sets the price of what it is old to the public via the auction house. Sure, not perfect, but at least only one group of people have control over the pricing and have the EULA to back up their decisions to make changes to it.
I believe giving players control over an economy has only led to the issues we have now where people see the need to buy gold to keep up with the gamers who have the time to just farm for gold. It’s great that people want to be able to set their own prices and give tons of money to alts, but methods can be implemented for the open sharing of money between characters on the same account as well as methods for donating items to other players by perhaps buying them on their behalf from the auction house.
Players have enough options as it is in a game, we don’t need to let them destroy in-game economies and skew the balance of the economy just because they ask for it. Heck, they ask for tons of things that are never given as well, I have no clue why it’s a standard that in-game economy is just something that should be left up to the players. We all know it’s going to get fubarred in the end if you do.
/end_rant_about_in_game_economics
Now, gold farmers who just farm gold to afford ridiculous priced items and lead to eventual inflation of prices across the board? They’re acceptable, but my rant above applies to them as well.
Spamming the channels with offers to sell gold, items or leveling for real money drives me absolutely bananas when I’m actually trying to pay attention to what an NPC or other player in-game is saying.
However, more than the farmer themselves, I get choked at the twits who enable these gold-farmers by purchasing their services and I think that whatever punishment is meted out to deal with gold-sellers ought to apply doubly to the meat-heads that buy gold, items or power-leveling services.
Like JuJutsu, my main complaint about them is the spam.
I also think that rather than try and block and or defeat them, designers should be looking at ways to allow it, or even create new economic concepts (TBD) that make the concept a non-problem.
I think the MMO/Gold Farmer thing is like the record industry and file sharing/music sharing. They do all kinds of things to stop it, block it, and sue people to stop it – and guess what; it doesn’t stop. Earth to MMO Developers/RIAA. You can’t kill it.
What they (developers/RIAA) need to do is think, “Gee – this is a big thing. There is a big demand for people wanting to buy gold. Maybe we should figure out how to work WITH the trend here rather than try and stop it!”
Suppose for example WoW had special “RMT” servers. If you were on one, you could buy gold from Blizzard. And Blizzard made it competitively priced so the gold farmers would have to struggle. Or let players buy gold in any server, but have them be marked somehow – sign on their back saying “HELLO I AM TOO LAZY TO EARN GOLD THE REAL WAY SO BOUGHT IT!”
Or imagine having prices in a world change based on the amount of gold in the world. If a lot of players start “hording” gold (via purchases), then monster drops start drying up, markets start selling things for more, repair costs go up, etc.
Novel concept really. Recognizing customer demand and doing what you can to meet it or somehow work with it.
More ideas. Create penalties for transactions – like withdrawl symptoms when you part with large amounts of gold. Gold farmers are doing tons of money transfers, right? Your average player doesn’t, right? There must be some way to leverage that fact.
What else do gold farmers do? They stay in the same place for a long time, killing things over and over. So why not build in a system where any player who repeatedly kills in the same place for a length of time (beyond your typical questing needs) would have an increasing chance of encountering a pre-aggro’d “avenger”. Kill a lot of Yetis in one place and sooner or later you get attacked by an “Avenger Yeti” that is out to get you.
Another thing to think of. In many ways, blocking gold farmers impedes the gameplay of the people who want to buy gold. Ergo, some percentage of your customers will be irritated you are blocking gold farming. Honestly, beyond the spam and watching someone get good gear via bought gold instead of hard work, gold farmers have minor impact on gameplay compared to some other behaviors (IMO).
I think that players have come to expect a certain degree of botting and gold farming to go on in MMO’s today, but the key is to not let it get out of hand. Botters and gold farmers stick out like a sore thumb, and the developers have the tools to track these people down, check their messages, find out their links of suppliers and buyers and enforce disciplinary action. I know it would take a bit of extra manpower but if you could assign a few people to strictly look over and enforce these policies, they could keep these botters and farmers down to a minimum. I rather have the botters and gold farmers handled in a manner mentioned above than having to pick a design based on what the gold farmers are going to do. Does the design that negatively impacts gold farmers come at the cost of negatively impacting the encounter? If thats the case then it seems your punishing everyone because of the gold farmers.
If your gameplay is such that buying gold is necessary to compete in power level, then gold-selling will be widespread, and the game will fail. This will not be because of the ubiquitous gold-seller spam, but rather because the game is another WoW clone.
In short, grind for fluff = ok = RMT for fluff is ok
grind for power = fail = RMT for power is fail
I’m with Melf on this one. Though it does make me wonder how this would work in a game where competition was required for advancement…
Been lurking here for ever but had to come out of the shadows to say something about goldsellers. I hate them so much. I am playing Runes of Magic atm and the constant goldseller spam is driving me mad, I have a very long ignore list, it seems particularly bad in that game I dont know why. Also there is constant spam of developer scrolling text saying Anyone who is caught buying gold blah blah blah. So, I hate them thanks for letting me complain
As many others have stated, I just find the ads/ spam annoying. Coming across a bot, it can be an amusing distraction to mess with their macros/ glider program by banishing mobs, fearing them, etc. I typically don’t play on a PVP server, so I’ve yet been able to have the joy of ganking a farmer.
