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This week we have interesting perspectives on gold farming from Game designer themselves.
A recent interview with Gamespot, Guild Wars' Jeff Stain expressed his view on gold farming.
Jeff was totally against gold farming business as he stated, "What happens there is that it floods your virtual economy with cheap gold. And of course just as in the real world the natural side effect of that is that prices go up everywhere.". And the company will ban accounts involved in botting or found to be professional gold farmers.
Jeff put it as "damaging" to the game and the players. Games are not played the way they are intended to and either the players have no choice but to farm gold or buy gold. However, Guild Wars has not been been a strong market for RMT business as we previously analyzed.
Another designer, Scott "Lum the Mad" Jennings did an interview with Something Awful. A quote from that interview "Farmers do not see MMOs as games, but as resources to be mined." Scott may be right or he was just sarcastic to say most of the Chinese found in US server are gold farmers. He also applauded Blizzard's effort to fight gold farming. Ironically, the World of Warcraft is the most active RMT market.
In comparison, Second Life a virtual world which encourages people to exchange real money with virtual Linden dollars had a tough financial week. Scams were everywhere.
The Forge reported a scam involving Ginko Financial. It is a bank-like operation where people put L$ to get interest in returns the company gets to use that money for investment. Basically, the interest is given at outrageous rate to attract money deposits. And when the people want to withdraw the company are saying they are short on cash as they have been investing. The company probably pay interest by the new deposit money and this use of cashflow resembles a scam called "Ponzi sceme".
PlayNoEvil reported another scam. World Stock Exchange, a virtual stock exchange service located in Australia apparently allowed the CFO the privileges to modify money accounts. A total of L$3.2 Million (about US$12,000) were hacked and stolen.
As scams and digital crimes become more common in Second Life, the government and law enforcement bodies will be in search for an effective regulations. Already in Canada, the police is recruiting Second Life residents as digital cops.
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