f13.net

http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/ebusiness/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218101859

 :awesome_for_real:

Well there goes 75% of the WoW subs!   :why_so_serious:

ni hao?

pifft, can't stop the spice.

Frontpaged.

More interestingly, the ban also includes 'prepaid cards for cyber games'. I wonder if this also includes microtransactions and other 'legitimate RMT' activities?

Jesus Christ, this shit just writes itself.

The SoJ:Yuan exchange rate is going to fucking skyrocket.

That was the part that stuck out to me as well, actually.  It could be farther reaching than it looks.  Anyway, now we have a moral dilemma.  Do we not buy gold because it hurts MMOs and is against the EULA, or do we support the little man in defying the oppressive chinese government!

Nothing in there says you can't trade real money for virtual stuff. This is a crackdown on the parallel currency QQ coin has become .

<edit> "Under the new rules, using virtual money for gambling will be punished by public security authorities, and minors may not buy virtual money." from the press release. That seems a bigger impact. The press release says nothing about gold farming, just virtual currency. Linden Dollars, not wow gold.

"The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services,"

This is the line that to me explains the game card thing.  The key word is "issuer"  if ncsoft or blizzard or any company wants to sell gold or time cards they can but if you aren't affiliated with the currency you're selling, no dice.

I'll believe it when I see it.

And yeah, WoW subs drop by half.

Eh, let's see how frequently this is enforced.

Just about any business conducted in China is illegal in some regard, yet prosecution is very selective.

Alienate the wrong person who possesses the political wherewithal and life, all of a sudden, becomes very harsh for one.

That.

Yea... but now MMO publishers have someone to complain to.
Weather they chose to or not is another story.

So whats the verdict, is this good for the MMO industry, or horrible?

As I posted elsewhere, I don't imagine this will be enforced against mainland chinese working steady jobs to farm gold to be exclusively sold to gweilo. Its main effect will be to drive underground or localize the intra-chinese trade in in-game currency.

Most likely will not get enforced. imo, if it were enforced, it would be incredibly beneficial. But of course, I'm the most rabid anti RMT person you'll probably ever meet.

Let's play Devil's Advocate and assume that it is enforced to the letter of the law.

What's the benefit Mopps?

(I'm not taking a stance, I'm asking for yours)

My brother-in-law's gold farming business is looking in to using servers in Canada. 

I do not know the ins and outs of how he is doing this, but technically his workers will be playing the game in North America now.  The gold and all real money transactions will be outside China.  Nice way to get around the rules and I imagine the other RMT operations will be doing something similar as well.

Assuming that we're reading the translation correctly and it really does mean "no more gold farming in china" and the government will behead anyone caught grinding those blood elves in aszhara, it would lead to a significant rise in gold prices for six months to a year while companies retool to other disadvantaged regions like eastern europe, vietnam, india, etc.

And yes, of course gold farmers are bad for the game. CS calls, scamming, abusive behavior, crowding out legit players, etc. Do we really need to go over this again?

Well... in SOE games it wont make a difference. You got me there.  :awesome_for_real:

If fully enforced it does sound like a fair amount of lost wages on the lower end guys. That might not actually be very good for China's economy.

Drastic decrease in subs is considered a good thing in what universe?

Proof this will lead to drastic decrease in subs?

You'll see a moderate short term decrease in the amount of farmers, a small to moderate spike in gold prices in the near future. Once the companies find workarounds (basing the company outside of China being the most obvious) it'll be business as usual.

so basically this will just result in more outsourced jobs in India?   :ye_gods:

This will be very interesting to watch. My bet is on outsourcing, or just operating illegally. I'm guessing we as players won't see too much change. Farmers will still surely operate, but spamming might drop a bit.

I really think that Developers don't see RMT as anything more than a PR problem and that's why they never bother to really crack down on it. The only game to do anything to make it less annoying was Turbine/LOTRO with their Rightclick>Golderspammer so you can put them on ignore fairly quickly. I doubt they do anything with the information.

