Ex Libris

A coworker linked me to the following post by a blogger named Tobold that asserted that gold farming is the result of bad game design.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2008/08/research-on-gold-farming.html

I have to heartily disagree. While I do think that it is true that players being given to buy gold can be the result of bad game design (the obtaining of gold relying upon doing repetitive tasks that bore them and why would the player want to skip content if it was good?), I don’t think it is the only, or even primary, reason that they do, and his assertion that if someone released a perfect MMO, no one would buy gold, is naive.

He makes the point that people don’t pay their friends to play basketball for them, because the enjoyment is in the activity and not the result. But while people may not pay a friend to play basketball for them, people will pay for steroids to make them better so that they are better than other players. So long as there is an element of competition involved in an activity, people will find a way to cheat, and buying gold is a way to cheat your way to dominance in an MMO setting. If anything, the most exceptional, fantastic, popular game would only attract more goldfarmers than inferior games, because more people would be driven to dominate such games.

Also, many people are lazy. The obtaining of gold has to be at least to some degree hard for that gold to have any value, and so while that will drive some people to rise above and overcome that difficulty, it will cause others to find the easiest way to that goal, often subverting the route that was intended to take you there.

And to make a less negative-about-human-nature point, people want to play with their friends, and in a game where people invest years in a character, this can be impossible to do, so buying gold or power leveled NPCs is the only way to catch up and enjoy said game with your friends.

The point is, in a multiplayer, persistent game, there are going to end up being huge disparities between players, and for one reason or another, people are going to look for ways to bridge that gap. The primary reason one goes to an MMO instead of a single player RPG is because you want to interact with other people, either on a competitive level, or a social level, and you can’t really make a good case that an MMO’s purpose should be to create a single player experience that is so exquisitely sublime that no one would want to skip it, because honestly, if you do, then you have made a fantastic single player game, but not necessarily a fantastic MMO.

I certainly can agree that boring, repetitive activities do not a good game make, and that MMOs should always be striving to create more dynamic and enjoyable content, but the fact is that when the first player realized that in order to be better than than his fellow gamer, instead of spending the time to actually do that, he could use his parents’ credit card to buy gold and buy all of the best gear in the game, the gold farming industry was born. And it’s not going to go away any time soon, even if a cadre of the world’s finest minds in game design come together to create the most subliminal gaming experience ever put down in microchips (and their egos don’t completely ruin the whole thing).