Leave it to the guys at Wife Aggro to ask a thought provoking question.
This weeks gem is:
What do you think is a good way for game companies to eliminate 3rd party gold and equipment selling?
Personally I believe MMO developers are fighting a pointless, losing battle against the Gold Farmers of the MMORPG world.
By default people are press for time and in the MMORPG environment time is as precious as any +50 Flaming Pig-sticker of Doom. Paying a marginal fee saves a resource rich MMOG player valuable time. I wager to bet there are many middle and/or upper middle class earning MMO players will cough up the necessary money to acquire goods that would otherwise require a massive amount of personal time. Why? It's basic economics, time equals money.
Are there any practical solutions for to resolve this? The short answer is no, however, I will discuss two possible theories that could lead to a "functional" solution of gold farming.
The alternatives I see are:
Assigning a hard "net worth asset" cap for all players using a sliding income scale. Most MMOG's have a numerical monetary value attached to all items, from vendor trash all the way to rare drops. Utilizing this value-based system the developers could, theoretically, rank the net worth that any player should be able to attain. For example, a level 20 rogue could attain a maximum cash reserve and net value of owned goods totalling an approximated value of 100 gold.
This imaginary asset break down consists of:
- 35% personal equipment (weapons, armor, misc. items [e.g. rings])
- 15% personal inventory (potions, expendable items [e.g. arrows])
- 25% warehouse inventory (i.e. bank vault)
- 25% liquid assets (i.e. cash on hand)
When the character hits their"net worth asset" cap they would no longer be able to accrue equipment or money. Thus your level 1 avatar you can not buy 10,000 gold because the "net worth asset" cap of a level 1 would not allow such a figure. Twinking is still not addressed as players could use mains or high level alternates, however, the downward "net worth asset" filter would moderate any mass transactions between characters. A side bonus may also be realized in that instead of banning low-level, disposable transaction accounts the bans would have to involve max level farming accounts.
The negatives to this plan are that this slows down, but does not stop, the process and your core power gamers will be infuriated by the restrictions.
The only other alternative I see for seriously eliminating 3rd party farming is:
Eliminate ALL intra-character transactions. Remove twinking, void intra-mmo item mailing, ban currency transfers, and disallow character to character items drops. Once the character acquires an item it will remain theirs forever. The only exceptions I could envision are allowing the sales of FINISHED trade items (i.e. sword) and/or RAW trade item goods (i.e. wood). To further expand on the trade angle, if prices are set with inflation carefully calculated to control price increases that would regulate the last bastion of money transference (i.e. selling a level 1 item for 10,000 gold).
Following those step makes all items in the game either vendor trash or ensures the Avatar uses the item. Removing transfers also eliminates the low and mid level twinks and should in most cases correct player-based economies as a single characters wealth can no longer be distributed amongst multiple player alts or accounts. Rare item hoarding and liquid asset transfers would no longer be a viable money maker for 3rd party farmers and the money/time paradigm is no longer a intact as all players will be forced to "farm" in order to outfit/equip their characters.
The negatives to plan include the introduction of a potentially massive time-sink for all player's seeking to acquire assets and of course introducing any additional time-sink has deleterious affects on your casual gamer component.
A true crackdown on 3rd party farmers will never occur. Mass banning may appeal to the rank and file players, but the business of farming will continue to grow as a strong contingent of gamers will pay money to save their most valuable commodity time.
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1.
25-08-2007 14:10
Clipsco, you obviously invested no time whatsoever in researching your games. You're so far off in your review of WWIIol that's it not even funny.
World War II Online is the only "true" MMO PvP game out there... and it's a simulation. No one said WWIIol is easy... nor should it be. Please research your stuff before passing opinions... you lose all credibility otherwise.
The only way to eliminate the gold farming is to take the grind out. Make it so you can get max level within a week. Save friendships, families and your health. I can just imagine IGE paying blizzard to keep them at bay and screw over customers. Give me a break, you pay over $168 a year for a game, then they want to you pay for upgrades!!!!, WOW is the biggest ripoff since Enron.
Developers can create a program that analyzes flow of gold, so they can see which characters are used for gold selling. which characters are storage mules for the gold, which are used to farm the gold (high level characters that are played constantly) and simply ban the gold selling network.
They need to do this all the time and quickly.
If they do this, it will not be profitable to start from scratch all the time.
That would be the optimal solution. I should have prefaced my answer by stating the standard MMO party line that selling in-game currency/items is not an option.
Leave it to the guys at 
