Aug 5
Gold and the Perfect Game
From Tobold’s latest screed:
“Gold farming is a result of bad game design. Gold farming means that some regular player finds some particular activity in a MMORPG so boring, but necessary, that he is ready to pay somebody else to play the game for him … At some point in the future somebody will discover how to make a MMORPG in which all parts of the game are fun to play, and there are no parts to “grind” to achieve some result of virtual currency or level. And that game will have no gold farming. Not because it would be impossible, or because of being threatened with bans, but just because it wouldn’t make sense to pay somebody else to have all that fun for you. The impotent rages of game developers against RMT are really just a reflection of their own failure to make their games fun in all areas.”
Someday someone is going to make a perfect game, where things are always fun all the time? Can’t wait. I’ve played a few, sure … they were called First Person Shooters. Not a one had to entertain a player longer than, say, 15 hours. None had to entertain a player for hundreds the way even the most basic MMO is expected to.
Gold farming is the result of human nature expressing itself inside the designer’s world. Humans are amazing optimizers, especially when it comes to repetitive activities. Do something often enough, and we mentally do our own game design aimed at thwarting or subverting what’s already in place. This is why people buy gold and use powerleveling services - they’ve chosen the optimal path they see between themselves and their goal.
The problem with this, which Tobold is sort of brushing against, is that this level of optimization is destructive to the game. By subverting the game’s design to this extent, it become harmful for both the player who engages in this activity, and for the people around him. Power-leveling is, I’d wager, responsible for far more ‘hacked’ accounts than viruses and keyloggers. That leads to emptied banks and sharded epics - bad mojo all around.
All that said, I think it’s heartening that designers are working to lessen the impact of gold farming in their games. Several of the titles I’m most anticipating right now, including The Agency, Warhammer, and Free Realms, are doing their best to disincentivize farmers. They’re also making it so that farming and purchasing of gold just isn’t as useful an activity to engage in as in other titles.
They’re doing so by fundamentally changing some of the elements we recognize from previous MMOs, which I applaud. Non-static spawns, achievement through non-grinding means, microtransactions … they’re all working to get around this pernicious optimization.
And yet, sad to say, there’s still going to be RMT and power-leveling in those games. Warhammer is built-in with a number of tracking, anti-spam, anti-RMT measures, but it’s still so traditional in a number of ways that I’m dead certain there is going to be a thriving gold farming trade within weeks of the game going live. I think Mythic Entertainment is going to have a lot of success keeping the price of third-party gold high, but that’s all the success I think they’re going to be able to claim.
And still Warhammer will be a fun game. People will enjoy it, they’ll play it, and somehow life will go on. Because (again) gold farming isn’t the result of bad design. It’s a reaction to the baser reality of being a human. People are always going to try to dodge the system. It’s what people do. Getting all huffy and high horse about it is counter-productive; it doesn’t address the human element.
All of these games that are designing around RMT would be well served to approach that human element as a component of their anti-farming methodology. Educate the players on the risks of third-party services. Make it clear what their actions could result in. Ensure that people have the proper context for their actions, and you’re going to have a playerbase much less willing to engage in this behavior.
Game designers are smart. Players are smart. Categorizing either as failures is a losing proposition from the get-go.
7 Comments so far
I think it basically comes down to math. Say a person can make 70 gold every hour and they need 10k gold. That is going to take them 150 hours to farm. Now let’s say that they make $20 an hour at their job. To be on the completely safe side, we’ll say it costs $200 to buy 10k gold. That means that in 10 hours of work, they will have enough gold to avoid 150 hours worth of repetitive farming, allowing them to spend their time doing other things in the game. As long as they have the financial means to spend that money on gold and not real-life things, then it is going to be very lucrative for them to pursue this. I wouldn’t ever do this because I feel like I could be spending that money to maintain my subscription or to buy other games, but I can see how the appeal is there.
I agree with the previous post, it’s time vs time, and we live in a world where people want it now. They don’t want to wait for tommorow to get their satisfaction. A fundamentaly human problem that can even be seen right when a new baby is born. Baby cries, baby gets a bottle, mom is satisfied instantly that baby is no longer crying.
