I would like to see Devs do away with the gold sellers, and simply force all gear to be bind on loot. You are either there when content is completed, or you cannot have the Sword of Arse-Kicking +5. Any money acquired would need ot be no-trade as well.

To me this is the simplest way to get rid of gold dealers.

It would mean there was no economy I suppose.  The game would have to provide a set market for buying/selling things to people at fixed prices.  Which is an evil I could deal with to get rid of the dealers.

Would you guys be willing to give up markets to get rid of gold dealers, and put all folks on equal footing?

As I see it you want to take away a large portion of the game away (The economy) just because some people decide to buy the odd item or Gold from these sellers. IMO we should just keep to the way it is in most games, you get caught you get banned. I think your overestimating the impact people buying items and gold online has alltho the constant spams in chats and mails does get annoying.

Originally posted by Moaky07

Would you guys be willing to give up markets to get rid of gold dealers, and put all folks on equal footing?

ummm...... no.

Markets are a fun part of most games, and can be used in some inventive ways.  I'd rather the GMs just be more active.  I'd rather pay $20-25 a month for a game with GMs who are watching the channels 24/7 and ban the shit outa farmers/botters, than to have a large portion of the game experience be cute out.

Originally posted by gooseh

As I see it you want to take away a large portion of the game away (The economy) just because some people decide to buy the odd item or Gold from these sellers. IMO we should just keep to the way it is in most games, you get caught you get banned. I think your overestimating the impact people buying items and gold online has alltho the constant spams in chats and mails does get annoying.

 I have seen the gold selling market described as a billion dollar industry, That is a little hard to over-estimate I would say.

I wish I still had a link to the EVE dev post where they documented the effect on servers that gold sellers were having. They logged various ststs before and after a major banning of sellers, and the influence the sellers were having on servers was substantial. This is in a game that carries 350k subs.

What if that game carries 500k or 1M subs?  You think the amount of sellers will lessen? I would have to believe it would be more incentive to invade said game.

Maybe I am a purist....but I believe everything in game should be gotten by in-game mechanics. Not due to outside influences....especially when they have been documented to affect others gaming.

Until there is a sure fire way to track farmers, this will continue to be a problem. I dont care how many GMs they employ.  So the only other alternative I see is eliminating the demand/ability of these farmers.

Which is what my OP is about.

Originally posted by Moaky07

Originally posted by gooseh

As I see it you want to take away a large portion of the game away (The economy) just because some people decide to buy the odd item or Gold from these sellers. IMO we should just keep to the way it is in most games, you get caught you get banned. I think your overestimating the impact people buying items and gold online has alltho the constant spams in chats and mails does get annoying.

 I have seen the gold selling market described as a billion dollar industry, That is a little hard to over-estimate I would say. pretty much true

 

I wish I still had a link to the EVE dev post where they documented the effect on servers that gold sellers were having here is one easy to find. They logged various ststs before and after a major banning of sellers, and the influence the sellers were having on servers was substantial not really. This is in a game that carries 350k subs.

 

What if that game carries 500k or 1M subs?  You think the amount of sellers will lessen? I would have to believe it would be more incentive to invade said game.

 

Maybe I am a purist....but I believe everything in game should be gotten by in-game mechanics. Not due to outside influences....especially when they have been documented to affect others gaming.

 

Until there is a sure fire way to track farmers, this will continue to be a problem. I dont care how many GMs they employ.  So the only other alternative I see is eliminating the demand/ability of these farmers.

 

Which is what my OP is about.

EvE works just fine despite gold farming thanks to anti farming mechanics and of course the fact you can buy gametime with ingame cash and buy ingame cash with real world cash.

I guess I am just  cynical, I think if a game company has a problem with gold sellers they can and will find a way to lessen the impact.  So games with what seems like a lot of gold sellers could really get rid of them if they really wanted to but won;t cause to them its just another sub even if its taken up bandwidth and such.  Because really now can;t they see that some accounts are on like 24/7 and see that there is excessive trade activity ?  Why do you think you see some items in the AH of games more ungodly amounts of in gold?  If you wanted to stop it they could but either are not willing to put forth the effort or are just unwilling to.  Oh well just my cynical nature again.

A good pve-game needs an healthy ingame economy and bind on pickup destroys economy as i witnessed in many games.

For to get rid of goldsellers you only need to get rid of subscriber mmos and change to itemshop mmos and as long the item shop is cheaper and easier to use there is no goldseller having a chance. This does not hurt the ingame economy to much bcs its designed around that.

Bind on Pickup is a quick-fix bandaid created by developers and successfully sold as a feature by marketing.

Great, a cure that's infinitely worse than the disease, that's just terrific.

Now that you've solved the problem of gold selling in MMOs, why not go on to solve the real-world problem of counterfeiting by outlawing all currencies?

Your opinion is fair enough.  Personally I would never play a game like that, as it takes away economy, but there's a large market of people who would play such a game. 

I'm hoping to see some development shifts in the opposite direction by addressing the root cause of these issues without taking away the economy.  Placement of loot, static mobs, static loot tables, static dungeon design, bots, dev failure to properly monitor; all of these play a role in causing gold farming issues.

Bad solution to a common problem.  I don't think most of us would play such a game.  I derive great enjoyment in helping others and giving them things for free that I find is a big part of that.   That would remove a lot of the enjoyment I get out of a MMO.

The solution to this problem is not simple, it is a complex task and we just have to wait for a developer willing to take the time to come up with a solution to it.

No, the root cause is people want to buy gold, period.  Or more to the point, people want to use real money to obtain an ingame advantage, usually by buying gold, or items in a f2p.

