f13.net

So go read it, then come back.

http://brokentoys.org/2008/09/25/how-to-stop-gold-farming/

My feeling is that enlightened self-interest is a viable foundation. However due to labor arbitrage given sufficient potential profit offshore gold farms do have the ability to significantly undercut prices and create an external market anyway. In other words, they probably wouldn't bother if you're talking about a niche title, but the next world of warcraft would still be overrun even with an engineered dual currency economy.

I agree. You see it in Eve with the gametime cards for Isk dealio. If it's possible to work a system, somebody(ies) is going to work it.

I think (more armchair design! yay!) that game design itself needs to take goldfarming into account. If you make a steep power curve plus huge time investments to advance, people are going to either quit or pay somone else to get past the boring stuff. WoW is slowly getting better about this. (For example, my guild ran a Zul-Gurub nostalgia run a few weeks ago, and we were all commenting on how stingy the reputation rewards were.)

/drail

You know, i was wondering what the hell those random pop ups were the other night in WaR, they need to quit that shitt.

/rerail

That solution pretty much describes the Puzzle Pirates economy.

Wait.. WAR is getting rid of gold spam by spamming you with a pop up window that you have to click "OK" on every time a gold seller is banned?  And they think this is a good idea?!

Yes, that was a key inspiration for what I was working with. Three Rings are smart cookies.

That's a niche game; I reckon it works well there.

Yes, its annoying.

That's what that is?

Hmmmm. It is a bit annoying and puzzling.

Maybe we should start a new thread about it, but I'm truly puzzled on how announcing the banning is supposed to do anything about gold selling?

If I understand you correctly the players who are annoyed by gold spam are also subjected to "we banned a spammer" spam?  Worse yet, the "we banned a spammer" spam can't be ignored or disabled, and requires an acknowledgement click?

Somebody actually thought this was a good idea?  :ye_gods:

Not only that but they're actually getting a lot of good feedback from players on it of the "WOO HOO KILL THOSE SPAMMERS AND THAT MESSAGE WAS FUNNY" variety. Me, I find it probably more annoying than the actual spam.

The idea is that they show the players that they are doing something about Gold Spammers.   Ironically, after I hit ok to clear the pop up I got a tell from a spammer. 

Yes, and they also have custom messages typed into them, the ones i get to see, are in orc/gobbo.

I prefer the system that one game had (don't recall name) where they crucified the player (literary) and if they logged in, guess where they were?  :grin:

Roma Victor

But I don't understand how that's going to do anything, unless maybe it's supposed to make the players fear buying gold?  But it seems as long as the bans are heading towards people like "Haldnfaln" the spammer then it would reassure players that only randomly named Chinese spammers ever get banned.  

And it's not like "Haldnfaln" is humiliated, he's a level 1 spammer that just rolled his face across the keyboard to get a name.  He was expecting to be banned the moment the character was made and the spam bot fired up.

That's the one. That way, i can at least go to the gallery and look, instead of "HAY POP UP, im sorry, were you doing PvP?"

Personally I don't mind the popup. As it goes on though it would get annoying. What I do like is that they list the banned somewhere so I know my reports are having an effect. The fact that WoW never told you what happened with your reports made the process impersonal and pointless.

Someone needs to make me a UI/IN-GAME popup blocker then.

Yeah, here is from an IM I just sent my fellow WSG flag runner:

Wait, it actually pops up a window and you need to click OK to continue? Seriously? I assumed it was just a chat message. That's frickin' crazy.

As for stopping gold farmers, I've always advocated datamining as the appropriate solution. You simply log everything--  where players go, what they kill, what they loot, their source IP address, time spent active online, what they mail or trade, and especially the content and language of their chat. Using this data, you can find patterns of behavior likely to indicate goldfarmers. You set those thresholds appropriately and conservatively so that it's nearly always correct and then have final review by a GM making $9/hour who then bans the accounts.

That kind of thing wasn't really feasible previously due to hardware limitations. Luckily commodity hardware has become incredibly inexpensive over the past couple of years. Licenses are still pricy, but this is all custom app code so you can develop on something cheap and build your architecture to perform appropriately segmented and horizontally scaled on MySQL and linux.

That's what I would do, were in in Lum's old shoes.

(http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/6197/banhammerca2.jpg)

Yes, yes it does. See the two boxes on the left of the above image.


The irony being I can set myself to be completely invisible on a server, using the in game check boxes, but I can't escape the official spam box.

How to stop gold farming? Remove gold. srsly.

