Curse

enter_the_zone · Feb 29, 2008, 06:07 PM // 18:07

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inde

Very good point Ctb. It would be interesting to see more companies implement something as this, selling the items and gold at lower prices. Making it legit. While it's money in the game developers pocket (not necessarily a bad thing) it certainly hasn't caused any of their shards or their game to collapse.

Agreed, I'd be in support of having 2 separate server farms which I can't traverse, one allowing RTM, one not. Shouldn't even be that hard to implement.
I just feel it's the quickest and most cost effective way to kill off the whole blackmarket gold trade in GW or GW2. Anything to stop those annoying PMs

Stockholm · Feb 29, 2008, 06:15 PM // 18:15

First: It is NOT illigal to sell game gold, it is against the EULA, so the law enforcment can not get involved. However, IRS(or each countrys equvilant) can go after the organized gold selling companys.(not enough money for them to collect compared to cost)

Second: Any player based moderation system is going to fail because of the same kind of people/players we want to have banned will manage to get them selfs appointed sooner or later and all it takes is one (1) person doing a mass ban just because it's fun (and all he/she will lose on it is an account).

-Sonata- · Feb 29, 2008, 06:17 PM // 18:17

I'd wager that it's more of a question of "Would such a system work for the overall benefit of Guild Wars, not just as a company, but for the majority of the community?".

It's a fair statement to make that what works for one game, or game company, might not work well in another. Different systems of trade, supply of xItem, and demands would factor in.

The question I would ask, which I hope isn't too silly because I've not been a part of Station; Does their system rid the games of the spamming and botting, which is really one of the core issues and concerns here in Guild Wars? If I was an RMT'er who did business in Guild Wars, which I'm NOT, but if I was, I would simply change my prices to compete against the legit services and continuing with spamming as many users as my many bots can.

Ekelon · Feb 29, 2008, 06:20 PM // 18:20

I think RMT needs to go out the window. The only way to stop RMT is like in RUNESCAPE, where everything has set prices. If this happened in Guild Wars that would also mean no more mules and storage accounts. It would also mean no ripping people off though, which is good, I guess. It would really hurt all the "merchanters" though. But since this is a game and no real life, I think it's alright. That would also mean the only way to get rich is through playing the game like you're suppose to, which is also a good thing.

Ctb · Feb 29, 2008, 06:27 PM // 18:27

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But since this is a game and no real life, I think it's alright.

It would never fly. Too many people enjoy, at least occasionally, the capitalist aspect of these sorts of games. I include myself. The earliest I remember truly being "into" Guild Wars involved standing in Pre-Searing selling iron and wood (salvaged from the ubiquitous 1g items) to people.

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one (1) person doing a mass ban just because it's fun

Unlikely. If you pick your moderators carefully you'll tend to wind up with people who are at least marginally responsible and well-adjusted. They may or may not be jerks, but, generally, they will at least have a neutral sense of duty and, even if they're very vocal about it, will set aside personal differences in order to maintain the integrity of the system as a whole. They may become fed up with what they perceive as "hand-tying" or favoritism, but, generally, you'll just see them (sometimes very vocally) renounce their moderation status rather than act out some sort of retribution.

ManiSan · Feb 29, 2008, 06:33 PM // 18:33

Player based moderation wont fail if it's done right.
Let me think a min... hmmmm
OK.
A volunteer (not everyone, you need an inscription) can ban a gold spammer a day. No more. Thats enought, since there are maybe 20 or 50 volunteers on gw.
2nd. At the end of the day, an Anet employee quickly have a look on server logs (they do it anyway right ?). Hes job is fastest, he just have to clic on the ban button, while reading the log (**pay attention to www.xxxxx.com**)

Volunteers will have the ability to ban for a day, immediatly. One bot only. So, they just cant do any serious dmg.

This will fail ? I really dont think so. I trust people, maybe I shouldnt...

Raiku · Feb 29, 2008, 06:38 PM // 18:38

Quote:

Originally Posted by Longasc

QFT.