I bought gold just the other day, and you can say what you want, but for me, it was worth it. I make enough working full time at my job that I have purchased every game and movie that I have desired, pay my bills, and live. For me that is the problem, I don’t have enough time to do everything. working 50 hours or more a week, gaming time is hard to come by, and when I do get to play I want to have fun, not do somethng boring and repitive for hours on end. Not to mention if I did spend 150 hours doing something over several months, my online friends would have already done that same 150 hours in a week or two.
I have to agree that gold farming is a result of bad game design. Something we do in game-based-learning is to stop forcing the player to do a repetitive task once they’ve proven they can do it, or to enhance the task with some new task to keep the player engaged. So why not let the player hire an NPC to kill rats for him and give him a cut of the money? Or think of some other way to subvert the desire to farm gold by providing an alternative in-game? Or maybe let the character make money as a low-level monster-hunter while the player is offline after the player has played enough grind content to get bored with it.
“People are always going to try to dodge the system. It’s what people do.”
Hence the system is flawed, hence the game is designed poorly. If it wasn’t there wouldn’t be a need to dodge the system.
I think a useful metric for judging the integrity of an MMO’s basic design is how much RMT occurs (with relation to its player population). In that sense a game that is plagued with RMT relative to population could be said to have serious systemic flaws (and therefore bad design). A game that has little RMT with a robust population could be said to have a successful systemic design.
I wrote this about Gold buying a long time ago, I was playing Lineage 2 at the time. I think it is still valid now.
In a mmo, your time killing things, translates into gold. Or you make items (killing things, gather parts, crafting), then sell them to other players for their gold (time). You then transform your gold (time) into healing potions, skills, and armor at the vendor. The gold never really is destroyed until you stop playing the games. Since in the end it is transformed into your Level.
But those Chinese farmers…… they have infinite time.
Hence they inflate time per person!!!
People go online and buy from farmers when the game requires too much time per fun. The game is too boring so you want it to go faster. Hence you buy gold online… so your account gets time added to it without the time. You can go buy your healing potions, skills and armor. The problem here is the developers trying to make the game take too long (too much time), in order for them to collect more of those lovely monthly fees.
All people are essentially lazy and greedy. In the real world these two traits are balanced against each other. The amount of laziness and the amount of greed vary in every individual. Hence you will always have some gold buying on any online game. Since gold buying allows a person to be both lazy and greedy, in the virtual world. However the real money that pays for that gold comes from somewhere, so a persons real world balance between laziness and greed does come into play.
If there is runaway inflation in a game, it is because people are buying way too much gold online. This means there are large numbers of farmers in the game. Which means the game is too slow. The solution is to add MORE gold, and consume less, hence make the game go faster, and become more fun. Making more people want to play it, and pay those lovely monthly fees.
[...] having written that post, I read an MMOG Nation post on “Gold and the Perfect Game.” An interesting, quick review of the theory that gold farming is the result of bad game [...]
Alyne,
You have written a great analysis here. When I read this I thought about what you said in my own terms of when I play WOW. At first the game is new and you really don’t care about how long it takes to level because you are taking it all in. Fast forward time and I now have five levels 70’s, two others in their 60’s, a few in their 40’s and more on the way at level 36 or less. Slowness in time for me is going from start to 70. So, I think in terms how can I efficiently move to level 70? I now pay for a total of 3 WOW subscriptions, distributed some of my 70’s to the other two accounts and run my lower level characters through quests that are orange and red. Doing this I am able to say level my level 33 druid to level 37 in about 2 hours as opposed 8 to 12 hours. I was rather surprised that despite not killing mobs for full experience had little impact on the bottom line as far as experience point accumulation in the long run in order to level up.
On other thoughts, I don’t like the word greed used in the context of self-interest because self-interest is a good thing. Greed in my opinion is misunderstood for self-interest. Greed desires to have something and obtain it without earning it. Greed has the mentality, “I have the right to possess what is yours”. Greedy people often use guilt to make you feel wrong about an issue in order to get you sacrifice for them. Greed has a strong tie with envy, jealously, and misery. Self Interest finds a way to obtain what is desired honorably, earning it, even if the means of doing so is efficient. The efforts of self-interest create values and those who participate in a mutual agreement benefit by their own efforts, weather it is one person working for self or a group of people working collectively. Both greed and self-interest desire to have or even to have more of something, however it is the implementation of how the desired value is obtained that makes the distinction between two.