Pretty valid, but I think Money for Items is more acceptable and integrated. Bad Company’s press hit with their content purchases shows some other problems. This 2 parter is pretty MMO specific though.
First, Go Read this rant sent to the gaming “press” by angry Lineage 2 players.
Then come back here and read some profanity.
More after the jump.
So I’ll lay this out. Gold Farmers, Virtual Currency Brokers, whatever bug the shit out of me.
Why you may ask? Is it because they encourage negative play behavior?
Nope.
It’s the parasitical business model. They’re picking up money we left on thet able. I’ll lay it out plainly.
1. People will pay you real money for items in-game.
2. Players have money they wish to spend in exchange for these items.
3. Most games do not support this which caused a huge secondary market to appear.
4. There is obviously a very strong business basis for these sales as seen by the profitability of these companies.
5. The behavior of the employees of these secondary market companies has a generally negative impact on the game.
6. The item sales of these companies does NOT have a generally negative impact on the game.
So, how do you address it?
The typical bullshit answer is to address the symptoms. Ban the farmers, take an unmaintainable stand against item sales, talk about the purity of the economy, purity of play, whatever bullshit you can think of.
And you’ll spin your wheels all while these gold farmers sell your items and make piles of cash. There are way more of them than you, and every one you ban, every minute you spend responding to a call is money spent to solve an unsolvable problem.
You want to know how to beat them?
They have scaled their operations up to a large degree. They employ people in China to gain these items and mark them up based on cost of acquisition. They have a reasonably fixed cost of goods which defines how much they can sell the itmes for.,
So here’s a secret.
If you run the game, your cost of goods for item sales will ALWAYS be lower than the gold farmers.
So you want to beat them and make cash on the side? Change the playing field. You sell the items. You sell the gold. They drop their prices? You drop yours. Make it easier and cheaper for these players who want to spend the money to buy from you instead of the third party.
I can already hear the cries “OHNOES. Sanctity of the Game!@!@ Purity of Economy!@!@ Money!=Accomplishment”.
You know what? Shut up.
It’s already happening on a huge scale. We can’t stop it, we shouldn’t stop it, and there’s money to be made there. The majority of players out there obviously want this, otherwise we wouldn’t have a problem with third parties.
So we miswell make a buck on it while fixing the more egregious aspects of item sales.
Stop looking at this as a behavioral problem. Look at this as a competitive business venture and you’ll whomp the everlasting shit out of these guys.
Part 2, written after a bunch of people whined about “ruining a fake economy”
So to all who tell me that you’d fuck up the economy.
It’s already fucked up. Items are already being sold to the players. That’s not the problem. The problem is the environmental damage caused by the harvesters.
More after Jump.
These harvesters are directly damaging the the play experience of the other players. They’re consuming more than their fair share of game resources. Players who want to play the game for real have to compete with them and they have neither the time nor resources to do so. Players don’t want to compete against professionals.
So what’s a player to do? They want to enjoy the game, but these harvesters are a direct barrier to enjoyment for them.
And that’s the issue we have to solve.
By selling items directly, you remove the most damaging aspect of these sales from the game. You solve the most pressing issue, which is the inability of your players to actually play the game.
Jeff (Yes, the internet Jeff Freeman) pointed out that you can solve most of the scarcity concerns by maintaining the bind on pickup, no drop and notrade rules that are currently in place.
You sell the items where it’s appropriate. You limit the trade in these items if it’s deemed necessary. These tools are just that, tools. They can be laser focused to dramatically and drastically solve this issue, or they can be used incorrectly and simply make it worse for all involved.
IGE and the like only exist because they make money on an extreme level. Focus your attention on that in the most elegant fashion and you can defeat them. You might have to modify your beliefs about player expectations. You might have to push through the unbased fear of economic destruction.
But if you want to improve your player’s experience it’s what you have to do. Rather than plink away inefectually at the harvesters, rather than piss away countless man months on gameplay alterations, maximize the damage to the sellers, maximize the player enjoyment and fix the problem.
Or you can continue to fuck around as you have. Maybe the gold dealers will run out of space for all of their money and go home.
originally posted June 2006
[...] Apollo, Dear God The Internet It Burns III: NGE Dan Rubenfield has no [...]
Interesting post; I think that, unlike a lot of other MMOs, you are definitely aiming in the right direction to solve this problem.
Unfortunately, continuing the metaphor, I think that you missed the target… which ends up at a worse solution than aiming at a different target. Here’s what I think is wrong with your suggestion:
You are asking people to pay for too much.
You are asking them to pay $60 (or whatever) for the right to access your game. You are then asking them to pay $15 a month (or whatever) for the right to continuing accessing your game. People already complain about this model. Then you are telling them that they need to pay more money in order to succeed at your game. Taken separately, or even taking 2/3, these are all reasonable things to ask of a player and it’s been proven that people will do them. Ask all 3, and I think people will abandon you.
Something that I think Western developers need to get the hang of is a concept that Eastern developers are already expert at: give people your game for free. Just give it to them; let them play the basic experience with absolutely no financial contribution on their part. (I guess as a caveat here, Anarchy Online has gone with this plan and I think it worked well to breathe life into a game that would have otherwise died). Then make them pay for extras… for cool weapons, or access to special areas, or in-game items, or riding turtles, or whatever. The problem you face here is not that it’s hard to make money like this. People are making very successful games based on this business model, so there’s a (large!) market for it. The problem you would face is a cultural one… Western publishers would be hesitant to take what seems like a risk, and Western players tend to be biased against free games, believing that the freeness also makes them somehow inferior. EA is already stepping into this model, and I think it will be exciting to see whether they can really run with it in Western markets.
