In SWTOR’s particular case, the items that players buy from the cashshop can be sold on the auction house. It makes quite a bit of money on its cashshop. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a free-to-play game. Until I spoke to a couple of colleagues of mine who were clearly more intelligent than me. Community Manager Eric Musco explained that BioWare simultaneously “banned hundreds of accounts and removed over nine billion credits from those accounts.” And the pleebs rejoiced I was one of them. Recently, Star Wars: The Old Republic took pride in taking down a gold selling ring. But that’s not the idea that developers usually try to sell us on when dealing with gold farmers. I don’t like the rampant account hacking or the possible child labor. Of course, there will be objections to the methods that gold farmers use, and I’m certainly not condoning everything that gold farming companies do. Although this might partially be botted, there are people behind the controls people who - for better or worse - are playing the game. They train characters onto mobs, collecting the gold that drops. However, the majority of gold farmers don’t do anything more than players with multiple accounts do.
In those cases, it’s clearly not good for the game. In some cases, gold farmers use exploits and hacks to gain gold. Of course, the economy eventually balanced accordingly, but this does demonstrate the logic behind those who dislike gold farmers. Nearly overnight, the prices of in-game items multiplied ten fold. However, by the time players finished the new tutorial questline, they had at least a million credits, and frankly, since the questline also gave them gear, the players had nothing to spend the credits on. Prior to the introduction of this questline, a player cracking one million credits was a substantial feat. I don’t think that this was more evident than in Star Wars Galaxies when the team revamped the game’s tutorial into a linear questline. We’ve seen examples of gold devaluation all the time when a new string of quests come into a game that give more gold than the previous questlines and when there isn’t a substantial way for the gold to exit the economy. If a single player were to flood the market with a bunch of gold, then simple economics tells us that the value of that gold will drop. I didn’t give it a second thought because it made sense. The developers told me that this destroyed the game’s economy, and it caused items on the auction house to be expensive.
I fell victim to this train of thought, too.
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