Gold Trading Exposed: Introduction Comments by Nick Ryan

im supprised the money grabbing cnuts at blizzard havent started legally selling gold yet :P

The link to Nick Ryan's website is pointing to a Eurogamer address and therefore borked.

The only problem I can see is mmo's refusing to just put a gold trading service officially into the game or get rid of the need for gold entirely.

There's a world of difference between gold sellers and gold farmers.

Gold farming companies are the sweatshops of the MMO world, but the gold farmers never sell directly to players. Farmers values their high level accounts too much.

Gold selling companies are borderline and sometimes over the borderline criminals. They buy the gold from the farming companies, put a 50% markup on it and then annoy the hell out of players by spamming trade and local chat channels. Sellers dont value their own accounts since they only need a low level to mail gold, so banning them doesn't hit them the same way a farmer gets hit.

To keep costs down gold sellers will obtain accounts as cheaply as possible, and nothing is cheaper than stealing someone's character or credit card details:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/halifa...

Get the MMO companies to set up an online auction house for items, take a certain % fee like ebay does, integrate it into the game to make sure that sales are legit. Blizzard et al are like the music industry in that respect, trying to apply broken models to realword situations. If they accepted that they can't stop the trading, then finding a way to make it secure and profit from it is the next best thing. As the article says no amount of powerups/itmes/gold will turn a rubbish player into a good player.

Mind you I never have and never will play an MMO so personally don't care either way.

When I played wow, I had nothing against buying gold. It seems like the clever thing to do, really.

I look at it like this:
It takes me x (x= many hours) hours to farm 1000g.
It takes me one hour to work some overtime, and then buy gold for the money I earnt working overtime.

Its more than 10 times faster to "grind work", and buy gold. Simple as that.

Now you may ask me "But Krelle, didnt you enjoy wow?"
"I did enjoy wow very much. Just not all parts of it. And even if I dont really despise grinding for gold, I think there are better ways to invest that time."

And if the above reason aint enough, I feel like a king when I put some rice on a poor mans table (:

Eve Online has tackled this problem somewhat with buying playtime for in-game money. Not sure on the effectiveness though.

Also, is this how fanatic organisations (like Al Qaeda) fund themselves? :P

dont say things like that... the Daily Mail might be trollin

What I find interesting is that MMO's are so grind-based that people are willing to pay to NOT play the game. Player's seem to be keen on the virtual willy-waving and more exciting gameplay that high end kit opens up but don't want to have to grind there way through to get there. By effectively "skipping ahead" they're getting to the part of the game they actually enjoy and the fact that people are willing to pay (decent chunks) of real world cash seems to be a pretty damning inditement of the current grind-centric MMO design standard.

RMT is the result of crappy game design aimed at enslaving its customers and making them pay their subscription for as long as possible. Consumer are tricked into attributing value to virtual items hidden away behind layers of mindless grind that offers no intrinsic fun. Developers fighting RMT, while at the same time taking subscriptions, are nothing more than jealous goons protecting their own money interests.

All there is, are a bunch of mental 12 year olds who want to show off their time spent in the game and parade in front of you. If they can't they start whining. look at the consoles and see how rewards are really done. Non transferable achievements, games are not the real world and they do not require an economic simulation within. Why are all fantasy worlds capitalistic societies anyway?. nobody ever complained that being unrealistic.

/rant

I still reckon the MMO creator should sell gold legally - but give a downside too. Buy a million ISK in EVE for a certain amount of real money and your character skill trains at 50% speed for the next hour or day or something - essentially so that you are disadvantaged somewhat compared to the "regular" player who does not buy gold.

jonthepymm: "so that you are disadvantaged somewhat compared to the "regular" player who does not buy gold"

At which point they'd turn round to non-regulated RMT surely? The whole point of buying gold is to get the advantage isn't it? If you take the advantage away where's the perceived value to players?

+1 to most of the above. When I played WoW I bought gold. I wanted to raid. I enjoyed raiding. I didn't enjoy having to mindlessly grind for hours a day to be able to raid.

