Honest GamingFollow

I have very recently become furious at how many people in WoW buy gold or pay for power-levelling of thier characters. It's CHEATING, and it makes honest players like me (and, I hope, the majority of the WoW community) have to work ten times as hard just to keep up.

More importantly though, it cheapens the entire gaming experience. If a person can just buy power and wealth in the game, then there is no reason to ever work for it. This makes playing the game a worthless pursuit, and makes any accomplishments in the game worthless.

I know that Blizzard's official stance is that they do not allow or approve of these things, but it is still going on with no decline in sight. I just don't understand why they can't stop it, so I pose some questions to you readers:

What is Blizzard doing to stop this behavior, and why aren't they doing more?

I am using this forum post as an opportunity to spearhead a movement I'm going to call Honest Gaming. I realize that efforts to stop these cheaters can never be 100% perfect, and I believe that the only way to see any significant decrease in it is for WoW players to protest by ostracizing those who are engaging in these unethical practices.

My principle: I believe that the pursuit of power and wealth for one's character should be secondary to the pursuit of a rewarding game experience. In a game where many players interact, this means a rewarding game experience for everyone involved. I recognise that while the pursuit of power is the entire point of the game, it is that very pursuit which is rewarding in and of itself, and which makes accomplishments rewarding.

The Rules:
1. The initial purchase of the game and the monthly subscription fee for access to the game is all the real-life money I will spend on WoW.

2. Every item, every skill, and every piece of copper my character accumulates will be the result of my own effort and time, or a result of the effort and time of other honest gamers.

3. I will not associate with people who break the above rules. This extends to quests, instances, guilds, and all other interactive aspects of the game.

4. If I find I am in a guild which allows or encourages this kind of behavior I will work to stop it. If the offending parties are below me in rank, I will petition for thier removal from the guild. If they are above me in rank, I will quit the guild.

5. I will encourage Blizzard to be more aggressive in stopping these behaviors.

I made a special point of including #4 because I believeguild members who are familiar with each others' gaming practices is the best place for this movement to start. When encountering a stranger in the game, it's usually very difficult to tell if thier character is artificially improved in one way or another, unless they are forthcoming with that information themselves.

A word about Twinks: A Twink is a low-level character which has been made unusually powerful due to outside help. This can be done ethically, or unethically. To buy gold and spend it on powerful items to outfit your Twink is not ethical. However, you may have a wealthy character who accumulated thier wealth honestly, and decide to mail some of that wealth to a different lower-level character. That is still ethical. Because your first character acquired this wealth honestly, it is still in accordance with the first two rules.

I hope everyone reading this will consider what I've said and join me in this movement. I plan to post this on other websites as well, to spread the word.

yet another pointless thread...

This post is a shining example of why game companies (And MMO companies moreso) take so much flak from such things as RMT. There is no middle ground!

On one side you have people complaning about how gold buying and power leveling ruins on the game.

On the other side you have people who complain that you cannot be properly geared without spending days of your life raiding or PvPing.

Some games have one problem, and some games have the other. Would you rather WoW have more powerful BoE gear, so that gold buyers have the advantage, or have more powerful BoP gear so you need to really work to improve your character.

If, OP, you replied that WoW is good because it has more powerful BoP gear, then you'd realize that gold buying does not have a big effect on the WoW community, since you can sit on 10,000 gold and be equipped in the two BoE pieces of T1.

I don't buy gold or sell it so hear me out on this. Thinking logically isn't buying gold just transferring real world currency to in-game currency? Is it any different than trading pounds for dollars?

In my view, it's more like counterfeiting. You are paying someone else to create money for you, and it affects the economy in the same way. Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell from the real thing.

Edited, Dec 10th 2006 7:30pm by dadanox

I reported a leveling bot a few weeks and added that bot to my friends list so that I can keep track of him. He had all the tell-tale signs. I had a pleasant experience talking to a GM about it and I felt confident that they would get to the bottom of things.

I haven't seen that bot online in over a week now.

Go Go GM power

@OP: aww, how cute =) trying to stop something undefeatable...

@thephotonfiend: hey! they're not all bots!! someone reported me for botting but i was there, sitting at my computer doing all the things you mentioned. it's called "farming with a process". what's the world coming to when a guy can't sit in a chair, clicking the same buttons at the same time every kill and doing it over and over again?

@everyone else: Buying gold does not ruin game economies. People who buy gold are paying real money for it, therefore are not going to just spend spend spend, they'll try and make it last as long as possible. And especially in WoW, RMT has no big impact on the game, since the best gear is obtainable only through BoP gear. The most that will happen is that they buy up a bunch of mats to raise a crafting skill, in which case giving gold back to the economy and mat-farmers. As for guild members secluding guildies due to them buying gold, chances are the gold buyer has already gotten the guild member to buy gold as well or buys stuff for the guild member...either way the guild member is not going to turn him in or seclude him. Gold buyers won't stop just because a bunch of people think it ruins the economy (even though it helps it) or that they think it's unfair and wrong, so stop trying, it's getting annoying. Blizzard bans the gold sellers as much as possible, but you gotta remember...the gold sellers have tons of accounts bringing tons of income to Blizzard and the gold buyers buy gold to enjoy the game more...thus continuing to pay the monthly fee and bring income to Blizzard. Blizzard mostly just bans the accounts that advertise it, not the actual farmers themselves (unless they've been reported). without gold-buying, there'd be a lot less people playing WoW (out of the 7mil people, i'd estimate about 1m are either gold buyers or gold farmers).