I sometimes wonder if legalization would be the solution. Many people would not like it, but I would say better ANet is selling the gold and cashing in than others...

QFT! Anet should be selling them <_<

Stockholm · Feb 29, 2008, 06:59 PM // 18:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by ManiSan

Player based moderation wont fail if it's done right.
Let me think a min... hmmmm
I trust people, maybe I shouldnt...

Then there is no need for in game moderation. We need moderation because some people can not be trusted to do the right thing, and in the next sentence you say that you trust the same players to moderate the game?????

Chthon · Feb 29, 2008, 08:11 PM // 20:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by X Ice Man X

As long as there is people who will buy the gold then there is going to be people there to sell the gold.

While rhetorically appealing, this is dead wrong. People only buy gold because it is cheap enough that they can get an amount that yields a substantial in-game benefit for a trivial portion of their disposable assets. If gold prices rose above such "pocket change" levels, demand for it would plummet. Certainly there would be a few wealthy people who would still like to buy, but there would not be a big enough clientèle to support an organized gold-selling business.

In short, imagine what would happen if a-net were able to impose barriers that raised the cost of gold to $100 per 1k, and you can see why the claim that "as long as there is people who will buy the gold..." is false.

----

@ Legalization.

It's a very bad idea. You get the same inflation as with the illegal version, only it's worse because it draws in new gold-buyers because it's cheaper and risk-of-ban-free.

Thanks to max-stat collectors' items, at least GW wouldn't end up like other games where there's a serious power differential between those cough up cash for in-game benefits and those who don't:

(I think Bilateralope summed it up pretty well, but Penny Arcade is funnier.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by enter_the_zone

The point is, Anet can drive the goldsellers out of business because it costs Anet nothing to be cheaper than them, since they have no operation cost associated with acquiring the gold.

You are failing to count the cost of ruining their own in-game economy to do it.

-----

Quote:

Originally Posted by hallomik

Fril's analogy to the drug trade is pretty good.

Indeed it is. It is a very good analogy and I'm frankly disturbed by some of the posts bashing it. When people fail to "get" an analogy that straightforward, I feel very bad about the quality of the education in logical reasoning available today...

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And as to the notion that "nothing can be done," there is some obvious truth to the economic realities, but the larger point to surely false. Look at the campaign against smoking in the US and Europe. Has smoking been eliminated? No. Has it been significantly reduced? Absolutely.

This is absolutely correct.

-----

Quote:

Originally Posted by Fril Estelin

It's the old discussion of "Does banning bots bring additional revenue to Anet?"

It certainly does. A-net would stand to make money by pushing the gold-sellers right to the brink of unprofitability by banning their bots and cashing in every time the gold-sellers bought a new account to replaced a banned one.
The questions are: (1) Could a-net make more money than they could in the above manner by eliminating the gold-sellers altogether and promoting a gold-seller-free game that drew in more legitimate customers? (2) Does a-net, out of principle or animus towards the gold-sellers, want to eliminate them even if symbiotic relationship would be more profitable?

---------

Quote:

Originally Posted by Inde

I think most of you are under the assumption that the average player knows that gold buying or selling is against the EULA. I assure you, just as there is only a small minority that read forums, there is a smaller minority that reads their EULA. I have come across many MMO players who have bought gold and had no idea there was even a controversy over these things.

In which case a WoW-style informational campaign would be a good idea.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Stockholm

First: It is NOT illigal to sell game gold, it is against the EULA, so the law enforcment can not get involved.

1. Your point about the EULA not being a law is correct; gold-selling qua EULA-vioaltion is "unlawful" not "illegal," and results only in a-net having a right to sue violators. (Even in jurisdictions where the EULA does not hold, there tends to be an underlying IP right that's getting violated and establishes a similar basis for a suit.)
2. Depending on a given jurisdiction's conceptions of intellectual property, gold-selling may qualify as plain old theft, and be criminally punishable.
3. Depending on how loosely drafted a given jurisdiction's computer crimes laws are, gold-selling may be criminally punishable as "hacking." (I consider this bad legal drafting, since it's not hacking by any common-sense definition and clearly not what was intended when such laws were written, but the result is the same regardless of my opinion on it.)

