Professional Farmers

[Chesspiece_face]

You should see DAoC.
MYthic was rather clever - they get the mony themselves.

If you buy a spare "bot" account you can buff yourself and be over 2.5 times as good in combat. And you dont even have to group with the bot; it can stand sefely behind lines in a friendly fort.
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Both Ultima Online and Everquest 2 (not sure about EQ1 but i would assume so) offer in-house farming operations. Ultima online will automatically skill your characters up depending on how much money you send them and EQ2 allows you to buy online items goods directly from SOE for real cash.

So here's the rub. Where do you, as the player, draw the line. Is it unfair and "cheating" for people to buy in game items with real money even if it is part of the system? or only if it is designated as outside the system. And how do you specifically designate what is outside the system. With companies like SOE coopting the methods used by these farmers and Gold for Cash websites the line blurs and gives these 3rd party players much more credability. The reality is Farmers and IGE are going to stay around whether we like it or not. They make money. As much as we might talk the talk regarding a "higher" code in these games, where purchasing these goods with cash is the lowest form of play, there are obviously enough people out there buying these services to make them not only worthwhile for the 3rd parties but also the people making the games.

The reality is, no matter what blizzard says, their terms of service are not enforcible when it comes to farming etc. in any real way. They have created an international game and there are no laws which are applicable to either enforce or prosicute people that don't abide by the ToS in an international setting.

Video of Note:

State of Play III

in particular: "State of the Industry Breakfast"

Edit: these vids are really long. be warned.

The real question here isn't whether these services will become more a part of the games we play (they will) it's how the legal system will legistlate and define the terms. Ownership then becomes an issue. If these items in the games come to be defined by a generally accepted cash value then how do we define who maintains ownership of said item? does it belong to the company who owns the game? does it belong to the player that has invested 100s of hours in obtaining that item? And if it does belong to the player what happens when these games shut down their doors, as they inevitably will do (Asherons Call 2 announced recently that it will cancel their service). These questions underly this entire debate and they are not going unnoticed by any of the players in this. The way these items are answered in the next few years could have drastic consequences on not only the way we play games but also the types of games that even get made.

[Guest]

Your points wrong.

Only items that someone would want, inflate in value.

The value of consumables doesnt inflate once they roughly hit the point where farming the consumable is roughly equal to farming gold in terms of time.

The value of items(gear) no one wants, deflates.

[Walkiry]

Actually, I think the NFL analogy is pretty apt.  There is a set of in game rules, enforced by referees.  These would correspond to you in game Warcraft rules, enforced by software.  If you violate those rules, you lose the game.

Then there is a set of out of game rules.  In the NFL, they are rules against roids and the salary cap.  In warcraft, it is rules against exchanging cash for gold.  In both cases you have a reasonable chance of getting away with it.  In both cases you are using resources you are not supposed to have to increase your chances of on field sucess.  And in both cases it is wrong.[right][snapback]96026[/snapback][/right]

Eh? I was clearly making the distinction between the rules in the field (4 downs, 10 yards, the whole kibosh) and the rules about how the team is supposed to be managed. I don't disagree that it's wrong in the sense that it violates the TOS, I'm just saying that rules that are in the TOS that do not directly reflect in the gameplay (as I said, giving someone 100g for cash or for a song makes a lick of difference) are not the scope of what he was referring to when he talked about what was "allowed" and not how the game was "supposed to be played," so to speak. I saw it clearly refer to the "field" rules.

And as I said, unless the real money cash can be exchanged for in-game cash that can be used to buy advantages from the NFL, it's not really a very good analogy. There may be a salary cap, but teams are free to spend as much as they want in training their players, equipping them with whatever they deem necessary, etc. Maybe paying players to join your guild could be closer, but WoW has no "cap" in acquisition of skill (as I've read in many places how uber-guilds woo good players to join them by offering them in-game gold or loot), only in acquisition of items (or in-game currency, which are roughly equivalent).

EDIT: Clarity of a couple of things.

[MongoJerry]

The reality is, no matter what blizzard says, their terms of service are not enforcible when it comes to farming etc. in any real way.  They have created an international game and there are no laws which are applicable to either enforce or prosicute people that don't abide by the ToS in an international setting.

Their ToS is enforceable in as much as they are willing to do the enforcement themselves. They don't need to involve the legal system to ban accounts or IP's should they decide they want to do that.

The real question here isn't whether these services will become more a part of the games we play (they will) it's how the legal system will legistlate and define the terms.  Ownership then becomes an issue.  If these items in the games come to be defined by a generally accepted cash value then how do we define who maintains ownership of said item?  does it belong to the company who owns the game?  does it belong to the player that has invested 100s of hours in obtaining that item?  And if it does belong to the player what happens when these games shut down their doors, as they inevitably will do (Asherons Call 2 announced recently that it will cancel their service).  These questions underly this entire debate and they are not going unnoticed by any of the players in this.  The way these items are answered in the next few years could have drastic consequences on not only the way we play games but also the types of games that even get made.

