MMORPG.com Columnist Scott Jennings returns this week to talk about the gold farming problem in MMORPGs and addresses three of the most common myths about gold farming and how MMO companies react to them.
A brief personal note: I’ve been hired (again) by NCsoft this week, to work as a developer and data analyst for their new Game Surveillance Unit. This CSI-sounding department is responsible for quashing botting and gold selling in their titles, some of which has been a bit of a problem of late. While this does introduce some potential biases in anything I might write here, I would hope that you, the reader would understand that I am already chock full of bias anyway, as would be anyone with strongly held opinions, and evaluate my writings accordingly. Especially when I write about something directly related to what I’m working on… say, gold farming?
Gold farming and selling in MMORPGs (the commonly used term within the industry being “RMT”, which stands for “Real Money Trading”) is, it’s safe to say, fairly controversial. A few games such as Ultima Online and Second Life embrace the blurring between virtual and real cash, but most games prohibit it, and most players (especially the more hard-core) claim to despise it. Yet, much like any other vice, there still seems to be a market for it.
Read Jennings: Real Money, Real Problems.