MarlinBackna · Feb 29, 2008, 08:21 PM // 20:21

Oh how I would want there to be no RMT! But alas, now that its here, it's here to stay.
So what to do now? Legalizing it I think is the only viable solution.

Here's what would happen. ANet will delete every bot (I'm pretty sure they have a good idea on who all the bots are), and begin selling 100k at USD 7. Then the economy would go crazy for about a month with people wanting to buy stuff w/ their 100k, but it would finally settle down, probably with some items plunging in value a bit. Then, slowly but surely, people would stop buying gold at all. I would compare this to alcohol laws in the US and Europe. 16-Year-Olds in Europe are responsible when they drink because the element of "illegal"-ness that teens feel in the US when they drink is missing. Same with weed legalization in the Netherlands. Legalization eventually teaches responsibilty, but that takes time. Time that GW doesn't have, so I don't support ANet selling gold in GW1 because it is too late.

So what about GW2? Now that ANet knows that RMT's will be a problem, they will anticipate a solution that will knock our socks off: either something that will prevent RMTs from being started, or legalization. I'd prefer the former, but the latter will be fine too.

Shadowmoon · Feb 29, 2008, 08:37 PM // 20:37

Wow, seems to me like it another blame why the economy is f'ed in guildwars thread.
To be honest, I believe gold selling seem to be the least impact of the economy, because the gold is actually being farmed, not magically appearing or disappearing. I think the real economy breaker is the combination of two events, Loot-scaling and the crappy handling of the duping fiasco. Loot scaling has caused the deflation of 90% of the games market. I read many time in this thread that gold selling causes inflation, but the market has clearly deflated. Now what has really inflated in price in this game, it is the high end market. And when did this happen, when the duping was happening. And many people were willing to trade their rare items for rediculous amount of armbraces without a thought in the world. Because A-net didn't roll back these trades, we have the highend market we have today. Ursan is the perfect remedy for this, it is causing the crash of this item, and the sooner it does it the better.
So now we have our current economy, nothing sell for much in the low end, but the high end just grows higher and higher. The poor are gettign poorer and the rich are gettign richer.

Ctb · Feb 29, 2008, 08:40 PM // 20:40

Quote:

To be honest, I believe gold selling seem to be the least impact of the economy, because the gold is actually being farmed, not magically appearing or disappearing. I think the real economy breaker is the combination of two events, Loot-scaling and the crappy handling of the duping fiasco.

First of all, you're patently wrong about the high end market. When Sorrow's Furnace came out greens from it were being sold for egregiously high prices. When Factions came out, greens from it were being sold for egregiously high prices. When Nightfall came out.... you get the picture. The high end economy has always been insanely overpriced. It was no different before loot scaling even without greens because farmers constantly exploited AI weaknesses and collected enormous amounts of merch fodder to shore up their storage. Many of the people that are still wealthy are wealthy from these early days when farming two or three SF greens meant you had your ecto slot half filled (well... there was no material storage then, but that's beside the point) and you were a third of the way to maxing your gold storage.

In fact, if you think the market's bad now - at one time there was a regular COLLECTOR stance shield from Crystal Desert that commonly sold for 40k-50k easily in Lion's Arch.

Furthermore, most of the things you actually can use are much, MUCH more affordable now. Superior Vigors are at less than 1/5 of what they were at one time. Black dyes are down and so are ectos.

Finally, as I previously mentioned, if you want to see what happens to a game that has a rampant problem with goldbots, check out Lord of the Rings. On many servers, prices are so hyper-inflated by the unchecked RMTs (Turbine keeps promising to do something, but for months hasn't) that many players can't even afford to keep their avatars equipped at a level appropriate for their current quest needs. And it's certainly not a rarity issue, because the same items are constantly listed - sometimes they don't even sell - they're just listed at ridiculous prices.

