The problem with all virtual game economies that I’ve come across is that if you have a large number of players whose income is measured in top denomination/hour played (i.e. a character makes 5 gold per hour of play) then prices for items will have a convenience tax, sometimes far outstripping a rational analysis of the item’s value. In other words, a rare drop has several gold/plat tacked on to it’s value simply because a high level character can decide to buy it for another of their lower level characters at a price that far exceeds the value of the item, but because the high level character is so wealthy it’s still a trivial purchase.

For new players, this presents a problem in that they often can not (or have greater than designed difficulty) acquiring the items they believe they need to make the game fun or optimized or whatever. This is the target market of the gold farmers, and until this aspect of game design is changed, the gold farmers will be a fact of life for game players.

Unfortunately, there are a number of ways to combat this (restrict players to one character per server, disallow trading of items, etc.), but they have bad consequences for game design for most players.

I do have one question about this suit though — could it backfire? I feel like there have been a number of lawsuits around MMORPG eulas that have been settled/dropped/otherwise fixed by the game companies (the ebay gold farming guide and the Lambda v Vivendi suit spring to mind), and it’s made me wonder if they suspect that their base assumption that they are sovreign over their virtual worlds is fundamentaly unsupportable in court.

Lambda certainly felt sure that they would be able to demonstrate that MMORPGs are more akin to theme parks or public entertainment spaces than sovereign worlds… is it legal to sell the tickets from skee ball games? If it is, that would infer to me that selling mmorpg currency would also be legal.

But, I’m asking the lawyer =)

Yes farmers (who are quite likely supplying the gold sellers) do have a detrimental effect on the price of goods in the game. I’m not an economist, but it makes me wonder how much the greater supply of rarer items offsets the prices of those items compared to the inflation from the jacked up money supplies.

While I agree this seems a trivial matter compared to RL issues, it probably does make some difference in “the price of tea in china.”

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spawn_camping (referring to first-person shooter spawn camping, where players set up shop over the point where “killed” players are resurrected, but the idea is the same).