http://forums.sirlin.net/showthread.php?t=992

I tend to agree with Sirlin on this, and think that the citation of Prohibition is apt. Sirlin also notes that societies tend to progress only once citizens can own property. That changes a lot of things from the feudal society where the King (Blizzard) technically owns everything.
.-= Tesh´s last blog ..Teshketchbook: Cat Costumes =-.

A good article – I think you’d be on to a potential solution with this approach, with only two problems – how far would you have to devalue gold in order to make it not worth selling, and what would that do to the views on gold making to those who are doing it legitimately?

Time is money. It takes time to make money in WoW. It takes time to level in WoW. There are people out there with real-world money who value their time more than the gold sellers/leveling service companies charge for their products. Because of this, there will almost always be a customer base for these companies to sell their stuff to. The main reason these comanies are not more successful is that players, through guilt, ethics, personal views on the game, and potential punishments from Blizzard think that those other factors make it worth the time and effort to create those products in a legitimate manner.

The companies we’re talking about don’t have those factors involved in their calculations, since they generate no revenue. They’re a business first and foremost, and their goal is to make profit. Which leads to the biggest reason why even if Blizzard sells gold, there probably wouldn’t be a drop in potential hacking…

The easiest way to increase your profits is to lower your costs.

This is the reason why a large portion of the leveling services and gold farmers are from lower-income countries. Wages for the production of these services, such as they are, are lower, which keeps costs down, leading to larger profit margins for the same product price point.

The problem is, to some of those companies out there, even this isn’t enough profit – especially given that this game is, more likely than not, finite in its lifespan.

So, in order to milk the WoW players for as much revenue as they can, they need to lower costs further and decrease the production time of their product (i.e. gold). What’s the cheapest and best way to do that, given an even marginally decent background with computers? Hacking.

Someone else has done the majority of the work for the companies relying on this method. The gold is there and just waiting to be claimed. For what might have been a couple days’ effort (in total – even if it was spread out over some time), the hackers in Intravax’s tale probably netted at least 100K in gold.

If we assume a low-ish price of $6 for 1K gold, that would net the hackers $600 for a couple days’ work. Worse yet, those hackers are probably running multiple hits at once.

See how even a low price (from an effort standpoint) for gold will keep the activity profitable for hackers?

Therein is the problem with selling gold to deter hackers. You can’t get lower than almost free for production cost, for these gold thieves. If they get caught, they don’t lose their hacking programs, and they’re free to try again later. They’re probably not even buying the game – the only thing they’re using that might cost money to them are the authenticators, and iPhones make those free now with an app.

So, that’s probably not a solution – and in fact, if Blizzard drives the prices down, then they’ll probably redouble their efforts to make up for lower margins with higher volumes, and the hacker problem would possibly get worse.

And in the meantime, as said before, inflation within the game would run rampant and hurt the players who are trying to play within the game legitimately.

As Bob says above, the only way to stop these guys is to take away the customer base voluntarily – but there are too many people out there (meaning any at all) that want to get to the end game without putting the time and effort into the process to get there (even if there’s a possibly reasonable-sounding explanation for it like “This is my 10th toon, I’m leveling!”), because their time is worth more to them than the money spent buying time from a gold or leveling service. And because of that, I see this as an eternal problem, and I think we all just have to take all the precautions we can to keep from exposing ourselves to hacker, and have luck that we are not the unlucky person who gets hacked despite all that we’ve done to minimize our risks.

It’s sad, but there are people who don’t want to play the game, but instead want to win the game, that propogate this sort of parasite, to the detriment of many.

I for one do what I can to minimize my risk, and keep my fingers crossed.

Good luck to you and your guild, Intravax.

Thank you, BBB, for spawning an entertaining debate, as well.

My 2 yen,

Akiosama
.-= Akiosama´s last blog ..Does (or Does Not?) Play Well With Others =-.

The only way I could possibly see killing the gold farmers would be to boycott the gold sellers and try to get their consumers to stop ‘consuming’. That would take a rather extreme amount of cooperation the likes of which I don’t forsee happening.

