Goldsellers are there because the players say “Would you please come into my game? I know the devs don’t want you too, but if you could sneak in, that’d be clutch because I will do anything to rocket myself to level cap and I want the strongest “whatever” when I get there. I’ll make it worth your while, I’ll pay you REAL money:)”.

No player, no goldseller. Then we’d have empty games? Not at all. Only select ppl with lower standards, wavering ethics and lesser morals do this. Take care of the player and you take care of the goldseller.

Part of that problem is how people seem to have jaded themselves to treat it as though it is something frivolous, like a “I got yer nose” trick.

Yes you can point to whatever reasons you want to defend it or treat it like it is less than it is. Many subcultures exist that find morally offensive behavior to be no big deal. Pointing and saying “Look at all the people doing it, it’s just a fad in todays gaming” is another way of saying everyone’s doing it which is just the nihilistic way out. It’s hopeless so let’s party like it’s 1999.

Just because I know many people who, let’s say, goes around spraying graffiti, or swiping “just one candy bar” from the convenience store down the street, and all their friends treat it like it’s just not that big a deal, doesn’t mean I’m going to join them.

That’s why I’ve almost stopped using the word goldseller entirely, and replaced it with goldbuyers. Because that is the source. The demand for cheating has opened up the market.

Sorry to rant, but I just did a similar post recently, and I guess the fire is still fresh in my veins :)

For example: having the best gear; being the server first to reach level cap; down first boss etc. The levels of one-upmanship in a PvE MMO are amazing and you only have to look at the various comments regarding Recount and Gearscore in the WoW community to see it an action.

In thinking about non-MMOs, though, it’s obvious that people will also cheat in single-player PvE games too: whether it’s by using a developer code (“IDDQD”) or finding an exploit, some folk will use whatever they can to beat the game. Perhaps it is to avoid the “grind” of playing a game, as you suggest, but I suspect there are other reasons as well.

My point? I guess while I agree that some people will cheat to bypass a grind, I don’t think that eliminating grinding will see a marked reduction in gold selling or exploiting. When games are played, people will cheat.**

*A former guildie alluded to the fact that gold buying would permit purchase of better gear and make levelling faster. He all but admitted he’d done it himself.

**This aphorism brought to you by Generalisations-r-us.

In PvE, my point more or less stands. The PvE cheating always tends to be, ultimately, an illicit shortcut to shorten the grind.

Maybe a better distinction about this would be to think it in terms of “cheating to gain an advantage over whom?”. Cheating in PvP and RL sports, as you pointed out, it’s about cheating to gain an advantage of an opponent. In PvE and non-competitive environments, the cheating is to one-up the game itself, usually because of ridiculous rules (or what players perceive as ridiculous rules).

Cheaters are a scourge and should be instabanned. I don’t consider doing something that is possible to do in the game but is not “in the spirit of the game” like hiding from fire or resetting bosses or what have you. Those are the game dev’s problem to sort out, not the players’. I mean like botting or modding to do things you wouldn’t normally be allowed to do in the game.

Lets not forget about content that winds up shut down or delayed while a “fix” is designed to combat against players that must have somehow known that things were not working as intended sometime around the 100th time they exploited a flaw. Sometimes (Everquest II comes to mind) they simply let something like trivialized content (gray shard farming) go by because so many players did it so often for so long. It’s like finding out after working all week long really hard at a job that all you had to do was show up and get the same reward.

In my opinion, anything that detracts from the game and discourages the honest players from enjoying the game is a detriment. Online gaming tends to be competitive for many and trivializing the end rewards takes away from the games attraction.

So the honest players in the end wind up not being able to log in while patches are implanted to subvert the exploits while content is delayed because developers are fixing exploits instead of working on new projects. In the end, we all pay the bill for those who like to exploit, purchase gold or bot their way through the game.

They’d still have to police the “non-gold-buying” servers, of course. A penalty for getting caught buying gold would be that your character would get transferred to a gold-buying server. (And, ideally, you would lose whatever gold you bought. This provides an incentive to start on the gold-buying server in the first place.)

It wouldn’t be ridiculous to suggest they might sell other things (experience potions, etc) as well. The goal here is to put the farmers out of business.

Of course cheaters would still have to be banned. (The better solution is to build an architecture that keeps most of the information on the server, so it’s harder to cheat.)

I wonder: if they did create gold-buying and experience-buying servers, what fraction of users would migrate there?

Whether it’s gold to MMO players, performance enhancing drugs to Olypmic athletes, fake blood capsules to rugby players or hired imposters for marathon runners, where’s there’s games and sport, there’s cheating. The reasoning for cheating is to win, to be (perceived as) better than everyone else.*

Why I only disagree to an extent is that, on further inspection, it can be also be asserted that where there are games and sport, there is also a grind if you are to be at the top of that particular discipline. (I’ve got half a post written about that very subject.)

*unless you’re a Chinese student and want to get into university that is.