You see the ads for these two game economy wreckers all the time - power leveling and gold farming. Hell you probably see one right now - wink wink.
World of Warcraft is a good example of how powerleveling and gold farming damage a games economy. Now don’t get me wrong, farming in a game for your own ends is fine by me, but farming and then selling the gold or items for real world dollars is a problem and has been for awhile now. And it looks to be growing. Massively.com just did a story on power leveling growing in popularity in countries other than China. It is growing rapidly in most Asian countries where internet access is becoming more widespread and broadband is increasing. There story notes that power levelers in Vietnam are actually getting paid more per month than teachers. That doesn’t boad well for fixing this issue.
Blizzard has stepped up policing power leveling and gold sales more than most online entities but even they are helpless to stop the practice all together. Age of Conan is already getting hit hard by the problem as well with players no longer needing to actually play the game to acquire items or levels, they can pay others to do it for them. This severely unbalances the game when guilds can become big overnight by purchasing online gold to outfit their members or buy a guild stronghold. Not only does it unbalanced the game in that respect but the farmers and power levelers themselves have an extreme adverse effect on regular players trying to play in certain areas as well. Gold farmers are good at what they do and can typically clear a large area quickly with practice, leaving very little for regular gamers to fight or gather.
In WoW, I can recall an area where you could venture to day or night and always find the same Chinese gold farmer there. He was a 70 frost mage in a lower level area who would not let anyone kill a mob, to get rid of him and complete any quests there required enlisting the help of one or more players of the opposing faction to come clear him out. While he would generally not kill lower level enemy playes (bad for business to attract to much attention for a gold farmer) he would never let you kill a mob if he could get him first.
With Warhammer on the horizon and other big MMO’s in the making there is still no real resolution on how to rid the game world of these economy trashing mongrels. This is a cancer that is going to continue to eat away at all major MMO’s now and in the future and apparently is going to actually get worse. Doesn’t anyone out there have a solution? What can we do to stop them?
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