If I had not been able to buy gold I would proably have quit rather than grind. Ironic really as the grind is meant to be there to retain players. Talk about flawed design.

I wish people would stop confusing "grinding" with "playing the fucking game."

I wish developers would stop confusing "grinding" with "gameplay".

I wish developers would stop confusing "grinding" with "gameplay".

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If you're grinding, you're either playing the wrong game or playing the right game wrongly.

The biggest problems with this and account farming are twofold.

Firstly: someone comes into a game, buys a prebuilt account, or gets a ton of cash to start their character off - they tend to get bored far earlier than a standard player and quit.
This has the result of reducing potential revenue for the company producing the game.
Now I'm aware I oppose this very argument in claims about piracy so I will admit, many of these players would NOT have played the game otherwise, and yes, even a brief subscription is a subscription - but instant gratification does remove the main component of an MMO which keeps players interested.

Second, INFLATION.

MMO economies are tricky as-is. Inflation is a major element and cash-sinks are EVERYWHERE to deal with them (Like Anarchy Online's plastic surgery clinic - which when introduced cost several MILLION credits to use - because that was where the economy stood at the time. As the economy has become healthier and runaway inflation been curbed, cost has been reduced in subsequent patches.)
With farming of cash, and the stockpiling of it to sell for real world money, you create a major issue. These are players NOT using the cash sinks. It builds up. And then you introduce an OUTSIDE element to the economy. Players are buying things not with earned ingame money, but with money "Magically" produced out of thin air using real world cash.
As a result inflation becomes unmanageable. Prices become impossible for many players to keep up with. More are forced to resort to buying cash to keep up, and so the problem gets worse. Pretty soon, it reaches a point where doing regular quests and trading ingame you'd take about five years to earn enough cash to afford that weapon you want. And new players are unable to support their characters in this economy and so give up.

End result of both of these? Less new subscriptions, less players staying on, less revenue for the company running the MMO.

Whilst I can fully understand the logic behind purchasing in-game currency in order to skip parts of the game for various reasons, it's highly lame and only serves to hurt the game in which you play. By participating in this you are contributing to the problem and making things worse for other players, making others more likely to leave and handing money to unscrupulous people who are getting rich off of a business that does indeed have many parallels to a drug or prostitution trade even if it's not as obviously 'wrong'.

Too many people want to reach the end of these games without realising you are playing within a virtual world. The idea of a virtual world is that you get to create your character, choose who you interact with, choose the path in which you go forwards and enjoy the journey towards the endgame. I am no fan of the lower levels in most games, after the initial novelty of a new game wears off I want nothing more than to be at the top with all the nice skills and items, destroying my enemies and challening the strongest players/clans on the server. I do not want to get to the top only to find out my only opponents are people participating in RMT in order to somehow try to compete with my superior ability or intelligence.

If you don't want to grind to get to the top of an MMO, then find an easier MMO or don't play MMO's in the first place. Just because you want the lovely end game content without working for it doesn't entitle you to cheat in order to get there. I might want to live in a mansion on the Cote d'Azur, it doesn't mean I am entitled to cheat my way there via different avenues of criminal behaviour.

I say again, if you don't want to invest time in your character, don't play a game that requires it. If you must play an MMO in such a way then find one that offers legal and openly regulated RMT that you can participate in, on a server full of other like-minded folk and see how much fun that is. Of course, most of you wont because you don't buy currency/characters/items to save yourself time, you do it because you want an advantage over other players.

For a final point it's worth noting that a large portion of those spending their money on currency/characters/items or actually botting/cheating in other ways are the very people who spend 5-10hours per day on the game in the first place. Even with all the shortcuts they purchase or cheat their way towards they still feel the need to play that long because it's not about shortening the journey to the top, it's having an edge over everyone else.

I thought grinding was the main basis to 'hook' players? What other reason would there be behind character levels?

