Chinese Communist MMORPG

[Keba]

Hm, I would have to say I like the idea. It would solve a lot of the problems with MMORPGs. I've played some, but grew tired quickly, it is so repetitive, there is no story behind things. Go to village/town/spaceport/whatever get quest/mission/task, kill critters, get item, solve quest/mission/task, get new quest/mission/task, and so ad aeternum. Having a human running a campaign with a story would be more entertaining.

[Adrian II]

I've played some, but grew tired quickly, it is so repetitive, there is no story behind things.

You are right that the game dynamics and environment are boring, but in the end the nature of your game depends on you. It turns out that on-line gaming is a highly social activity, much more so than other video games. Many people play them in couples (man-woman) or peer groups. So they log in to 'meet' people whom they also know in real life, and they go on a quest or raid together with their IRL friends. These are the die-hards of on-line gaming: they make up their own story as they go along and meanwhile they deal with IRL issues. There are stories of people who dissuaded a troubled friend from committing suicide by chatting to them in the game. On the other hand, people who are isolated IRL will be alone as players too, so they tend to get bored real quick. Or they become a nuisance to fellow players, inviting teh ban from the in-game mods.

[KukriKhan]

I wonder if this business model (hiring a ringer ('game manager', in AdrianII's parlance) to play/work for you for cheap) translates across game-genres to FPS's that have player ladders/ranks? What would a 'wealthy' american 16-year old be willing to pay a chinese ringer to see his username in the top-50 rankings of Halo or Call Of Duty? Two bucks; five; 10?

[Fragony]

I wonder if this business model (hiring a ringer ('game manager', in AdrianII's parlance) to play/work for you for cheap) translates across game-genres to FPS's that have player ladders/ranks? What would a 'wealthy' american 16-year old be willing to pay a chinese ringer to see his username in the top-50 rankings of Halo or Call Of Duty? Two bucks; five; 10?

I have been a very active rogue spear player (#2 on worldladders with pistols only you noobs) and cheaters pay a WHOLE lot more.

[Major Robert Dump]

I'm not sure if i understand your question completely, but i'll give ti a shot:

Anyway, Major, could you tell me if these farmers on SWG are paid by the AFK in game currency or in real $$? I haven't discovered a meeting board for real currency MMORPG service deals yet. Goods exchange, yes. But not service exchange -- like the shared adventures and rewards you mentioned. Do you know a URL?

The answer is likely both. On Ebay during the first 18 months SWG was going, you could buy credits on ebay or you could pay an ebay account to level your character for you while you were away.

There were also actual players who advertised in unofficial SWG forums that they would level AFK people if you payed them in-game crtedits or items, although I don't know if their intent was to turn around and sell those for real money or just to be able to get rich in game and own rare stuff.

I can be certain, however, that the "I'll level you" situations they were "follow x, attack x's target" macros involved because it simply wouldn't be cost efficient to log onto one account at a time and grind grind grind. If you made a couple dummy accounts and used them all at once on different PCs (or on different user IDs on the same PC) you could grind for hours and recieve rewards and xp for all toons equally. I also think this is the case because the ebay grinders made a disclaimer that they weren't responsible for decayed items due to death, and they weren't responsible for lost xp in the case of a bounty hunter coming to kill your jedi. Considering the amount of time it would take to grind certain things it simply would not make since to sell your time unless you were selling it to multiple people at once, and doing this would greatly increase the chance of one of the party dying due to that toon being controlled by AI, or, in the case of a bounty hunter, not being able to simply force run away from danger because the person in control of the macro chain gang is on PC#3 and can't get over to PC #6 in time.

In the cases of credit farming, people who sold credits online did it one of two ways, both of which were actually due to bad design in the game:

First, if amissions payout was 20k then all party members got 20k instead of it splitting amongst them. This is where the macro gangs would come in, and one person leading a chain of 7 toons could make 8x an individual in a legitimate group of 8 players, because in the legit group 7 toons arent mules.

The second way was to go to a place where a static spawn was located, and to run an afk combat macro by yourself or in conjunction with other AFKers, and add a /loot command to the macro. With a right timer on the /loot it would guarantee a consistent spawn so you would never be overwhelmed AND it would keep other players from pinching your business because a respawn never occured until all the corpses were looted. So now you got people going to placesd where elite bosses spawn and drop high end items, or places where spawns are huge and statistically increase your chances of getting a a rare component, and they afk camp it. the bigger the group the better, that way no ones inventory fills up too fast. these items are then either sold in game for credits, then the credits sold for $$, or the person was just doing this to make themselves more uber by getting rich and having rare stuff.

I never saw anywhere actual in game items being sold individually on ebay, it was always either credits, grinding, or an entire account, but now it happens since things arent as rare as they used to be. A year ago you could have gotten enough ing ame credits for a jetpack to turn around and sell for $750 dollars, now I see jetpacks on ebay for $180 and they can be repaired in game now, whereas before if u got it blown in PVP it was gone fro good.

Also, take into consideration the varying economies from server to server in a game like SWG and by doing cross server trades of credits you could always launder your money to the server that would gain you the most real life profit.