The situation is pretty straightforward. Blizzard owns the servers and all the information on them. The player pays for the priviledge of playing on the servers but at no time do they ever own anything. Players have been selling items and gold for real money, but those items and gold are really owned by Blizzard. Should Blizzard decide to step in and delete sold accounts or gold, they can if they want to. So far, it just hasn't been worth it for Blizzard to do so.

[kandrathe]

Your points wrong.

Only items that someone would want, inflate in value.

The value of consumables doesnt inflate once they roughly hit the point where farming the consumable is roughly equal to farming gold in terms of time.

The value of items(gear) no one wants, deflates.
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Gah! Gold's value deflates uniformly according to how valuable it is to the majority of capped toons on the server. It has nothing to do with how the gold is spent, or on what. This situation is similiar to what happened in Spain after they raped South America and poured tons and tons of silver, jade and gold into the money supply. Everyone was wealthy, but no one was interested in making food.

[Guest]

Not a valid example. Thats like saying the e-boom of the 90s shows everyone gets rich from stocks.
A general mass euphoria(or hysteria) is an example of a market behaving irrationally.

The majority of the time real life markets behave just as described the game behaving.




You using the example you did actually backs up my point - the majority of the time markets dont behave that way.

[Occhidiangela]

And it's "couldn't care less".
The crowd here are, I suspect, strongly inclined towards Rinnhart's point of view.
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1. For my money, you are both better off using "I don't care" or "I don't give a flying fruitbat" to express the desired sentiment.

2. In Diablo II, Koreans came under fire for a variety of perceived "in game sins." In WoW it appears that Chinese are now the evil Asians of the Realms. Will the next great MMORPG, called "The Doom of the Ultimate More Pig On Line" induce the complaint that Indian bacon farmers are ruining the game economy?

3. Even NPR adds its plastic butter knife to this sword fight. Looks like Robert Sigel is flying in to crap on the "RL for Gold" (new lamps for old?) issue.

In other news, the President of South Africa doesn't give a flying fruitbat about any of this. His nation is the leader in REAL gold production, and *nice segue here* has chosen to set a continental (African) precedent, albeit following the Netherlands' lead: legalization of same sex marriage.

Is this outcome a bit of reverse karma emanating from the Dutch Boers? I'd have lost a bet on that one, so I am glad I didn't bet on it! :whistling: Also glad I am not playing WoW, now that the grinding and goraning has begun in earnest.

Occhi

[kerosion]

Well that would go a long way in explaining the player who will consistently sell off 4 Travel Packs for 50-75% market value in Ironforge every evening. =)

This article presents what strikes me as the most accurate portrayal of gold farming I have yet encountered based on my own observations of behavior inside the game. As a whole the public response to gold farming operations has been overblown, I believe primarily as a result of a lack in understanding in how they operate and the actual impact they have on the economy.

Discussing a couple points from above just for fun...

Point 1) Gold farming accelerates inflation.

Considering farming to be an excessive focus on activities such as gathering, grinding kills, or repeatedly killing bosses in order to generate gold or materials with which to acquire gold there should be two things being generated by farming activity. An increase in supply of items and materials in the market, and an increase in the amount of raw money being looted directly off of dead bodies.

An increase of supply of items and materials available in the market results in reduced equilibrium prices of those items. This is resulting in cheaper prices overall in the Auction House for all items easily farmable by solo or small groups of individuals. The excess amount of raw money brought in from dead bodies on the other hand would be causing inflation as increases in the quantity of raw money in the game decreases the value of raw money already existing. The question becomes which of these is having the most impact on the economy as a whole?

It is beyond me to definitively prove one way or another but it would likely be safe to assume that these two influences likely counter-act each other. The affect on the market should be minimal when compared with the activities of regular players.

Point 2) Farmers focus on profitable activities in the game reducing the value of regular players effort in those activities.

When specific activities are particularly profitable an increasing number of people will become involved in that activity until so many people are pursuing that activity that it is no longer profitable. Whether this occurs because there are so many rare and epic items being supplied on the auction house of specific types that demand is largely satisfied and the price is driven down, or there are so many people riding through Burning Steppes that it becomes no longer worth the time to make the rounds inevitably a profitable pursuit will attract attention. Farmers accelerate this yet are limited in the activities in which they can partake. Due to difficulties discussed in the article on farming most farmers are restricted to activities they can pursue primarily on their own and can quickly turn into gold. This rules out markets requiring larger groups to farm effectively such as Fiery and Lava Cores as an extreme example.