I've SEEN what happens when a company doesn't fix gold botting problems. I have yet to see any serious consequences related to loot scaling, save the isolated problems it caused for a tiny minority of very dedicated farmers.

Quote:

Thanks to max-stat collectors' items, at least GW wouldn't end up like other games where there's a serious power differential between those cough up cash for in-game benefits and those who don't:

The only good thing about Hellgate London is that it's very existance seems to provide a ceaseless trove of examples of how NOT to do basically anything you conceivably COULD do in a game.

Seriously... I was in beta so maybe it's better now, but I'm thinking that if you're art department's contribution is going to cause enough clipping issues that every freaking map can trap you in a dozen different places, you could at least implement a /stuck command... or at the least not require the entire game to be shutdown and reloaded to get unstuck o_0

Longasc · Feb 29, 2008, 08:56 PM // 20:56

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chthon

People only buy gold because it is cheap enough that they can get an amount that yields a substantial in-game benefit for a trivial portion of their disposable assets. If gold prices rose above such "pocket change" levels, demand for it would plummet.
(...)
In short, imagine what would happen if a-net were able to impose barriers that raised the cost of gold to $100 per 1k, and you can see why the claim that "as long as there is people who will buy the gold..." is false.

These "barriers" are too hypothetical. How on earth should this work without ruining the game for players as well.

If 1000 Gold would cost $100:
- It must be extremely hard to get gold ingame.
- prices would reflect that. Stuff would cost less, as people would have less money. And 1000 Gold would be worth a lot.
- gold sellers would probably be in paradise. Just one bot would net them extreme income.

The inflation thing is also something you have to prove. It does not exist, WoW would be DOWN if gold selling would cause massive inflation. World of Warcraft has extreme gold-selling and farming.

I reported a farming bot, after 3 days the guy was still running in circles in Un'Goro crater. After the fourth report to three different GMs. He might be still running around there. And this was not the only bot. You can even see bots washing money by dropping stuff for other bots to pick up and similar things.

Blizzard is making good PR by fighting gold sellers, but which of the many gold sellers becaome their first target? One of the most notorious gold spammers, that really spam permanently all channels, pm people and so on.

I would welcome a world without gold selling.
Still people have not found a way to combat gold sellers or make people buy less gold.
But WoW has a nice way to restrict the impact on the economy, some things (epic gear) must be earned through fighting and questing, and no gold seller bot can help you with that. And even for that arena grinder services for fame exist. At least for pvp gear. Now tell me people are not bad as hell!

bilateralrope · Feb 29, 2008, 09:29 PM // 21:29

Quote:

Originally Posted by Longasc

The problem is that the price for 100k Gold would have to be so low that people would not consider it worth the risk to buy from illegal and cheaper gold traders than ANet's "gold store".

And you are right, there is a risk of inflation.

But it works in Everquest, without having destroyed the economy. The influence cannot really be measured, but it has not shown to be significant, the market did not react at all. One could say because gold selling was already there before, legal or not.

While I have no idea how the EQ system works, I'm guessing that the gold sinks counter the inflation from the gold farmers. Though I wonder how the sinks are designed so that they don't hit the players who don't buy gold too hard.

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My suggestions:

1.) Bind on Pickup (to account, stolen from WoW)
Rare items should not be able to be traded. They would have to be won by yourself. It would also be some badge of honor, it shows you were there, in a victorious group. Plus you were lucky.

So instead of grinding in whichever farming spot you enjoy most, you have to grind one specific area over and over ?
I don't like a bind on pickup system unless the drop is guaranteed for each player who can use it the first time they do that run.

Quote:

2.) Token system (again, stolen from WoW - and I do not like that game... funny)
As luck of the draw is annoying at times, people can get tokens from chests or major bosses that allow them to exchange a certain amount of them for special items. Tokens could also not be traded.

