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Gold Trading Exposed: The Players Article
MMO PC Article by Nick Ryan
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In the last two weeks, Nick Ryan's four-part weekly feature series on gold trading - the grey market for in-game currencies, services and items in MMOs - has introduced us to this shady business, and investigated the lives and motivations of the gold farmers and sellers themselves.
Next week's final feature will gather the responses of the biggest and most influential MMO operators - some of whom condemn real-money trading, some of whom are working to build it into their games. But this week, Ryan talks to the people at the business end of the market - for better or worse - the players. Who are the players that use gold sellers? And do as many of us hate the thought of buying gold as we claim?
"When the gold rush comes to town, then you know about it. Like a plague of human locusts suddenly everything is consumed and then when the gold is gone, they vanish..."
The Gold Rush (Charlie Chaplin, 1925)
There you are, in the pantomime that is your favourite MMORPG and up pops your best friend. Wait a minute ... he doesn't respond to 'tells', he's switching alts faster than you can type "Hang on" and within minutes the guild bank is cleared out, and Jonnie is sitting chatting in Mandarin to some elven floozie when you could swear he was from Wisconsin.
Lineage II's harsh death penalties make buying gold even more tempting.
When he gets his account back (eventually), Jonnie swears he ran all the latest virus checkers and definitely doesn't download dodgy videos from the internet. So just where did the scammer get his details - and is this the typical face of gold sellers in MMOs today?
We could all name stereotypes when it comes to players who've used gold sellers and farmers to boost their characters. But as Professor Richard Heeks of Manchester University, an expert on real money trading (RMT) puts it rather clearly:
"The supply-demand economics of gold farming are very simple. Some people in the world have more money than time. Other people in the world have more time than money. The former demand finds the latter supply via various physical and virtual channels."
Vox Pop
Most players, though, still tend to voice the negative when it comes to the gold-selling world. Take just a vox pop of players I've spoken to in World of Warcraft and other MMOs such as EverQuest and EVE Online recently:
"I'm very much against gold-selling and power-levelling services in WOW," claims Tod, a British WOW player in his early 40s. "Quite apart from any potential unbalancing effects on the in-game economy, to me it's cheating for any player to buy gold or get someone else to level up their character.
"I also get irritated at the gold sellers advertising their services by yelling in Orgrimmar, or whispering people and advertising their services if they get a reply. Either way, it's another reduction in the immersiveness of the game experience.
EVE Online's game time for game currency trade effectively limits real money trading.
"But I don't really blame the gold farmers or power levellers," he adds. "I blame the people who set up these businesses and probably make most of the money."
Hungarian WOW player Konrád puts it a lot more bluntly: "It's a system of keyloggers. The account goes to a hacker; who then steals your gold or uses your account as a farm character, or both; and then sells your own gold back for real money if you do use this service. Now this is pretty f***ed up as everyone can see, besides it kills the fun in a game designed to interact with other people online and explore fantasy worlds and not to hear from level 1 characters whispering: 'Are you there?'"
Stieg, a 20-something player from Sweden, has tasted the gold selling experience from both ends of the spectrum.
"Except for having my account stolen from me once, and both emptied of gold and used to create one of those annoying gold-seller alts, I have little experience with gold sellers in WOW," he says.
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Comments: 1-16 of 16 in total
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I would consider buying items and money for an MMO, especially as I don't have the time to grind an mmo anymore (like a lot of people in their 30's who wasted too much of their 20's playing them).
However I would only really consider a private exchange of items or even an account with another known player, rather than the faceless horde of far east gold sellers. Eve's solution seems the best as long as its not completely out of whack with the prices charged by the black market. |
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albertofustinoni
01/04/09 @ 17:51
+1
Guild Wars unsuccessful? Strange: it's the only MMO I and a lot of people I know played for any extended length of time.
Also, I find it pathetically laughable of publishers to complain of RMT when most MMOs are designed to keep players toiling for as long as possible on boring tasks using the carrot of endgame content (the only entertaining part of the game) in order to maximise subscription revenue. This is what drove me out of WOW after playing it for two weeks: is it smart to PAY to do boring tasks, when I could either get paid for them (get a job) or spend time playing games I enjoy? As for RMT: provided it is done in legitimate ways, I welcome it, as it pushes publishers to implement better game designs and counters their tendency to milk users as much as they possibly can. |
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curtlikesmeat
01/04/09 @ 17:53
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I used to play Everquest hardcore years ago and back then I could see the need for gold selling although I never bought any - you could get items from the top bosses and they would be Bind on Equip.... the thing about buying gold is that I just don't see any need for it in WoW.... what would you do with it? All the best stuff is Bind on Pickup... it's not like back in EQ where you could use real world money to buy the best gear in the game.
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4thVariety
01/04/09 @ 17:59
+1
Guild Wars needs no subscription and the series will soon have sold SIX MILLION units. Name another of those MMOs which has done that. Name another PC exclusive franchise that has done that recently. There only is WoW and GW. Then there is nothing in terms of PC-only sales in the millions.
So WTF is this "Extreme gamer" on page three trying to say?
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most recently on 01/04/09 @ 19:00
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The cash rich, time poor logic does make a lot of sense. I do understand people that base their reasoning on this but it's not the bulletproof excuse that they all seem to think it is.