From my experience the majority of the activities being taken by gold farmers are those that are repetitive time-consuming endeavors. They deflate the market for the rewards of these activities and reduce the value of pursuing the activity beyond what would normally be.

My question would be why not simply observe what markets it is that the farmers are deflating and redirect efforts from competing in an activity of decreasing value and instead focus on activities that take advantage of a dirt cheap supply of Arcane Crystals for example? There are plenty of opportunities not commonly leveraged by gold farmers due to their restrictions that can be leveraged for enough funds to acquire necessary goods in a shorter time period than had a player collected them themselves.

Anyhow, I'm up way too late and instead of something of value this post is drifting further and further away from cogent thought so going to wrap it up.

Overall the situation in World of Warcraft with gold farmers mirrors conditions we can observe taking place in the real world. Labor exists much cheaper in other regions of the world than it does in the United States. In order to survive in a capitalist market companies must take advantage of this if they are to remain competitive in an increasingly open world market. In order to thrive in such an environment we need to become adept at removing ourselves from being that labor force and instead leveraging it to our own advantage. Economic conditions in World of Warcraft provide an excellent place in which to experiment and grow accustomed to working in such an environment. Yes it's challenging. We have to work harder to succeed and grow stronger with the experience, with the exception of those who take the easy way out and take shortcuts. For most of us the gold farmers are good for us, they create opportunities that would otherwise not exist. For the other ones -- a fool and their gold are soon parted.

[Occhidiangela]

3) Macro-Economics: I argue that a "professional" players killing the same monsters in a single location for 12 hours straight has a nearly identical impact on the macro-economy as would 12 separate "casual" players, each killing those same mobs for 1 hour each. In both cases, roughly the same amount of gold is being "created" from monser drops and trash loot sales. In addition, about the same number of useful items are "created" as well. I assume that the number of "professionals" is very small in comparison to the general server population. I would also expect that the sum of the /played times for all professionals is vanishingly small when compared to the total /played times for all other casualy played characters. Even if professionals' mob kills accounted for 1/1000 of total kills on a server (which I think is probably an over-estimate by several orders of magnitute), then the mobs they kill would have to drop 10 times better loot than the average mobs to even have a 1% impact on the overall economy. Overall, I'm extremely skeptical that professionals have *any* measurable effect on the *aggregate* economy.

I think a better estimate would be to consider the percentage of a given server population is made up of 24/7 farmer accounts, then consider the average hours per day of a non "professional farmer" player account. Then consider the min max approach the farmer takes in terms of funneling gold and items into the system. Your 3 to 1 does not remotely come close to approximating the delta, IMO. (Or did someone else suggest a 3 to one casual farmer versus regular farmer.)

I was under the impression that 2000 per server was the max population, but that may be "max on at a given time." I don't know where that number comes from deep within the recesses of my memory, nor how many total accounts/players are the limit on a given server.

If 20 accounts are farming professionally for their living as described in the article, out of 2000, that is 1% of the population producing a significant proportion of high end goods. I'll suggest that their Min Max approach makes them contribute a good deal more than 1% of the gold in the economy, due to their motivation and set up, and the percentage of their time on mechanical tasks versus all other tasks. (Chatting, having fun, etcetera.) I don't have the time to make a model with a few variables to try and compute that, but I hope you get the drift of my idea.

Farmers logged on 24/7 on busy servers each pre empt someone else from playing for X time if there are waits to log on. That is a cost to the player that you can't measure in gold.

No one seems to have addressed that issue, has waiting gone away as an aggrivation?

Occhi

[Iolair]

Both Ultima Online and Everquest 2 (not sure about EQ1 but i would assume so) offer in-house farming operations.  Ultima online will automatically skill your characters up depending on how much money you send them and EQ2 allows you to buy online items goods directly from SOE for real cash.

I don't understand what you mean with 'in-house farming operations'? Could you elaborate, please?

And about EQ2 allowing buying online items...I think it should be noted here, that it is not the norm and not allowed on most servers. You make it sound like EQ2 is in general allowing this, when it's not true. They have 2 special servers for that, the rest of the servers are 'normal' :)

[Chesspiece_face]

I don't understand what you mean with 'in-house farming operations'? Could you elaborate, please?

And about EQ2 allowing buying online items...I think it should be noted here, that it is not the norm and not allowed on most servers. You make it sound like EQ2 is in general allowing this, when it's not true. They have 2 special servers for that, the rest of the servers are 'normal' :)
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Meaning that they have taken the business models of the 3rd party companies that fuel the secondary market and have moved those models into the primary market. These secondary markets like IGE etc. have already proven to be a billion dollar industry and the excursions into this area by the likes of SOE and EA (Ultima Online) have, by the admission of the publishers, been entirely successful monitarily.

