Warhammer Gold Farming Ban Rampage

[Slycne]

If people have a demand for Gold sellers this early on they need to look at themselves and ask why they are even bothering playing a game.

Of course Jacobs has basically 'called out' these gold farmers. And I think it is for this reason they are so active now.

Ultimately it is up to the player to use these services. And as there are many asses in this world that will, the rest of us are going to be spammed. On the bright side though, every banning means a new game these people have to buy. So I am sure the more that are banned the more they will look at the cost ratios.

We can all hope!

Gold spammers and farmers never or rarely pay for their accounts. As paulgruberman said before they employ stolen credit cards and use of lax digital charge back policy to avoid them.

 

[Jenny Creed]

I doubt getting huffed up about them makes any difference other than to mr. Jacobs' blood pressure. They don't care how gleefully you ban them, they just create more accounts and apparently make enough of a profit to run their business. Which may say more about their shaky credit card credibilities than the willingness of players to pay to have their games played for them. Or not.

I liked the approach City of Heroes used to have, where no resources worth having could be traded between players. Of course they could still sell leveling services. What we need is a mmorgrp with completely skill based rather than stat based combat, so the only way to get better is to actually play.

 

[ElArabDeMagnifico]

Hey, I heard Gold Farming is a billion dollar industry!

That's it, I'm selling all my Mythic shares!

 

[Chocolate Source]

The only real way to stop gold farmers is eliminate their market. Banning people who buy gold is much more useful than banning the farmer and I hope Mythic will have the guts to do it.
Once people realise that if they buy gold they're going to get thrown out of the game, the gold-sellers won't have a market and they'll go back to other games.

 

[Alfie]

Another way is to remove low lvls(up to say rank 10) capability to send mail and whisper people outside their friends/guild list, and as you all know thats what gold sellers use to make their anying spamm comercials.. Perhapps alittle harsh but its an idea that can work since then they have to spend more time betwene spamm mail/tells, but thou it seems whatever you do to try and stop them the player allways looses..
Glad to see thou that they are comitted to stopping them...

 

[Acaroid]

Ive seen quite a fee mmorpg's totally killed because of this, good luck to getting those people out of games!!

 

[Eyclonus]

I still don't understand the rage against gold farmers. If anything gold farming is a wonderful example of globalization as well as a treatise on free market economies.

I find it funny that one of the illusions these MMORPGs try hardest to preserve is that of the meritocracy.

Well look at it from another point of view, developers put a lot of thought in how to remove unstable elements from an MMORPG economy. Gold farming produces inflation/deflation in those MMOs that use some form of S&D mechanic with their NPC merchants. The system behind is just a simple algorithm being run by the server.

When an excess of items flood the market, that item drops in value, but if theres an increase in an item that has been specifically marked to not decrease, then we have surplus of a valuable , pretty basic right? Well Gold is that item, if everyone has lots of gold, then everyone can buy that awesomely massive sword of epic asskicking +10^9899. With more of them in the market, the value of the sword goes down, making it useless in trades, whilst still usable in combat, a clan raid becomes less fun when the challenge is eliminated.

You also get people who act like the "No-Lifer" from the South Park WoW episode hunting your newer players and pretty much destroying the major point of MMO, community. Add to that, but frequently the people who buy all this stuff are complete arseholes and only a few steps above cyberbullying in their behaviour.

The Gold Farmers and our other friend, the Character Factory, seldom do anything that involves other players. They just hangaround instants/mob zones just fighting, or just as frequently Kill Stealing.

The fault is on both the people who sell the gold and the shits that buy it. When the company running the MMO does a real-for-virtual offer this probably doesn't come into it as they have complete control of the market equilibrium.

The only real way to stop gold farmers is eliminate their market. Banning people who buy gold is much more useful than banning the farmer and I hope Mythic will have the guts to do it.
Once people realise that if they buy gold they're going to get thrown out of the game, the gold-sellers won't have a market and they'll go back to other games.