Whatever system you make, people will break it.  You understand that the game's own customers are colluding with goldsellers to break it for everyone else.

It's impossible to stop an inside job, and in the case of games, the owner benefits too from these exchanges, at least in the short term.

It's really an impossible situation.

Uhg...

Toss the economy out the window, and I suppose this would mean no crafting at all, which also puts a damper on the in-game community.

MMOs have become generic enough in my opinion, and this would make it much worse. Some may be interested, but i would probably never play a game like this.

Originally posted by Moaky07

Would you guys be willing to give up markets to get rid of gold dealers, and put all folks on equal footing?

 Ironically, this is the exact opposite of putting "all folks on equal footing."    If everything was BoP, casual players, those without a large active guild and those without the huge chunks of time to invest in raids would never be able to have that Sword of Arse Kicking +5.  BoP is about the worst innovation ever, imo.

There is no way to eliminate Gold Farmers/Sellers.  But you could reduce them by making gold non-transferrable and forcing all transactions to go through an NPC.

Originally posted by jpnole
Actually I hate bind on pickup. I wish it would disappear entirely.

Couldn't agree more.

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Originally posted by Marcus-

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Originally posted by jpnole
Actually I hate bind on pickup. I wish it would disappear entirely.

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Couldn't agree more.

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Originally posted by Moaky07

Would you guys be willing to give up markets to get rid of gold dealers, and put all folks on equal footing?

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Absolutely not.

Those who buy ingame money with real cash will get hacked sooner or later so they quit the game they were cheating in......its all self cleaning hehe.

On topic......imho, they should lose the whole "bind on..." strategy and make everything tradable......but make a rare drop a RARE drop instead of a common drop.

OR if you realy want to have an ingame economy.....make the best items ingame the crafted items witch can be enchanted by other players with stats.....and repairs to items also possible by players only......competition on the economic market will bloom as is used to in the old days of UO :)

Just mho.....sloebereu out :)

The only way to be rid of gold sellers are having more or less no economy like the first GW. But that takes away a lot of the MMO experience.

BOP and BOE is not logical (together with a lot of other things) but a must in the kind of game where people gets new gear all the time . It also makes crafting more useful.

But it might be time to focus more on character than changing gear every 5 minutes. In our Warhammer FRPG (P&P) did my only addition to my initial gear during a long time of playing consist of a wheel lock pistol and gunpowder. And I were pretty kickass at the end of the campaign and still had a blast. It is fun to get new cool gear if it is something rare but constantly getting new stuff kinda dampens the fun. If enchanted swords would be really rare things would be more fun at least for me and BOP or BOE would not really be needed.

To make everything BOP would BTW be more complicated than to not allow player transactions at all which would be the same thing. 

No, I think the right answer is to focus more on character progression and less on gear. It works well in pen and paper games and there is no reasons it wont work in MMOs. To get a good economy, focus more on other stuff, like guildcities, allow players to owns estate, to gamble and to play have stuff like tournaments where you can gamble stuff on the winners.

Player housing is another popular thing where many players like to put in resources, if you make it more useful so players can have their own shops ar workshops (which the guldcities also should have) there you have another thing to boost economy.

A MMO needs an economy because there is many players who like playing merchants and to lock them out is not a good idea. It also makes the world more alive and you can in fact use that by making stuff for them to play with. But giving players loads of junk they don't need and force them to discard everything too often does not make a good economy at all.

Originally posted by sloeber

Those who buy ingame money with real cash will get hacked sooner or later so they quit the game they were cheating in......its all self cleaning hehe.

 

The problem is that they encourage people to hack others accounts too, with keyloggers and phising. While it wont happen to someone who keeps a good security it still happens to many innocent people. So it cleans a little too good.

This thread made me think of a book I have that I haven't read yet and just started, it's called Play Money http://www.juliandibbell.com/playmoney/  Got it a couple of years ago and due to a major home catastrophe forgot about it (house caught fire).  Not to far into it yet but it is very interesting and people who want to understand some of the reasons behind RMT's should give it a read because its not just done by people who have lots of disposable income and/or lazy people.  Also check out this site if you think that RMT's are not very wide spread or only are run by "shady" sites, http://www.uotreasures.com/  pretty eye opening to say the least 20 games listed at the top.  Again as I said in my previous post I think that due to the fact that it is not cost effective to stamp out the gold farmers and RMT's they will always be around and have not even been legitimized by some games so c'st la vie.

Originally posted by jpnole
Actually I hate bind on pickup. I wish it would disappear entirely.

/sign

I see bind on pickup as a concept that still has a lot of room to grow as a method of limiting the radius of trading.  Bind to character and bind to account are just a starting point.  You can have less-absolute forms of limitations: bind to guild, bind to class, bind to level, bind to faction, bind to culture, bind after X owners, bind after X days and so on.

( I have no problem with playing a game where merchants are nerfed - I think in almost all games "trader" is an extremely overpowered class )

Originally posted by maplestone

I see bind on pickup as a concept that still has a lot of room to grow as a method of limiting the radius of trading.  Bind to character and bind to account are just a starting point.  You can have less-absolute forms of limitations: bind to guild, bind to class, bind to level, bind to faction, bind to culture, bind after X owners, bind after X days and so on.

( I have no problem with playing a game where merchants are nerfed - I think in almost all games "trader" is an extremely overpowered class )

No, thanks. I don't see how that would add to the fun at all, and it would not really limit the traders more than BOP and BOE does.

I can see some merit to limit the effects of items and the number of items you actually get but if people want to play merchants you should not take that away from them, you just needs to balance it while trying to make the experience more fun.

Crafting is an excellent start, buff crafting and nerf drops so people can craft good stuff instead of junk.