Lum's plan to stop gold farmers

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.)

[Mrbloodworth]

/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

[Numtini]

That solution pretty much describes the Puzzle Pirates economy.

[cevik]

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?!

[Lum]

That solution pretty much describes the Puzzle Pirates economy.

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

[sam, an eggplant]

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

[Mrbloodworth]

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, its annoying.

[HaemishM]

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?!

That's what that is?

Hmmmm. It is a bit annoying and puzzling.

[cevik]

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?

[Kamen]

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, its annoying.

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? 

[Ingmar]

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.

[Tmon]

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?

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. 

[Mrbloodworth]

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, its annoying.

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?

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?  

[Kamen]

Roma Victor

[cevik]

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. 

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

Roma Victor

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?"

[Paelos]

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

[cevik]

Roma Victor

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?"

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

I mean if it were a chat in your chat window that'd be one thing

but imagine you're about 10 feet from capping the flag

you get rooted and need to shift out

5 people are beating on you

and suddenly Nmanbdabd gets banned

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

[tmp]

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Soln]

/derail 

Yo!   lumethemad.com   


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

[sam, an eggplant]

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

[Soln]

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

[tmp]

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.

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.

[sam, an eggplant]

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.

[Triforcer]

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

[Drugstore Space Cowboy]

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

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

[UnSub]

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.

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.

[Triforcer]

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

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

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. 

[Calandryll]

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

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

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. :)

[Wasted]

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.