These examples of SOE (EQ2) and EA (UO) are only the first we will probably be seeing of developers and publishers encorporating models of the secondary market directly into their games.

Now, like I mentioned above, It is very easy for the secondary markets like IGE to be discounted (especially in America) by thier obvious divergence with the EULA's and TOS related to each of these specific games. Unfortunately these games are international in design and the laws that govern each region greatly differ. Over the last year in places like Thailand, China, and across Asia consumer protection laws have been put in place that guarantee players of these games certain rights over the items, characters, etc. that they invest in. In China it is required that the games reimburse players for lost or stolen items and that these items are property of the players. In Thaiwan rulings have stated that the data being transfered in these games constitutes magnetic property, meaning that the items and characters in these games are protected under anti-fraud. These differing laws and regulations across regions, in and of itself, creates a great lack of harmonization in how these games environments can grow, but think what will happen when more companies begin moving the secondary market into the primary.

If that company itself markets "Holy Sword of Ragnarok" as 15$ through their service they are putting a monetary value associated with said item. Now under the laws of these other regions, not only would that company have to give the player that item back but, if for whatever reason, they could not do so they would OWE the player that 15$ that the company lists as the value of said item.

Monjojerry - Sorry but you are way off here. The only country that has made laws, that i know of, supporting the validity of EULAs as enforcable contracts has been the USA. Many more countries where these games are played are making laws that give much more control and ownership to the players than the companies. That's just a fact. Now these laws are in their infancy presently, but you can be assured that in places like China, Thaiwan, and the rest of Asia the laws will continue to build in the direction they are now. While presently the regulations in America have barely attempted to tackle this subject I would be suprised if they didn't follow last years Blizzard case in enforcing EULA's creating a great divergance in the regulations required to operate an international MMO such as WoW. And as such this will have great repercusions on how these games are designed, operated, and marketed in the near future.

Edit: I again point to the link i listed above. The State of the Industry Breakfast a little way down addresses many of these issues arising in the area. If you have an hour or so to watch.

[Thecla]

And here is a recent National Public Radio article on a similar topic (including a WoW gold/dollar exchange rate chart) -- sorry if it might have been linked elsewhere in this thread :)

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...Id=5032947

[Iolair]

Thank you Chesspiece_face for the clarification, I see what you mean now.
I think it will be interesting to see how these things develop in the future.

[kandrathe]

Not a valid example. Thats like saying the e-boom of the 90s shows everyone gets rich from stocks.
A general  mass euphoria(or hysteria) is an example of a market behaving irrationally.

The majority of the time real life markets behave just as described the game behaving. 
You using the example you did actually backs up my point - the majority of the time markets dont behave that way.
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I don't have time to educate you on the nature of inflation. Here is a link to an analysis of the state of things in 16th century Spain.

The combination of population pressure and inflation exacerbated by the flow of gold and silver from the New World saw a price rise that cut effective wages in half by about mid-century. Changing economic conditions saw many peasants lose their land as the terms of their tenancy become much less favorable, while land was becoming concentrated in the hands of the elites, especially the rising bourgeousie. Homelessness and vagrancy were on the rise, and towns experienced a sense of crisis trying to deal with the poor. By the end of the century, a peasant almost never saw meat, and many of them had reached such a state of despair about the future that they engaged in widespread revolts. Tensions between the social orders were high on many levels.

Suffice it to say that inflation is a combination of many factors, supply, demand and money supply. Spain saw all those factors converge in a short period of time, with fewer producers, more consumers, and huge influxes of gold into the money supply.

Wikipedia - Causes of Inflation

If you extend 16th Century Spain to WoW, as toons cap they enter the luxury class and will not be bothered to farm an item, supply therefore drops and demand remains constant or increases. Couple that with the steady increase in money supply devaluing gold, and you will see high inflation on all goods and services. The more gold that drops and is not spent into the game (mounts, training, faction stuff, etc) devalues all the gold on the server.

Trust me, as someone who plays the AH religiously, I'm watching the prices on most things creep upward every week. I call that inflation.

[Guest]

double post

[Guest]

Let me call you "stupid" and leave it at that.

I could go into more details on economics, but since you stooped to veiled insults let me return a direct one - and we can stop talking about this.

[Rinnhart]

Let me call you "stupid" and leave it at that.

I could go into more details on economics, but since you stooped to veiled insults let me return a direct one - and we can stop talking about this.
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Tomorrow, post something anti-Semetic and round out the week with a perfect score.

[SwissMercenary]

Yes. Ghostiger, the lot of us are out to get you.

Let me call you "stupid" and leave it at that.

I could go into more details on economics, but since you stooped to veiled insults let me return a direct one - and we can stop talking about this.
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[Guest]

Huh?

[Tal]

Ghostiger you're crossing the line here - attack the post not the poster.