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PreviousThe Great Digital Gold-Rush Interview
PC MMO Interview by Robert Purchese
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It took me endless hours of picking herbs in World of Warcraft before I decided to use real money to buy gold. I spent about fifty quid for an in-game thousand, and bought a purple epic mount. I went back and bought more as time went on; money that helped push our guild into hardcore raiding and splash out on other members. I was greedy with it as well, covering my second character in the very best.
Therein lies the lure of real-world trading, which extends to buying characters and items as well as gold. It's not a new thing, it goes right back to beginning of massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (let's say Ultima Online for argument's sake). However, these days if you search for "buy gold" you are rewarded with endless results. You may have heard of it through Blizzard or Square Enix banning thousands of accounts.
The problem lies in how the money is gathered, which is where "Chinese Gold Farmers" come from. The idea is that a gamer will spend all day working for a company doing boring tasks in a game to earn gold. This can cause repercussions in the persistent world, with companies monopolising resource-rich areas. It also leads to bots; automated characters that do the hard work for you and appear to be zombies to anyone communicating with them. Are you Sarah Connor? Are you Sarah Connor? Are you... [We get the idea - Ed].
Some have tried to legalise this sort of trading, like Sony with its Station Exchange in EverQuest 2. This lets it act like an official auctioneer. And others ban. But RuneScape, a web-based MMORPG with over six million active accounts, has found a new way. So we cornered content chief Imre Jele to hear more, and find out why it is such a big problem in the first place.
Eurogamer: So, why is real-world trading such a big problem?
RuneScape: remarkably similar-looking to Ultimate Online.
Imre Jele: Oh, big question. I'm going to approach this from two different perspectives. Illegal real-world trading breaks the game and it breaks the business, to put it simply. As for the game, what happens is there are several types of attack. The first one is that they use automated characters - bots - to play the game and collect the gold. And the presence of those bots in the game is really annoying; characters standing there doing the same thing over and over again.
The second thing is that illegal real world trading is pretty much like cheating. It can be fun to have unlimited health for 10 minutes, but after that the game becomes boring because there is no other challenge. And those people who buy their way through the game are going to experience this. Anyone who is using real-world trading and actually getting money is effectively cheating the game and going to get bored and leave. Anyone not doing that is going to be annoyed by these people because they have an unfair advantage. It breaks the game model pretty effectively.
The other side of this story is the business side. Obviously we can talk about the fact they are effectively stealing money from us because they are using our game environment to make money - that is annoying but not our biggest concern.
The biggest concern about real-world trading is - sorry for this example as I know it is not politically correct - it is a bit like prostitution. It's not necessarily the prostitution which is a problem, although you might have moral problems with [real-world trading]. But the real problem is the organised crime that's built around prostitution; the human trafficking, the drugs, etc. And that's the same with illegal real-world trading. The problem comes in when they start doing other illegal activities. One of the biggest is the use of stolen credit cards. They realise that if they pay GBP 3.20 and become members of RuneScape they can make more gold in-game, therefore make more money in real-world terms. So they realise hey, why would I pay for this if I can use a stolen credit card? It brings a terrible financial burden to us, not to mention the other problems we might have legally or financially around this.
Eurogamer: What's a bigger problem, the bots or the money-buying?
Imre Jele: As a player I am more annoyed by walking around and trying to talk to someone who doesn't answer because it's a bot. Obviously if I take it to a higher level as a game designer then I see how people ruin their own game experience by cheating.
Eurogamer: What if people spent their own time gathering in-game resources to sell in the real world?
What people buy with their money in World of Warcraft.
Imre Jele: Legal real-world trading is something a lot of companies are playing around with the idea of, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. But you have to design your game with real-world trading in mind from day one, you can't just chuck it on top of the game. In the future we are going to have games, good games, where you're going to have professional players who create an account and sell it for real-world money and manage to make a living by playing. And that's going to be fun. But RuneScape is not designed on that principle. RuneScape is designed so you experience the whole game as an art. For us this illegal real-world trading is breaking the game experience and is not something we want to cater for at the moment.
Eurogamer: Are you saying we will have to wait for the next generation of games before we can hope to control this? What about Sony with its Station Exchange service in EverQuest 2?
Imre Jele: Yes, yes. Let me answer it one by one. I think it's very simple. We have more MMOs now that are more and more successful, and MMOs are the perfect ground for illegal real-world trading, therefore we have hundreds of companies. We are talking about a huge amount of money: millions and millions of dollars and pounds are changing hands here, so it's a great business for those people.
Different companies have different approaches. Some companies like Sony with the Station Exchange have tried to legalise it and tried to make some money out of it. But let's not forget, Sony has been very, very careful about what they said; once you have the real-world trading you can never get out [as your account is stuck on those servers]. So they also realised that it breaks the gameplay, but said it's OK if everyone is doing it. And so those servers are a different EverQuest and you can never get out of them.
Another approach is what we are doing. To be honest, I don't understand why other companies don't react to this. It seems to me that the bigger half of the MMO industry puts their heads under the sand and pretends like it's not happening. Most of the companies try to tackle the issue by putting more and more people on it. We were doing it as well. For years we were releasing software updates to tackle bots and hiring more and more people in player support to hunt them down. But every time we put on an extra person they put on two; every time we created a new engine update they coped immediately.
Our new policy is very useful for many of the major MMOs out there. We said we're not going to play around any more, but we are going to put up a fight. And that's what this whole RuneScape real-world trading change is all about, to grab and address the issue at a core level. We changed the game in a way so that real-world trading doesn't make any sense any more.
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RuneScape
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Comments: 1-22 of 22 in total
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convercide
19/02/08 @ 05:18
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I noticed that with Ellie's submission yesterday at 5:00a.m. Tom is a slave driver isn't he? I think he's converted the Eurogamer offices into a dungeon.
