MMO Gold-Sellers - Not the rant you're expecting!

[Nekojin]

The whole matter of gold-sellers on online gaming sites is a major piss-off button for serious gamers. The idea that someone can just throw money into a game and get what someone else has worked hard for rubs many players the wrong way. It gets even more offensive when this behavior is against the game's rules to begin with.

But this rant isn't about the gold-sellers. It's about the people who sling mud at the games/gaming sites when bitching about the gold sellers!

Over the past few years, I've noticed a growing trend in discussions about gold-selling. People start bitching about the gold-sellers (and not without cause, because there are negative effects on any game's economy when people start trying to manipulate the game for a real financial profit), and sooner or later, the discussion will turn, however briefly, to stopping the gold-sellers, and someone will sling mud at the people who run the game. The mud usually consists of one of two arguments:

1.) "They just don't care about the players."
OR
2.) "They're making money off the gold-sellers, and it'd hurt them too much to stop it."

The thing that pissed me off enough to write this is that I just spent 20 minutes arguing with a pinhead who thought that those were the only two possibilities worth considering! He genuinely thought that the game company was either too lazy or too greedy - or both - to stop gold-sellers completely. He genuinely thought that the game company knowingly and willfully allowed gold-sellers to run amok, with only token attempts to show that they were trying to control it.

Let's take a step back and examine the entire scene, shall we?

Every online community that has some measurable point scale that can be traded in some fashion has people who try to sell these points. The more popular the site, the more prevalent they are. Pogo has them. Gaia Online has them. World of Warcraft has them. I'm willing to bet that even Hello Kitty Online will have them.

Sony tried to control the gold-sellers in Everquest 2 by creating what were originally called Exchange servers, where it was specifically allowed for players to buy and sell gold, gear, and characters as long as you went through their system. That crippled the gold-sellers - since they were now competing directly against the people who used to be their suppliers and customers - but even that didn't stop them completely!

Is it rational to suggest that there isn't a single gaming site with integrity? That they're ALL too lazy or greedy - or both - to stop gold-sellers? Or is it more rational to conclude that it's impossible to stop them? Occam's Razor certainly seems to swing that way.

[lordlundar]

Of course there are gaming companies with integrity, and it's a case of as soon as there is a market in place, the gold sellers show up and it's impossible to remove them without removing the market, which often times just isn't viable.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are companies (or divisions thereof at least) who just do token efforts without any real approach. FF XI ans sony are prime examples, where players have to use a frontloader to get into the game which they can lock down very tightly without impacting the game but they don't.

And finally, there are just games where the developers just don't give a shit and let it go rampant. Lineage 2 is a perfect example of that approach, and the game is now being "played" almost entirely by botters and gold sellers.

As far as the companies making money off of them? Of course they are. look at trial accounts, which are neutered as opposed to full accounts and tell me that they don't make money on each new account sold from these sellers. But a good company/division looks at the big picture and decides which is worse, losing a small populace of sellers by getting rid of them, or losing their major playerbase by sitting on their asses?

But you have to remember, it's not about integrity or ethics or morals, despite what they may claim. It is about money, and which brings in more. You have to ask yourself this; if a small amount of sellers brought in the large majority of money for the game company, would that company stand by their integrity or ethics or morals and still kick the bastards out? Out of a 100 companies, I'm willing to bet that most, if not all will say yes, but maybe 1 will actually do it.

[Seshat]

Is it rational to suggest that there isn't a single gaming site with integrity? That they're ALL too lazy or greedy - or both - to stop gold-sellers? Or is it more rational to conclude that it's impossible to stop them? Occam's Razor certainly seems to swing that way.

There are people who approach the world with the fundamental belief that everyone only looks out for themselves. There are also people who approach the world with the fundamental belief that everyone's out to get them.

The first belief - well, I disagree with it. I do think some people are out only for themselves, but many aren't. The second belief is obviously flawed, but you'll never convince someone with that belief that it's flawed.

To people operating with either of those beliefs as a core premise for their logic, yes, it is rational to believe no gaming site has what the rest of us would call integrity.


Of course, there's another thing: in the current economic system, corporations are fundamentally about the shareholders. So while the individuals in the corporation are frequently striving to do the honest and ethical thing, sometimes the interests of the shareholders are (or seem to be) opposed to that; and it's quite the internal-politics fight to be ethical.

So to some extent, when talking about corporations, the assumption that they're only out for themselves (or more accurately, their shareholders) is true.

[otakuneko]

The vast majority of a gold seller's gold and spam comes from stolen accounts. Thus, we'll never see an end to gold selling and spamming, simply because it is chiefly the fault of the players themselves.

[Arcade Man D]

The vast majority of a gold seller's gold and spam comes from stolen accounts. Thus, we'll never see an end to gold selling and spamming, simply because it is chiefly the fault of the players themselves.

Actually, in the MMO I play (City of Heroes/City of Villains), most of the RMTers advertised on trial accounts, and apparently a few of them used non-stolen accounts so that there were no worries about having the owner figure out it was stolen and going through customer support. This was apparent because you can actually see the global name of the account for any character readily, and these were usually in the form of @<random letters>.

And in response to the idea that the devs are making enough money off RMTers to "turn a blind eye", I doubt that. Each RMTer represents a few accounts, but they piss off actual players. Thus leading to actual players leaving, then when they leave, it's only RMTers playing, then they leave when they realize this, killing the game. Any person in charge would recognize this as a logical progression.

[Kirkygirl]

Alright, this thread may have been killed, but I will give it a shot.

I (used to) play Lord of the Rings Online. Turbine actually added support where you can report gold farmers. It automatically sends the user(s) to your ignore list, as well as having the account canned by the admin.
Yes, most of the users were from trial accounts, and this slowed the spammers down considerably. Not 100%, mind you, but it still helped. As far as downtime goes, if the servers mess up really badly, they give their players goodies as a sort of apology. Nice goodies too.
So gaming companies actually DO care about their gamers. It is just dependant on the company and the game communities that are involved with the games.

[Evandril]

WoW has a 'report spam' option you can use easily, which reports the person, and puts them on ignore for 24 hours for you (If they were truely spamming, the account is nuked by that time)

I don't doubt most companies would love to get rid of the gold sellers...as there is nothing they put into the game that the companies want, and they actively *hurt* the game for the majority of the players. As someone has mentioned, hacked accounts are a primary way of doing buisness for them, so the company is *LOOSING* money, when the subsciber doesn't pay for their stolen account.