The serious side to the joke

Ah, April Fools' Day. Blizzard announced Tin Foil Hats and tried to pass of their old Warcraft RTS games as the new WoW expansion. Turbine announced blue-skinned hobbits with white hats, whose complicately spelled name was pronounced like Smurf. And I write a fake announcement how WoW gets rid of gold farmers permanently. But of course such jokes are only funny if they are remotely believable. The funny thing in my joke was that it actually would have worked! If you would prevent players from giving each other gold, gold farming as we know it would die. But so would major parts of the player economy, as well as twinking, and sending stuff to your friends and guild mates. So the serious question behind the joke is: How much would we be willing to endure to get rid of gold farmers?

Farming gold is perfectly legal, as long as you don't use a bot to do it. Sending 1,000 gold to a complete stranger is perfectly legal too. Only receiving real money in exchange for these 1,000 dollars is against the terms of service and can get you banned. That means of the activities of a non-botting gold farmer, the only thing that is illegal happens outside the game. Unless the farmer is so stupid as to sell the gold on EBay using the same e-mail address that he used to sign up for his WoW account, there is no way Blizzard can catch him. They can't legally get hold of the buyers credit card statement or find any other proof that the seller received dollars for his gold. Blizzard can, and does, detect bots and bans accounts using them. Blizzard can't, and doesn't, ban a sweatshop full of Chinese farming manually. Neither can they do anything against the big companies buying gold from the farmers and selling that gold for dollars to other players. They can ban the account that is sending in-game spam mail or tells advertising a gold-selling website, but those are just free trial accounts anyway.

The reason why the in-game activities of gold farmers are legal is that they are indistinguishable from the behavior of regular players. I saw a guild mate of mine riding on a talbuk, and asked him how he got it. He said its a reward from getting exalted with the Mag'har, and he got it by killing ogres in Nagrand. At 10 reputation points per ogre, you can calculate how many of them he killed to get there. And he probably made a pretty sum of gold at the same time. How is Blizzard going to know that this guy killing 5,000 ogres is a regular player and not a gold farmer? Sending gold per mail is also something that regular players do all the time. Mostly between characters of their own account, but often also to players on other accounts, be it girlfriends, little brothers, or guild mates.

You can think of many different modifications to the game which would make gold farming harder to impossible. Like in yesterday's joke you could make gold effectively soulbound. Or you could introduced something like the Chinese government requires, having mobs drop less and less gold after 3 hours (although that would just force the gold farmer to buy 8 accounts). You could lower the gold cost for mounts and other money sinks by a factor of 10, thereby reducing the buyers' demand for gold. But any solution you come up with is sure to impact regular players as well. My April Fools' joke would have effectively killed large parts of the WoW economy. Diminishing returns would be rather unpopular, think of what would happen if your raid finally reaches the end-boss of the dungeon, and he doesn't drop anything because you took too much time to get there. Less money sinks would cause inflation in the prices of AH-traded goods. And so on.

Even the current situation, where Blizzard looks for suspicious behavior and then bans a hundred thousand accounts every quarter is a compromise. Whatever sophisticated software and methods you use, you will always have some false positives and false negatives. So after the bannings there are still some gold farmers left in the game (while the banned ones just start new accounts), and if you have just 1% of false positives you just banned 1,000 totally legit players which were caught in the dragnet by showing some unusual behavior. Of course these complain loudly, causing a lot of bad publicity.

So in the end stating that gold farming is harmful and should be eliminated is too simple. You need to do a more complete analysis just exactly how harmful it is, and what you would be willing to sacrifice to get rid of the problem. Apparently Blizzard thinks that gold farming isn't harmful enough to justify limitations to the legit player economy. They react slow to people reporting bots, both because of the danger of innocent people getting accused of botting, and because of the cost of following up every report immediately. They are against real money trade, but it isn't their top priority, and they aren't going to do anything spectacular, like preventing gold trade by changing the game, or sueing a major gold selling company.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:15 AM Permanent Link