I was thinking about a way to disable gold farmers all together and think I came up with a solution. It would actually solve more than one problem such as inflation due to gold farmers and those who purchase money from them, and the farmers themselves.

Imagine this, you log onto your game account and know you want to upgrade your chest armor in X Game, so you browse through the list of all available items in the game and select an item on the auction house.

A bidding system, whereby you select an item you want to purchase and place your bid on said item, but you don't have any gold per say being stored in your bank because there is no such thing, only items. Let's say you bid 100,000 gold for an item, which meets or exceeds the sellers asking price, once you have placed your bid, every gold piece you make from the game goes directly to that purchase, or if multiple purchases were made at once, the gold you generate is evenly distributed amongst those purchases until they are paid off at which point you get the items.

If you are the seller, well, you are selling items to upgrade your own, so the gold from items you sell is directly transfered to items you have placed bids on.

All items on the AH are anonymous, so gold farmers can't jack up prices on items and instruct you to purchase it or vice versa because even if you bid high on an item, if one is available for less, you will recieve that item and the remainder of your gold will either go towards other items you have bid on, or vanish.

This would not enable someone to save millions of gold, but it wouldn't matter because inflation would be minimal. There would be people trying to farm items to sell but they would only get items in return. The only way to purchase items in the game would be to earn them or find them yourself.

Gold is thereby eliminated and inflation is virtually eliminated as well.

It's obviously not the most free system, but for a game like Diablo, I think it would work extremely well. It would also work with MMO's I think.

I'd love to read your thoughts.

Originally posted by Mogus

I was thinking about a way to disable gold farmers all together and think I came up with a solution. It would actually solve more than one problem such as inflation due to gold farmers and those who purchase money from them, and the farmers themselves.

Imagine this, you log onto your game account and know you want to upgrade your chest armor in X Game, so you browse through the list of all available items in the game and select an item on the auction house.

A bidding system, whereby you select an item you want to purchase and place your bid on said item, but you don't have any gold per say being stored in your bank because there is no such thing, only items. Let's say you bid 100,000 gold for an item, which meets or exceeds the sellers asking price, once you have placed your bid, every gold piece you make from the game goes directly to that purchase, or if multiple purchases were made at once, the gold you generate is evenly distributed amongst those purchases until they are paid off at which point you get the items.

If you are the seller, well, you are selling items to upgrade your own, so the gold from items you sell is directly transfered to items you have placed bids on.

All items on the AH are anonymous, so gold farmers can't jack up prices on items and instruct you to purchase it or vice versa because even if you bid high on an item, if one is available for less, you will recieve that item and the remainder of your gold will either go towards other items you have bid on, or vanish.

This would not enable someone to save millions of gold, but it wouldn't matter because inflation would be minimal. There would be people trying to farm items to sell but they would only get items in return. The only way to purchase items in the game would be to earn them or find them yourself.

Gold is thereby eliminated and inflation is virtually eliminated as well.

It's obviously not the most free system, but for a game like Diablo, I think it would work extremely well. It would also work with MMO's I think.

I'd love to read your thoughts.

I'm confused... Am I reading this correctly.... If you are saying that there is no such thing as gold, then noone has gold, therefore no one can ever make an initial purchase...  And if you aren't saying there isn't gold, then why wouldn't  somoene just buy an item outright... This doesn't sound like an item for item market, because you mention purchases a number of times.... So I'm lost here.

What happens if someone buys an item, is in severe debt, then stops playing long before they receive the item?

Also, what is stopping gold-famers from stalling other sales with bunk buy-offers that will intentionally hang in limbo?

You just gave gold-farmers a way to win at interest rates, and a chance on making 'free' income if a player doesn't hold up to his end of the bargain.

Couple of things.

1. The game compony that produces the game also sells most of the gold that is sold trust me on this one.

2. Most gamers play games to stroke their own egos even if its only to them selves or to "net friends" that they really dont know.

3. Look at me people, need t1 ! , t2 ! Iv got 20k ! and as soon as they start falling behind the Jones they will find another game to try and come out on top (in their own mind) or start buying gold to keep the ego boost addiction fed.

4. Their are ways to hack any game thats currently published.

5. We could build a no loot game totaly skill based where you would spend an day grinding to get another +1 dps or ar, but then you would only hire somone to log into you account and play it for you.

6. Several games in the past tryed no loot models and quickly added it back in.

Originally posted by WarWitch

Couple of things.

1. The game compony that produces the game also sells most of the gold that is sold trust me on this one.

If you want to believe that, fine. More power to you. However, it's false and no amount of 'trust me' is going to change that. It makes far more sense for a developer to change a couple values in drop rates or directly sell a sparkle pony than to get into some convoluted and clandestine backend deal with gold sellers.  

2. Most gamers play games to stroke their own egos even if its only to them selves or to "net friends" that they really dont know.

3. Look at me people, need t1 ! , t2 ! Iv got 20k ! and as soon as they start falling behind the Jones they will find another game to try and come out on top (in their own mind) or start buying gold to keep the ego boost addiction fed

2 and 3 are the same thing, but I'm not seeing what point they are making or what they have to do with stopping third party gold sellers. 

4. Their are ways to hack any game thats currently published.

Again, what does this have to do with third party gold selling?

5. We could build a no loot game totaly skill based where you would spend an day grinding to get another +1 dps or ar, but then you would only hire somone to log into you account and play it for you.

This seems like more of 2 and 3. 

6. Several games in the past tryed no loot models and quickly added it back in.

 Can you list or link them? This is something that is actually relevant and would be interesting to research. 

Only way to get rid of gold farmers is for a game to sell gold themselves.

Originally posted by hyllstarter

Only way to get rid of gold farmers is for a game to sell gold themselves.

This,    unfortunately

Or just go F2P, and have bought items be sellable.

imo this prob is just like politics.

politics: everyone bitches about em, but hey, someone voted those morons :P

goldfarmers: everyone bitches em, but hey, someone has to pay em ^^

it's not me, but my point  is: there must be enough people who support em. lets find em, and burn em. and then we solved the problem :)

ps: imo it's those "i didnt do it!" banned players :)

Simple solution, make everything BOP (bind on pickup). To clarify the OP I think he is saying make it so when you loot a monster or sell items to vendors or get gold from quests that the gold is invisible, that you can't physically give it away, it would only show you how much gold you got. That is a great idea that I think wont catch on though because believe it or not these game companies love gold farmers. They bring them massive subscriptions, without having gold to buy these players would see the time involved to get things as a joke and wont play the game. It sucks I know but this is how most the gamers are now days. Don't believe me? Look at the virtual gold market in profits last year, was something over billion world wide.

Ya screw those 3rd world poor pieces of crap who are just doing what they can to survive. They should all just go die in the Apple Iphone factory. Maybe the real trouble comes from the consumer? Maybe if everyone didn't want things handed to them these days then the gold sales wouldn't be such a big industry. It's your parents fault. They obviously didn't teach you the value of working to reach a goal. They just showered you with un deserved praise and told you that you were special until you actually believed it.

I say every MMO should siwtch to a Cash based economy. Real money like in Entropia. Then if they want to sell the money for LESS than what the developer's exchange rate is then no harm done to the economy. It would only hurt the farmers.