Gold sellers are evil. We have been told it is so. Turbine even put it in their Terms of Service agreement. But apart from it being wrong, why is it bad to do? Say Turbine began to offer gold on the Turbine store in exchange for Turbine Points, would that be wrong?
The main issue with buying in game gold with out of game resources, like money, is that it causes inflation in game. This means that the money in game becomes more plentiful, and thus is worth less. Every gold piece can buy fewer and fewer items in game as inflation increases.
Inflation in an MMO is always present. This is due to how in-game gold is generated. Every mob you kill creates new money. The longer a server exists, the more money gets created. This builds inflation into the system. This is not necessarily bad. A limited inflation will allow the supply of money to expand, thus allowing people to feel like they’re personal in-game wealth is growing.
Developers know this and try to control inflation through what is commonly called gold-sinks. This is why it costs gold to buy and maintain a house, to travel, to reforge LI’s, to re-trait, list items on the AH, and to repair armor. A developer carefully balances these methods of removing gold from the game with the rate of gold being brought into the game in order to have a limited amount of inflation.
Selling items to other players does not remove money, but merely moves it around in the game. This is the basis of the economy. Some players spend a lot of time to get or make rare items or consumable items like potions in order to sell them to make a profit. Many players like to build up a large reserve of gold as a sort of additional game style.
Imagine a game with a fixed money supply. Maybe there is no way to make new money, or the creation and deletion of wealth is perfectly balanced. This zero sum economy would mean that for anyone to get rich, everyone else would have to get poorer. This would not be very fun. Inflation allows the money supply to grow so that some players can amass a lot of wealth without bankrupting others.
So we come to gold selling and buying for real world money. Those who want to play this other aspect of the game, will sometimes decide to take a shortcut to amassing a lot of in-game gold. They can pay a few dollars in the real world and suddenly they can buy anything they want, and don’t have to worry about gold anymore. This actually causes inflation to run rampant. There are two reasons for this.
First, this gold that the buyer got was not worked for. It is not nearly as precious to the player who got it so easily compared to the person who spent a lot of in-game time to amass it. So that buyer is now willing to use more of it to buy the things they want, like pots or armor or Symbols, etc. This means prices will steadily rise as more people buy gold and begin to be willing to pay more for everything they buy with it. This is the one side of inflation, the increase in price of all goods.
Now you might say, “but they did work for that gold, just in real life.” This would be true if the gold had been created at the same real cost as they themselves would have had to exercise. If I make 100 dollars an hour and I spent an hour in game making 10 gold instead of at my job making the 100 dollars, I would consider the trade rate to be 10 dollars per gold.
The problem is most of the gold that is for sale is made outside the US. Those people might be getting paid 1$ an hour to create that same 10 gold. For them in their real world economies this might be excellent pay. But this means that in the US people are not really spending their time worth of real world money to get that gold. So the gold in game gets debased, since people obtain it inexpensively, and inflation ensues.
Secondly, gold buying causes inflation by drastically increasing the supply of gold in game. The fact that people in economies outside the US can make so much real world money by using cheap labor to produce this in-game gold means that they will make much more of that gold than the game would normally have seen. This is the other half of inflation, the mushrooming of the money supply.
So the gold sellers create drastically more in-game money than there should have been, and the buyers cause in-game prices for everything to go up.
So why is this bad? The guy buying the gold doesn’t care, he’s not hurting anyone but himself by risking a ban for breaking TOS, right? Well, as we have seen, he is hurting everyone in the game who does not buy gold by reducing their golds buying power. You must now pay 25 gold for a Symbol of Celebrimbor instead of the 20 gold it might have been. The symbol’s value is the same, but the gold it takes to buy it has been reduced in value. The gold buyer is stealing from everyone else in the game. He is not stealing their gold, but he is stealing their golds value.
So it is wrong to buy gold because you are stealing, apart from just breaking the TOS agreement.