Right now the thing is there mainly so players have something to pay their repair bills with, which in turn are there to act as sinks for the potentially unlimited cash inflow. Remove it and the durability shit, that's one less pointless grind to put up with.

If money is devalued (or removed entirely) players just move to a barter economy, which can still be translated into real world money. That's what happened in diablo2; instead of gold players bought items with stones of jordan.

/derail 

Yo!   lumethemad.com    :uhrr:


you'll find my new blog at ralphkoster.com -- named after a character I have yet to create.

I betcha ralphkoster.com gets more hits than his real site. His name is misspelled more than "rogue".

Raph gets a lot of hits.  Lumethemad?  not as much.

This requires both a barter good that can function as coin, and goods that the players would actually want (and could) barter for. With most useful things being player- or account-bound nowadays, the exchange becomes largely limited to (optionally craftable) consumables. Which can go and fuck themselves, if i want to chug pots there's lot of diablo-inspired Korean MMOs that offer me that dubious pleasure.

Taking it to the logical extreme, as long as players can trade, there'll be an economy. When you remove the economy entirely (which is where you're leading) you kill a great deal of the attraction of massively multiplayer gaming.

Why can't MMOs just go back to renaming players who do bad things "a homosexual?"  It worked back in the day  :why_so_serious:

I am but a young man and my gaming experience has been but brief; please enlighten me.

I wonder at what point that counter loops back to zero, or does it hit alpha integers?

Also: banning gold spammers is a nice PR move, but how about banning gold buyers? How many gold buyers have been banned yet?

Agree with Lum - you can't suppress gold selling / external RMT 100%. Much better to undercut them yourself.

In the very earliest days of UO, someone posted some screenshots of a customer service person showing up, and, to punish the poster for some offense, he renamed him "a homosexual."  But it was all photoshopped and never really happened, I think the poster got banned over it. 

While that story was untrue, there were many instances of players with bad names being renamed things like "MyLittlePony" and the like. :)

To be pedantic the article doesn't desccribe how to stop 'gold farming' but unsanctioned RMT's (which are supported by the act of gold farming) and spam messaging (to promote the unsanctioned RMT).

A sanctioned RMT design could increase the presence of gold farming within a game, that being the actual act of players performing duties to gather the in-game commodity in whatever method is most efficient to the possible detriment of other players (camping spawn sites etc).  the act of gold farming itself is not dependant upon whether RMT's are sanctioned or not.

True story: in DAOC, you could pick a last name at (I think) level 20. If the player picked a, shall we say, creative last name, it would be forcibly renamed by DAOC CS and locked so it could not be named. They had a set of generic-sounding names for each realm - for Midgard it was Eberwald.

They moved to picking new names on a bi-weekly basis when EVERYONE started using the last name Eberwald.

The presumption (which I did leave largely unstated) was that since players have a greater investment in their characters and the game's community, they are less likely (not unlikely - just less likely) to be flaming jacktards.

Wow. That looks totally annoying.

What's next? A confirmation popup everytime there's a successful database transaction? To reassure us that the database is indeed working fine?  :uhrr:

Sounds like Homer's "Everything is OK" alarm.

The Gold seller box isn't big enough to remotely effect my gameplay at all - I have my GUI scaled down pretty damn low though.. Granted I'm at 1920x1200 but then I don't think many people are running 640x480 or 800x600 in WAR either. If they have a computer that can run WAR, their monitor is probably bigger than that.

The implementation is just fucking moronic though.  At least let players opt out of getting the popups.  I mean, you're banning goldsellers, wonderful, great, but after the 3rd "We have banned 'kjasfkjsaf' for being a vile goldseller" dialog box, I've seen all I'll ever want to see.  Don't interfere with my gameplay.  I mean one of his primary reasons *why* he hates goldsellers is that they interfere with gameplay... now they still do, even when banned.

I'm not really following on the secret sauce part of your plan Lum. While forcing it all to be annonymous would get rid of the Spam issue (which is great), it still doesn't address the companies that pay people to be logged in 14 hours a day running circuits in zones of every mining node, chest, boss spawn, etc.

While the spam stuff is annoying, it's the companies paying people to play the game as a job that I think really hurts everyone else's fun. The more people in your game grinding out gold as a profession, the more gold enters your economy, and the more inflation you have. Inflation drives the casual player (that doesn't want to pay real money just to be able to afford a haf decent foozle) away from your game.

