In many ways, this entire overarching discussion is typically approached piecemeal and from different specific angles and rarely as a whole. Farmers and bots (not the same thing) obviously tend to impact the quality of play for “legitimate” players. However, they wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t a demand.

I do believe it is possible for the MMO companies where this is an issue to essentially take over this business, or at least experiment. My main caveat being in regards to the “ownership” of sold items, gold, etc.

Without getting to verbose or specific, I believe that by tweaking no-drop status of certain items, balancing quest rewards versus purchased items and allowing players to buy items and in-game currency, it would be possible for an MMO company to either remove or seriously curtail bot/farmer activity on those servers, keep the money themselves and limit the negative perception.

It’s at least worth a try.

Rich

If gold and everything else had weight and there was no teleporting or flying for player convenience, the practicality of gold farming would be severely diminished.

If items could be stolen freely when killing a player, gold farmers would need to spend a lot of resources on security.

What is amazing is that we are into, what, the second decade of MMOs, and game designers don’t bother to design their game mechanics to address these problems? That is perhaps the biggest question and most apalling part of this.

As noted above, by going to a “Virtual Asset Purchase” model, which is becoming increasingly popular in Asia with games like KartRider and Maple Story…the problem just goes away.

There are upsides to RMT & gold farming. Obviously, there is a demand. Players are apparently spending several million US dollars a month on virtual assets. That says that the players are not happy with the game… or are willing to spend a fair chunk of change to improve their game experience.

http://www.imao.us/docs/NukeTheMoon.htm

Goe, would rather nuke france.

Developers could avoid hyperinflation by suplanting IGE instead of working double shifts at the mint. Buying gold from players on one end and reselling on the other.

That’s what Second Life does. It’s run exactly like the NASDAQ, where you can go in and set up buy and sell orders at particular prices, and when the buys and sells intersect in the middle that’s when a sale actually happens. For those less interested in playing it like a market and more interested in just buying or selling some Lindens, there’s the buttons that circumvent the order placing process and just fill the best open order.

There’s no reason at all for farmers to try to sell outside this in-game market, because this is where they will get their best prices. And the prices stay pretty low because since it’s legitimate more people are participating with their casually earned in-game cash, so the farmers have less of an interest in the market and thus less interest in farming Lindens in Second Life.

Essentially, it turns into a gold sink for your veterans and a gold source for your newbies, but it’s all optional.