 | Another gold farming articleJuly 19th, 2006 |
Article centered on China, with more of the usual figures and a good glimpse into the culture of it there.
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ugh, ralph, posting with firefox is a real pain. this preview really sucks on the cpu.
anyways, aever see that movie shattered glass? for some reason this artcile remidns me of that movie.
So have any game companies taken the plunge and started offering their own gold for sale? Directly, and not the Puzzle Pirates way. Although they may have hit on what everyone will eventually use as a solution…
posting with firefox is a real pain. this preview really sucks on the cpu.
If you copy-and-paste your comment in, you don’t have to deal with the live updating. Just one hit, and you can glance at it for review. I do that sometimes, when I have a big comment. And I use Firefox.
I’m one of those “20 to 30 percent” who feel that buying/selling virtual items is cheating. I don’t trust that number, but I recognize there are players who see no problem with this. I actually think SOE’s “Exchange” initiative is a good idea. By legitimizing the practice, it becomes easier to control. I’m interested in finding out how well it’s been working out for EQ2, because ideally it would help separate the players who do this from the players who don’t and both sides would probably be happier. I haven’t heard much about it though since it launched, so I’m not sure if it’s really working out or not. I still get the tells from the farmer’s ad-bots in the normal EQ2 servers, at least once a week.
Good to see someone actually interviewing gold farmers in an article on gold farming! That’s a voice too seldom heard.
Personally, it fascinates me that whenever this “issue” comes up in gaming circles, normally intelligent people start talking about in-game inflation (as if goldfarming has anything to do with it!) and “solutions” to the “problem”.
You’ve got a couple of hours a week to practice, and so you don’t need a fancy tennis racket to whip my butt. On the other hand, I’m time-poor, so I buy an expensive high-tech racket so we can both get a good game. According to logic commonly employed to criticise goldfarming, this is “cheating”.
Cheating, here, refers to the perception of the player that implicit rules are broken. When it comes up, you either get rid of the implicit rules (by sticking to the explicit ones and refusing to acknowledge implicit ones) or you get rid of the cheater (and thus make the implicit rules explicit).
The flaws of virtual economies are reasonably well-known; actively taking advantage of system flaws doesn’t sit well with people, even if it is a common practice in other places, even if it’s technically permissible, etc.
Gold-farming is heavily dependent on some particular flaws in virtual economies, most notably in-game inflation. As a result, if they want to eliminate the “cheater” (by hard-coding the implicit rules), they have to eliminate these systemic flaws in the economies. The alternative is to say, “They’re not doing anything wrong,” as I noted above: and that doesn’t sit well with their playerbase, again, as noted above.
Good response, Michael.
I would argue, though, that the flaws of virtual economies are, in fact, not well known at all. At least, they’re not well known by players.
And as you say, it’s player perception that’s the key to this issue.
Now, I understand perfectly well the desire of the MMOG-producing community to obscure and hide these flaws as much as possible. It would be hard to attract people to a game with the advertising tag “Massive money sinks! Rampant and unstoppable inflation built in! Without constant grind, watch your character quickly slip behind in the ‘cool gear’ stakes!”
However, I think it is utterly reprehensible that the MMOG-producing community allows these “well-known” flaws to be blamed on gold-farming, which is essentially extremely poor people turning their time into a saleable product. Yeah, $100 a month is not a job you’d take, but what if doing that over the summer allowed your dirt-poor family to pay your next semester’s tuition fees? That’s actually the bargain for many of the reviled “gold farmers” – the cheating bastards. I think I’ll cut and paste some obscenities in Chinese into the auction channel…
It is probably too much to ask, but I’d like to see a little truth being told. Here, I’ll even write the plain-English press release:
“Look, it isn’t the gold-farmers, kids, so lay off. The problem is that, to make our game ‘fun’, we’ve made resources infinite, and allowed you to infinitely exchange them at fixed prices for money at NPC vendors which is essentially the textbook definition of runaway inflation. The problem’s in the game. If you don’t want to buy gold for cash, don’t. If you feel that other players who do are ‘cheating’ then we suggest you take a cold, hard look at your self esteem, and while we’re at it, here’s a few websites on game addiction.”
Of course, what actually happens is that they make a lot of noise about non-specific “cheating” — which players take to mean gold-farming — and do sweet fanny adams about the flaws. Which is, and there’s no coincidence here, pretty much an exact match to the compromise position implied in your last paragraph.
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