Because they think (rightly or wrongly)that beyond it lies something they’ll enjoy more. Gamers usually believe that the “endgame” is where all the action is and where all the cool kids hang out, and the sooner they get past the lowbie stuff the sooner they’ll reach the promised land. That’s the big draw of powerlevelling and gold buying - to get to the ‘proper’ game, as the buyers see it.

Whether the grass is actually greener at the level cap is another question, of course

1- We live in a sweat shop labor based world. Almost everything produced is being produced, at least in part, by sweat shop labor. You can blame Neo-Liberal policies like globalization, you can blame the Military Industrial Complex and its role in fragmenting communities world wide, or you could just blame capitalism like good old Uncle Karl Marx would. The issue of sweat shop labor is ignored and until people recognize this transformed mode of slavery for what it is, we will continue to suffer from its ills.

2- Things in the MMORPG world have monetary value and require labor to get. Until either the value of these goods or the labor required to get them is addressed, gold farming will persist

Above I believe, are the two main reasons for gold farming. Legalized RMTs for gold will not solve this issue when sweat shop wages can compete with the legalized transaction (Just look at Eve Online, they have a legalized RMT with the use of time card for gold transactions and gold farmers still persist). So the solution lies in the vast reduction of real world monetary value or the vast reduction of virtual labor required.

IOW, understanding farming (crop rotation, when to plant, how to fertilize, how to sample ground, what crops grow in what climates), this is the essential understanding. There are marketing models for such analyses that consider the conditions that have to be present in a market. The analysts find different locales with similar conditions and apply similar models. An example from the literature is store chains noting similar environments in Texas and Florida who then sell the same products using the same aisle organization methods.

Yep!

Human nature is that people want shortcuts noy only to skip thingsthey see as “unfun” but to catch up with their friends, to look cool because they have a max level widgit and so on.

It’s not as if the neo-prohibitionist approach has especially worked, the only thing I’ve seen which truly did work was Eve Online’s “sale of game time for in-game cash” - which crushed the ebay prices of their currency by over an order of magnitude without causing massive inflation (there *is* inflation, but that’s purely because of later design descisions…)

There’s also a difference between allowing companies and individuals to play in your space, demanding a liscence with terms for companies for example could be quite effective legally, companies without are de-facto acting in bad faith…

No matter how much I hear about a product, no matter how good it looks, no matter how many people have/wear/use/hear it, what matters to me is whether it’s something I like, can use, or want to have.

If it is, and I can justify spending the money on it, then I’ll buy it. If it isn’t, then I won’t.

It’s out of the mass of individual decisions that trends are formed, which is what is, to me, the intuitively obvious truth. Influentials and word of mouth are “seeds”, yes, and it’s useful if you happen to catch someone like that in a marketing campaign, but they’re not predictors of what will really happen.

After all, that influential person will probably go through the same process of elimination in deciding whether it’s something they want to use/buy/listen to.

The first time I saw this in person was with Lineage 2. Before then the time of any player was “valued” equally high as any other, but with the farming sweatshops running full tilt no “real player” can compete on the selling market unless there are major exploits around, but thats a different and sadder story.

Whats going on in Pirates of the burning Sea is just the farming organisations establishing a foothold in case the game becomes a hit for the bussiness. If there is a market you make the most money by being the first seller, so they are pulling a gamble to invest a little for a potentially great profit.

My take is that the grind, as much as it’s deplored by blogging game designers, is part of the satisfaction most people get out of an MMO. If you have real world money and you can use it to grind faster, chances are you will. I don’t really see this as a terrible sin.

Why would someone choose to accelerate past what they are enjoying?

Also, narrow the definition of ‘grind’. Practicing and exercising your execution of skills or puzzle solving is one thing, tedium and time-sinks between you and your goals is another. Its certainly subjective and the differences are subtle, but the effect on player enjoyment is huge.

When you design content for a game, like a zone or an instance, some people are going to say “Man, that was really fun.” but some will complain it was too hard, and others complain that it was too easy. In games with levels one can control the difficulty by leveling up first. Some people might like to visit the Cave of Wonders at level 29, others might prefer to wait until level 31. But that only works until the level cap. Then suddenly my choices are much more limited.

So no, I don’t think “if the game were fun enough” people wouldn’t buy gold to gear up the character. I think it’s a side-effect of ending the leveling game.

Gold farming activities are distracting and disruptive.

Which is one of the two points I wanted to make. The worst experience I ever had in World of Warcraft was from a gold farmer hunting near us. He would “agro” and “tag” the “mob” and then lure it into the area my pick up team was playing. If we didn’t get it with an area attack then someone just plain attacked it becuase, hey, it was there. This happend over and over again. He wouldn’t talk to us, and his armor was common gear or fairly common bind-on-pickup. Never seens a max level player with such bad gear. And just like he didn’t care about the TOS he didn’t care if his grinding ruined our fun.