This solution to the RMT problem kills of player to player trading for items that players would actually want, along with preventing players being kind to each other by giving away items they don't need.

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3.) no more money-sink/consumption titles
Drunkard, Party Animal or Sweet Tooth should not count to anything or be removed completely. They are primitive money grind, and are basically gold buyer or hardcore farmer titles.

Drunkard and Sweet tooth aren't really a problem because they pull gold out of the economy (reducing inflation). The worst case is if a player buys/farms gold then trades with other players for the items, because that gold is left in the economy. However wouldn't most gold buyers be wanting to get the title quicker, meaning they buy directly from NPCs (leaving a net inflation of 0) ?
For the non-farmers these titles provide a gold sink. So they aren't a problem.

However Party Animal requires player to player trading, meaning the bought gold is left floating around to cause inflation.

Quote:

Originally Posted by R.Shayne

To those that feel there should be a crack down on RMT; apparently when you read these articles’ on RMT most of you forget to read the part that most of these companies give KICK-BACKS to the game publisher company considered an operating cost.

Which articles mention the kick-backs ?

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To those that support in game gold buying via ANET or NCSof; the only way this could be done that would not affect the economy drastically would be for ANET to establish a price on every item in the game and enforce this price with NPC traders. That means the company would have to spend money on developing. The publisher would have to pay for this development and that is NOT GOING TO HAPPEN

So NPC's selling unlimited amounts of every item at set prices ? (maybe with a condition that must be met before they sell the item, like a title)

The only problem I can see here is that it would kill player to player trading. But given that every item would still be available to everyone (either farm or but the gold), I can't see the harm there as long as the trading system is left in so people can be kind to each other.

This system would still have the gold sellers spamming and using more resources (bandwidth, server load and moderating) than the average player. But to prevent this ANET just needs to sell gold at a price lower than the gold sellers do, forcing them out of business.

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Why is it not going to happen, see above statement or re-read one of the none basis articles’ that are not afraid to upset the game companies and even mention Kick-backs. The publisher have a real dilemma now, waste money on developing something that will give a marginal profit or keep taking kickbacks from RMT at no cost to them. Morality is always subjective.

Can you provide links to any of these "unbiased" articles ?

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I reported one gold seller through NC Soft website with screenshots, took me about 45 minutes to report the gold seller. If ANET or any company was serious about stopping gold sellers they would have an easy way to report them. Type in “/report name” do you see gold seller listed as an option?

Just report them for spamming, then ANET will check the logs and hit them for the spamming and the gold selling.

Longasc · Feb 29, 2008, 10:12 PM // 22:12

Quote:

Originally Posted by bilateralrope

While I have no idea how the EQ system works, I'm guessing that the gold sinks counter the inflation from the gold farmers. Though I wonder how the sinks are designed so that they don't hit the players who don't buy gold too hard.

CTB posted some more about it some postings earlier in this thread.

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So instead of grinding in whichever farming spot you enjoy most, you have to grind one specific area over and over ?
I don't like a bind on pickup system unless the drop is guaranteed for each player who can use it the first time they do that run.

You would like a guaranteed green every time from a dungeon chest, too?
We already have the dungeon chests, and they only sometimes guarantee an onyx or lockpick, but never a green item.

I deem it much better gameplay and more of an achievement and enjoyable to "grind" a whole dungeon over and over than to grind a farmspot and buy the item. Which would bring GOLD you can buy into the equation.

Quote:

Drunkard and Sweet tooth aren't really a problem because they pull gold out of the economy (reducing inflation). The worst case is if a player buys/farms gold then trades with other players for the items, because that gold is left in the economy. However wouldn't most gold buyers be wanting to get the title quicker, meaning they buy directly from NPCs (leaving a net inflation of 0) ? For the non-farmers these titles provide a gold sink. So they aren't a problem.

Your assumption is this "inflation" you fear. People buy all the things you mentioned cheaper from players, but I will agree on your point and say it does not cause inflation. I say this inflation would not exist anyways, though.

