Steinhauer's Opinion: Gold Farming, Part 2

In part two of his series on Gold Farming (read part one here), Jonathan Steinhauer looks further at the RMT industry and ways to realistically combat the problem.

A full barter economy won't stop gold farmers, but it will make their job more difficult, especially if the commodities can be kept diversified (something AC failed to do). Then it becomes not a matter of simply harvesting cash, but of netting resources, completing quests, and so on. Looking at this from the flip angle makes sense, too. A dishonest player who wants to get a lot of capital can't simply go to an RMT and buy loads of universally useful cash, they have to purchase resources which may or may not be useful to them and may even become obsolete. It makes sense as a genre too. Most MMOs are founded on the fantasy model with the Middle-Ages as the base point of inspiration. Only in the latter years of the medieval era was money used at all. Prior to that it was all barter, be it chicken's eggs for cow's milk or lordly protection for feudal service. A barter economy doesn't hurt game play or the trade market; instead, it makes both more interesting.

Read more after the leap.

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I don't disagree that a full barter economy would make it more interesting for some, but I believe that such a huge change would most definitely devistate any existing economy. I also think that any new game that would use such a system would dissuade trade overrall.

While it may work in real life, where resources are very important, a game is fundamentally different no matter how seriously one may take it. First off, those who aren't interested in the trade economy would have little recourse for getting the base items they need (i.e. better equipment).

Second, those who are would have to spend much more time A) finding those who want to trade for their items and B) finding those who want to trade them the items they need. And they would have to find someone who fits A and B if they don't want to spend all day simply trading commodities.

Third, it would mean no auction houses. That's a crippling blow in today's MMO market.

Finally, end-gamers (read: hardcore players who spend lots of money to keep playing) who typically have plenty of money to waste would have problems as well. No longer would they be able to spend hard earned money for their alts to have great equipment; they'd have to go through the whole resource-trade grind again. (Of course this could be argued as a positive result of the system as well, but I would imagine most end-gamers would very much dislike it).

While I do like the basic theory of the idea, I would have to say that any game with a decent crafting system would just have way too many resources to support a full barter economy effectively.

I agree that even if it were possible to successfully implement a full barter market system into a game, not only will trading options be limited and frustrating for the casual player, but it will not really solve the farmer problem either.
If, for example, it takes a certain item to create a powerful piece of equipment, then that item will be a hot commodity for trade, and thus farmers will shift their efforts into obtaining that item and then selling it to buyers.
A way around that, then, would be to constantly introduce newer and better equipment that demands different resources. Not only would this frustrate the player base, but the farmers can just as easily adjust to farming the newest hot commodity.

Even if there was to be a revolutionary new way of creating items (provided that crafting is considered to produce the best equipment), where there is no one certain resource that is rare and is thus sought after,* then farmers will then shift their efforts into actually crafting these items and then selling them.
Take Diablo2 for example. The game's gold holds almost no value, and all trade is done through bartering high end game gear that is hard to obtain. If you look at what kind of services some sites offer for Diablo2, you'll see that they are willing to sell you this high end gear for real money, and not in game gold.

(*For example, in the game Saga of Ryzom, to produce an item you had to have a number of items that fit into a category, say; an armour shell, thread, and stuffing, to create an armour vest. An armour shell could be found on certain monster loot, and it could also be harvested from the land by collecting sea shells. This created a very diverse way of crafting, where you could literally piece together an armour from the various junk in your inventory.)

The only way to successfully end the farmers' reign, then, is to cut them off in the actual farming process, or when the bought gold/item changes hands. Like you have mentioned, it is possible to track transactions where a large amount of gold changes hands, in return for nothing or something of very small value.
Tracking these transactions can be difficult and very time consuming, and if the farmers decide to do transactions in small amounts over a period of time and perhaps even use several third parties to handle the gold, then it would be a real headache and take a lot of time to track just one transaction.

We must return, then, to the very core of the problem, that is the farmers doing the actual farming of the gold/item. Back in the day these farmer characters were operated manually by someone and thus hard to spot and take action against. Nowadays, however, most farming characters are all mostly operated using "bots". Any player that has come across a bot, no matter how well programmed, will say that it is obvious when you observe them for any period of time.
Steps against bots have been taken, such as games using background security programs that try to bust these bots, but all these programs can be worked around.
Some have also suggested to create programs that prompted for some sort of response that can be done by players; for example, entering a string of numbers and letters that appears on the screen from time to time. This will obviously frustrate the players, and there are ways to work around this as well.
Perhaps, then, it would be possible to have a team of people working for the game company to "scour" the land by physically observing random places where one can farm for something that sells well? These people can become invisible and then walk around in the game and observe players while they go about their business. If a bot is found, then that account can be quickly banned.
Of course, these people will have to take extreme caution not to falsely ban a player that is simply farming up some gold for himself. Perhaps these disguised people could somehow try to interact with a suspicious player? Create in game "anomalies", or irregularities and see how the bot reacts to them?
For example, bots are programmed to target and fight a certain monster, or number of monsters. It would be possible for one of these disguised people to spawn a monster that has the same name and the same "tags", but in the game actually looks like a piece of stone, or a bush. No real player would think to try and target a pebble they see on the ground, but bots cannot differentiate between that, and will gladly spend their efforts into hacking a piece of vegetation to shreds.

What do you guys think about this approach?

I think the solution lies in making things so easy that a person has no excuse to do something on their own or eliminate the problem areas altogether. Crafting is obsolete in some games anyway. It's nothing more than a simple timesink and the goods are easily trumped by the uber drops from the uber mobs. Kill the ridiculous money sinks. Eliminate money and let people just trade stuff. Everyone can make their own decision on an item's value, based, in part, on its usefulness to their class.