What about Turbine? What if they sell Gold? They can obviously do what they want, but I think it functions the same. Turbine would be stealing value from everyone in the game who is not buying their gold if they sell it too cheap. The only way it could work honestly is if they charged as much or more real world money per gold than it would take someone in the hosting country (USA for our servers) to make that gold on their own time. Since everyone has a different hourly rate in their real world jobs, this would seem to be problematic. I would advise Turbine to never sell in game gold for real world money.
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January 26, 2011 at 8:11 am
Plus, more and more people are experiencing hacked accounts. The driving force behind this is gold buying. Think about that if you are considering buying gold.
January 26, 2011 at 8:15 am
While the in-game economy is an important part of the picture, there is the side of the gold selling/buying “business” where actual gold, not just value, is stolen from other players.
What is the motivation for stealing account information? Is it because the thief wants to play the game? No. It is to either strip the account of gold, sell the account, or both. Since selling a stolen account seems like it would be more problematic, stealing the gold ranks as the main reason in my mind.
I am not saying that all gold sales are from stripped accounts, but the existence of a market for the gold (buyers) means that the thieves will look for the most efficient way to get that gold to sell. This may mean cheap labor to farm it, it may mean botting, or it may mean sending out a wide net of malicious email to see what gets caught.
Buying gold may have a negative effect on the economy of a game, but I can deal with that more than I can deal with hearing of people so upset over an account theft that they don’t come back to the game. *That* is the real tragedy of gold buying in my view.
January 26, 2011 at 8:24 am
“Stealing their gold’s value”? Come, now– that’s every-day economics, and how most of us make our money. If I buy a Symbol for 10g and resell it for 11g, I have “stolen” 1g of that Symbol’s value from my buyer (who could have originally bought it for 10g). If inflation drives up the price of Legendary Fragments, it isn’t stealing the value of everyone else’s gold; the economy fluctuates.
Sure, buying/selling gold may affect others’ buying power. However, that is not stealing, and is not in any way unethical, any more than trying to corner a market through in-game tactics. Or, would you have all resellers accused of stealing?
January 26, 2011 at 8:54 am
This post is about the effects of the economy when people buy gold from a gold seller. I feel you may be sort of missing the point and focusing on a teeny tiny sentence and think that Haakon is calling all people who use the AH to make money a thief. That is not the case.
We do have a post later this morning that will discuss using the AH to make money. It is a valid use of the game and not something we are opposed to.
However, this post is about gold buying and its consequences.
January 26, 2011 at 9:48 am
Fair enough; thanks for the response. However, I do believe that my post was relatively on-topic. Haakon seemed to argue that there are two reasons why gold-buying is unethical: (1) It violates the TOS, and (2) It is stealing from other players. The first is non-controversial, and I whole-heartedly agree. I’m not convinced by his second argument. however.
Still, though, a well-written article, and it’s great to have dialogue about these topics. Thanks, Haakon, for writing it!
January 26, 2011 at 11:07 am
I think it’s fair to say that gold-buying is stealing other players purchasing power. There are certainly in-game mechanics that affect the purchasing power of gold but the fact that gold-buying is outside of any lawful gameplay mechanic means it’s unlawful- ergo stealing. That is my opinion anyway.
January 26, 2011 at 9:01 am
I don’t know if reselling is stealing, but it strikes me as a pretty butthole-ish thing to do.
You didn’t work for the Symbol. You bought it. And then you’re going to charge somebody MORE money to buy it from you.
Maybe you think “Well, if somebody is dumb enough to pay more money than I spent, then that’s their fault.” I would think the jerkishness in that statement would be evident.
Eh, just a pet peeve of mine.
January 26, 2011 at 11:39 am
Reselling is a very common market practice. It’s not stealing value from other players, it’s eating up their consumer surplus, but they could haver captured that by selling it for more. It’s all about the buyer’s willingness to pay and the sellers willingness to accept. You post a Symbol for 10g, you are willing to accept 10g for it, and the buyer was willing to pay 10g and sell it buy reposting it for 11g. It’s BASIC market theory.
Gold selling introduces a different problem entirely.
January 27, 2011 at 12:51 am
@Eluros
You miss the whole point about “stealing their gold value”. It’s referring to the massive uncontrolled inflation. It has nothing to do with reselling.