Some people might post reports of LOTRO, the only game that really suffers from massive inflation, as Ctb reported. I would like to know how the LOTRO economy is that this can happen. I do not play it, so I won't talk more about it.

Back to GW, this does not make this kind of gold buying better. It takes away from the grind achievement if you can buy titles. Gold buying has influence on them. It makes them even "cheaper" and even sillier than such grind titles are anyways.

The idea behind bind on pickup restrictions and removing gold based titles are that gold gets less meaningful. If you cannot get things by gold, but only by your personal effort, gold selling is no problem anymore.

crystalklear64 · Feb 29, 2008, 10:20 PM // 22:20

As far as the WoW campaign is concerned, I don't think I'd care about ruining the game for other people if it got to the point where I wanted to buy gold.

For a suggestion, just get rid of gold trading all together. Gold would be used on NPC's only. Kinda something like D2. Gold is essentially worthless, but needed to buy essentials such as potions and scrolls. Only items could be traded between players.

True, an item would arise to take the place of gold (the soj/runes in d2, ecto in GW), but it would slow down the process considerably, as farming items is much more time consuming than farming gold.

X Ice Man X · Feb 29, 2008, 11:44 PM // 23:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chthon

In short, imagine what would happen if a-net were able to impose barriers that raised the cost of gold to $100 per 1k, and you can see why the claim that "as long as there is people who will buy the gold..." is false.

So your saying then in short. That if it cost $100 to buy 1k and people were willing to pay that then nobody would sell it to them?

I say again, as long as people are willing to buy it, and by willing to buy it they are willing to pay the requested amount (otherwise they wouldn't be willing to buy it would they...) then somebody will sell it to them. Sure, selling gold at that amount would greatly reduce the amount of people willing to buy it. However if somebody still was willing to pay that much money for 1k then somebody would be ready to sell it to them.

You also could not use laws to stop Gold Sellers. Say it was made Law in the USA that selling gold for real money inside of games was illegal. How would that affect the person selling it in China? It wouldn't. The only real option for A Net if they want to stop other people making money off of their game, is simple. Sell the gold them selves from the in game store at a much lower rate than the gold sellers can do it while making a profit or even breaking even. They would then no longer have the ability to compete in the market and would be gone.

RavagerOfDreams · Feb 29, 2008, 11:49 PM // 23:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by bilateralrope

This leads to inflation, leading to higher prices, leading to more people buying gold, leading to more farmers, leading to more inflation.

problem is prices are dropping not rising. I.E. armbrace is now down to 100k+15e so your inflation theory can't be true ;P

Inferno Link · Mar 01, 2008, 12:47 AM // 00:47

I really dont care because I used to play Runescape for 5 years and they killed their own pvp trying to get rid of it causing I believe it was 6% of the population to quit membership. I would preffer it gone but just dont F up your own game doing it. Then again everyone is smarter than Jagex (maker of runescape.)

rohara · Mar 01, 2008, 12:49 AM // 00:49

i used to casually farm when i needed cash, but loot-scaling put a stop to that. i can certainly see why people buy gold.

all politics and analogies and "sensible" arguments aside, i'd like to see Anet sell gold in the in-game store. why? GW's economy is farked beyond repair, and i think its because there is no easy way to sell items in-game (ie. auction house). unless something is extremely rare (therefore coveted and quick to sell), its often not worth your time to spend hours spamming in the big cities to make a measly plat or two. i'd like to spend my limited time playing the game - not playing saleswoman.

hell, when my patient guildies need money, i give them a ton of loot to go sell for me and i split the profits with them, because i can't be asked to stand around and spam. its friggin boring and frustrating.

and hey, lots of people just want stuff and they want it now, regardless of whether or not they have "earned" the "right" to have said stuff. those willing to pay will always find a way. a legitimate means to do so would be nice. i'm sure people would rather give their money to Anet than some random chinese farmbot that may or may not even deliver your gold and/or steal your account/credit card number.