When I first started I loved grinding those asteroids I worked for four WEEKS to get my first cruiser. I then lost it two weeks later in a senseless early gatecamp. I also worked for 2 months to earn enough money to get my first battleship!

I used to play for 8-12 hours a day, and while I fondly remember those times… I was 21 or 22 years old, with no real significant other and a poorly paying job.

I’m older now, I have a wife and a house and a great paying job. All of those scream for attention, to me my IRL time is way more important

While I Love playing Eve and love mining, I just dont have the time any more to mine the ore/find someone to refine it and find the best places to sell it, and STILL have time to PVP.

I have become a casual player who loves to PVP. So I spend 20-40 bucks every 3 to 6 months on 500 million isk to be able to fly around and lose my ship to people much more skilled than me. I love every moment of it.

I don’t condone buying isk but when it would take hours to make enough money to be able to fly a ship you can lose in 5 minutes of combat, it’s just a matter of priorities. What do you care about more? Real life, or your gaming universe.

I personally love my real life, I love my wife, my good paying job and my house. I just want to occasionally dabble in the entertainment of the game.

So, there was a serious serious problem, and while I really hate the idea of gold buying and the like, I understand why people would do it.

On the other side: I have no concerns at the moment any more about my ability to keep ahead of repairs and consumables, and things are just getting better as they increase the number of daily quests. I don’t even run all of the dailies I can any more, just enough to get by, and I’m still ending up with a net positive every week.

So—Blizzard’s done a lot of good here, I think. Both in keeping up their strong stance against gold buying (rather than caving with a “well, everybody does it…” mentality) and decreasing the value of being a gold seller. (There’s a heck of a lot less demand for gold now—the daily quests provide a mechanism for anybody to make some cash fast, without allowing gold farmers to make it in the quantities required to be profitable.)

Perhaps the only down-side here is that because it’s impossible to make sufficient quantities of gold cost effectively by grinding any more, there might be more reason to hack accounts for money to make a quick buck. It certainly did happen before, but I suspect that it’s become an increasingly large portion of the gold supply as the more traditional sources start to dry up.

I’m not sure there’s much way around that.

As for the points about gold sellers providing ID info to other people to use for identity theft, etc… I can pretty much guarantee this. Information gets traded around out in the wastelands of computer crime like you wouldn’t believe, and chances are pretty good that you’ll never realize any sort of connection because you’re just an entry on a list being passed around somewhere for months or years until somebody picks you out at random.

In short: kudos to Blizzard for keeping up their hard-line stance on this issue, and for trying to deal with it through both enforcement and through mechanical means. And, a warning to people who give out their account info: don’t do it unless you’d trust that person with your credit cards.

Last patch, they reduced the amount of experience to go from level 20 to 60 (From my experience, it takes around half the time). All you have to do is quests, and people have written guides for the optimal quest circuits if you’re in a rush. The same holds for expansion content – there are enough quests and well-designed quest hubs that you don’t have to do anything besides questing to reach the level cap, and even then you will have enough quests left over to get you around 2000g because of the experience-to-gold conversion and rewards. True, a lot of quests are kill- or collect- quests, but there is enough variety in the other kind of quests (e.g., spying, aerial bombing, experiments and test flights) so that the leveling experience is more enjoyable.

Finally, gold buying isn’t the only cause of inflated prices for low-level items. With the introduction of huge amounts of gold into the game since the expansion, it is only natural that prices for everything increases. Players leveling a second or third character can afford to pay a premium for items, but it works both ways – you can also sell items for more gold.

I quit WoW, because it’s not fun @ max level after awhile. However, depending on reviews, I may get the next expansion and take a Char up to Max level on a newer server. The actual “rpg” part of the game is really fun, leveling and getting new gear and equipment and changing builds and stuff. It just…well at max level, your fun grinds to a halt :P

There is no rule that says you have to have the best gear. I’ve been playing WoW for just over a year and am close to getting my first toon to 70. A friendly mix of PvP and the insane gold you can make questing in outland has left me in a position to be able to buy some nice PvP gear and my flying mount in 2 levels time. with marks, honor and gold left to be able to enjoy the game without thinking of getting bogged down to a raiding schedule.

All that and I work 40+ hours a week and have a partner who can detect when i’m on my PC in a 15 mile radius and has the most un-get-outable reasons for me to turn off and watch brain melting TV.

The game is 100% what you make it if it’s a grind to you don’t play if you see your self as casual and feel the need to buy gold don’t play.

What annoys me the most about gold buying is that it completely rapes the game economy, a 4 strength 4 stam leather belt level18 should cost 50-60s but because the market is flooded with gold buying “casual players” this price hikes up to 2-3g.. you can’t earn that kind of cash at that level easily so while making things easy for you, you fuck things up for everyone else.

It’s a massively complex argument when you get into it so i’ll shut up.

One thing i’d like to add is that surely blizz doesn’t need trial accounts anymore? Sure fire way to prevent spam and the direct adverts to players.

One of the reasons I constantly leave WoW (for 6 months at a time) is that I am so tired of end-game being one of two things: PvE grind – in order to raid, you have to do heroics. In order to do heroics, you have to do instances. Then, in order to raid, you have to have specific gear – and often talents – to be allowed. Then you have to FIND a guild (and on my server, Horde to Alliance is 1-4, so there are almost no Horde guilds that raid, and they dont need more people).

PvP grind: The so-called ‘welfare epics’ are a horrible misnomer, because you get them neither for free, not easily. It takes a long time to get. A good AV win is 500 honour – the cost of the weapon, set of armour, and one trinket is in excess of 200,000 honour. AV matches take between 20 minutes and an hour.

Then you have the grind that comes into play for both: Money and Materials.

I can totally understand buying gold. If you are a casual player who only gets an hour or two a week, the last thing you want to spend your hour on is attacking the same mob 400 times to maybe get a drop, or maybe get enough gold for something.

Keep in mind, a lot of people enjoy specific parts of the game that require excessive money to get to – endgame PvP, twink PvP, raiding, etc. If you’re a casual player, those are completely impossible – even with season 1 armour and a full vindicator set, I’m still coming up against warrioes who had 18,000 health, unbuffed. Buying gold is simply where people use money instead of time to get something.

If you’re not enjoying the journey, find another journey. If the game feels like work, find a game that doesn’t. If you need help “affording” the enjoyable gameplay… face it, the design is out of wack. Leave.

Someone explain why it isn’t this simple?

P.

Lots of things have imaginary worth, which is in turn leveraged into real worth by people who want to rip off other people who should know better but are too greedy to pass this stuff up–or, in the case of goldfarm customers, too impatient to play a game fairly. Not like you can “win” WoW, or get prizes for “winning” WoW, so the entire motivation to play it is psychological, social, and emotional.

That’s the impression of worth and value I get from whenever people try to explain to me how economies work when things start to go downhill around the world. Or people bring up cheating in MMOs.

While I honestly couldn’t care less about WoW, MMOs, or the problems faced by the players within, I can’t help but be reminded that pretend-worth has as much value as real-worth, especially when real money is involved.

(Note that most money is “imaginary,” anyway. Ever bought something off Steam? Tried doing it with gold boullion? And why is gold so valuable, anyway? It’s not like you can eat it, or make cars out of it. Real gold or WoW gold, still imaginary value, still real money.)

I’d better stop now before I start rambling on about the guy in EVE who invested roughly $10,000 worth of time and effort to reach the top, only to lose it all to griefers.

Also, yeah, how can people say WoW is bad “cuz iz grindy leik”? 10 million subscribers – can’t be too bad, otherwise no-one would play.