January 26, 2011 at 8:32 am
You are right about the inflation when goldsellers are active. However, the developer (Turbine f.i.) has information about the gold-growth on their servers. With this information they could influence the respawn-time of mining-nodes and the costs for repair/mounts/AH etc. Too much gold in-game? Lower respawntime for mining-nodes and increase costs for repair/mounts/AH etc. Higher rates decreases amount of gold. (= taxes..
)
March 18, 2011 at 9:45 pm
Sorry, but your strategy would actually hurt honest players. What you suggest will indeed decrease the amount of gold in the game, but it won’t affect the gold farmers. They are not making use of the services, like repairing items, buying mounts, etc. And they will just be patient and keep working the mining nodes if you increase respawn rates. The only ones who will be burned by your suggested changes are the ones who are earning their gold.
January 26, 2011 at 8:53 am
I’d be interested to see if you could make an argument distinguishing between the effects of inflation due to gold selling, and the effects of a modification to the game to allow more Symbols of Celebrimbor to drop (thus reducing their value from a hypothetical 20 gold to 15 say).
Or, alternatively, what effect the Store has on all this. If I used to be able to make 20 gold profit by selling crafted items, and those items can now be bought from the store, for real world money, that’s 20 gold I haven’t received (and the buyer doesn’t have to work for this in-game). The obvious difference, to my mind, between this and gold selling is that Turbine get to pocket the cash.
January 26, 2011 at 8:58 am
Nice posts Haakon : ) keep up the good work /thumbsup
January 26, 2011 at 10:47 am
While I don’t support gold buying at all, I also don’t believe that gold sellers are directly responsible for hacked accounts. That’s merely propaganda spread by MMOs as a scare tactic.
I will concede that account hackers are indirectly involved with gold sellers (ie hacking into an account to steal gold to resell) but I’ve known plenty of people who buy gold and have never been hacked just as I know many others whose accounts were hacked despite having never bought gold.
That being said I think the Turbine store does a lot to curtail gold selling since much of what people would buy gold for is readily available for Turbine points. Additionally the currency system in LOTRO provides a psychological barrier to buying gold, one gold in LOTRO is worth ten times as much than in other MMOs and the real life prices reflect that.
January 26, 2011 at 1:03 pm
“While I don’t support gold buying at all, I also don’t believe that gold sellers are directly responsible for hacked accounts.”
If no one sold or bought gold, what reason would there be to steal accounts? Most of the other items that are really worth anything are bound and would only be useful converted to gold anyway.
January 26, 2011 at 1:11 pm
I tend to concur. Although I do not think that there is a 1:1 correlation with people who buying gold ending up being the victims of hacking I would like to point out that most of these sales go through PayPal or eBay and transpire via email. And any information that you give to someone who is selling gold puts yourself at greater risk. But I do agree that purchasing gold does not mean you will be hacked. However, the easiest way to get gold is through hacking accounts; not through farming on toons through the game (although I know that is how some gold is obtained).
January 26, 2011 at 11:25 am
Doesnt Turbine already kinda sell gold? You can buy crafting mats and crafting recipes. Then u can sell those itema for gold. I fully believe if Turbine could get away with it they would sell gold. They are already selling lots of other stuff.
January 26, 2011 at 11:42 am
They are not selling gold though. Selling gold and selling things with an in-game value in gold are different things. It’s on you to convert the resources into gold.
January 26, 2011 at 2:44 pm
You can’t sell items created with Ingredient Packs bought with Turbine Points; when you use an ingredient pack, the resulting item is bound to account.
January 26, 2011 at 11:36 am
It is like stealing from the Government, they dont like competition.
January 26, 2011 at 11:53 am
Only in the sense that the “government” is everyone involved (either everyone in the country paying taxes, or in this case all the players playing the game).
