Ever wondered who's actually winning when it comes to The Gold Farming War? The developers or the actual farmers or perhaps the players of said MMOs?. Well, it can't be the players, unless you (yes you who's reading this right now!) condone buying virtual currency.
Read on..
MMO companies complain and battle gold farmers in their games, in the press, in their forums, and via their live support teams. The question is - how are they doing and who's winning?
A certain gold farming site provided me with some long term data on average currency prices across all of the server shards in several games. If anti-gold farming initiatives were effective, gold prices should go up as the cost of business increases for gold farmers. (NOTE: This assumes that demand is fairly constant. If game companies could actually convince their players not to buy gold, than prices would drop with a glut of gold on the market and no one to buy it. I've not been able to get volume data from any gold sellers, but my sense is that their customers are not going away.)
World of Warcraft has a lot of price volatility. Whether this is due to anti-gold farming activities or other effects is hard to determine without more information. If anything, it looks like the US gold farming market is getting increasingly competitive while the European market is simply volatile. Additional data on actual server populations as well as volume of gold transactions would be very helpful.
Comments
First of Gold farm are those poeple that farm gold to sell it for real money. It need to be stopped. Because it make prices on item go up, so those poeple that play the game need to pay more for item they should have too.
To stop it. Sue the the website hosting site and sue the poeple getting the money.
US IRS since most of these site dont pay taxes on money they make from selling gold. Lot of off shore company. But since it US base company IRS can used to close these site down.
Blizzard really isnt taken active roll in trying to stop these gold farm. If spend just a small amount of the money they taken on trying to stop it. it would be over.
Hey blizzard heres an idea for you..
Want to stop gold farming?
Make it so whenever we do instances bosses drop loads of gold, this way people would have other options to do money that are actually fun, instead of mindless BS repeat stupidity (dailies)
I would love to go to Black temple, do a full clear and come out 500+ gold OVER what i started with. not 90g UNDER.
Or doing a normal instance and comming out 50g over and 100g if its heroic.
This way i can PLAY my way into getting my epic mount in a NICE AND FUN manner, not mindlessly killing mobs, unlike most koreans, some of us dont love killing a billion mobs over and over, its not fun.
In this way it would take me:
10 weeks of 25 man raiding to get my epic mount
OR
25 days of doing 2 heroics a day
OR
33 days of doing 3 normal instances a day.
All of which seem WAY more fun than farming for crap or doing dailies.
If everyone is making gold that easy you can bet people will not need to buy any gold. as its really not needed to play the game in a normal way, im sure the farmers would have problems selling their gold then.
I understand theres other issues like inflation etc but what im trying to say is instead of having dailies bliz should focus on making people earn money whenever THEY GROUP AND PLAY with each other on FUN activities, not minless solo killing
my 2c