How to END Gold Farming in a MMO...

zaria

VileIntent wrote: »

in every Elder Scroll game I have ever played I eventually had so much gold it didn't make a difference in how i played the game.

tordr86b16_ESO wrote: »

punish players even more? I'm not into s&m.

Without an actual reason as to how it punishes them, your comment is pointless. Seems the hate replies start early. Greedy gold farmer.

Far better to use my idea, no restrictions however some actions get you flagged.
Stuff like playing 24/7, no ingame life, just grinding or farming, giving all your loot or gold to another player regularly. also other suspicious transactions like getting lots of gold / mats from other and give away again without real trade.

This is not banning just put you on a watch list for additional logging. It might become an ban if evidence piles up, say players get lots of items from bots getting banned he get autobanned too, GM will then look at where he sent his gold.

MercyKilling

Knottypine wrote: »

Pretty much it. Every solution to combating bots/gold sellers is punishing to legitimate players. We've already been effected enough by this.

Actually, this is false. Putting live GM's in the game with the power to instaban accounts isn't punishing players at all, and Zenimax employees get to make the decision on whether or not what they're seeing is a bot or not rather than a player.

Take out enough farm accounts, and it gets tougher for the actual sales/trade accounts to keep up with any orders.

Last night I must've reported twenty or so bots that ran up to a certain point just outside Wayrest, where there are back street thugs gathered around a citizen threatening him/her.

They would pause there for two to five minutes, then head into Wayrest, to the Recruitment Officer, pause again and then head actually -into- the Mage's guild to the soul gem vendor. There they'd sit for a while, presumably emptying their bags and then vanish.

A live GM with the ability to ban could have wiped out perhaps a hundred or so in the hour that I watched them come and go.
AND it wouldn't have harmed one single authentic player/subscriber.

Makkir

[/quote]
Gold Farming is a crime. I have watched it grow into a plague over the last 20 years of my MMO lifetime.
Gold farming leads to botting, Untill you remove the carrot the horse will still follow it.[/quote]

Whaaaat? So I am a criminal if I spend 3 hours in game looting coin and selling the drops (aka farming legitimately) because I am trying to acquire a large amount of gold?

So in Communist ESO, do we all have a limit on how many epics we can have? mounts? skill points?

Lol...

The day I can't strive to be wealthy in an MMO is the day I stop, and thousands of others stop, playing them.

I have a better suggestion, ban Chinese IPs from American servers...
They don't have a minimum wage over there, so their CGF (Chinese Gold Farmer) companies set up MMO sweatshops paying people about a nickel an hour to farm or bot gold in MMOs. Since they don't have a minimum wage, they can sell gaming gold WAY cheaper than anyone else, thus deflating it's value. It sounds harsh, but it's a start.

During the early years of another very popular MMO, I had the opportunity to speak and interview a Chinese Gold Farmer. It put a whole new spin on perspective to listen to him in Teamspeak talk about his job, which was 11-12 hours a day, of farming gold. He spoke about this job just as you or myself speak about our jobs here in America. To them, they're not cheaters. They are fathers, uncles, brothers, and "normal every day Joes" just going to work and earning pennies (to us) put food on their tables at home. Most of them don't even play the games for recreation and don't have much knowledge of the games outside their farming roles. The gentleman with whom I spoke, said his place of work was a giant warehouse with hundreds of computer stations set up. Most days he would just log onto his Hunter character and spend the day in one area repeatedly killing the same mobs over and over again only going to a main city when his inventory was full. He had a break to eat food and would have someone come to play his character while he did so. If they didn't meet their daily quota, they were let go (aka jobless). So lets be weary of the stigmas we attach to all gold farmers.

Bottomline, these warehouses are set up to meet the American demands for virtual gold. These companies can meet these demands because they pay very low wages for hundreds of employees to play all day long. The problem is the demand market. Stop buying gold. Banning the botters, the farmers, and the guys like I described above does NOTHING to deter demand and increase the value of the "gold" on the black market. Sure, banning cheaters (botters, dupers, etc) is absolutely necessary for the economy's health BUT not the ones legitimately bringing gold into the economy.

Sorry but placing a gold cap on players is just plain stupid.

KerinKor

ralurielb16_ESO wrote: »

Gold farming is not a crime.

Botting and gold selling however are. It's a war in any MMO.

The best way to combat these? Boots on the ground. Put enough GMs in the game...

Any selling spam observed....BAN account.
Any bot reports...teleport to reported location observe behaviour and send the suspected botter /tell...no reply...BAN.
Any gold selling emails reported with evidence...BAN account.

After a while these gold sellers and botters will just give up.

As a bonus you can even add a zone message when the GMs ban someone...players will love you for it!

Not that hard really.

I find it interesting I don't see the phrase gold buyers here: given they're the ROOT CAUSE of RMT I wnnder why?

Requiemslove

Sorry, for me the only solution is to ban gold-spammers. I agree anyone who uses the black-market should also be banned but the focus has to be on such a work-force. Even if it does put some poor sod out of a job that puts food on the table, for them. What they do is modern day slavery, and ILLEGAL anyway. I challenge anyone to show there is such a thing as legitimate and more to the point LEGAL gold-spamming businesses. The solution is with GMs actively monitoring /zone chat and monitoring PMs that indicate a gold-spammer has sold to a player. Both should be banned without powers to appeal. This is supposed to be a game, the only business is supposed to be from the people who make it, and the people who want/love to play it.

