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Workin' on a Gold Farm...
by Chris Remo, Jan 23, 2006 10:40am PSTTerra Nova has a forum excerpt quoted all about how one gold farmer ran his business in EverQuest. The author made over a hundred grand in his first year of operation, and eventually turned the enterprise into a company doing $800,000 in a year, which supported 16 employees--with health care coverage. (It's probably worth noting that none of his employees were Chinese). Somewhat surprisingly, it seems that most of his employees were husband and wife duos who actually supported families on their gold farming salaries.
My tax return for that year which has salary from 2 months of my job which I quit to make this my full time business, showed $150,623.78 after expenses. By this time I had made another character on another server and bought myself another computer and was playing on two. I killed guards in everfrost and sold the weapons to vendors and then bought items from players, or sold the platinum. That's the entirety of what I did to make that income.Eventually the "article" shifts from a description of the running of the author's business into a discussion of how the in-game economy has become inflated and inbred beyond repair. I have played EverQuest for maybe a total of two hours in my life, so while I'm not familiar with some of the terms he uses, the principles are easy to understand. The closest analogue I have in my gaming career to the insane upward drive of the economy due to widespread farming and sale of currency is the Diablo II Battle.net servers--and yes, I'm aware that Diablo II is not an MMO, but its player economy operates very much like one--when it got to the point where there was simply no hope of a new player participating in trade with established players without having to spend money on gold himself. It seems like a similar fate might be in store in the long term for World of Warcraft, which is apparently more conducive to gold farming than EverQuest. One thing I see working on WoW's favor, however, is that by virtue of its absolutely enormous playerbase, the number of casual players who have no interest in buying gold might keep the problem from becoming too large proportionally. Then again, that is only idle speculation; I am by no means any kind of MMO expert.
Comments
- disallow trading of gamemoney and items directly
- allow trading of items for gamemoney only through auction
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 8 replies.
In order to get all the gold to the seller account, he has use the auction house trick to transfer money from all his farm hand employee accounts. Maybe you could use scripts to do this, but it is starting to become a logistics nightmare. Blizzard could easily monitor this auction house activity as only gold farmers would be the ones moving large sums of money in this manner.
I disagree that price caps would drive players away. An even better solution may be to cap the amount of money that can be traded in a day. Say, 100 gold per day. Sure, you can make the 1000 gold purchase but you cannot do it again for another month. The farmer would need a no. of accounts equal no. buyers per the cap period. Trading 100 gold a day could get to be a hastle.
Do away with perpaid game cards. Force everyone to have a credit card to play.
Hide seller names in the auction house. Force the buyer and seller to coordinate in real time, otherwise I am posting my 900 gold PoS Club next to yours to confuse the farmer buyer.
You don't need to close the loophole, you just need to make it logistically difficult and cost ineffective to use.
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