I doubt anyone who sold credits online was someone who played for fun alone, or was someone who got rich from crafting. SWG had a very unique crafting system, so much that there was a significant portion of the gamers who played who ONLY crafted and ran shops because they thought it was fun. That being said, the time investment was too big to make a profit selling credits, even with crafting macros going, because crqfting macroes required you be at keynaord a lot more than camping/follow macros.

SWG killed looping macros, and SWG changed the manner in which rewards were payed out, and a lot of this
nonsense stopped with Ebay on a small scale and went onto a larger scale

There were plenty of players, however, who were not farmers who used these methods to grind, get loot and get rich in game. also, if you consider the amount of storage allowed in the game and the fact that you could own property and homes and storage ships, people who were doing this the entire time likely had a surplus of credits/loots they could continue to sell for a long time.

In the old days on ebay it was common to see "1 million credits for $15 dollars" or "5 million for $65 dollars". And I mean that stuff was on there a lot

Now it appears everything for sale credit-wise is larger increments, and its cheaper, but if u check the dates on these links a lot of this crap has been up for sale for a while, and I'd be willing to bet half those accounts for sale are mule accounts

http://video-games.search.ebay.com/s...1654QQsbrsrtZl

I didn't see any grinding services there when i just checked, but since they made the game level based and made it where you had to do quests to get xp, I doubt a grinding service would be worth the enteprenuers time unless he charged huge amounts. Remember, the game used to be based on 250 skills points to put in whatever skills you wanted, as long as you had the relevant xp to fill whichever of the 500 skill boxes you wanted, and combat xp was gained by killing stuff with the weapon you wanted xp in. I don't see a grinding service happening now, tell me if u do, but as I recall the ones I used to see had a brochure they would send you, they had some sort of money back guarantee and a website. Of course, all this was illegal under the Sony rules, so the people involved were kept confidential and in cases where one of the mule/grinder leader accounts was banned, they would just buy another and afk grind that one back up to par in like 2 days


--edit, I also forgot about faction points being sold online. You could get those from killing things against your faction, and they were used to buy faction pets like AT-STs and bases and turrets for PVP. Faction points sold for 1 point for 100 credits, and smugglers got a transfer bonus, so smuggler players in afk grind chains killing rebel bases could transfer the faction points without penalty to whoever was buying them. I also knew a lot fo people who just did afk spawn camping for faction points to sell, use etc, but this was for in gamew use only not to make real money

[Adrian II]

I'm not sure if i understand your question completely (..)

Yes, you did. Thanks for the wealth of information. I never played SWG, but I can understand most of it with the aid of their website guides.

It seems SWG ran into many similar issues that developers of other games had to deal with, such as respawn camping and level grinding. Macros can be scams too. Runescape mining macros were sold to noobs on eBay and Runescape boards for $$ for some time, and this went on well after they had become useless because new players were not allowed into RSI anymore and noobs had to join RSII, which was considered macro-proof. I know of an American noob who was so impatient he bought an outdated automining macro on eBay for $50 and was immediately banned when he tried to run it in RSII. He had just paid toward his half-year membership as well, so he pissed away more than a hundred bucks that day.

By the way, have you ever read The Great Scam by Nightfreeze? If not, you are gonna love this.*

*I could find only a cache of it.

[Major Robert Dump]

Ha, nice read. Yeah, I played Eve too and ended up quitting after getting podkilled in deep space without insurance when my corp went out to colonize the far edges. Some pirates basically camped our noob station and killed anyone who came or went, so we ended up being two dozen players stuck in space with no ships and no where to go. They did it for a week, but I just quit after that.

The guy in that story is kind of a dick, though, but online gaming sort of breeds it. Whenever theres money or an economy noobs are gonna get ripped off and people are gonna scam. I thought about giving all my credits and stuff to a noob, or even to a guild mate, but I pulled a little trick of my own and remaining players something to get a good laugh from.

Back to farming:

I can safely say I will likely never, ever play another mmorpg again because they are either dry, cookie cutter and boring, or if they have any depth whatsoever they get ruined by farmers and scammers who essentially effect the economy in a bad way. In SWG someone figured out a way to dupe veteran rewards that sold for tens of millions, and once most halfwya informed players figured out looping afk macros, everyone became rich, and the next thing you know every third player is sporting RIS armor, a jetpack or an AV-21, things that used to require lots of work and luck and skill, but with the market flooded with money no one is afraid of taking losses and no one cares about risk vs gain, and soon after pvp goes into the toilet too because every player who doesnt have top of the line gear gets ganked all the time, which means new players get discouraged and quit, which means the game makers stop making as much money which means nerf nerf nerf to make more user friendly.

[GoreBag]

I know a guy who used to play that online Final Fantasy game (X? XI? I don't remember) and he used to complain about the insane in-game inflation caused by the Chinese/Korean farmers. I didn't actually understand the gravity of the situation until he linked me to an article about how Squaresoft was cracking down on the farmers and banning them by tracing large transfers from one account to the other.

The whole thing reminds me of the online situation in the Sims where certain people began acting as Simwhores and making real money by having cybersex with Simcustomers. Mind-blowing.

If anything, though, that video just makes me think about how different things are in China.