By participating in this you are contributing to the problem and making things worse for other players,

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[retard]
so what?

if their not rich or smart enuff too do that its there fault lol

[/retard]

This is unfortunately the problem with most people who use these services - they really don't give a shit about the world or anybody else in it. They don't give a flying fuck about other players - that's why you see kill-stealing, ninja-looting, players buying gold and other "selfish" behaviour, coupled with the "GIEF ME GOLD PLX" and "KILL Q MONSTER 4 ME PLX" attitude to levelling. Many players assume that all other players are little more than AI-controlled characters whose sole purpose in the game is to assist them and make their life easier.

Playing solo is one thing. But presuming you're the only player of any importance in the game is another.

"playing the right game wrongly"

Fair point but I believe the onus to change is on the developers. As an analogy we'd all (rightly) criticise a beat-em-up that you could win by repeatedly mashing one move (I'm looking at you Soul Calibur 4) but early level play on some (not all) MMO's can boil down to pretty much that.

It's a tough challenge and I'm not suggesting I have the answer. If you focus too-much on player skill you'll risk alienating a large chunk of your audience who'll be resigned to never being good enough and if the goal is rewarding dedication / play-time then we're back to grinding as a time-sink.

I thought grinding was the main basis to 'hook' players? What other reason would there be behind character levels?

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No, "grinding" is the repetition of killing creatures/NPCs to gain XP/gold/reputation from their deaths with no motive beyond this gain.

For some reason, a lot of people think "grinding" refers to anything that involves killing more than one creature at a time or something that takes you time to complete.

If you see doing quests and getting XP is "grinding" then every aspect of an MMO is a grind. And unfortunately a lot of people think just that because it takes "too long" to "WIN."

I wrote a bit on my blog about time sinks (yeah, I know that makes me sound like a wanker) but basically the point I made was it's not about difficulty - it's about convenience.

What puts people off in a lot of instances (no pun intended) is that your average dungeon raid takes a couple of hours to run. Add to that the organisation and travel and you're looking at a complete evening's play, something not everybody can do. A better solution is to break up "epic" quests into smaller parts that can be done over the course of a week or even months. So rather than have a quest to slay the dragon, you get quests that build up to a smaller, but still "challenging" finale. And in that finale, offer bind-points/continues. If a player completes the quest without them, give them a bonus reward. But don't penalise people who can't attend a 50-man, 5 hour raid.

"Get the MMO companies to set up an online auction house for items, take a certain % fee like ebay does, integrate it into the game to make sure that sales are legit. Blizzard et al are like the music industry in that respect, trying to apply broken models to realword situations."

Even if companies did that, there'd still be unscrupulous people who didn't want to pay a cut to the developer, so there'd still be the same problems involved. Also, more legitimate players would start playing like gold-farmers - not a good thing, either.

Spekingur

Look up the word "endgame" and it will all make sense to you.

"Grinding" to gain levels is one thing. (The best part of wow, next to 40man raids!)
Grinding for gold is something completely different. (Very dull, unless you mix it out with funny people at ventrilo/booze etc)

It's nice how people are not considering the people behind these operations. There are the poor people working long hours in poor conditions to farm the money, and who get a pittance compared to the people who sell it to the players. There are the gold sellers themselves who are shady in the extreme. Gold selling is a very easy way to launder real world money and credit, and don't think that tax and revenue services are not paying attention.

And that's not mentioning the dubious characters behind this industry. Go wiki "Brock Pierce", that's the kind of person you are handing money to because you want to "stay competitive" in an MMO without putting the time in.

I agree but the thing is, economies rely on supply and demand and players level them out usually. Everything finds balance. The problem WoW faces today is the overuse of certain professions against others - jewelcrafting economy is borked, as is the ore, whereas alchemists being rarer can charge much, much more for their wares. And engineering is a spectacular blunder on the part of Blizzard, requiring 12,500 gold in vendor-bought materials alone, furthering it as the useless goldsink profession. This is forced economics and it has more or less split the game into two halves.

