More farmers banned

[Zane0]

I'm not sure how you could create a resource system without some sort of inherent repitition; every node can't be a fresh and exciting experience.  If you made things require less mats, they would be easier to get, and it would be hard to justify their current relative power compared to monster drops.

Blizzard has reacted to this by having the good crafting items require rare resources that you can only find inside raid instances where farmers can't get at them.  This is great for minimizing pointless grind, but so much for casuals getting access to good items without the prospect of large groups.

Of course, most of these mats are BoE, but there's still the potential for someone to say, "The price is too much!" and buy gold to purchase the materials.

We can't have nice things, etc. Enjoy. :)

[stray]

Work, work 

[Phred]

I think you'd really hate a game that no one could help another person in in any way. So, unless games eliminate coin transactions, how do you design a game where people can't sell coin and people won't want to buy it, to shortcut effort, or just because they don't make friends easily?

Sorry, I have to pay Real money to help another person in any way ?  I have to pay money to make friends ?

Paying money to shortcut effort, I can barely understand, but the other two ?  I refer the right honourable gentleman to the 'That's Fucked' answer I gave some moments ago.

You seem to have misinterpreted my post as a defence of RMT, which it wasn't.

[Ironwood]

That's what it seems.

Ooops.

[Phred]

No, I guess I phrased it badly. I was trying to point out the difficulty in designing a game that did not lend itself to RMT at all, and all I can figure is to remove coin transactions completely from the game. People even ebay'd CoH influence from what I heard. All games seem to have a system of easier access to cash at high levels and even though WoW seems to have made an effort at high level cash sinks, with respec costs and repairs, but even there people are buying gold to shortcut them.

[Glazius]

RMT just replaces any actual social relationship between two people with a cash transaction.

But that has more impact on the game than just the transaction.

Uh, yes, yes, I know.

But.

Saying "RMT means a game is dead" is like saying "any game where someone can help someone else out is dead". Because if a player can help another player without in-game compensation then there's a crack there for RMT to drive itself into.

Scouring the game of anything that could involve RMT doesn't seem very practical.

--GF

[Venkman]

Removing coins wouldn't solve it. The players would adjust to a barter-based economy.

1 - RMT increases that farming. Your argument is circular.
2 - The farming itself is the bit of the game that is broken, requiring RMT.

You think farming would decrease without RMT? I think not.

RMT was caused by farming and the simple truth that every player starts an MMORPG inherently unbalanced by default: due to Time. There's a lot of ways to cheat in games, but you can't add more hours to the day without taking away some from something else. Some just don't/can't do that. As such, even if this was a utopian world without RMT, these people would still be at a disadvantage, with now no way of catching up.

RMT is just a sympton of the deeper farming issue. Remove the need for farming at all and you've solved many problems. That's been done, but not in games that have been hugely popular in the monthly-fee department. Of course, RMTing would still be there for BoE items, because again, there's unbalance exists at the most fundamental level (Time).

[Ironwood]

Giggle.

You're actually trying to get me to defend one side of an argument I've called Circular ?


 

[Venkman]

Sorry. It sounded like you were saying RMT was the problem. If you think RMT = farming = RMT though, yea, circular :)

I just don't agree with that. Farming to buy because one can't adventure is that someone trying to level up outside of having to spend time in an instance. Farming becoming the purview of those who have at least as much time to farm as raiders have to raid is not because of RMTing. It's because people figured out that it's easier to farm than adventure and developed wasy to make it more efficient. Farming is emergent behavior that spawned RMTing.

Remove the reward of farming and a lot of RMTing goes with it. But then, doing that removes a good chunk of what quite a lot of people apparently like (Raiding) either because they do it or because they want to.

I like the BG approach in theory