Nonwithstanding the fact that gold farming ruins the game for everybody who is not A: a gold farmer, or B: a gold farmer's customers, and all gold farmers need to be taken out back and beaten within an inch of their lives...

Bitter? Moi? Maybe.

But really, you'd be pissed off if one of the other players was selling nuyen for IRL dollars to the other players.

Mercenary!

Seriously, gold farming ruins MMOs. On top of the monthly fee to play, if you want to compete with those who do bisuness with the gold farmers, you have to pay more to some asshat in china so the guy who's running the gold farming sweatshop gets a load of money, and the bastard who just cussed you out gets a pittance.

Gold farming ruins MMOs because they resist it. The game makers could end it all by selling gold themselves since they will always be able to undercut the market. However, gold farmers and power levelers are actually a large chunk of the service, so no, they don't ruin it; they make it affordable / profitable to run the servers.

We're already paying to play the game twice at the least, sometimes many more times. We don't need to pay three times.

Let's see...

Pay 40-60 dollars for the box, 80 if you get the collector's edition...
Pay between 10 and fifteen USD a month to play. Heads up folks, that comes up to 120-180 USD a year. Not much for a year, but that's also a hefty library of Shadowrun books you could have purchased...

Not to mention any expansion boxes, which cost 30 dollars to buy, on average.

And on top of that, we should pay the game makers another 200 dollars to get the 200,000 gold we need to compete with that rich ass-tard who calls everybody a newb, even though the only reason he can win in fights is because his daddy gave him an unlimited creditcard which he has used to buy uber-gear?

Why not? It's just like a CCG, then. With the added ability to actually grind your way there.

Besides, there are games that max level and items in PvP (Guild Wars, for example).

Maxleveling is the worst and most horrific mechanic to restrict munchkinism that I can think of.

"Oh, I can't wear this helmet. What? Just put it on my head? Duuuuude! I can't just put it on my head! I'm only level twelve, and I has to be level fifteen to wear it! What? Won't it fit on my head? Sure it'll fit on my head! Put it on? I just told you, I can't doooo that, duuude!"

And it rarely prevents abuses anyway, because then they'll just switch to selling accounts.

Selling accounts /is/ fair. I'm not sure what you issue really is here. What does it matter if the person you're opposing has something because the earned it in game, or earned it out of game? Some mystical "that's not fair" tantrum?

The intellectual properties of the password and userID do belong to you, and you should be taxed when you sell them. You're taxed when you buy them, after all.

I love the explainations that people have to deny the obvious.

The truth is, I never got into MMORPG gaming because I don't see the point of a game I have to keep buying.

Yet, some people deny this fact by saying "no, you're just buying the game once, then paying for server time! Yeah! That's it!"

Since I can't play the game without being online, that kinda means that I have to keep paying for it, right? All the while, I could be using that cash to feed my paper/pencil/dice habi-er, hobby, which actually requires me to think.

As opposed to an MMORPG, which is brain-rot in comparison...

On the flip-side, there's always the prospect of a good ol' MUD. No flashy graphics, but (depending on the one you find) the playerbase will actually be more fun to hang around with (In Dragon Swords, we used to join up into 20+ player groups and go 'round slaughtering MOBiles.), and you never have to worry about people H4XX0|2ing the system/buying their way into higher equipment.

Plus, they're all utterly FREE (except for ValhallaMUD. Talk about defeating the purpose...)

Money only matters if it can be used to buy things that mater. The best way to avoid powergaming through gold farming is to properly balance items so that the most expensive items are no more powerful than their cheapest counterparts.

Given that the US Government decides what is copyrightable within the US (input from the Berne convention aside), it does indeed not matter if you call BS on the government.

As for TOS, it is indeed not a legal matter. Fraud, on the other hand, is—if you sell someone your username and password, you're in the clear (and the account will be cancelled as soon as it is determined that the original licensee is no longer the individual using it, as is their legal prerogative). On the other hand, if you claim to sell them your character and their virtual possessions—something you do not own—you have fraudulently misrepresented your legal rights over the items in question and their transferability.