Better way mate, multiple currencies with differing exchange rates between vendors. MMORPGs have all these differing nations at a war, and yet they've all managed to establish a mutually agreed Gold standard. An exchange rate can prevent gold farming being effective by devaluing currency unevenly across the board, you can have a vendor scan the players coffers and adjust its prices for disrepancies between the value of the player's Lordareon Pounds to an Ogrimmaran Dollars and the Outland Brick.

 

[Limos]

By this, do you mean that leveraging someone else's work product for unlicensed profitablity, earned by underpaying workers in small work environments, by hiring in underdeveloped countries where the work is too disadvantaged to argue is a good thing? Or that globalization is horribly flawed? It's a huge industry. It's enticing criminal organizations. And why not? Easy money, no risk and it's "legit".

The point Doggabone makes here further addresses my frustration with the above news article. When you launch an MMORPG - globally - you have to look at the possible repercussions through a similar lens. If we assume the problem is roughly analogous to the "drug war" the US has been fighting for over 20 years, clearly attempts at slowing the incoming drug supply have proved futile. Shouldn't we expect a similar outcome in the efforts to ban gold farmers?

What's troublesome is that the anger isn't being directed at those responsible for the demand. Jacob's statement should read "I hate people who use gold spammers with every fiber of my being." My guess is those people aren't nameless, faceless "others". I would guess those responsible for the demand reside a little too close to home and comprise a valuable group of subscribers.

The Difference is that the people at WAR are omnipotent gods who can see everything you have ever said or done and then smite you no matter where you hide. The US can't just smite the drug runners remotely.

And they aren't banning people for buying gold. They are banning people for selling gold.

 

[poleboy]

Smack 'em down hard.

Games should be escapism, not just a fictional place where your real life income affects your power and influence. I haven't seen or heard from any farmers so far, which I take as a good sign. After all, they've had plenty of chances to perfect their skills in WoW, so I half expected them to be all over the place when I started playing WAR. And I wouldn't mind seeing people banned just as hard for buying gold as well.
People are acting like it's an infringement on basic human rights. Seriously, get over it. They're banned from the game, not thrown in jail or even fined. They don't get their digital candy because they acted like stupid brats and didn't follow some very simple rules. Serves 'em right.

 

[Arbre]

Remind me who put, into their game, a system which permits and gives a reason for gold farmers to exist again?

I don't see how they could remove that reason, unless they removed all ability to exchange items or gold within the game. Not letting people drop, trade or give away things seems like a drastic step to take.

So what's the problem again?

 

[Blayze]

The problem: Gold selling exists.
The reason: A market exists.
The solution: Remove that market.
The answer: Make everything BoP, including gold. You'd drive the gold sellers into drop-running (Taking their customers through endgame instances and the like for the harder-to-get drops), but at least they'd have to pay for their accounts in order to do so.

 

[Doggabone]

The problem: Gold selling exists.
The reason: A market exists.
The solution: Remove that market.
The answer: Make everything BoP, including gold. You'd drive the gold sellers into drop-running (Taking their customers through endgame instances and the like for the harder-to-get drops), but at least they'd have to pay for their accounts in order to do so.

Some folks play for the in-game economy - no trade or barter, no economy. The crafting sub-games generally rely on item/currency trading within the game as well. (I'm making a breastplate, and I need a leather pad inside it, and so I need to buy one from a skinner.) To some, this would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". This would work well for some games, but it would be ruinous for others.

As much as I may wish it, I'll never see the end of gold spamming and selling. The nearest I'll can reach is to never cater to the market. A best, a developer can minimize or offset the annoyance. But still, if you do nothing - if you surrender completely to the inevitable - you'll be overrun. To paraphrase: I'm not 100% in support of all that is done in the "war on drugs", but it's a damn sight better than if they do nothing at all.

Even if you take gold out of the game completely, the players will find something else to trade:

A dupe bug renders money useless overnight. In an interesting economic development, the players almost immediately fall upon Dark Angel Feathers as a replacement currency until things return to normal. DAFs are valuable because they are rare-dropped yet stackable items and required to cast player-killing spells. Pkers have an interest in getting them, and non-pkers have an interest in keeping them out of pker's hands.