January 26, 2011 at 12:25 pm
I don’t see it in LOTRO as I have in other MMOs, but gold sellers are also responsible for things like flooding chat channels with obnoxious messages and bot farming. When Aion launched, for example, both of these things were so out of control that they had a significantly detrimental effect on the game – it was almost impossible to actually use the chat channels for a legitimate purpose, and bots were literally everywhere, stealing mobs and resources from actual players. (Yes, you can see that my bias here is that gold farmers and the like don’t count as legitimate players. This is not the same in my mind as a player who devotes the majority of their game time to in some way playing the AH or amassing gold for fun – they are still actually playing the game.)
The link between hacked accounts and gold sellers is often debated. In WoW, at least, I am familiar with a large number of cases in which an account is hacked, stripped of everything, and resources, gear, etc. is sold off fairly quickly – I have seen this happen to friends, guildmates, and other people on my server. There are a lot of spam emails that direct the recipient to keylogger sites, but it’s not always clear that those are also gold selling sites.
However – what does a hacker get out of an account except for gold – which is useless to them in any form that I can think of except to then barter for real-world currency.
Turbine Point purchases muddy the waters somewhat, but I don’t think that the buying power of purchasing saleable items with TPs versus the chunk of gold you can get for X real-world dollars is quite equivalent.
January 30, 2011 at 10:59 pm
With regards to gold sellers flooding the chat, as recently as 2 1/2 years ago on Meneldor, this was the case. Turbine put in a system whereby you can right click someone’s name in the chat window, select “Chat” and then click “Report as Gold Spammer” and they’ll simply disappear within seconds.
This was so amazingly effective that it almost entirely eradicated all of the gold-selling website spam. I don’t think I’ve seen any since before Mines of Moria was released and prior to that downtown Bree was FULL of them at all hours of the day and night.
You even used to be able to see auto-follow trains of 4 to 6 identically geared characters with similar names and equal levels running around completing quests so they would be grey to all creatures in dwarf iron areas and could harvest freely.
No longer.
Turbine did a great job eradicating the early gold selling folks, now it’s time to crack down on account hacking and shore up security so that they’ll lose that avenue as well.
January 26, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Unfortunately, your ‘think of the inflation!’ argument is straight outta 2006, and that argument tremendously overinflated the effect of one individual on an economy populated by thousands.
By way of illustration, who do you think injects more currency into the supply side of the economy on an hourly basis?
A) someone who buys 10 gold from China.
B) The collective cash value of all the quest rewards handed out by NPCs during that same day?
The amount of illicit gold purchased is a tiny, tiny drop in the overall economic bucket compared to the thousands upon thousands of gold handed out daily by your local hobbit who needs pies delivered or brigands RUNOFT.
The next consideration is the source of the illicit gold. Back in 2006, it was quite common to find bots running in those areas of WoW that were less used by questers, like Shimmering Flats. Ga natural extension of bot-farmed gold was that gold was more expensive on PvP servers, where the bots could be killed.
The sellers have updated their tactics. Ever notice that you rarely, if ever, see bots dotting the landscape anymore (in any game?)? Ever wonder why that is?
It’s because it’s far easier to hack the players (and their crappy passwords) than it is to engage in cat and mouse with the software security team.
LOTRO didn’t have have a huge issue in the past, as pre-FTP, lotro wasnt the hot gaming ticket. It wasn’t Game if the Year, it didnt have a bunch of WoW tourist checking out the latest launch, and it was tiny compared to the 800 pound gorilla that is WoW.
Is it mere coincidence that an increase in the number of accounts being hacked is coming on the heels of a Game of the Year award? I suspect not. LOTRO is hot again, and there’s free money to be had. And the shortest path between the goldseller and the order he just got is your weak, frail password (the one you probably use for Facebook, and the one that we all hope you don’t use for your email account and bank and credit card login, too.).
The goldseller most likely hacked your account a while ago, and is sitting on it, waiting for that order to roll in. They certainly don’t want a huge stockpile sitting someplace! They’ll create an FTP account, log in as you, shard your stuff, and mail the proceeds to the disposable mule, who forwards it on to the customer, who is impressed at how quickly the order was delivered!
Sorry, the amount of inflation in the market caused by gold buyers is absolutely *minuscule* compared to the inflation caused by players turning in quests and getting gold created out of thin air by the NPC.