If you only have 2hours per night to play your chosen game, then you are going to take longer to achieve things in game, that's how things are. Those who have 10hours per day to play will achieve things faster than you, but not a great deal faster. If you're unable to play the game 'enough' to achieve what you want to achieve then you need to find a new game, learn some patience or make every hour of your time in game count so that you can get to where you want to be. The solution is not to buy currency from a random person who may or may not have earned them through dubious means (almost certainly did). "wah wah I can't achieve the same as the kid who plays 10hours a day wah wah, I better spend lots of money on hugely depreciating currency as soon as possible so that I can get the same epic mount as him wahhhhh" Why not just work for it? A long term goal? Aren't these games meant to be fun, the building of a character is meant to be entertaining and an exciting journey. Grinding may not always be fun but it's part of the game you chose to play, just because you can't handle it doesn't grant you a free-pass to break the rules and buy your way to the top. So once again, there are seemingly valid reasons for RMT but the fact it's run by third parties who are almost always scammers, cheaters, botters and dubious characters is something that needs to be controlled. RMT didn't hurt UO back in the day for several reasons. Firstly, it was run entirely by players who became wealthy and had spare cash that they often used to pay for their subscriptions. Secondly, in the older days of UO players didn't really have any 'items' to buy in order to play the game and there was no endless treadmill designed to constantly soak up your time on pointless tasks. Finally, there were no sophisticated botting programs, nor any real way for someone with an extreme amount of time to ever get ahead of another player. Older UO was exemplary MMO game design, the MMO's of today are full of flaws, hooks and traps in order to keep you grinding away, forever moving the goal posts to ensure you never quite reach the end. Most devs are petrified of players reaching the 'end-game' and having nothing to do, well guys if you designed your end game content in better ways you would have no need to fear this eventuality and you'd stop feeling the need to endlessly increase level caps and add new levels of items which are slightly better than the previous best ones. RMT might work if it was regulated, but it will almost never be acceptable in one of today's many item-driven MMO's. |
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kangarootoo
01/04/09 @ 20:29
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Seems to me the most interesting point made (though not an original one) is this quote.
"By comparison, making 1000 gold in-game would take around 6 to 10 hours game time and would be most efficiently done over a few days. I earn quite a bit more than one pound an hour and I have little spare time outside of raids and girlfriend and work, so it makes more sense for me to buy gold than it does to grind it out. So I do, and often." The crucial point being that grinding costs time, which in the real quite simply costs money. So what is the difference? The point of the game is that players have fun. If a player doesn't find grinding fun, but does find bashing monsters with decent weapons fun, why should they spend over £10 worth of their time doing the former instead of £10 worth of cash doing the latter? @Synthesis Come on now. You make some very good points, but filling your made up quote with 'wahs's is beneath you. Its an attempt to villify gold buyers and undermine their actions by making them out to all be sad wingers. You are clearly able to weave a good post without having to resort to such clumsy ad hominem. "Aren't these games meant to be fun, the building of a character is meant to be entertaining and an exciting journey" There IS no "meant to be" in fun. Something is either fun, or it isn't. If a gamer finds buying gold (and then spending it in game) fun, and doesn't find grinding to be fun, then frankly they should just buy the gold (which as has been suggested may actually cost them less given the time involved in grinding). Anyone who sits there having less fun in the name of "playing the game the way it is meant to be played" is surely just cutting off their nose to spite their face. There are only so many hours in the days you know, and one day we will all look back and wish we had more fun with our time. Writing "he played WoW the way it was meant to be played" on your headstone won't make your deathbed regrets seem any less burning :) |
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Silvervein
01/04/09 @ 21:09
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@anduz
Gold Selling is caused by three things: poor game design, a sad society where virtual achievements have value and stupid people. This about nails it. Especially game design part. As someone else on this thread said, if game developers put boring grind in the game as an artificial lengthening mechanism (knowing full well it's not fun but will give them more subscription money) then appearance of gold selling sites shouldn't really surprise anyone. I don't know if anyone really enjoys grinding. I don't. And as I always say: if you need to entertain yourself while playing a game, you know there's something wrong with it.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 01/04/09 @ 22:10
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notmyrealname
01/04/09 @ 22:59
+1
Stompy: ''Just be glad such people can't so easily buy themselves a charming personality or a pretty face, otherwise we wouldn't be able to spot them as easily as we do now.''
/sour much? What's it to you if ppl buy gold because they want to skip parts of boring mmos. To each his/her own game. Pride yourself that you dont cheat and you are ''better'' than them (if skill can actually apply to item based mmo's). But please don't make a deal out of it. It's just a game ffs. and yes: guildwars was awesome.. only online massive rpg game that had pvp that DID require skill and wasn't item/grind based (GASP? What.. you mean... that you are actually judged by your brainpower instead of x weeks spent ingame or cash spent? oh noes!) *Hopes GW 2 comes out soon.* |
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The thing is if your spending real money on in game gold to skip the boring bits why not just spend real money on games that world of warcraft. Yes there's the social aspect but if it is the social aspect why do high level items matter.
Then again I found world of warcraft stultifyingly dull. I love getting high level or more powerful items in rpg's or leveling up my character(s) thats part of the reason I play them, but its not the only reason and a game has to have a plot or hook other than that. Baldurs gate 2 has plot as well as +2 greatswords, disgea has strategy and comedy as well as crazy leveling. You could say world of warcraft et al have on line socialising but when most people have keyboards not headsets and the game is rpg dull not lite who cares. |
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4thVariety
02/04/09 @ 06:44
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It is not so much poor design as it is insidious design.
Traditional games set up a goal, have you fight some battles and then reward you with the ending. MMOs establish a goal which they fully intend never to let you reach. A conscious choice to preclude you from the psychological feeling of closure that ends every experience. So people continue to play the game and what a coincidence, the game costs a subscription. The players are exploited by a psychological trick. They learned to play a game until it says they are "done", however they are never "done". No surprise MMOs are rampantly successful in Asia, the people there did not have that long history of "being done" with a game. Except Japan, where MMOs are again not that important. |
Comments: 1-16 of 16 in total
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