There's an archive of these ancient comments at http://thecan.org/in/m59.html

There's a lot of relevant commentary in "The Laws of Online World Design" - a collection of axioms about, well, Online World Design accrued over the years: http://www.raphkoster.com./gaming/laws.shtml - Ralph Koster is a game designer whose credits go back at Ultima Online. The "laws" are an interesting read, particularly with this discussion about gold spamming in mind.

 

[Mariena]

Well, at least it's going to be a change from the usual WoW gold forum bots..

"cheap warhammeronline gold buy cheap cheap rolex".

.. Already looking forward to it.

 

[Blayze]

Some folks play for the in-game economy - no trade or barter, no economy. The crafting sub-games generally rely on item/currency trading within the game as well. (I'm making a breastplate, and I need a leather pad inside it, and so I need to buy one from a skinner.) To some, this would be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater". This would work well for some games, but it would be ruinous for others.

Granted.

Even if you take gold out of the game completely, the players will find something else to trade:

But if there's nothing available to trade or to trade for, what then? The previously-mentioned drop-running. At the very least, it gets people running content. The gold sellers would need to pay for accounts in order to run customers through end-level content (As most other content could be soloed anyway). That means they'd need to reach max level and stay there, which means paying for accounts...

.. Already looking forward to it.

Heh. Me too. I almost never set foot in any of the major cities in WoW any more, because I get those damn-awful "Who can do it?" spams from SSE Games or whoever they are.

 

[Arbre]

From the top of my head, here are some ideas about what they could do:

- make gold farming legit, with the necessary economical model to attach to this activity. Allow appropriate bank channels, to prevent spam. Eventually attach taxes there, but be careful not to rise them too high otherwise you'll encourage non-EULA acquisition of credits.

- tax money exchanges, where the higher the exchange or the more frequent the exchanges, the higher the tax, without hesitating to go beyond +200%. Increase the tax even more if the exchanges are often made between the same characters belonging to different accounts.

- "paint" any single coin or group of coins to know where they come from, and who owned them. If the source of the virtual money is found to be coming from suspended accounts closed because of gold farming, all the money, no matter where it is, is classed as illegal and destroyed, with taxes upon the players who came to possess those particular coins at a given time.
This information does not need to be visible for the client, but will be easily retrieved on the servers.
This option could be mixed with option 1, where all gold acquired outside of the legit "gold farming banks", if anything as such could exist, would be worth the same draconian sanctions cited above.

My 2c.

 

[SunoffaBeach]

dont ban gold farmers. mark them as "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis".

then make quests like this:
1) kill 10 "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis" -> gain 1 level.

 

[poleboy]

dont ban gold farmers. mark them as "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis".

then make quests like this:
1) kill 10 "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis" -> gain 1 level.

While that might be a slight... immature, the idea is not bad. Branding people who ruin the game for others (extreme cases only) and hunting them down for sport not only sends a message that the community does not tolerate this shit, but also strengthens the bonds between players. It's quite common in Urban Dead if anyone plays that. While PK'ing is not officially discouraged, people vigorously register the PK'ers and self-appointed bounty hunters track them down and exact justice on them. It's quite a fascinating system, actually.

 

[Wolvaroo]

dont ban gold farmers. mark them as "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis".

then make quests like this:
1) kill 10 "cheaterswithagiantchinesepenis" -> gain 1 level.

While that might be a slight... immature, the idea is not bad. Branding people who ruin the game for others (extreme cases only) and hunting them down for sport not only sends a message that the community does not tolerate this shit, but also strengthens the bonds between players. It's quite common in Urban Dead if anyone plays that. While PK'ing is not officially discouraged, people vigorously register the PK'ers and self-appointed bounty hunters track them down and exact justice on them. It's quite a fascinating system, actually.

As a member of DEM, I must agree with you completely!

WAR has a neat little counter on the right side of the herald page that has the current number of farmers banned. Neato! http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war

But the saddest thing is that there is so far very little use for gold... I always have more than enough for anything I need and even buying gear off the Auction house isn't useful as upgrades come so easily and frequently.

 

[Ixus Illwrath]

I for one will say that the gold spammers in Wh-O are 10x more obnoxious than anything i've ever dealt with in WoW. I hope they solve the problem soon...