Quite a lot of people on my server, and even some in my guild have bought Gold online. Quick and Easy way to get some funds for that special item or your epic mount at level 60 so you dont have to grind for days to get the coin (or play the AH…).
I dont see how you can call it cheating just by having someone give you a few gold coins in exchange for a service rendered.
They dont call the exchange servers in EQ2 (Or whatever they called them) cheat servers.
But it probably makes the reward less of a ‘reward’ when you acquired it so much easier.
I’d value real life time above the value of a virtual reward.
Why should time spent in the game be the SOLE way to get virtual items? Just because it’s fun for you doesn’t mean it’s fun for someone else. Instead, they’re simply exhanging time for money. What do you care? It doesn’t hurt YOUR fun, so why should YOU hurt THEIR fun by denying them such an opportunity? I find most people who resent RMT do so because they themselves have lots of time but relatively little money. In contrast, those who use RMT to get virtual items do so because they have plenty of money but not as much time. They’re not buying one of everything and lauding it over you; they’re just buying what they think they need in order to enjoy the game experience.
I was going to post something like: “holy god, don’t bring up this stupid fucking argument again, not in this thread” and then I checked the thread title again.
… Think of them as ‘micro transactions’ and instead of gold they’re “Microsoft Points” – except you dont pay the money to microsoft but to IGE or whatever they’re called.
I was going to post something like: “holy god, don’t bring up this stupid fucking argument again, not in this thread” and then I checked the thread title again.
So, okay.
Just a digerssion, I remember seeing a few “art” sites on the net (not porn) that had a 3D virtual representation of web sites and how they are connected. It would be interesting to see the same done with forum subjects, e.g. how they start from one subject and evolve into many variations. [Thread View if peopel would reply correctly] and then again linked to the previous subjects with the same… I’m sure there is a lot of interesting data here that could be presented in one way or another.
Oh yea, not all goldfarmers are hackers, I’d think, and if they are – they have never harmed me (so it must not exist, right?)
Do we have to have this discussion again? Some people feel that using out-of-game riches to purchase in-game rewards cheapens their in-game efforts and inflates the game economy. Others agree with them and don’t care because they’ve got easy purples now.
This entirely depends on your point of view. I play WoW mainly to raid. I love raiding, I love learning new boss encounters, and I love the thrill of victory of that first boss kill. I also love the comraderie on ventrilo.
What I don’t love is insane repair costs for equipment. Paying up 30+ gold a night when learning new encounters sucks copious amounts of donkey shlong. The only reason I would have for farming gold would be to accomodate those repair costs, and after putting in the hours to raid, I would really rather not spend another several hours gathering mats to sell off and killing mobs for gold.
I haven’t purchased gold online yet, as I still have a good stash, but if it gets to the point where I’ll be broke just because of repair costs, I would seriously consider it.
Sooo, here’s a question for you:
Does farming Gold not make earning Gold in the game harder?
So if area A is being farmed, what happens to a player that visits area A legitimately?
Is it harder in the Farmed areas to legitimately earn Gold?
It works like that on some games, what about WoW?
If it makes it harder, wouldn’t that strengthen the position that by buying Gold you are contributing to the economic decay of the game’s economy?
I’d imagine that in any dynamic economy system, the more Gold farmed, the less it’s worth per piece.
I still haven’t read one strong reason why a hack like a bot should be allowed.
Being lazy isn’t really a good excuse IMO.
The more demand on the market for Gold to be sold outside the game, the more the necessity for hacks to Farm it…
By supporting the outside sale of Game Gold, you’re supporting the hackers of the game in some ways IMO.
That’s just my whole take on the idea.
To each his own, but to a point.
Ya know, if you really want to nip this digression in the bud, perhaps you should try using less provocative langauge. If you throw around fighting words, you can’t be annoyed if someone rises to the challenge. :-P
I belong to the ‘have money, no time’ group. I see absolutely nothing wrong with buying gold for real money. However, I’ve not done that yet because most of the good stuff are really BoP anyway - you really just HAVE to run instances multiple times to get stuff, and normally you make money doing this.
The only time I ever really felt the need to buy gold was when I was trying to earn enough to buy my mount. After that, it was pretty easy at 60 to earn enough from instances.
i’ve bought gold a few times before but it was really cheap gold ( like 5-10 bucks for 100g ) for chars I started on new servers. Its not like you really need a whole lot of gold when you are first starting out but it sure helps to be able to get bags and train all your stuff right away with out having to worry about money. I mean shit I did it once I’d rather not have to deal with that again.
Not trying to start anything, more thinking about the reasons why the Hackers are so “Driven” to beat the Heck out of the system.
The attitude that buying Gold occasionally really cuts to the chase. I didn’t realize how many people really have no problem with the concept. As long as there’s a Market, there’s going to be a Hacker fulfilling the demand.
The outside “Real” profit makes it well worth the time and effort to continually Hack around the WoW security as well as any other game you could possibly provide this service for as well.
You really don’t need to hack to make money, hence the term ‘farmer’. The money is being earned entirely legitimately within the game system. In fact, if I were running an organisation like IGE, I would probably DISALLOW hacking by employees, for fear of Blizzard taking corrective action against clients (e.g. IGE employee uses hacks, sells gold earned through hacks to client, Blizzard reacts by confiscating gold involved). The gold sold should be relatively safe for buyers. You can’t achieve this if you use hacks.
This is my main beef with this conversation that always seems to come up.
Hacker != Farmer. Some Farmers hack, some players hack, but not all farmers nor all players hack. It’s not really reasonable to say “Gold Farming is bad because of hacking”.
World of Warcraft specifically prohibits the use of third-party software, and “botting” is not possible within game itself. So yes, a bot is a hack in this case.
It’s probably the number one thing that Blizzard scans for while you’re playing the game, and the use of third-party software will result in permanent banning. Gold farmers can afford to take the risk since they can just buy a new copy of the game and bring another character up to 60 through around-the-clock playing in about two weeks, so the permanent ban really doesn’t affect their business model much.
I personally think that in MMOs that rely on player economies and a reasonably even playing field, bots are wrong, as is buying gold. If you don’t want to play the game as intended, why are you there?