If they really wanted to deal with it, they have to introduce rudimentary logging of player transactions (something as simple as: If %todaysnetworth% > 100 * %yesterdaysnetworth% then %Suspect% = yes)
Then actually ban players for buying it, instead of the gold farmers which are almost impossible to catch. The shit would end real fast. But getting a company to give up a single customer for betterment of their other customers is probably never going to happen. You basically have to stand in the center of your mmos capital city yelling racial slurs for hours on end to get banned nowadays.

This is a boon for all of southeast Asia.

Err we going to do the how many gold farmers in the mmo market debate?

The point is if people still want it, they'll still get it.  So farmers in other regions will just expand their business.

Coming from FFXI, SE considered RMT a little more than a PR problem. They did quite a bit to curb the "problem."

Correct me if I'm wrong as this is all from heresay as I would never play that fucking horrible game, but didn't it take them years to make a dent in RMT? Wasn't FFXXI the worst offender of them all for a significant period of time?

WoW has Right Click > Report Spam as well. I don't see how this will make a huge impact, the farming industry will just move elsewhere.

You know, I just read the article again, and I think "Bans Gold Farming" may not actually at all what happened here.


There's nothing specifically about eliminating real money for fake money in the actual quotes from officials that I've seen, just the exchange of fake money for real goods and services, which I am led to believe actually happens in China. The part about gold farming as we know it in the article seems sort of speculative to me.

I think we need more details before we can start celebrating the death of gold farming for sure.

In the immortal words of the late great Ed McMahon, "You are correct, sir!" It did take SE a very long time to even address the issue. Rumor has it that it was due to a major outcry from the Japanese reaction to being out-botted for HNM spawns and the unreal amount of MPKing farmers would use to clear players from the best NM spawns/zones. And just knowing all that makes me feel dirty on the inside - but it was still a very pretty game. -now i need a shower-

We need a bit more information to see the exact fallout from this decision.

However, even if China banned gold farming outright and burned all gold farming sweatshops to the ground, there are plenty of other regions to pick up the slack. Ironically it might be the wider adoption of the microtrans among Western titles that drives the impact of gold farming down - when every dollar you earn depends on players not sending it out to third parties, companies start to care deeply about stopping gold farming.

I think it is pretty clear, if you have virtual things, they must remain in the virtual world and not be exchanged for real things.  So if I have 20,000G, I can not exchange it for USD200.  They are not banning the purchase of online credits (microtrans like QQ), but those credits must remain within the virtual realm.  So, systems like QQ can still exist, while the sale of WoW gold for real money would be stopped.

Source:

http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/newsrelease/commonnews/200906/20090606364208.html (http://english.mofcom.gov.cn/aarticle/newsrelease/commonnews/200906/20090606364208.html)

So the idea is you can spend $ for QQ, but not then change the QQ back out for $? I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense.

Yes, here is some background on the issue:

http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB117519670114653518-FR_svDHxRtxkvNmGwwpouq_hl2g_20080329.html (http://online.wsj.com/public/article_print/SB117519670114653518-FR_svDHxRtxkvNmGwwpouq_hl2g_20080329.html)

Spot the loophole.

Selling 20 Runecloth, 50 dollars
Comes with 2000G for free.

Since the core topic has been covered well, I'm going to take the bait and opt-in on the tangent:


Right-click > Ignore in other games as well. This is not novel.

I suppose that server side filtering does not count either? You know, where we catch the spammers and mute them before they can annoy you? Nah, we aren't serious about it. :D Check out the audio from Fan Faire last week and you can see the head of SOE CS talk about some of the measures his staff takes to handle this in our products.

It has an impact.

WAR, of course, had the Banhammer Count as a public indicator of gold spammers banned:

(http://mythicmktg.fileburst.com/war/us/global/images/rightbar/right-box_banhammer.gif)

Of course, the funny thing was that over time that counter has slowed dramatically the rate that it was gone up. So either Mythic is fantastic at stopping in-game spam, the spammers have stopped coming to WAR or the spammers have discovered workarounds.