It’d be really nice to find a way to discourage RL money being spent to buy in-game items, but honestly if I had a choice of developers spending months doing this vs. additional content, I’d say let the parasites co-exist and spend time on making good, wholesome content.
Vald
@Rozanna
For complaining, I highly recommend the Nerfbat Forums. Out here we’re at the mercey of whatever topic Schwader posts. Inside we can start a new thread when we want to gripe about something
oops make that Schwayder
Sigh, I give up
Thanks JuJutsu, I do lurk there too
I hate them at a level I would have previously thought impossible to achieve.
It’s the devaluation of in-game currency. It’s the farming that interrupts a regular player’s gameplay. It’s the SPAM, the freaking SPAM.
Way back nearly some 10 (oh my gosh) years ago now, regular players with more money than they could ever spend in-game would sell it on Ebay. They never advertised or spammed. I rolled my eyes at this and at the players that bought it in the games I played (EQ1/DAoC). The immense, unbelievable hatred didn’t truly begin until I couldn’t finish quests time and time again due to bot-trains, and the spam started and hasn’t stopped since. Now I hate with pre-meditated tarring-feathering-drawing-and-quartering strength any gold farmer, seller, or buyer. I don’t discriminate.
Perhaps every city should have gibbets and stocks where the avatars of caught farmers are hung. It would at least entertain the farmer haters :^)
Back on topic. Gold farmers are simply taking advantage of a flawed economy; one with infinite sources and infinite sinks combined with essentially fixed pricing. Every player has the freedom to print their own money, and no merchant will refuse it nor raise prices. There is no supply and demand EXCEPT FOR GOLD, of which there is an infinite supply.
Hence, gold farmers thrive becaus they can game the flawed system, and meet demand, which is driven by player greed and “I want it and I want it now!” attitude. It’s win win for gold farmers. It’s supply and demand delivered via a flawed economy.
Question: does Eve Online have gold farmers? I think the answer is no but I’m not sure. If it is no, the reason why is becaus it’s a dynamic economy.
The spam bothers me a lot and I expect game developers to provide a simple, fast reporting function, and to suspend spammers almost immediately. If this fast reaction is facilitated by an automatism or attentive customer support I do not care about, just that I will not get a spam tell from a reported player twice.
Other than that? Not so much. I do not play MMOs competitively and do care little about how other players achieve their game goals. If someone thinks that paying RL cash is preferable to gaining items or levels … that is their decision. I play MMOs to play, not to achieve, if something is not fun on some level, I do not do it.
As mentioned above by waldo , a game that requires excessive gold is a badly designed game. A well designed game economy does not require gold farming for day-to-day playing, it only uses luxury items as major money sinks. How the game economy develops is independent of money volume, it only depends on time invested versus advantage gained. So the concept of inflation is actually meaningless in a game economy, growth of money does not have the RL consequences which make inflation harmful in the real world (i.e. menu costs and the wage price spiral). The use of “required” money sinks is thereby a useless concept, one that not only annoys players, but additionally encourages the services of gold sellers.
In consequence, game developers have all the tools available to keep gold selling out of their game. Good, fast reporting and suspension of spammers and under-emphasis of money for game play.
Personally I think MMOs somewhat brought this on themselves. Earth and Beyond had a huge population of gold farmers and Ebay auctions. But not once did I get a spam email or tell from them. Why? Because they had a public forum to advertise in.
Give these so called gold farmers a venue, then they won’t have to resort to bothering people via tells or emails. If they use exploits or bots, ban them, flog them, then sacrifice them to the Raven god.
Mod parent up! +1 to magicktrick
It’s a battle you can’t win without designing your entire economy around innovative solutions.
1) Make gold bind on pickup
2) Set ceiling prices on AH based on item/power level
Take all the time, effort and thought currently being designated on how to stop gold sellers from the development team and put them on something else to make the game better.
(I would still let gold be transferred between characters on the same account)
@magictrick:
The only issue with that is that the entire game economy suffers from inflated pricing. So the people not participating in gold purchasing (will use the word “illegal” here, because we aren’t talking about a company owned and endorsed RMT model) end up bearing the brunt of not being able to participate fully in the economy without either a) a ton of free time or b) buying gold. In essence you are just driving regular players into the arms of the illegal sellers to enjoy the game.
If you give them a venue, you are blessing it – why do that? Why let 3rd party companies control your economy? Might as well have the developers sell it themselves. No bots, no hacked accounts, et al.
Chris F:
That would make the game less fun for everyone. You can’t make drastic design decisions like that just because of gold farmers. How many times have you helped or been helped by a friend with money or items? That would be gone forever. Setting ceiling prices on the auction house (unless they’re reasonably high, which would make it fine for gold farmers still) would take the market out of the hands of the players, which sucks.