Very interesting take on it and an issue I’ve been very conflicted with in the past.
Just an idea I had:
Rather than making ‘leet items’, allow the in game character development to determine how a player’s items grow, reducing the items to an aesthetic choice rather than ‘leet loot spex’ on an item.
An example – You play a roughish character, you find an outfit you really like which happens to look like some sort of ninja-variant assassin’s garb. Great, you look how you want to look now… but the ’stats’ of that armour are determined by choices you have made as a player through the game, rather than by the item itself.
I hope that makes some sense…
IF you want to sell items, let them be ‘aestheitcs’ rather that character uberleeting. Let players either FIND the attires/items/visual customization assets which suit the choices they’ve made in game as they developed and also what they visually feel best represents their character, or let them buy it from you [Generally low prices, perhaps varrying prices based on rarity].
Just a thought. I have many
^^ An add -on to the above…
Doing away with ‘classes’ and allowing players to develop their characters through ’skill ranks’ or some point of ’skill point progression system’ is a dream of mine. Where a character can pick up ANY weapon in the world they wish, BUT, their skill with a weapon depends on how much ‘training’ they’ve had/skill points spent in that weapon type [Note not weapon specific allowing for a range of weapons with which the player can be more profficient than others].
This way, using the same rougish character if I decided to lean something like, ‘Short Melee’ weapons, my damage output/blocking would be much higher with it than a greatsword for example because I haven’t trained in at all -BUT I can still use it if I want to at a very basic skill level dealing very basic damage.
However if someone invests as many skill points in their Greatsword as I did in my weapon set choices, than we actually do EQUAL damage because we are of equal skill with our own perspective weapons.
Hope that made some sense – it sure does in my mind! But I’m not MMORPG designer… for now…
No, the majority of players do NOT want people who have more real-world money to have a massive advantage over them. The majority of players want a level playing field. That’s why we hate gold farmers so much.
The minority of players — the ones with the extra disposable income — want the advantage to go to the people with more money: themselves. As long as the honest (and non-wealthy) players think the game company is trying to keep the playing field level, we’ll tolerate some amount of inequity. To buy a newly-launched MMOG and play it for a year costs $215. That is not a trivial amount of money. Require us to pay even more in order to be able to play it on the same level as other players, and we can and will say “the hell with this” and go play some other game that seems to be more devoted to providing a good product for a fair price instead of squeezing every possible dollar from its players.
This article is great and spot on. All you people that say it will ruin to the game because the developer will come off as greedy are insane, really. You people are living in the past.
Farming companies ruin my experience daily. I have to put up with tell, mail, and general spam all day from these companies. Then I have to deal with their farming characters out in the world.
Here’s the key word to what this solution to this major problem is: OPTIONAL. No one would be forcing you to buy the gold, items or levels, no one would be pointing a gun to your head. Obviously though, the arguments presented above this are proven wrong because these farming companies have a HUGE market and make a lot of money.
It appears to me that a lot of MMO players are hypocrites. It’s ok for some third party gold spam company to make a bunch of money because you are too lazy to farm the gold yourself, but when the developer can address the problem and basically completely shut them down by undercutting.. you call them greedy? That’s dumb. I want gold spammers gone, and this article is the solution.
http://yfrog.com/bglegendsbefallenj <— This is funny now, wait in a year or 2.
Its not the solution, the solution is instaban accounts who are farming. The companies dont want to do it because they pay 15$ each month like everyone. So now not only will we have to deal with gold farmers, we will become farmed by the new MMOs. This is the greediest shit, and the games that will come out of it so unbalanced according to how much money you put in that i hope it dies on its own from sheer stupidity.
This is total shit! If the game supports a player driven economy you can’t just dump huge amounts of currency or items into it without it having a massive detrimental effect on the entire economy and game!
“The item sales of these companies does NOT have a generally negative impact on the game.”
What? Where in the world are you getting that from?!
The whole reason people are willing to spend so much time and effort to play mmos and obtain mmo items is because the items are scarce. When that stops being true, players have less incentive to obtain the items by playing the game, and are encouraged to leave the game as playing it is no longer as rewarding.
Those players that stay will also need to invest more time and effort to obtain items from other players due to the unchecked influx of currency from farmers inflating the costs of all items in the market. Your proposal does nothing to stop this as there’s no way to make currency untradable. That means the farmers will keep their niche and the players will continue to suffer regardless of who sells the gold.
“The majority of players out there obviously want this, otherwise we wouldn’t have a problem with third parties.”
You’re talking out of your rear end. You don’t have a clue what proportion of mmo players buy these items. For all you know it’s just a prolific 10%, in which case you’re alienating the majority of your playerbase by selling those items. Once they’re gone, the item buyers will just get up and go elsewhere rather than tolerate empty servers.
Oh and saying that MMO economies are “fake” is just silly. They have scarce goods and the means to exchange them. Just with that I’ve established that they’re real economies. It doesn’t matter that their goods could be unlimited, the fact is they aren’t, and their value is conditioned on that. The more you increase the availability of these goods through real money, the less competitive alternatives (playing the game) become, leading to player dissatisfaction that gameplay is not rewarded. Once you pull the carrot off the stick, people will leave.
“Fake economies”… Just tell that to CCP who hired a PhD economics professor to analyze their game and publish quarterly reports.