You shouldn’t buy gold because someone else on your server is getting hacked to get it to you (and if that other player is really stupid, they’re potentially having their identity stolen, too.).
And if Turbine decided to sell gold in the store? So what? That just puts a fixed price (and therefore, value) on it.
1 turbine point is roughly 1 cent when purchased in bulk. If 1 silver is sold for 1 turbine point, that establishes 1 gold at $10. Now you can say that your house is worth $70, or whatever.
You made a point about the value of a dollar being more or less to one person or another. That’s not true. A dollar is a dollar is a dollar. The relative value is of the hours you had to work to get that dollar. One person might put 12 minutes in behind a retail counter for that dollar. Another might be an oncology nurse for 3.84 minutes fir that dollar. Another might write 40 words for a magazine…but in the end, each can buy 100 turbine points with that buck.
…and if that means they buy 100 silver with it, and my kinmate-with-abc123-for-a-password doesn’t get hacked, I’m all oir it.
The best stuff in the game is on a barter system anyway (skirmish marks, etc)
January 26, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Well said, Jonathon.
January 26, 2011 at 1:25 pm
An interesting fictional examination of the oppression that us experienced by many young people who work as gold farmers – Cory Doctorow’s FTW – while fiction, is based on the facts of daily life for many young people who experience exploitation and violence in gold shops. You can read it free at http://craphound.com/ftw/Cory_Doctorow_-_For_the_Win.htm but please pay for it if you get simething out of it!
Just another set of reasons to not buy gold.
January 26, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Hm.
The more I ponder this, the less well thought out the argument is.
* First, this gold that the buyer got was not worked for.
What?
When I sell a stack of something on the AH, I’m not working for that money, either. It says right there on the tooltip – “VALUE: (x) copper”
If I get more for that resource than that value stated on the item, I’m *totally* getting that money for free – i.e. ‘not worked for’.
* It is not nearly as precious to the player who got it so easily compared to the person who spent a lot of in-game time to amass it.”
This is not remotely the objective statement you present it to be. You’re making a presumption about how another player *feels* about the money they have, and in the process, you’re presuming that:
A) Every player feels exactly the same way about the gold they’ve bought.
B) That “Gold Buyer’s Feeling Union” mysteriously happen feel exactly the way you happen to believe they should feel under those circumstances.
Lemme tell ya, I value my Steed of Night WAY more than my Bree Starter Pony – mostly because I know I spent *TWENTY FRIGGIN’ BUCKS* on it. Likewise, I’d be inclined to shepherd purchased gold much more carefully than gold I earned in game – precisely because it has a (very) real world cost attached to it.
I know every Turbine point I spend costs me a penny, and so I spend them only with much careful consideration. I don’t follow why Gold purchased with real dollars would warrant any less careful consideration?
So, your first reason why Buying Gold Causes Inflation isn’t much of a reason at all. It’s certainly not fact.
Your second “reason” is a shambles of “What?”
“This would be true if the gold had been created at the same real cost as they themselves would have had to exercise.”
So, what you’re saying is that the quest rewards I get (as a System Administrator) are WORTH MORE than the quest rewards my girlfriend gets (as the aforementioned Oncology Nurse – though she’s actually in Research), because I make (somewhat) more money than she does?
And therefore, our quest rewards are worth more than our Barista’s?
And our Barista’s are worth more than our Barista’s Babysitter’s?
And our quest rewards are *all* worth more than the quest rewards of people playing in Australia, due to the USD/AUD exchange rate?
And that all our collective rewards are worth more than those people playing (even the people being paid to play) in the poorer parts of Asia?
Funny, I thought the reward was 1 Silver and 60 Copper and a cloak, no matter who you are…
“The problem is most of the gold that is for sale is made outside the US. Those people might be getting paid 1$ an hour to create that same 10 gold. For them in their real world economies this might be excellent pay.
***But this means that in the US people are not really spending their time worth of real world money to get that gold.***
So the gold in game gets debased, since people obtain it inexpensively, and inflation ensues.”