Compare to WoW, where the economy is completely fragmented into servers and many of those economies are rather shafted anyway. We’d have to be on the same server to have no net effect and if we weren’t then either we couldn’t do the trade (so RMT is more convenient to get the deed done) or we can but it could over time lead to wildly unpredictable shifts in the economies of servers as gold transfers between them.

Given the dodgy nature of the WoW economy* on any given server anyway I’m not sure how noticeable this would be of course but it’s something to bear in mind.

*EG the rampant inflation that the gold supply compared to sinks has produced over the years.

So if you really want to remove gold sellers, remove gold. Make everything operate in a manner similar to most of the existing alternative currencies, using untradable items and points. (Badges, honour etc)

To alleviate issues around wanting to help friends, let those alternative currencies be depositable in the guild bank as the only method of trading them, and have the same sort of restrictions possible as on item withdrawals today. So for example if a lowbie in guild wanted a shiny new thing, you could still help out by farming up some BADGES OF AWESOME (or whatever), plopping them in the GB and they could withdraw.

That way you could still help friends in your guild but nefarious evildoers would find it much harder to steal your stuff and profit from it in a hard to trace way – as anyone buying those stolen badges would have to join the same guild. I’ve no idea if such things are tracked but I imagine they could be fairly easily if the will was there and it would also tend to flag such bad buyers to their friends. (“Oh look, Steve left guild for 2 days and came back decked out in BADGE OF AWESOME gear….hmmm.”)

It would severely bugger up the WoW economy of course but then the economy on many servers is completely borked anyway so I’m inclined to suggest that little of value would be lost… :)

Players can buy timecards from Blizzard or third party sellers. They can then either apply those timecards to their own accounts, or sell them to other players for gold.

This way, there is no way to convert gold to real money…the most you can do, with a lot of gold, is convert it to subscription time. And if you have plenty of real world money but not much time or inclination to farm gold in game, you can buy timecards and sell them to players for gold. This way, there is zero money entering or leaving the WoW economy as a result of gold trading…its all just being passed around between players.

Of course, you’d have to look at the amount of gold obtainable via other methods, to ensure that we don’t get into a situation where everyone is wanting timecards because of how much gold they have, and no one is buying them from Blizzard. However, this is the best solution, as Blizzard doesn’t lose any money…they still receieve exactly the same amount of subscriptions. The people selling the timecards simply pay for their own subscription, and timecards on top of that. The people buying the timecards with gold are just basically giving gold to the seller for paying for their subscription.

By effectively limiting the ability to BUY gold in quantities of more than 1000g/day from a single account/hacker, and with additional security to detect “odd” behaviour, especially with multiple characters on the same account, or a single person receiving “gifts” from multiple “generous” accounts, then you’re stemming the fuel for the crime: The gold buyers.

In much of the world, for transactions over 10,000USD/AUD/GBP/EUR, there is often a need to disclose why this transaction is taking place. The onus is typically on the banks to do this.

Why not introduce a new limit for gold trading in-game? Any transaction that involves the transfer of more than 499g could require a Blizzard Escrow Service, where item and cash are placed in “escrow” for, say, 30 minutes. Any account that transfers/pays more than 999g directly to players (not including AH) in one game day then must wait 24 hours for the gold to go through.

AH proceeds over 1000g per day could have a 24-hour “cheque in the mail” period. Chain-selling/mailing could then be subject to further checks.

I was hacked about 3-4 weeks ago, whereupon I promptly bought an authenticator. I scanned a rarely-used computer (the one my kids use for online flash games) and found evidence of a keylogger :/. I did manage to notify Blizzard within about 5 hours of the hack, but it was enough time to have pretty much everything sold, disenchented and cashed in.

The hackers RELY upon haste. Put in a slight delay, that will become “part of life” for players (over time), and suddenly hacking will become MUCH less lucrative than simply farming. You don’t need to sell gold, or stop the sale of gold. You just need to make “honest work” (mining/herbing) pay better than crime (hacking).