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Thursday 21 July, 2011 at 3:55 pm / 0 comment

Scott Hatsman and how farming hurts our games

I’ve been shouting this like a mantra for a long time, but quit because it’s become uncool to talk about it – like doing homework or reading a book.

I noticed a lot of comments on Massively’s post that perpetually seem to gloss over these problems. The main crux is based on a singular selfishness – I say selfishness as a grammatically correct term and(if you want) in a negative context. Sure. hacking, botting and stealing accounts hurts the players, but that’s a very “on the surface”, immediately perceptible harm that affects a player directly. Farming hurts the game for everyone and it does hurt each and every player.

The price you sell at, the price you buy at, availability, fluctuation and inflation are but just a few of the the things that get limited for players. You may not get that awesome new upgrade to run the next dungeon because materials are worthless for your level-range. Developers may take away your freedom to actually affect inflation and price fluctuations. You can’t undercut to get your stuff sold. Your drops aren’t selling because all the money and the availability for the entire economy got choked into only the tiny, top percentile of high-level gear.

Hacking and botting is a problem, but not near the entire story. Those are actually ancillary problems that occurred after the main problem of having a broken economy due to bringing in exorbitant amounts of gold in a game that wasn’t designed to handle that.

Do we even know what a working economy looks like? How can we really sit back and say everything is fine if all the games are broken and we actually don’t know what possible rich, freedom defining and hot-knife-through-butter working economies look like. Economies are always working at far from optimal levels.

I know in Runes of Magic, the economy is very skewed toward high-end stuff. That makes a little sense based on the game, but it is not the answer to why the economy is like that. The real, main reason is directly a result of the affects of gold-farming. You see it in just about any MMO. There’s a huge curve where nothing is worth anything until you get near max level. Sure, you might have a gradual curve in any MMOs economy in that direction, but we have far from that now. Right now we have virtually no way of sustaining profit through low- to high-levels.

This is one area that I think World of Warcraft does a fairly decent job. Granted, I think they hurt there economy a lot when Blizzard released Burning Crusade, but it probably raised profit margins. The damage is still noticeable – not even WoW is immune to it, but thanks to some restricting of player freedom they’ve managed to keep a better economy curve through all the levels. You can actually craft and make money at any level.

More attention should be placed on the real problems, instead of the hoi polloi rationalizing acceptable reasons for the ancillary affects of gold buying.