Sadly, that appears to be *exactly* what you’re saying.
You’re saying that because I make $28.40/hr, if I make 1G in that hour of questing, it’s worth $28.40.
If she does the same thing, it’s only worth $24.03, because that’s what she makes.
And if I lived in Vietnam, and did the same job for 1/10 the wage, that 1G would be worth $2.84
…and that’s a crock.
You also seem to be trying to make some sort of a link between a low labor cost, and a high supply by saying,
“So the gold sellers create drastically more in-game money than there should have been”.
There’s just one flaw with that. There’s only ONE source of money.
NPCs.
One Chinese Gold Farmer running 9 boxes for one hour has *exactly* the same effect on the economy as 9 players working on a Slayer Deed for one hour.
They’ll all go to an *NPC* and trade in their crappy skins and bones and wings for some silver when they’re done.
Chinese Farmers don’t have some magical ability to turn hobbits upside down and shake them to get 3x the rewards that the rest of the players get.
All of this hole-poking in your argument is completely leaving aside the fact that this is no longer 2007, and every game company has learned lessons about detecting and deactivating 2006-style botting farmers.
Like I said above, a good keylogger and/or a brute force attack against your password and/or a successful phishing attack is MUCH more time and resource efficient when compared to constantly developing new ways to bot-farm.
Once you have an account breached, you can let the player go on accumulating gold and better items, and just raid the account when you have an order on that server. Very slick, very easy.
So go change your password to something unique and secure. Now.
There’s a good article over on Lifehacker.com about how to select a secure, unique and memorable password.
http://lifehacker.com/184773/geek-to-live–choose-and-remember-great-passwords
January 26, 2011 at 4:00 pm
I’ve never totally bought the whole idea of an “economy” in these games anyway. In the more sandboxy games where crafted items *are* the economy as well as various qualities of crafted items, that’s one thing. But in games where the real stuff is from drops and only a handful of items (consumables, usually, though LOTRO has its Symbol and shards) are ever worthy of engaging in trade, I just don’t get it. It’s a false sense of economy and a false sense of “affecting the market” which can be done by anyone at any time but only last a brief period. On top of that, each server has not only its own community vibe but also its own faux economy. My server is fairly small, so the “economy” such that it is, has always been out of whack.
So unless someone bought gold with the malicious intent of using it to disrupt the server’s mini-economy, I don’t see buying gold realistically having more than an extremely short-term effect, if any at all. Not to say I approve of buying gold, mind you.
Oh, and offhand I can think of one developer, CCP who sells EVE’s in-game currency known as ISK, which can not only be used on the market (nearly everything in EVE is crafted) but also players with enough ISK can convert it to pay for their monthly subscription fee.
January 26, 2011 at 4:12 pm
Reselling on AH = Good.
Buying farmed/hacked gold = Bad.
Okay. How does this one go down with the “concerned of Middle Earth”
I was at Ally status with Eglain rep. I had run out of regular quests to do and then realised that there were crafting quests, that gave rep.
So I figured out everything I needed to make the correct amount of crafted items to achieve kindred status.
It was about 900 sturdy hides or something like that. I bought about 300 on AH. All there was in fact, as Gilrain has a small economy.
I still needed about 600 and frankly did not feel disposed to gathering those myself. So I “hired” two other players to get them for me.
I gave them a price per hundred hides and offered a further bonus, if they got the full amount within a given time frame.
To cut a long story short, capitalism won out and I got my hides, crafted my rep items and achieved kindred status in one evening.
I did not earn it in the traditional sense. I threw money at the problem to resolve it.
I found this to be one of the most enjoyable things I have done in LOTRO for a long time.
Your thoughts?
January 26, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Ingenious idea!
January 27, 2011 at 1:27 pm
This is ‘player generated content’ at it’s finest.
The only thing you were missing was the gold ring over your head to indicate that you had a quest that someone could get from you.
February 1, 2011 at 5:55 am
Since real-world money didn’t exchange hands on it,(im assuming you recruited players in-game with ingame gold as the prize) I think it was a creative way to address the problem of AH supply being too low for your needs.