RMT is a hard one because I remember back playing Final Fantasy XI, when companies like IGE et al held the AH system to ransom and milked players not only of their hard-earned and well-earned gil, but for those who were not so well-off they made a killing in real money - at the expense of peoples enjoyment of a game. That is before we get to the idea of sweatshops of people earning barely a fraction of what the machine they are using costs so the people running the shop can sell it at a markup of thousands of percent.

I do not like forced economies. But I don't like RMT as it stands today, so this should be interesting.

This is just the evolution of cheat codes. Don't people object to gold farmers more than the act of buying hold? This is the same thing as teleporting anywhere in the game world for some money. Convenience to avoid slower progress. Add a loan facility ingame then to allow limited shortcuts

Game designers employ currency mechanic and then act surprised when it behaves like a currency SHOCKER.

I'm the author (Nick R.) of this, and the following stories.

There's a limit, of course, what you (one) can do with space, time and budget restrictions. Actually that's a big point about the collapse of traditional newspapers and budgets for investigative journalism + expectation on the Internet by everyone under 30 that "it's all free". But that's another issue, I guess ;)

All I hope is that across all four pieces we've got enough to engender some interesting debate. Makes a difference to some of the stories I'm sent out to do .. check my site or blog for those http://www.nickryan.net / http://www.ryansrants.com


best,

Nick R.

Anything that gets rid of the grind in a MMO is a good thing, it's why I don't play them. I don't see why I should pay to grind out tasks every day of very month people already have that in their lives it's called work.

You want a perfect example of the dangers posed by unchecked RMT, do some research on how the entire economy of FFXI was virtually destroyed by farmers monopolizing items/spawns and manipulating the auction house system using their vast buying power to corner the market on wanted items.

The result was a period of hyper-inflation that at its peak made it impossible for a new player to actually get anywhere without a sponsor, prices vastly outstripped earning potential for a newbie... it was just broken.

In a player-controlled economy, you cannot allow these kind of practices to flourish because it hands too much power to groups that are purely financially-motivated. A normal player cannot compete against an organized workforce that is able to dominate spawns and events 24/7.

they are right that gold trade does effect the game's econemy.

there are way's to make RMT a part of an MMO. Knights of the old republic MMO sounds like it will be a prime example of this.

However games that aren't designed with RMT in mind are spoilt by it and devs are correct to put a stop to it.

iokthemonkey -

I wish developers would stop confusing "grinding" with "gameplay".

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If you're grinding, you're either playing the wrong game or playing the right game wrongly.

i'm with iokthemonkey on this one, if your grinding too much then your doing something wrong. But at the same time if your looking for fast progression in a game then MMOs really aren't for you. Surely part of the point is spend the time with your character building them up slowly.

WOW has a good approach of reducing RMT advantages by making some of the best items only availble as drops that are soulbound on pick up so they can't be traded. The only thing this doesn't help is people who pay for power leveling services, but people who pay for those really have missed the point somewhat!! Though again Blizzard are now catering for those people with the tournement servers.

@Kikizosan
"Get the MMO companies to set up an online auction house for items, take a certain % fee like ebay does, integrate it into the game to make sure that sales are legit. Blizzard et al are like the music industry in that respect, trying to apply broken models to realword situations."

Even if companies did that, there'd still be unscrupulous people who didn't want to pay a cut to the developer, so there'd still be the same problems involved. Also, more legitimate players would start playing like gold-farmers - not a good thing, either.

http://www.station.sony.com/en/stationca...

I believe Sony already has a system like that for Everquest and Everquest II (but there are limitations that I don't know about) and is implementing a replacement system now. I wonder how it affects things in the game? Anyone know?

It seems to me the best way to counter the gold selling/farming is for the MMO makers to sell it ( the gold ) themselves. Job done and no problems arise at all. Sony do it. It works. There is no argument for this. Full stop. It works in everyone's favour

"Illegal" gold selling is there. It's a fact. It's like prostitution, its there whilst there's a market for it. Always will be. ( until they invent robot 19 year old blondes who'll do what they are told and be quiet the rest of the time). However, until that day.......