A business that is trying to sell currency would have to substantially under cut the legitimate seller to make up for that it less convenient and less secure to use a thrid party site for the transaction.  But the bored teenagers who want to play for free won't stand for that and drop their prices to match.  The business will keep being forced to drop their prices until they are driven out of business.  The people who just want to play for free will always be able drop their price more because they have no costs.

http://stationexchange.station.sony.com/livegamer.vm

Yup, that's where ii think it's heading anyway (removal of player trade) While i realize it's still fun for some to click 'craft' button and go afk while game pretends the player is doing something, and then put the end results in "AH" so that they can have money for gear repairs and consumables, personally i'd enjoy the same game quite more if the armour repairs were not present, the consumables were simply player's "skills" providing the same effect, and the money with associated grind to get it that makes people turn to gold sellers because they can't be arsed... just wasn't there. And given how many players bitch about the money grind and the very existence and wild popularity of gold sellers suggests i'm not the only one.

Incidentally, i'm not sure if player trade is that much of attraction to MMOs anymore, when it's been pretty much reduced to interaction with faceless "goods exchange" screen or with players-turned-vendor-machine zombies. These could be well replaced with interface to NPC service, and i doubt many people would notice any practical difference.

This is for average diku MMO though; there's games there like EVE where destruction/acquisition of gear is core element of the game balance, and so player trade is viable and large enough gameplay path... but the "ding, grats!" grind machines with their bind on pickup +wang items have moved so far from that point, the only reason they still have some player trade is force of habit. And it'll take just couple more (continually simiplified and restricted) iterations of that, before it's gone altogether.

This.  This, this, this.  A thousand times, this.

Prohibition can work if you go after the right target.  The reason it doesn't is because in almost every instance of prohibition, game or real that I'm aware of, it's the supplier that is primarily targeted.  Enforcement against the supplier means only one thing - an additional cost.  Whether that's Al Capone paying bribe money to the cops and paying for his henchmen, guns, ammo, and any other necessary costs due to the illegality of his business, the same costs for modern day drug dealers, or the money and time needed to buy new boxes and pay for new accounts when gold farmers and sellers get banned, it's an additional cost on a ledger to be factored in.  And while it is theoretically possible to make enforcement so comprehensive that the cost to the supplier grows higher than the cost willing (or able) to be paid by the consumer, the cost of such enforcement is so astronomically high that no MMOG company could stay in business while having such comprehensive coverage.

On the other hand, the customer stands to lose far more for giving into their vice, as Lum puts it.  Getting banned wouldn't be an expense on a ledger, it would be the loss of everything you bought in the first place in addition to all the time and effort you had ever put into every character on your account.  You might start again, buying a new box and starting over, and a few people might even go and buy more gold to get them back on their feet.  But I have strong suspicions that the number of people willing to put their accounts at risk - if it is made public that gold buyers are immediately banned, no questions asked - is not sufficient for the sellers to profit.

Imagine those popup boxes instead announcing the names of characters who have been banned for buying gold, there being a ticker on the website and a listing of characters banned for it.  The sellers?  Put some time and effort into getting rid of them, but nowhere near as much as into the buyers.  Buyers can be humiliated.  They care that they might be outed as gold buyers.  Buyers can be stopped.  They care that they might be banned.

I think this is the fundamental problem with the dumb popup boxes -- they're not effectively shaming the goldsellers.  Hell, the goldseller just got banned and will go create a new kjdhfalkasf character to peddle his wares.  Throwaway characters have little to lose.  Now banning buyers may be too big a stick (at least for a first offense).  But perhaps some public shaming might work -- they're probably much more susceptible to peer pressure, given that they want to keep playing the silly game and are likely somewhat invested in it.

Are they even banning the accounts at least?  Banning the character only is stupidly useless.

For what its worth today I was spammed with gold seller tells more than ever and never saw the pop-up once.

I did get my first WAR spam within an hour of logging in on my first day.

The farmers likely got into beta and started writing an app back then.  It's like they were ready to go immediately.  They're also getting past the 'no spam' addons more frequently now.  It's going to be a tough battle.

Is there an easy way of reporting gold spam in WAR? I didn't see something that leapt out at me.

I looked too but didn't find anything, I find it hard to believe that part of the anti-spam tool set wasn't an easy way to report them.

Spam me not is a mod off Curse gaming - it stops the spam and auto-reports the gold seller. 

Off the back of a quick google, I still don't know how to report spam messages to Mythic for the banhammering / pop-up on my screen.

Someone please tell me how to do it, because of course the whole "we hate gold farming" would be nothing but empty posturing if there wasn't a simple way to report spammers.

When I was a senior guide for EQ, we used to rename people variations of "Nermal" until they found a new name we'd allow.

Didn't some GM in UO get flack for renaming a player's character "Gaylord"?