It is also possible that you could have longer-reaching positive effects as the two players recruited to hunt the hides might start regularly doing it once they realize they can make a mint selling on the AH. (filling a need that isn’t being covered atm.)
January 26, 2011 at 11:34 pm
Or they could make buying gold unattractive by creating gold sinks that aren’t completely ridiculous to super-casual players. It’s not the geared, experienced players who buy gold – it’s the guy who plays 2 hours a week and just wants to own all the festival horses and have a decent-sized vault. I’ve bought gold in various games because yeah, it’s crap that my alts couldn’t all have epic flying or I couldn’t have every conceivable storage upgrade just because I worked that day instead of farming. Nothing is going to stop goldbuyers until this happens – the Chinese are happy, I’m happy. The only person who isn’t is the one who disguised his lack of creativity and content by artificially inflating how expensive it is for me to have a larger closet.
January 30, 2011 at 4:12 pm
@Eugene Page
“Too much gold in-game? ****Lower respawntime for mining-nodes**** and increase costs for repair/mounts/AH etc. Higher rates decreases amount of gold. (= taxes)”
I have read all these arguments very carefully, and this is the one of the comments that perked my interest the most. It may be that it was not intended to be said.
Lowering the repawn time for resources in-game would not be a solution to an economic problem involving gold. This would only turn the economy into a severe offset of supply and demand, and move gold between players.
However I do agree that for a true removal of gold “taxes” would be one of the only ways to take gold back out of the game. But taking into consideration that Turbine does anticipate inflation, lowering the actual value on vendored items would be the most logical solution. Because instead of controlling the amount of money they are taking away, they can control the amount that is given. In this way a undue hardship is not put on players that do not have the gold to pay “taxes”.
Either way the amount of resources cannot be lowered or it seriously offsets the amount of buying and selling after the current resources are consumed on crafted items. This makes the richer-richer, poorer-poorer, with taxes only adding to this effect.
January 30, 2011 at 9:03 pm
I have to disagree that gold buying costs other players money.
Lets say a player buys 10k gold from a farmer.
The player than spends 10k buying the Orb of Deception off the AH.
By the player buying the gold it actually made another player alot more money. The other player was able to sell the Orb of Deception for 10k gold.
If the server was free of gold buying, and selling everyone would be dirt poor, but still have the same buying power.
That same Orb of Deception in a non gold selling server might sell for 1g, but 1g may be valued at 10k gold on another server.
Do you think players would really pay 400g a stack for wool if players weren’t buying it?
I think it may actually help the server more than it harms. How many players would farm wool if it was only worth 1g a stack? How many if it is worth 400g a stack?
Do you see what I mean?
On the other note of farmers switching to hacking accounts, and it being affiliated with buying gold in the past.
Ponder this…..
Lets say an account hacker sets up a legit World of Warcraft blog. He ends up getting 50 comments a day. Every day he parses out every email address, and name of the commenters. He has exactly what he needs to hack your account. He just randomly starts sending you phishing emails, and eventually some people bite. Did you ever wonder how hackers end up getting your email address even if it is secure like AbiG81l27@gmail.com?
January 31, 2011 at 4:17 pm
Wasdstomp,
Using your examples…
If future sales of the Orb are influenced by that 10k sale, then other players are still harmed. All of a sudden the amount of gold you need greatly increases it has the effect of
a) putting purchases out of your reach that may have been reasonable before
b) making you spend more time and effort gaining gold so you can afford things, or
c) tempting you to buy gold as well in order to “compete” with those who do.
That said, in order to have as drastic an influence as you have in the example, the economy would need a high number of gold-buyers who were all willing to part with outrageous sums. Otherwise, there would be a push toward normalization as items did not sell.
I think the account theft (hacking, as you refer to it) is still a valid argument, though, and I don’t quite see your point. I think people get lost in the notion that we are saying “if you buy gold, your account will be hacked”. That is not what I am saying at all. I’m sure it does happen sometimes, but my point is that the profitability of the gold-selling industry encourages account theft *in general* as a means of gathering that resource.
