The Daily Grind: Is there a difference between item malls and gold farmers?

Depends on what you can buy.
I think items that don't give you any advantage (change looks, pets, etc) are OK in free to play games.
But if you can buy ingame currency, gear or xp then its no different than buying from gold farmers.

Big difference. Gold sellers have been shown to hijack people's accounts, disrupt gameplay of legitimate players in a quest for the gold they sell, and not to mention the chat and in-game mail spam.

The difference is that gold selling only allows you to use the gold (a generic term in this case) to affect change in your experience that you COULD affect if you simply farmed the gold yourself. Item malls, on the other hand, offer shortcuts BEYOND just getting gold. In some cases, you MUST participate in the item mall in order to get ahead in the game, or of other players.

Unfortunately, it seems that most games with item malls do it poorly. RoM is an example. They want you to pony up real money to buy in game items THAT EXPIRE. Essentially, you're not buying virtual goods...you're RENTING them.

On the other hand, what DDO Unlimited seems to be doing (based on news here at Massively) is to offer enhanced experience through their item store. They're not selling anything that will allow you to "twink" your character. Instead, they're making the experience "a la carte" through items that will HELP you if you purchase...but you won't be hindered if you don't.

Gold Farmers spamming chat with adverts: annoyance that can be blocked
Item Mall glaring in the UI: annoyance that can't be blocked

Scope is correct in saying that there is a huge difference between gold farmers and item malls. Even if an item mall sells the same things that a gold farmer did the gold farmer would still be worse, due to screwing up the economy because they farm an inhumane amount of items. (And can sell them at a much lower price than legit players can).


Of course I would stay away from an item mall game that had items for sale that help twink your character.

Well regardless of the content of item malls (though RoM's pushes the extremes of what I personally consider ethical), the BIG difference is that paying money to a studio sustains/expands the game and funds development of further games - paying money to gold farmers does nothing to support the game.

Paying money to gold farmers (or account sellers etc.) over the studio itself is effectively liking a game so much you'd undermine it: no different to someone proclaiming themselves a huge Batman fan, only to go buy a pirate DvD and then complain when the movie franchise ends.

The difference is simply a matter of who earns the money.

I am in favour of games that are built from the ground up to be based on RMT, & player trades, be that trades of goods currency & even characters, if it is in from the VERY START.

What I detest is a game being built to not be RMT based & then shoehorning it in later, such as SoE has done.

Of course there is a "mindset" difference at work, buying your way to power is seen in the West as cheating by many whereas in the East it's just how it's done.

As far as RMT being done by parties/companies/organisations tyhat are nothing to do with the game development of the game in question or not a licensed partner then I am totally against it in every single form, money generated BY the game should go TO the game developers, not some party that has nothing to lose by wrecking the game & the experience of the players.

The Gold farmers farm, because people buy it. These secondary economies develop solely on demand and then supply (yes I reversed that for good reason). Capitalism at its best in my opinion.

Are these secondary markets disruptive? Maybe. Maybe not.

But who is really at fault? The supplier or the purchaser?

I don't think you want to totally eliminate secondary markets, in doing so, you could vastly effect the game itself. In my opinion, the size of the secondary market is directly related to the popularity of the game in question.

You know Shawn... Ending a post with "Discuss!" is akin to starting it with:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

Surely *you* of all people, with your position in this esteemed site can do a whole lot better?

In the subscription model, there is no difference at all between gold farming and a company adding an item mall so they can "double dip" in the players pockets. While one is more annoying with the way they advertise their product, the other is just as worst by adding items that change game play like xp bonus items. Both the Farmers and the Developer are guilty of ruining the game worlds virtual economy, which in the end effects all the players whether they use the services or not. If Player A buys cheap gold and goes around the Auction House on a spending spree, it causes the sale prices of items on the Auction House to increase for Player B who is playing the game the way it was originally designed and not using real money for a cheat code to have more in game cash.

Another reason malls and DLC are just as bad is because we're going to start seeing more and more games (not just MMO's) withholding content they designed during production of the game, just so they can release it later as a premium item on the mall. Games like Mass Effect, GTA4, and Gears of War2 have already been in question with their Xbox Live content they added after release. With the files being small downloads, many believe Bring Down the Sky, Lost & Damned, and the GoW Map Packs were already on the game disks you purchased and just needed some patch files to "unlock" them. If that is true (and I can't prove if it is) then they are double dipping your wallet for an item you already purchased.

The average gamer will be afraid of using gold farmer for fear of getting caught and losing their account or losing money when the farmer doesn't deliver on their end. When a game company lets you start buying gold from them, they're telling the average gamer that it is totally okay to purchase gold in a RMT and that gamer might start looking at the outside competition for better deals.

If the developers were really worried about gold farmers ruining their games, then they would have made game currency "no trade" items a long long time ago.

