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As a rule, the gaming industry would rather slap gold farmers than smooch them, but in RedBedlam founder Kerry Fraser-Robinson, gold farmers may have found their Romeo. Kinda.
"It's going to happen whether you like it or not," the virtual worlds developer said of gold farming. "People will always find the path of least resistance, if you stop them buying your gold then they'll buy that gold from somebody else who is gold farming."
"Trying to stop that happening is literally like telling the tide not to come in - you will fail."
"If you don't build that into your system then you're not going to be able to compete with the gold farmers and that will ruin your in-game economy, which will in turn ruin your game. At the very least having the recognition that virtual economics is a discipline and is a very important integral part to being a virtual world," he added.
Fraser-Robinson listed Eve Online as a game that -- rather than stomping out real money transactions only to have them return in greater force – arranged its economy with the help of an actual economist.
"I think that's absolutely essential going forward… because wherever humans are in communities and whenever they are bartering there is a market and there is going to be a market place. If you let that go with no regulation and no recognition then very, very crazy things will happen."
Yipes. We’re pretty sure the Nazis just won.
Comments are closed on this article
Antilogic81
January 22, 2009 at 4:01am
The Dutch managed to reclaim about 1/3 of their land from an ever present ocean....I'm pretty sure something can be done to stop this problem.
The real answer "We aren't going to pay X amount of employees or hire a Z amount of employees whose sole purpose is to hunt down farmers"
neo1piv14
January 22, 2009 at 1:23pm
Exactly. Noone wants to fork over the money to pay people to watch for that kind of thing. Same thing goes for anti-bot codes. The only game I've seen that actually had a good antibotting system was a MUD that I used to play way back when. Whenever the game would detect that you moved in a completely systematic pattern and did nothing but attack, no talking, forming, etc, it would buff up the next mob you attacked. A player who was actually at their computer would see that and run away. A bot would sit there and die. Pretty simple stuff. I guess that's harder to implement in a non-text based game though.
graill
January 22, 2009 at 12:32am
There are plenty of ways to totally stop gold farming, however with subs in the millions the MMO industry would be killing revenue and they simply wont do this.
yugiah
January 21, 2009 at 11:39pm
As of yet, I think there is just one major mmo that managed to stop these guys pretty well. RuneScape, ridicule me, I don't care, but the truth is, illegal gold trade in that game is practiacally zero although quite a few liberties were sacrificed to keep it like it is now.
Just felt I'd point that out.
chronium
January 22, 2009 at 11:52am
and what did runescape do?
The only real effective way I can see to stop illegal gold farming is by offering a legal one run by the developer or publisher or whoever has the rights. That way they can provide a safe means for their customers to play the game how they want to.
yugiah
January 23, 2009 at 8:21pm
They pretty much put limits on trade completely, so merchanting is gone now. Trying to give away something expensive for free is just about impossible, and most players were/are terribly upset. Check the website, because there have been tons of changes if you're interested.
