WAR's Jacobs To Gold Farmers: 'Go To Hell'
It's been a long, weird road for gold farming. I can still remember my first, naive reaction to real-money-trade gold farming in MMOs, all those years ago - I thought it was a joke. Surely, I thought, there isn't enough demand to make gold farming an actual problem rather than a curious example of human behavior. Nowadays, of course, nobody can deny that gold farming and RMT is not only big business, it's also a big headache for game designers trying to keep their in-game economies stable and accessible.
We've also heard the other side of the story, reading about the plight of Chinese gold farmers in surprising places like the New York Times.
With the launch of the latest MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, developers are taking the fight to the streets... er, to the servers. EA Mythic's Mark Jacobs waxed bellicose with the caps lock:
"I HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING,"
"I've been waiting for the day that WAR launched so I could have the absolute pleasure of instituting policies to make their lives more difficult so we could drive them out of WAR,"
"We will continue this policy and expand it to the other servers. We are in for a real fight against these bottom feeders, and it will be a long and costly battle but it's one we are going to take to them and this is only the first step. After all, this is WAR,"
Jacobs created a "strike team" for WAR that is dedicated to removing gold-selling spammers - and the team even uses public banning messages to let users know when a gold spammer has been banned. This last bit is a nice touch, as it gives gamers a sense of the scale of the issue: WAR has already banned over 400.
Moreover, Jacobs says that gold sellers have offered him "a piece of the action both personally and corporately" to "turn a blind eye." Jacobs told them to "go to hell."
WAR Bans Over 400 Gold Farming 'Lowlifes' [Gamasutra]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, MMOs, Video Games on 23 September 2008
· Comments (5)
Other stuff like this: ea mythic, gold farming, mark jacobs, war, warhammer online
Hear, hear!
Now what's even greater... is that on this page I read this very news from, there's a banner for a WAR gold and EXP site.
"4 years gold service EXP, now on Warhammer"
Hilarity.
Since when did using "wax" as a verb followed by an adjective become such a popular way for people to try to sound smarter? I've seen it in various places across the internet, but this site is by far the worst offender that I've encountered. It just comes off as really pretentious.
Is that a hater I smell? hmmm..
Tiny does use the whole "wax" thing often, but he's a pretty smart kitten. I'm pretty sure he's not sitting around opening his thesaurus or checking dictionary.com's word of the day.
To the article, good on them! I've often waxed angrily at the morons that do farm, and since I've been waxing RVR as of late in Warhammer, I'm ready to wax happily at the Auction knowing full well the devs have waxed the gold farmers.
Pedantry about people's vocabulary aside, I think it's good they're being so pro-active about the issue.
I have yet to see a gold spam/whisper in Warhammer and was wondering what was taking them so long. I notice he couldn't resist making a snarky jibe at Blizzard in his blog either.
Keith:
You do know that words can have more than one meaning, yeah? Just because you don't have a word in your common lexicon, doesn't mean other people shouldn't use it.
It means you're ignorant and close minded.
I always picture gaygamer as a site for open minded people. Level up your thought process? -20 lame points +20 awesome rank for Keith!
Also, watch the pretention casting comments. Pot. Kettle. Black.
Tiny, great article. I appreciate your humor. OMG.
I think I'm done waxing poetic on the subject now.