Gold Farming Worth $500MM

by Jon on August 25, 2008

The BBC just published an article on how gold farming is a $500MM industry. For those who are not familiar with it, gold farming is a “business” where people (primarily in countries like China) play online games to acquire virtual currency and items–and then sell it to more affluent audiences in the West. It takes advantage of the large income disparity in Eastern versus Western countries to enable players to skip large amounts of playtime so that they can skip to the “fun” content at the end of the game.

For online game companies like World of Warcraft, this has the effect of shifting income away from the creator of the game, and into the hands of other businesses who are basically helping players skip some of the subscription time. The counterargument is that many people would not play at all, or wouldn’t subscribe as long, without a mechanism that allows them to buy their way to the “best” parts of the game.

This blog posting isn’t about the ethical and legal issues regarding whether gold-selling is legitimate or not, and it isn’t about the moral issues regarding whether it’s right for a player to do so. What I think it does is raise a lot of interesting game design issues.

To what extent are the game designers culpable in creating demand for gold-selling? I can’t think of another game other than MMORPGs in which players want to skip vast amounts of gameplay and content. If people would rather pay to skip these parts, isn’t is basically poor game design? What can be done to improve gameplay so that people are so engrossed that they’d never want to skip those parts?

I think those are the right questions to explore regarding gold-selling–and if game design could get better, the legal, moral and ethical questions will all vanish.

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{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }

GBGames August 25, 2008 at 3:06 pm: How does income shift from Blizzard to the gold farmers? If the gold farmers weren’t there, and assuming subscriptions remained the same, doesn’t Blizzard get the same amount of income? If it doesn’t reduce subscriptions, where does Blizzard lose its income?

And yes, I would agree that grinding is weak. It works since people like getting rewards on a consistent basis, but I think there could be a better way to encourage people to play.

Then again, people would like to skip parts that other people find fun. I used to play Wind Waker with my girlfriend at the time, and she would generally be the one playing, but she would always hand the controller to me when it came to the parts she found tedious. For instance, after you get the grappling hook, there is a section that is essentially there so you can get practice using it to swing from one area to another. She had no patience for it, whereas I found it fun.

So is THAT also a matter of poor game design, or is it a matter of tastes? Maybe some people like grinding, and others just have no patience for it. If so, to “fix” it seems to require a complete overhaul of WoW. You might as well make a different game entirely.
Neeneko August 25, 2008 at 4:05 pm: I’ve ranted in the past about it being more ‘poor design’ then anything else, but I’m starting to soften on that stance.

I think it is less poor design, and more trying to design for multiple personality types. The A type personality types LOVE grind,.. putting in lots of hours and hard work to earn the next widget… Not to mention learning to optimize the play style to get the absolute maximum return on their effort. These are the same people who play console games with the goal of getting ‘100% complete’ along with finding every hidden easter egg and getting the maxium score.. the same people who will spend a week and piles of cash to overclock a computer and get 2% preformance gain.. or in the past might have spent weekends working on their hotrods to get just a little more power out of the engine.

On the other hand, you have more casual players who just want to have fun, or goal oriented players who are there to do something specific. They really don’t see the value in killing 100 pigs so they can kill 50 chickens and thus, slowly, move up to the part of the game they are actually there to play. To them, the grind is something stopping them from doing what they are there to do, rather then being the work being put in for a payoff.

Gold farmers cater to the later group, game designers tend to think like the first group and thus cater to them (the classic problem of designing a game for yourself).

So what is the solution? Hard to say. The big piece is the designers need to come up with advancement throttles that are not overcome by repetitive action. EvE’s skill system is a good example of how this can be approached.

Content that must be done in order to advance needs to be enjoyable in and of it’self, and not be something that simply ‘needs to be done over and over’.

Penalties on repetitive action would be a good way to go too, so the hardcore people don’t gain as much from killing those 100 pigs. This would force designers to balance a bit lower down on the scale (since it would keep hardcore and casual players in a similar band of advancement rather then the HUGE gap most games have).

I think that is the big piece right there. The frequency of drops and such tends to be balanced to the hardcore player since they play for many many hours. But that balance also hits the casual player… so the designers go in with ‘well, we only want someone to find one of these widgets once a day, but we have players who do this take 1000 times per day, so make the chance 1/1000′.. with the problem being a casual player might do that action 5 times per day.

By bringing players in a tighter band (increase rewards for infrequent play, deminishing returns on frequent) then they would be better balanced, and the casual players would have less need to go out to gold farmers just to keep up.