Here is the reality of it,

There are enough players buying 3rd party gold to create a billion dollar a year industry.
The equals thousands of gold spammers / bots and all that other crap that goes along with it.

Since no one apparently can stop them it's way past due that the games themselves flush them out.

I have no real issue with companies selling it themselves just as long as it doesn't screw up the game. People are buying the crap anyway so I would like it at least controlled and sanitized by the publisher rather then a billion gold spammers.

I sorta like the direction DDO is going and wouldn't mind if other games did that. Full subscription premium payers are uneffected and free to play pay as they go.

Works for me. I'm all for flushing the farmer parasites out of our games.

While personally I do not like item shops at all, that's me and obviously I am in the minority. I like third party parasites even less.

To be competitive in Game X, every character ultimately really sort of needs a McGuffin. As the game is designed, you have a 1/50,000 chance every time you defeat an NPC to get a McGuffin as loot, and there's an in-game player-to-player marketplace where people can dump their extra McGuffins.

Player 1 kills 100,000 NPCs, eventually gets his McGuffin. We all agree that player 1 is playing the game as intended.

Player 1 kills 100,000 NPCs, gets two McGuffins, only needs one. So he offers his extra McGuffin on the marketplace. But very few McGuffins are offered, so it sells for a gazillion Florens, more in-game money than any normal player would have. Player 2 plays the game in such a way that he normally, legitimately accumulates a gazillion Florens and buys player 1's spare McGuffin. This is playing the game as intended.

Player 1 kills 100,000 NPCs, gets two McGuffins, needs only one. So he offers his extra McGuffin on the marketplace. Player 3 gives up on grinding for McGuffins or for a gazillion Florens and just pays Game X Studios $100 for enough Florens to buy a McGuffin, or just pays them $100 for a McGuffin outright, and somebody else buys Player 1's spare McGuffin. This is playing the game as intended ... but creates a minor tax problem. Now we've established that a gazillion Florens = $100, so as a convertible currency, every Floren "earned" by playing the actual game counts as income for the player. Furthermore, it's unsecured currency created out of thin air by Game X Studios, which risks destabilizing the real world economy. Lawyers, tax accountants, economists, and government officials are nowhere near consensus yet as to how many of these potential problems can be headed off by making the currency only one-way convertible, and are mostly taking a wait-and-see approach.

Player 1 kills 100,000 NPCs, gets two McGuffins, needs only one. So he offers his extra McGuffin on the marketplace. Player 4, can't afford to buy a McGuffin with the Florens he has and doesn't have the time or patience to grind NPCs for one, and Game X Studios doesn't sell Florens or McGuffins for cash, so player 4 PayPals $100 to Player 1 for his spare McGuffin. This disadvantages the players who have to play the game as intended to get their McGuffins, but more to the point, this also gives Player 1 an extra $100 in income on which he has paid no taxes. It also means that every time that another player obtains a McGuffin by playing as intended, the gaming company has given each of those players a gift, or a reward for gambling more precisely (since some element of chance is involved), worth $100 on the open market. This involves them in illegal gambling, and creates undocumented and hard to track tax burdens for all of the players. Not a tolerable situation.

Player 1 kills 100,000 NPCs, gets two McGuffins, needs only one. Player 5 buys a gazillion Florens from Gold-X LLC, who obtained them by paying people to farm for Florens, they say. Maybe they instead just stole them by hacking Player 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10's accounts and stealing all of their Florens, maybe they hacked Game X Studio's servers and found an easier way to get a gazillion Florens, or maybe they're telling the truth and they actually did pay a bunch of third-world poor to grind out NPCs for enough Florens to buy a McGuffin. This creates all of the same problems as above, plus creates law enforcement nightmares as the people who had their virtual Florens, and maybe even virtual McGuffins, stolen from them scream bloody murder and demand that prosecutors find out if it was employees of Gold-X LLC who stole their Florens and McGuffins and prosecute them for /something, anything/ if they did.

Looks like WOW is going to lose 9 million subscribers..........

In the case of Item Malls I think encorperating RL Currency into games (especially F2P games) destroys one of the main bonuses of playing an MMO: Your RL worries are irrelevant. Item Malls make players feel like they're the lesser gamer because they don't want to pay for an Item. Games that claim they are "entirely free to play" yet have item malls, are shameful in my opinion. If the game is P2P, yet there are still items that you MUST buy with RL currency, it really kills the fun of virtual reality.

Then again there is no way to stop players from using RL Currency to get ahead, in a game that doesn't offer an Item Mall. But I think players trading RL Currency for in game items amongst them selfs is much better than Item Malls, because it has absolutely no negative effect on the game. The only people being effected are those participating in the trade, and they are in fact benefiting.

In the end it comes down to honor. If a player is too lazy to suffer through the repetitive tasks that come with nearly every MMO in order to get ahead. Then they should be able to go ahead and do it. But I hope they feel guilty about it, because the rest of us are getting ahead the conventional way.