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I just read in interesting article that people make a living off of other peoples mmos and its created an interesting market of sorts in the real world. I've seen it in many games but after doing more reserch its actually becoming such a problem that some countries actually arrest people for doing it. Games such as world of Warcraft, have people who will sell rare items and gold for real cash. Now this isn't a side hobby for these people this has become a multi million dollar trade. Some lone people will make 100,000+ yearly. What i found funny is gang fight are breaking out on these games, a group of gold sellers will report others so they can corner the market. A quote from one of the articles said "In May, Blizzard, the publisher of World of Warcraft, banned over 30,000 gamers who were using automated processes to harvest gold, and removed over 30 million gold pieces ($4,048,582, according to GameUSD.com's latest exchange rate) from the game's economy."

Here is one of the articles i found on it http://www.forbes.com/2006/08/07/virtua ... ljobs.html

This might be something to think about when you make your game, do you want to embrace these people and let them do it or be like some games and try to get a cut of it by making that a feature of your game. Or would you like to ban these people all together.

This is nothing new. Gemstone, a once super-popular text-based MMO (MUD) had a thriving 3rd party gold and item selling economy going back to 1995 at least! Of course these were smaller in scale. EQ1 brought a much larger scale gold-selling economy, and FFXI bumped it to newer heights than had previously been seen back in 2003. But then of course WoW changed everything, and the scope of gold-selling operations changed forever.

As far as us making our games resistant to these types of markets, I don't think we have to worry about it too much. There has to be a high demand for these types of services in a specific game, or gold sellers won't spend the time to obtain the goods. Even some of the less popular AAA on-the-shelf MMORPGs have little in the way of gold and items being sold for them because the games are not popular enough to warrant the time spent farming for them. RF Online is an example of a AAA game that has very little of a 3rd party economy. If your game got large enough to have demand for gold and item selling services, I think you would not be too worried about it because that would mean your game has become a runaway hit!

You'd say that but a text based mmo i use to play wasn't very big, most of the players were either dead accounts or once a week log oners. The was only 200-500 truely active players per server and only 2 or 3 server and most of the active players had accounts on multiple servers. But even that game had this, people were selling there accounts and people would buy. So all it takes is 500 players for it to take root. Its just in most games those kind of things are not allowed so they go under the radar until the game becomes huge.

Accounts are different than selling gold and items. Pretty much every game will have some account selling, but the difference is who is selling them. Larger games will have the same groups who are selling gold and items farming accounts as well, powerleveling character after character to sell them (or botting to raise the level quickly). Smaller games will have regular players selling their own accounts when they no longer wish to play them, and that will occur in almost any game. The thing with having "professionals" who powerlevel accounts to sell, sell gold or items is that they aren't going to target games with low demand for their wares. And that takes a fairly large game to have that kind of demand. Outside of Gemstone (which, last I checked, still had a 3rd party website selling items and gold that has been around for over 15 years), no MUDs have 3rd party gold seller services, not even the most popular MUDs still in existence (such as Achaea or Aardwolf). Even some smaller commercial MMOs do not really have gold seller markets (some websites are set up but they will basically eternally say they are all sold out because they are not buying from any farmers).

Yah i guess your right. This wont be relevant to everyone. My game is build in such a way this wont be relevant, but i know others who are making 3d mmos which will hopefully become large games. It was just something that people should be aware of. I mean some games like mine has a very strict economy.

Hehe, apparently China taxes these type of people. Gold farmers and all lol.