Everyone needs to outfit their characters, especially if they raid or PvP and many people achieve this in various ways. One option, you can grind for drops, this helps in different ways as you can gain experience, gold and items. Second, you can always venture to the Auction House and see what goods are available, but the prices are set by players and can in many cases be exorbitant if not obscene. Thirdly, you can do the raids and/or PvP to get better items. This may be time consuming and the repair bills can get up there, especially if you are using mediocre gear. The last option is to go through a gold farmer. It is quick and easy, and is normally less time consuming than many of the other above options.
Yet one has to take into consideration the legitimacy of the last option and ask how legal is this? How is this person obtaining all this gold? As we all know there are legal ways in game to make money, like selling items that drop as well as crafted ones to other players or grinding spawns to get money and items. However, there are those people that will uses illegal means to get an increased gold flow and then profit by selling the gold/items via websites that cater to the gamers.
In Manchester, England a professor ran a study about the “gold farming” industry and came to some interesting conclusions. The BBC interviewed him and the full article is here. He also discusses “power leveling”, many of us tend to block those spammers in game as they get annoying because you tend to get inundated, low level players tend to receive the brunt of them and they tend to fade away as you level higher.
The big issue here is we need to keep the in game economy going, and still try and keep it as legitimate as possible. Yet, there is no real way of knowing who is by the book and who isn’t. This makes it very hard to crack down on the people who get their gold by using “shady” methods. Regardless, it is food for thought not only for game developers, but the players as well.
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Yet one has to take into consideration the legitimacy of the last option and ask how legal is this? How is this person obtaining all this gold? As we all know there are legal ways in game to make money, like selling items that drop as well as crafted ones to other players or grinding spawns to get money and items. However, there are those people that will uses illegal means to get an increased gold flow and then profit by selling the gold/items via websites that cater to the gamers.
In Manchester, England a professor ran a study about the “gold farming” industry and came to some interesting conclusions. The BBC interviewed him and the full article is here. He also discusses “power leveling”, many of us tend to block those spammers in game as they get annoying because you tend to get inundated, low level players tend to receive the brunt of them and they tend to fade away as you level higher.
The big issue here is we need to keep the in game economy going, and still try and keep it as legitimate as possible. Yet, there is no real way of knowing who is by the book and who isn’t. This makes it very hard to crack down on the people who get their gold by using “shady” methods. Regardless, it is food for thought not only for game developers, but the players as well.
More...