~J

Well, the courts actually make the ruling on the holder of the intellectual property, but again, it doesn't matter here. I'd love to see them arrest some chinese kid on the charge of for selling his "character". "What? No, I was selling my character; you know, my ethics."

Like I said, backwards services.

----------

"The" : A poem

The

----------

Great, now I've copyrighted "The". Everytime someone uses "The" in a sentence they have to pay me $50 US.



That's why you can't copyright words and phrases.




TOS is a contract and violating a contract is a tort (assuming that the contract is legal on its face). Of course, as contracts go TOS is slightly less enforceable than a same-sex marriage certificate written in invisible ink on wet toiler paper. But they could try.

Actually, I'd let you sue if someone else wrote a poem called "The" with the subject of "The" spaced how you spaced it. Of course, you could only sue for the value of the poem, which is 0.

There, you have discovered how one-word poems become copyrighted—it isn't the word.

A word is not copyrightable. A work that consists of one word with one particular layout may be.

~J

Two ways to "solve" gold-farming.
Here's my favorite: Make every common item on the game server ridiculously cheap, to the point that any n00b can own one within an hour's work, and make every "super duper deluxe special item" a piece of junk with a very marginal boost in power over the super-cheap version, and ten times more expensive. This way those things become the "sunday best" gear that a n00b will wear out to strut, and you can tell that if someone is walkign around decked out in nothing but the super-duper 1337 "deluxe" version is either an ancient player, or a schmucktard who paid IRL cash.

This will never happen, because the next "super-duper deluxe!" that keeps coming ouit is what keeps the non-roleplayers coming back for more.

The other option is to flat-out undercut the gold farmers officially. This again does not solve the problem of your IRL cash being leveraged to get you an in-game benefit. This would be tatamount to paying Valve USD$100 for a "legal" wall-hack that Valve Anti-Cheat ignored.

One game that I saw handle farming very well is the Matrix Online game. There, agents show up and kick your ass if you're doing the same mission for very long, and anyone can perform modifications to items/item creation, devaluing the value of equipment, although I suppose inflation's always going to be an issue.

I suppose they could do something like Morrowind/Elder scrolls 3/4. You can wear anything you want, any time you want, but if your skill level isn't high enough you don't get the full benefits from the gear.

Coincidentally enough I just noticed that one of the advertisements circulated through at the top of the page is $1.50 for 1,000 platinum pieces in D&D Online. I guess we know the Dumpshock Official Stand on gold farming.

Google official stance, actually.

~J

Google's official stance is "They pay us the ca$h-monie$, so until someone tells us it's illeagal, we put their ads up"

For a second tehre I thought you were telling me to google for the phrase "official stance."

Just click on the adds at the top of the page ... and cost those gold farming slimbags some coin.

Actually, Google will remove specific ads from a given site if asked.

I have mixed feelings about google's human rights policies. On one hand, Google China is censored to PRC standards. On the other hand, Google has fought requests for information by the United States government and the main Google site is available Chinese uncensored.

Personally, I like that they sold adspace to disreputable internet pharmacies who give perscriptions to anyone with the coin to pay. I like that they sell ads to goldfarmers. I like that they are generally unscrupulous because I like the basic concept of lacking and and all ethical and moral standards while being legally savy enough to cover your ass.

That is why I watch Boston legal after all, to see lawyers who shoot people and get away with it, to see lawyers who cut off preists' fingers and get away with to, to see lawers who say "you should commit a crime but I can't advise you to do that because I'm a lawyer" and get away with it because they cover their own asses.

Now, part of me sees Google China as a way for Google to cover their own asses in China while subverting censorship by still providing the real service to anyone savy enough to get around government filters in the first place.

From this point of view, Google isn't immoral enough. They need to hire Shadowrunners to kil some people for them if they haven't already.


Of course, it is possible that I'm misreading Google's stance on China and they really do buy into the censorship BS.