This really just shows that the old framework of grinding and having an "end game" to grind towards, and then expansions that merely push back the "end game" for more grinding is silly.

In my opinion, MMOs shouldn't even have a reachable "end" (A point where this little left to do). Of course, providing that sense of accomplishment must now be determined by something not related to how much time you spent doing it, but simply having completed a variety of challenges that a MMO can throw.

RMT is BAD. Okay?

1) If playing the game is boring, QUIT! DO SOMETHING FUN! Paying someone else to effectively let you SKIP and thus NOT EXPERIENCE content seems like it is from Bizarro-world. (I am talking about the associated power-leveling services here.)

2) Mr. "bought the game and a level 80 shaman" will be the DEATH of pick-up groups and raids in general since they will have NO CLUE how to actually play the character. Rais wipes all around for people who have yet to put them on ignore, and when they eventually are on everyone's ignore lists and noone wants to play wirth them, will they then consider it a good investment? "Ah, I got to ruin the experience for twentyfour other players - money well spent!" indeed. (Hm, maybe this should be attempted in real life, too? Some billionaire paying Tottenham to let their untrained geeky son play on the team in PL matches? Would that work?)

3) As others have pointed out, inflation. The economy is more or less balanced around a certain "playing speed" - gold farmer characters optimising certain ways of gaining goods means this is shifted so that

4) Tragedy of the commons - gold farmers will hog the "resource" represented by whatever they use to meximise profits, and thus remove those kills from ordinary players.

5) The sheer annoynace of them: 1st level warrior in Stoprmwind? Gee, I wonder what he is here for. Oh, there's the spam message in /say, /yell, Trade, General... Heck, the last time I fired up the (now free-to-play) ArchLord, my chat window was scrolling fast as a Ferrari with two spammers trying to hawk their wares (i.e. RMT-related goods). They are annoying players EVERYWHERE.

hiddenranbir

But the endgame in (for example) WOW and FF11 is half the game. Arguably the single most fun part of the game.
You want developers to just take that away?

I dont know what your "No goal" game would look like, really. Mayhaps Im too narrowminded.

Im no stranger to either buying or selling in game currency.

When I quit Star Wars: Galaxies after 1 year of playing I sold some of my assets to a player owned bank for 2000$ and gave the rest to my PA (Guild).

When playing wow I also bought gold from a guildmember who had a large supply rather than to spend time farming needlessly.

I think the problem in wow was that you had to farm for money in order to play the endgame but the moneyfarming was never interesting.

This is just the evolution of cheat codes.

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If you want to use a cheat code in a single-player game, that's fine. But to use a "cheat code" to advance your abilities whilst others do not makes a mockery of the whole game.

Maybe they should just put out a special edition of WoW that, when you sign-up, just flashes up "YOU WON THE GAME!" and then you can immediately uninstall it to save yourself the bother of having to actually play it.

So, "criminalising" a behaviour deemed immoral but which doesn't involve actual fraud or coercion leads to a rise of a black market that bring with it a rise in actual fraud. What a surprise. Surely this has never happened when otther forms of consensual activities between adults deemed immoral have been outlawed.

The game companies could actually take a good look at the prohibition of alcohol, drugs and prostitution throughout history and what effect those prohibitions hav had on the rise of criminal syndicates. The similarities to gold selling are rather telling.

Yet for all the anger and dire comments, it's clear that people -- players -- do buy in-game items, currency, power-levelling services and even characters in a variety of MMOs. Even when it is against the EULAs.

There's clearly a demand issue (i.e. in some MMOs there is a demand for outside access to 'cash' in-game). And I would hazard a guess, a certain amount of hypocrisy, a bit like the "pr0n" argument: far more people do it than they admit. Why? I mean, those spammers presumably wouldn't be there unless there was some chance someone was (regularly) buying their product.

Later pieces in the series will reveal attitudes from gold sellers, players and some of the industry responses.