I wont type this and say I have not played MMOs where I have spent hours and hours farming gold but it has always been for my own use, for crafting mats, to buy gear sold on MMO auction houses [personally I hope ESO never goes the auction house route] and that is the crux, anyone who does not play this game because they WANT to, who have a real economic agenda [whether its someone in front of a monitor, or a bot creator] and actively seek to filch gamers of their actual money HAS to be banned. They are robbers and that is the ultimate truth. They have to be stamped out. No matter what direction the games economy takes down the line the end result must always be player 1 sells x product for x amount of GAME currency and that is the reality of any MMOs economy.

SantieClaws

If you want to look at how to control economic crime in a virtual world then you need to looks at methods of financial control and crime control in the real world first of all.

Firstly education - tell people and keep on telling them why it is stupid to buy gold from these crooks in the first place. I haven't had one single e-mail from Zenimax telling me why I should not buy gold. Explain to people why it ruins the game, why it puts their payment card at risk etc.

Punishment, punishment, punishment - ban the sellers and keep working to ban the buyers. Let people know their game account is really at risk if they damage the game by buying gold. Link the actions with the consequences.

Control of goods - there is a limited supply of everything in the real world. If one player harvests more than 50 jute nodes in a day (or another reasonable limit) then make it so they don't see any more in that day. In real life crops don't grow overnight and ore doesn't respawn. There needs to be a balance between enough being available that a normal player could use in a day and an oversupply that bots can feed on. The limit needs to be per player rather than an overall limit in the world or that will just make for a shortage that encourages goldseller purchases.

Perhaps instead of a gold based AH set up a "want to swap" system where people put up something for sale (say a bow) and say what they want in return (say 25 jute). Organised and easy barter system if you like. Take the need for gold as a univeral means of acquisition out of the system a bit.

Mechanisms - they are real world mechanisms for controlling financial crime. Such as limits on money transfers etc. I understand the balance between not harming real players but maybe something like only letting people send a certain amount of gold per day to other players. Thay would allow normal players to make reasonable transfers but stop large, repeated transfers between bots. Of course they may just produce more bots to get round this.

drschplatt

VileIntent wrote: »

Step 1: Max Gold (per character or account) doesn't matter which, just set a cap.

Step 2: Design your NPC economy around this cap. This ranges from repairs, to npc merchants and everything else like Guild Stores (more on this in a second).

This would do absolutely nothing to stop gold sellers. If you artificially establish the value of a gold piece, they'll simply sell gold in lower values.

For example, without a cap, lets say a gold staff sells for 10,000gp. ZOS institutes a player cap at 5,000gp, so naturally the cost of a gold staff must now go down and maybe it settles at 2,500gp.

Let's say I really want a gold staff when there's no cap and I find a gold seller who will sell me 10,000gp for 5 dollars. The value of that gold staff now equals 5 dollars.

Let's say there's a cap and I really want a gold staff. The gold sellers know that before the cap the value of a gold staff was about 5 dollars. So now all the gold sellers simply change their offers from 10,000gp for 5 dollars to 2,500gp for 5 dollars.

It works the exact same way as an economy on a gold or silver standard. Right now without a gold standard a gallon of milk might be 4 bucks. But 100 years ago on a gold standard the gallon of milk was 30 cents. The only thing that changed was the value of the money based on an artificial cap. Wages adjusted accordingly as did the cost of living.

Step 3: Make Gold bound to Account. No trading it to any other account. You can buy something for someone and give it to them, but never any gold. (treat it like AvA points)

Gold sellers will just trade gold for gear and then give the gear back. This does nothing.

Step 4: Place a Cap on how much items can be sold for on a Player ran system like the Guild Store. Base each item cap to the set economy. Allow a small variance so players can buy and sell to the lowest bidder.

So again, you're just establishing an artificial price cap that will do nothing to stop gold sellers. All it does is make individual gold pieces more valuable and deflate the economy.

"Would this really hurt me as a player?"

Yes. It would be an inconvenience and do nothing to stop gold sellers.

If they cannot get a price for an item for a bunch of gold then no one will need to go to their site to buy gold or items.

And no one else can make any money either because you're artificially capping prices. All it does is deflate the economy and raise the value of a single gold piece. Instead of selling 10,000gp, the gold sellers will sell in lots of 1,000 instead because now 1,000gp will buy what 10,000gp could buy yesterday. Nothing changes.

The very next thing that will come from someone is "If this happens then EVERYONE will have max gold and there will be no economy!" Again, let's head back up top and ask those questions again. Who cares?

I'm sorry but that's not how market forces work. They've never worked this way. If no one cares then the market will simply no longer exist and I imagine that will be a turn off to a lot of people, myself included.

The overall concept is this. If you put the economy in the hands of the players it will always and forever turn to sh!t due to gold farmers and players." Stop worrying about a virtual economy and greedy players and play the game. Only greedy players and gold farmers care about massing a virtual wealth.

It's a nice thought, you; the white knight who will sleep under the stars, eating scraps dropped from the table while keeping to you vow of poverty and righteousness; but to the rest of us who enjoy economics, business, supply, demand, gain, loss and challenge, it sounds really boring.

Simply put, there are already rules against gold selling and the rules just need to be enforced.

Cogo

Why make it so complicated.

There is 1 solution to get rid of goldsellers/bots.

STOP BUYING GOLD FROM THESE VERMINS

Very very easy.