Comments on: RedBedlam Boss Says Gold Farming “Inevitable”

By: Erlam

Erlam — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 05:59:08 +0000

That comment is gold.

(get it? Eh?)

By: sampan

sampan — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:35:59 +0000

I like prima-gold verymuch because it’s very beauty
http://www.prima-gold.fusionthai.net

By: kr8

kr8 — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:31:11 +0000

The inflation argument doesn’t seem to have been correctly identified in the above comments. It’s pretty easy though, as the average amount of gold that drops from a single mob is fixed, killing more of those mobs will net you more money. RMT companies have the incentive to spend a lot more time on farming these resources than the average player, hence the gold supply is artifically inflated, gold buyers have more gold to spend and prices go up. For the average gamer just playing the game for fun, this makes the game harder, as now the wow auction house for instance has become completely useless since you can’t pay for anything on it.

Also, games are supposed to be virtual. You start fresh, a new character, the same basic skills as everyone else. You can aspire to greatness, within the little rules of this virtual world, and earn a sense of accomplishment, a little escapism to brighten your day. In real life you might just be flipping burgers, but in this game you’re a slayer of dragons. Now with RMT though that annoying tard that nearly runs you off the road every day in his BMW just goes to some website, spends a couple of hundred bucks on gear and gets ahead of you, completely destroying this sense of accomplishment (which is partly based on your comparison to other players).

Not to mention that people don’t buy gold to avoid the grind, they do it to appear better than other players. Humans all suffer from this peacock-like behaviour where they feel the need to show off their wealth, online games are no different.

By: Number 6

Number 6 — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:36:30 +0000

Perhaps there could be a certain time that a player needed to associate (adventure) with another player before they could trade gear/gold?

I mean, who the hell would want to have to play for a couple of weeks with a typical gold farmer? No one. But if its a friend or would be friend, it should be no problem.

By: Kanakotka

Kanakotka — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:44:42 +0000

@DarthS, no matter how much anyone ever tells you that WoW is about equipment and not skill, it is of humongous amounts of untrue garbage.

It all boils down to skill, no matter what. Even if it were “just about equipment”, you’d still have to know which equipment to pick.

By: Kanakotka

Kanakotka — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:37:48 +0000

It is fairly easy to pick out and remove in a few simple measures, however. But due to some limitations, certain games cannot enforce this. Such ease as ; Flagging larger transactions of money from one player to another, and by flagging i mean allowing stealthy logging of actions, if actions seem legitimate, everything is just fine. Another thing is preventing trial accounts from speaking on general channels, or even using macros to begin with. Strict macrorule is easy to place on a trial client, and would be removed from the full client.

By: Shiznit

Shiznit — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 01:44:38 +0000

yes you can be very good at making gold in mmos but some people like me hate to grind or work the economy. when I played wow all I wanted to do was instances, raids, and pvp, basically kill stuff. I couldn’t have cared less for crafting, farming, auction house, etc.. Luckily I didn’t really need that much gold for what I did (guild covered repair costs you could pick the herbs i needed for potions in 30min), but if I had to actually make fake money consistently to play I would have quit much sooner than I did. When I get home from work (class at the time), I wanna have fun not start a second job.

By: luminosity

luminosity — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:17:32 +0000

It’s a functions of time spent. As long as people can make a lot more money in mmo terms buy having a real job instead of grinding, gold buying will never stop.

The sad thing is, you don’t need a lot of time to make money in most MMOs, if you understand how the economy works. I have a job, work full time and could easily buy gold and justify it by not having as much time to spend in game — but I don’t need to. I’m actually one of the better off people in MMOs that I know, usually far better than people who do spend a lot of time. As per usual, in MMOs if you know what you’re doing you don’t need to spend a lot of time.

By: BoltingTurtle

BoltingTurtle — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:10:51 +0000

Oh, KFR. I’m glad he hasn’t dropped off the face of the earth. I used to play his little mmo. A great Idea that simply lacked some real-industry experience, even if it did have some eye-catching names behind it. They needed more (and cleaner) coders, and some in-house testers.

The Game was Roma Victor, and I think you can still play it. It was revolutionary in several ways, possesing a twitch-based combat system that added personal skill to your stats. Matter of fact I dropped Kerry in our first encounter, but that was due to the fact that skills weren’t registering due to a bug.

The whole game worked on the principles talked about above, or were rather a playground for them. They had a system where the game was free to play, but you could buy in-game currency. What wound up happening was that one guy bought up all the NPC shopkeepers (you could do that) and drove prices sky-high. In theory we should have just killed him and his little NPCs. But theory didn’t account for the amount of gold that would have cost us.

In other words, KFR is a brilliant, perhaps eccentric man with alot of great ideas floating around his head, and the gumption to test them in a game that ate up his life. During the time his wife bore his first child, and for most of the development process none of the guys making the game saw a paycheck.

RedBedlam isn’t just a game company, it’s a game company that uses its games to test new ideas and expand the horizons of virtual worlds. They may be crazy, and they may give more than necessary creedence to Ed Cassanova, the guy who first researched virtual world economies, but it’s this kind of experimentation and academic interest that we need. As Ed Cassanova pointed out, the world of Everquest had a higher GDP than several real world-nations. Imagine what kind of GDP WOW must have. These games have an economy, and people will exploit it. Increased regulation only makes it more lucrative to do so.

By: fodigg

fodigg — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 23:07:38 +0000

I have no problem with paying to save time as long as there’s no way to purchase a “win button”. That goes for in-game currency as well.

By: WarpRattler

WarpRattler — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 22:54:48 +0000

This is part of why I’m able to continue to enjoy Kingdom of Loathing (and potentially other browser-based MMOs with similar economies, though I’m not interested in any after Forumwarz basically being shareware and not being able to get into Twilight Heroes) without Asymmetric saying stuff like this. Mr. Accessories, not Meat, are the game’s real currency, and though you can buy them from other players (either in-game, which is a normal activity engaged in by many players, or through things such as buying characters holding them on eBay, which is a great way to get shunned from the community and potentially get scammed), the only way they’re actually generated is with a $10 donation directly to Asymmetric (barring hacking, of course, which is rare and results in characters being disabled if seriously exploited). Farming just gets you Meat, which doesn’t take any money away from Asymmetric, and buying Meat from other players is just plain dumb – why not give your money to Asymmetric when you’re going to get the same amount of Meat from selling your Mr. A than you’re going to get from someone else?

Man, I wish there was a preview button on comments. Maybe I’m just spoiled by forums.

By: Shiznit

Shiznit — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:45:02 +0000

sorry about the typos, what happened to the edit option?