There's clearly a demand issue (i.e. in some MMOs there is a demand for outside access to 'cash' in-game). And I would hazard a guess, a certain amount of hypocrisy, a bit like the "pr0n" argument: far more people do it than they admit. Why? I mean, those spammers presumably wouldn't be there unless there was some chance someone was (regularly) buying their product.

My personal answer to this (early WoW TBC raiding for reference) was I wanted to play through the games 25 man raid instances. To do so required a regular supply of gold. Getting that gold legitimately required either repeatedly flying a circuit around various herb / ore spawn points or repeatedly killing mobs with good drops for hours. Nothing I'd consider fun. Alternatively I could buy the gold and spend the time I saved with my kids. I just don’t understand the whole "you need to put the time in to get to the good stuff" mentality. These things are meant to be games not life substitutes.

The point is, really, all this positioning and ranting by the companies and Mr Big Mouth himself, of WAR is by the by. Goldsellers are not to blame, goldfarmers are not to blame.

Gold buyers are.

And the fact is that the buyers are the players - just like you, just like me. I play WOW and EVE and although I've never bought gold or ISK (because the fact is that cash is stupidly easy to make in online games), I hear so many players who claim to not know how to make gold, that I can see why they'd buy.

But also, as was pointed out, ingame currency doesn't really help you. If you are level 10 you can't buy gear that will make you undefeatable. If you just started EVE, you can't buy a massive battle cruiser and use it. No, most people I think buy currency for the ingame items that require farming: mounts and so on. Its not bought to make the game easier, it's bought to compliment the baseline gameplay.

Just to add, if a guildmate said to me "god i had to buy 1000g to cover consumables" I'd think they were a little dumb: not for buying gold but for not managing to figure out how to make that gold in two days just by playing the AH.

Spindle +1

Everyone who havnt been in the same situation as Spindle, me, and others should probably just stfu and stop complaining about people who buy gold.

Everyone who havnt been in the same situation as Spindle, me, and others should probably just stfu and stop complaining about people who buy gold.

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I have a life, a full-time job and regularly go out for social events.

I also play MMOs.

Not once have I been tempted to buy gold.

If I don't "qualify" for the content, I don't try to get it. Simple as that.

What people fail to understand - or more correctly, don't care about - is the damage this does to the game for EVERYBODY by unbalancing the economy. So what happens? You need MOAR GOLD and so you end up lining the pockets of another gold seller, which further destroys the economy.

But fuck everybody else who plays, right?

It's a shame VHS rentals are so out now. I think there's obviously a huge market for hiring people tapes that are cued to only show the last 5 minutes of the movie.

First up if a company were to start legitimising gold selling and getting a cut in the proceeds you'd quickly see the gold sinks in the game spiral wildly out of control.

Secondly inflation in MMOS is no bad thing for players, in general terms it means your resources are worth far more compared to the gold sinks, meaning much less grinding. It's only bad for developers as their time sinks become less effective.

Oh and grinding is any activity you do for the reward rather than the experience. In a typical MMO (say WoW) this is 99% of the single player content plus any of the economical stuff. I'd be interested to see how much RMT goes on in these games next to less grind-tastic experiences such as CoX or DDO.

iok - If I don't "qualify" for the content, I don't try to get it. Qualify? I bought the game, I paid a monthly sub and yet you think I should still have to "qualify" to see the content? Now present me with a genuine and stimulating challenge that I have overcome to see fresh content - great! I'm there. Tell me I have to do something mindless, dull and repetitive then... no, no, no. Gold buying is a symptom of bad and lazy game design.

As for the moral issue? Chinese sweatshops etc... how about you go check the labels of all your clothes and check where all your fancy consumer electronics come from. If none of them are "made in China" feel free to lecture me.

Yes I'll accept that if people didn't buy gold other players wouldn't be getting hacked and having their characters cleared out. But, you know its only a game. I can still sleep despite the cause and the effect.

The main point I'd come back to is that the real villain here is not gold buyers it is poor game design. As long as you lock quality content away behind timesinks because your fundamental gameplay isn't good enough to keep players playing your game then people will buy their way around the timesink.