If so, can I work there? |
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3william56
19/02/08 @ 07:59
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"If you want to tackle it at a core level, is there an argument for getting rid of the inherent grind mechanics of the genre that real-world trading has grown up around trying to "cheat"?"
Duh! Might also get a few more players who can't be ar$ed spending their entire life grinding to get a decent weapon or character. Grinding relegates MMOs to the province of the obsessive. This is why MMOs (and, by extension, RPGs) just have no attraction for me. The beauty of WarHawk and the like is that you're straight in, on a basically level playing field with anyone. And instead of artificial limits on your character, and simulated learning and earning, your real skills increase in a real way as you play and get better. Having to do six hours of washing up to score a rocket launcher would somewhat dull the experience. It's bad enough that the higher Ranks require insane dedication that anyone with a life outside computer gaming will never reach, but at least that's just appearance. If it gave an actual advantage in-game to the thousand hour plus freaks, it would ruin it for casuals. Would love an online dungeon crawler with the same ethic. |
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I think CoH/CoV got a lot right by removing items all together (I don't know much that has changed with invention). You just played with your god given mutant abilities from outer space. Influence and enhancements were easy enough to get as you progressed that you never felt you needed to buy game money from outside sources.
WoW on the other hand is the complete opposite, requiring you to have the best equipment to advance in the game. When that's the case people are always going to want to get it as easily and quickly as possible. |
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BrokenSymmetry
19/02/08 @ 09:13
+1
I like that Runescape is putting up a fight against the gold traders. Disallowing unbalanced trades seems like a pretty smart solution.
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Nice interview and a very interesting article. I very much like the idea of an in-game stock exchange, but it's surprising no one has done this before. After all, if that's how the money problem is solved in the real world, it's kind of obvious that it should work similarly in the virtual world. Well, obvious now someone's gone and done it, I suppose. :)
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MrChuckles
19/02/08 @ 10:08
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The last line sums it up:
'If I am incapable of providing you with enough fun while you collect that 1000 gold for a steed, then the game is not good enough.' This is why i have stopped playing every MMO at about the middle level. Everquest at lvl 25, WoW at 39, CoH at 27.... the grind kills me... He doesn't explain very well how the trading works though, do you have to trade pens for the right amount on the stock screen and there is no bartering? |
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Tiger_Walts
19/02/08 @ 10:58
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The stock-market/commodities idea is also great. It stops people farming items in one area so if you are on a quest that requires something specific, you're not racing other players for them. Over-farming will eventually make that item so cheap that it'd be a waste of time to gather any. It also means you don't have to trudge all the way to an area rich in a certain item to get it. Just farm whatever is near and trade it for what you want.
MrChuckles, an item's worth would be based on it's base value (vendor value) and then modified depending on how much of it there is in the stock market. I hope that they have separate stock markets as that would encourage people to transport goods and spread people across the world rather than sit in one area. Guns, did you not read the article? Buy money how? To make a trade you have to offer something in similar value, which you may as well sell in the game... or are you referring to EVE?
Edited 3 times,
most recently on 19/02/08 @ 11:01
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Snidesworth
19/02/08 @ 11:36
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Arguing for the "experience" of getting X-thousand gold for Y is all well and good but, as 3william56 said, it most often isn't any fun to raise those sort of virtual funds. The only time I ever had the money for one of the big things back when I played WoW was after playing through the Outland quest content, so when I hit the level cap I could scurry off and get a flying mount. This was fine: the money flowed in while I was running about and doing stuff that was pretty entertaining. To get the gold for the best flying mount though, well, that would have been actual work. And for some people isn't not just big, one off purchases. Alot of guilds spend huge amounts of money on consumable items to help them with the larger dungeons in games, and this happens on a weekly basis. They could all spend hours and hours farming to raise that money, or drop £50 to sort themselves out for a fortnight and then spend their time playing the fun parts of the game. One of my friends back then bought loads of gold regularly, reasoning that he didn't have time to grind out all the cash he needed (having a job and all) and that gold was so cheap that it was a drop in the bucket for him to purchase large sums of it.
I'm not saying that gold buying is perfectly okay, but for alot of people it's a necessary evil if they want to actually enjoy whatever game they're playing. |
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>> I'm not saying that gold buying is perfectly okay, but for alot of people it's a necessary evil if they want to actually enjoy whatever game they're playing.
But then as the chap was saying in the interview, *having* to do this to get to the fun bits in the game surely means a badly designed game mechanic in the first place. Progression should be consistantly fun throughout the game which in itself would help alleviate the farming/buying gold problems.
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 19/02/08 @ 13:17
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I think Blizzard would come to realise how absurdly expensive the most desired items are in WoW if they introduced balanced trading people would be unable to realisticly afford an epic mount. Wow bassically rewards the time rich and obssesive rather than those most talented at playing the game or forming social connections within the game. I would have had no problem paying for an epic mount at level 60 (back in the day) out of money i've earned on my character however the natural progression of the game doesn't allow that sum of money to be in your coffers without specifically grinding it. (usually doing something tedious and repetitive)
Edited 1 times,
most recently on 19/02/08 @ 17:09
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Kirly_Wombat
20/02/08 @ 11:04
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I dont think it will ever be controlled/stopped (unless the game is designed around it like archlord etc, and look how that game turned out lol).
There will always be people who want to take the easy way, or are just too impatient. I dont mean that to sound elitist or anything, but from what Ive seen and experienced on different MMORPGs, its usually been the case. Managing gold is just another challenge and part of the game, and just like real life, some people want to spend more than they have the means to make lol. |
Comments: 1-22 of 22 in total
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