This is just simply not true in my experience. Gold spam volume is way down in every MMO I play, not just the Turbine ones. I don't remember the last time I got a spam tell in WoW for example, it has been a few months; I used to get them 10+ times per hour back in the day.

Or Mythic stops caring.

I see very little goldspam in WoW. I remember it came in spurts (huh huh) so I know something's going on behind the scenes. Bless Blizzard and bless anyone who slams goldspammer's dicks with hammers.

Or the web guy stopped updating a graphic image.  :grin:

Or someone has clogged all the right tubes and the updated graphic image is stuck somewhere and won't arrive until next week.

Or they are bleeding subs so bad that they need the farmer subscriptions to keep their ass above some quota.

I remember some PotBS developer at the last Austin GDC quoting some massive hit to revenue they took from gold farmers (10%?). The subs they got were mostly on stolen credit cards, so not only did they lose the sub, but took a big hit in charges from the credit card company. So I doubt encouraging farmer subs would be a good business proposition.

One thing that would make a dint in gold farming is reducing the comparative advantage of gold farmers to average players. Cap the amount of gold a farmer could make in a month to a reasonable multiple of what an average player makes, and gold rates would jump a lot. Of course, you would still have the US/China wage difference, but that  is likely smaller by comparison.

I do believe he was referring to impacting operation of a MMO. Not end user experiences.

That's true - didn't consider that the guy responsible could have stopped / been fired. Mainly because I would have thought such an update would have been automated.

I'd rather have developer that totally ignores the problem, allowed the spam through unfiltered and never busted a single gold seller/farmer than a developer that introduced it themselves years after a games release. Add to that the fact that all Vanguard servers are now exchange servers? Forcing it on the entire games population. What the gold farmers do, pales in comparison to what you did to your own game. As long as you guys run exchange servers, I'll never play another Sony game. Period.

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I can't play 3 of my favorite games because of SOE's profiteering.

Show me on the doll where SOE touched you.

As long as you guys run exchange servers treat your customers with utter contempt, I'll never play another Sony game. Period.

They touched me on the Mos Eisley  :why_so_serious:

Better than your wookie.

GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAN

Better than your wookie.

GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAN
[/quote]

 :facepalm:

Sorry if I sound bitter, but I can't play 3 of my favorite games because of SOE's profiteering.


Then you can play SWG then, it will never touch you that way.

This is exactly my thoughts. I went to read it again after all the initial reactions. I do not think this impacts in any siginificant way, gold farming. I read it as more about eliminating this fake currency (QQ coins) from purchasing any tangible goods or services. Glad I am not alone here, thought my reading skills had diminished or something.

Actually, I'd put up with that... and did. But the exchange servers were just too much. And yes, I realize I take an extreme view on this, but I utterly despise RMT.

To those who say this doesn't affect gold farming, do you not understand how transactions work?What is the difference in spending QQ coins to buy real money, and spending real money to buy WoW Gold?

Wookiee.

Better get used to it, or give up MMOs.  It's the way of the future..

If China bans gold farming, how am I going to keep myself amused when the actual game is boring me?

Okay, fair enough.
Be cool WUA, don't blow it!
What? An actual response?
OMG. Run with it.
Not exactly, but close enough to get there. IT'S ON.
Alas, it wasn't meant to be.
This is where I could do something really mean/hilarious like pretend to be my own outraged wife and yell at her for being a scheming whore or something, but whatever. I didn't want their sweatshop master to beat them, so I let them go. One time I tried to convert one of them to my own made-up brand of Christianity until they were just like "Fuck you!" but I forgot to take screenshots.

So in other words, all you managed to do was try to cyber with a gold farmer and get shot down?

I didn't screenshot it, but they were nice and asked me where I got my worg pup. I didn't have the heart to really fuck with them after that. I fail at trolling.  :sad:

Open trade.

Insert all gold.

Don't hit accept.

Harvest lulz.

I've done that and gone afk upwards of 45 mins to find them still sitting there begging me to hit trade.

Back in my day, simply "boat processing" sand giants or training spectres in Oasis would get you in hot water. Oh how times change.