I don’t care if the person is gathering email addresses from their own website, from other fan sites, from your Facebook page, or from that birthday e-card your crazy Aunt Ida accidentally sent to all of aol.com. It is the end goal of that theft that concerns me. what do they want from the account? Gold to sell. Why? Because people buy it.
February 1, 2011 at 1:51 pm
WASDStomp,
There just aren’t enough people buying gold to offset the ‘normal’ activities of people who are just playing the game.
To make 10k gold (near the level cap, where trophy items are worth 4s, and quest cash rewards are worth 50s) would take one character working 24/7/365 for just shy of three years. (Given: killing 90 mobs @4s vendor value, turning in 4 quests per hour @50s and just destroying everything else for simplicity’s sake)
At the same time, a server of 2000 people can make 10k gold (collectively) in a tick under 13 hours. (12h49m, given the same parameters)
The effect of the players on the server, just playing the game, completely overwhelms the input that any one player (or even a small minority) has on the pseudo-economy
Finally, Gold farmers don’t have a magic money spigot they can turn on to fill their orders – They have to grind wolf pelts just like everyone else, so in the end,
A gold farmer grinding mobs for two hours to sell to a vendor for silver that they then give to a player for a $10 bill. That player then takes that gold and gives it to another player for several stacks of wool on the AH. is functionally the same as a player grinding mobs for two hours to sell to a vendor for silver that they then give to a player for several stacks of wool on the AH.
People buy gold for one reason, and one reason only.
To “buy-pass” the parts of the game that they find boring.
If you have a subscription game, you’ve got to put in time sinks that are absolutely boring in order to stretch out the progression for as long as possible, while mitigating the likelihood that a player will ragequit in frustration.
Example: Alter the drop rate so that you have to farm the same patch of mobs for 45 minutes to get the 8 Pristine Horns of Despair you need for the quest, despite the fact that every mob has plenty of horns. (Not that I ever encountered this in other games, right? Most certainly not in a place called Jadenar.)
LOTRO isn’t a subscription game, so there’s no reason to put things in merely to be a time sink. (In fact, I’ve noticed quite the opposite – The new starter areas I’ve done (Erid Luin/Thorin’s Hall and Archet) have been very much streamlined since the last time I did them.)
As a result, the whole game can concentrate on just being fun to play, and stuff in the Store can speed what little grind is left up – for a price. The store is also a good place for “This is fun…but you know what would make it more fun?” kinds of items…
February 3, 2011 at 6:50 pm
I have always felt that a much more demonstrable argument against gold-selling is Intellectual Property.
The gold-selling companies are effectively selling Turbine’s Intellectual Property–and for a lot of money, I might add.
I, personally, have yet to see an argument that explains away the Intellectual Property issues.
Yes, the inflation is an issue, but, as others have pointed out, it’s a drop in the bucket. What the other commentators do not mention is that the gold-selling could get a LOT worse, and you could quite literally have half of the people on the server being gold-farmers. Then it indeed would be an issue.
But, again, a better argument is Intellectual Property
.
September 22, 2011 at 7:38 pm
I think the same story goes for TP, if we talk about inflation. The fact that you can buy them in the store and earn them in-game makes items more expensive in the lotro store. We’ve seen the outrage over the RoI deal, I believe one of the major reasons for the huge price discrepancy between the cash pre-order and the store TP expansion has to do with the fact that you cannot only buy points for money (like 600 TP for 6 USD), but also earning them. I earned over 700 TP grinding deeds in prepping for RoI paying zero dollars for them. Assuming that everybody gets a percentage of ‘free’ points, the value of a 600 TP item in store isn’t 6 USD but maybe 3 USD.
The same happens when you can buy gold outside the game: due to inflation prices go up. Fortunately I’m still able to buy Symbols of Celebrimbor for 10g on Elendilmir, but I bet those price will increase dramatically when buying gold outside the game will become more common.
It’s so easy to earn gold in this game, just don’t buy it. It’s not worth it. Literally.