PS: the major gold-selling companies (IGE, BroGame, WoWMine, etc) don't steal accounts...it's bad for business. people get their accounts stolen when they try and download a bot or hack (which major companies don't use them which is why they don't get banned).

edit: @dadanox: do you even know what counterfeiting is? people don't buy money in real life, counterfeiters keep the money for themselves! "you are paying someone else to create money for you"? that's like saying "hey, i'll give you 1 dollar if you make me a counterfeit dollar"...

Edited, Dec 10th 2006 8:34pm by Luciene

Two things;

1) They can't "create" gold. It's not a real, actualized item and they aren't hacking the code to make it spring into existence. They, like us, grind for it, sell in-game items for it, whatever you'd like to call it.

2) It isn't counterfeiting either. They aren't duplicating the gold, they are doing the above mentioned things to aquire it to sell later.

If you'd like a more plausible analogy, it's more like illegal immigration. The item itself isn't illegal to own, just like say Chinese can enter our country and become citizens; Any character can have gold if they put in the time and effort and any Chinese man or woman can become a legal US citizen with time and effort (usually). The process of acquiring the gold is illegal. Just like you're not allowed to hop on a cargo carrier and sit in the basement to disembark at your destination of choice, you can't just had someone a few bucks for in-game currency.

Another reason for this analogy is how difficult it is to actually stop. Short of putting a ban on transferring in-game gold, deleting the auction house, removing the mail system, and other extraordinary (and extraordinarily useless) steps, you can't stop people from getting their gold or sites from selling it. Short of stopping every ship in the middle of the ocean and surrounding the country with a fifty foot electrified fence, you can't stop people from coming in. The amount of time and effort it would take to stop either activity isn't worth the cost of doing so.

And, really, you'll find a similar number of people on the sides of both issues, usually with the same reasons. It ruins the economy/helps the economy, it causes people to not value gold/citizenship as much as if they couldn't do it, it's against the law/the law should change, it's too hard to earn the gold for casual players/these immigrants need help out of their situation... And most people will just sit off to the side, doing what they've been doing all along without caring either way.

Don't worry about gold farmers or power-levelers ruining the game. If it ever got too out of hand, Blizzard would try and fix it. The WoW economy is just fine and will remain so for a while. Just grind your gold, like me and the rest of us, and worry about how YOU'LL get that Grandmaster Kill-All Sword for PvP... Because if someone got to your level from power-leveling instead of experiencing the game and learning as they went along, they likely will be just another free kill.

You can make it from start to end game raid without ever having to buy anythng off the AH.

I have been playing a long long time now. I have never seen one of these "farmers" Nor have I ever not been able to go out and harvest what I needed for any of my trade skills.

I am not realy seeing this damage to the enonomy you speak of, could you show me a few examples?

/signed

Those that argue that buying gold or powerleveling is not wrong because the effect is so miniscule are naive...

Imagine thousands of small effects coming together, now you have one large one.

Problems:
Economy wise, prices go up! That's right, people buying gold can spend more so people selling items have and use the ability to sell for higher...

Unfair advantages lean towards you because unlike other players everything you may need is handed to you no need to farm or grind for your money...

Funny: "I'm going to spend my hard earned money (Or my money from my mom, lol to you folks) to buy WoW gold. Aww shucks i'll be the 'l33t' owner now"...do you not have a social life? No offense...

Edited, Dec 10th 2006 9:34pm by macphp

Luciene, you are the one that is naive.

Some people buy the money for an epic mount. Some people buy the money for an epic mount, realize how easy and painless it is rather than earning 900 gold, and continue to buy. Some people just have more money than they know what to do with and would rather not go through the rigors many of us do. There are different kinds of gold buyers.

Gold sellers often simply farm for money, which while it does elevate the rate gold enters the economy, doesn't directly do anything wrong. However, when they (a) do that in ways no player could keep up with, especially in conjunction with teleport hacks and the like, (b) use their excessive and arguably ill-found fame to control markets so that people are forced to spend more for a stack of runecloth or a few gromsblood, to the point of (imagine this!) buying gold to be able to afford basic components, you've got *something* wrong. There comes a point when you can stop playing the "good business sense" capitalism card and realize that it genuinely is hurting the little guy. (Read: everyone outside the RMT system.)


Other people accept the facts that nobody but you is arguing against. They've seen them in practice in other games where the effect is much more devastating. I could easily find you two servers, one controlled by farmers and one not, and compare the average price of a Major Healing Potion on them. The burden of proof is on you, not them. Show some numbers that prove they don't cause inflation.

It boils down to one thing... using money to cheat at a game.

It's the same, ethically, (IMHO) as slipping a baseball umpire a 20 to say a runner was safe when he was realy out. Using real money to gain an advantage in what it's supposed to be a game on a level playing field.

If I was playing monopoly against someone..... and when I got low on cash, I could buy some more monoploly money under the table with real cash, and other players at the table could not do that.... it's cheating.

Buying gold is cheating, plain and simple.

They've seen them in practice in other games where the effect is much more devastating

Final Fantasy XI comes to mind... I played that game before WoW, for nearly two years. It is sad to think people work for real currency, only to waste it on fake money for a video game. It seemed every year around Christmas time, prices would sky-rocket on high end items to the point where no one playing legit would ever be able to obtain them without getting the drop themselfs.

Coming from a game like Final Fantasy online, I am happy with the way World of Warcraft is designed, and think it is effective at reducing the effects of RMT on the in-game economy.