How Free-To-Play could eliminate Gold Farming.

I love a good online MMO, but the most dreaded and annoying element I have encountered in nearly all of the MMO games I have played is this dreaded gold farmers.  They people consider themselves honest working people who provide a needed service.  And I’m sure some pimps would use this justification too.  Not only is gold farming harmful to the players, but it is a deathblow to the game’s company.  Before I discuss solution lets look at the problems that come about because of Gold farming.

The first and most obvious effect of collecting massive amounts of gold is inflation.  Lets look at the definition as defined on Dictionary.com

Inflation

–noun

1.	Economics. a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency (opposed to deflation ).

First the gold farmers flood the economy in the game with lots of the currency enabling players to pay outrageous sums for items.  And after a person see that they sold a 10 gold piece of useless wood for 100 gold then the prices begin to rise.  Why!?  Because the low items are usually used in a crafting system that players use to make the better items in the game.  Now the crafter has to raise his or her or its price just to cover the expense of making that +1 Sword of Ultimate Beat Down.

The second effect that this has is the High Level Noobz which come in two distinct flavors.  I will deal with the most hated flavor first.  This Noob (yes this is the offensive use of the Noob) went and bought a high level character that was used to farm gold.  To sweeten the deal with these characters the farmers usually get them the rarest items in the game (more on how they do this later).  He joins a party with the best equipment bragging about himself and proceeds to screw the entire party over cause he has no idea how to play the characters role in the party.  This is very frustrating at high levels due to the penalty for failure.  And this Noob has the nerve to get upset when someone calls him on it.  The next noob buys his way to the top.  Instead of questing and joining groups to work for rare items and learning along the way.  He just buys the good stuff with all his daddy’s cash.  And with his arrogance he will throw tantrums after 10 minutes fighting saying what he wants to do or that someone else suxors!  I hate these guys!

Due to the long ours involved in this type of operation the farmers can and will hunt for the rarest of items ALL DAY LONG.  See while the rest of us have lives where we have to go to work, eat, sleep, talk to people, and heck, go outside;  these guys sit 24-7 for that precious gold.  Pretty soon these guys have a big monopoly on the rarest items.  Then what do they do?  They drive the prices up on them.  Why? So you will be more likely to buy gold from them to get the items.  Its a vicious cycle that these low creatures perpetrate.  This is how they are able to sell characters with the best stuff and we all have to suck it up and take it.

Lastly necessity  breeds invention.  In come hacking to accomplish unrealistic goals set be the companies that task these people to farm this gold.  I had a conversation once with a gold farmer who told me of trying to raise an insane amount of 100,000 gold a day when a good drop was between 10-15 gold.   In order to accomplish this gold which is impossible on drops of gold from fighting they had hacks which would tell them when rare monsters with rare items were around.  It would also automatically move them to the monsters and fight for them.  This allowed one person to control more than one person at a time.  The farmer I was talking to at the time was controlling three player.  So now you have this unfair advantage taking everything from an area.  It was many a times I traveled the lands and across seas to find that the good camp ground was empty and full of farmers! Not cool at all.