Pardus did an interesting job with the latter. Every player got a certain number of moves per day, 5000 I think. Rich (read: hardcore) players could buy drugs to increase their moves, but each application of drugs had a diminishing return.. so one dose might get you 200 moves, then 100, then 50, etc. Rich players could still do more, but even poor players had access to SOME boosting… and the rich players were kept in check by the diminishing return. Kept the balance rather well.
Jon August 25, 2008 at 4:30 pm: GBGames:

The theory is that a customer would subscribe for a shorter period of time if they buy gold, because they’d spend those months gaining levels. It’s one of the specific reasons that Blizzard cited in their lawsuit against WoW Glider.

Neeneko:

I agree with what you said. One of the compelling reasons to buy gold isn’t so much to skip content and reach the “better” endgame–but to be able to play with your friends, who are in the endgame. I feel this problem is rooted in level-based design itself, which is a relic of D&D where the same group plays with each other all the time, which doesn’t map that great to the asynchronous gameplay that occurs in MMORPGs.
Neeneko August 25, 2008 at 4:45 pm: *nods* I tend to blame D&D for the mess many games are in today. A quick game hacked together with levels and classes and now it is entrenched. All sorts of bad designs persist simply because they are what people are already using. (a good example of this is the unix ‘make’ utilty.. it has some insane catches to it’s usage, mostly due to a bug introduced very early on but the original writer wouldn’t fix it because a whole 8 programmers were already dependent on the broken behavior… now millions live with it)

You also bring up one of the other issues. Endgame and keeping up. Endgame tends to be bad because once you reach it you either have to start over or drop your subscription (which is a turnover buisnesses do not want).. and keeping up… that is something EvE did quite well. You don’t need to keep up, and even a low point character can be quite useful to high skill groups in their activities. Though that introduces a low barrier to meta-gaming which is a mixed bag.
GBGames August 25, 2008 at 5:53 pm: Thanks, Jon. I hadn’t followed Blizzard’s lawsuits, and so I wasn’t aware of that argument.

But if that IS the argument, then the grinding part seems to serve as nothing more than to artificially lengthen game time for the player. I know the N64’s content limitations required games to lengthen their play time by requiring you to unlock things at different difficulties, and a lot of people weren’t happy about it…but again, some people loved it. I know others found it tedious to return to the same temple over and over again in Phantom Hourglass, but I felt that there were enough changes made to make it interesting.

But then I wasn’t grinding through the same enemies just trying to gain levels.
Jon August 25, 2008 at 8:28 pm: @Neeneko: Agreed, I think the concept of “endgame” in an MMORPGs is bad. I think the emphasis needs to be on the “game” and not the terminus. Perhaps Eve has done a good job of avoiding the endgame-mentality.

@GBGames: I think you now get the MMORPG subscription-
business model On console games like the N64, you’ve already paid the entire price for the content, so nobody cares if you skip the content or use a cheat to get around it.
Razlath August 26, 2008 at 2:16 pm: I think it is due to equal parts poor game design and poor gamers. The game designers have made sections of their game that serve no real purpose than to slow the player down. Often they are not interesting and instead are just pure tedium. By the same token gamers are demanding that of the game designers in their mad rush to “end-game”.

There are large sections in most MMORPGs where you are not learning anything new, or developing new skills, you are just pushing the same buttons against the same critters. This is the game designers fault. They should look critically at every piece of their game and say, “Is this fun to play for the amount of time required to play it to advance? Does it add anything to the game in the realm of skill development, background lore, current storyline, or theme / setting?” If the answer to those is no, then that part of the game is pointless and should be re-written. Every bit of every game should be interesting. It should all contribute something to the overall game.

The gamers are also at fault. There is a mindset that anything prior to the endgame is just junk, and only exists to keep you from the end game. You hear things like, oh have to level a character time to start the grind. Or just got a new game guess I better get on the treadmill so I can get to endgame. They rush past the content designed for the lower lvls any way possible (including buying gold). When asked why they did not do that content they say… It’s boring. When you ask them if they even gave it a try they say…Of course not, it is pre-end game content so its boring. I just want to see the end game. With attitudes like that rampant we can only expect poor game design. We can also only expect people to step in and assist in the attitude (ie gold sellers).

If one side or the other doesn’t make a stand then we will just continue on the downward spiral we are on in the MMORPG market. At some points developers have to develop content at all levels that is interesting and fun, and gamers have to make a commitment to actually play that content. It is time to dispel the rumor that if you aren’t max level you are “grinding”. There was a time when exploring new places, doing new quests, beating new monsters, and meeting new friends was called playing the game not grinding. We need to get back there on both sides of the fence.

-Razlath