I would have to go back to look for quotes. I believe it was stated they planned to 'actively discourage' sellers and buyers from doing so. Details on what that would involve I do not remember.

First, I'm no developer so this is all theory based on what I think I know...

Short answer is no and yes.

I don't believe they are specifically "banning" gold farming as practice, but they are trying to set up an economic system that doesn't create a situation where it can thrive, as it does in other games. The finite economic system is the tool they are using to subvert this tactic. You can try to corner the market on product x, but the fact that it can and will run out, and most importantly, not just magically respawn, is supposed to be the brake on the engine.

We will all see if it will work.

In theory, if you kill "all the gophers" for pelts, the gophers will go extinct. And the price of the pelts will vary depending on their supply and demand. So if you push the limits of the system you can and will break it. And once it is broken, it is broken. And you, as players, have to live with the results. So with that in mind upfront, it may be in your own best interest to work as hard on keeping it stable vs. exploiting it for short term profits.

Sound interesting?

Can the community police itself for the good of their own world?

Or are we predestined to leave nothing behind but a scorched pile of rubble?

Do we win the battle but lose the war?

What is the role and responsibilities of the community leaders (the nobles/aristocracy of the game) to preserve the world against the greed of it's own inhabitants?

Some serious socio-economic questions to watch play out simultaneously on each of the four distinct and separate servers over the planned ten year life of the game.

I'm very curious to see an overall perspective of how each one picks and chooses it's own path.

Caspian said that it wouldn't matter as this system would be made moot.

OPC scripts already exist so technically that is like having everyone botting (the quality of the script will be up to you).

There is no instant travel or quick way to move large pay loads so they would have to use the same methods as everyone else in order to procure and ship gold. This is assuming they find a gold mine first and get full rights to said mine without the mayor/count/etc. getting involved and wanting a piece.

NPC bandits and deviant players will go after caravans as they are the ideal targets, assuming protection present can be taken on easily. Several players have already commented that if they were to find out about a shipment of gold/silver/etc. was for gold sellers, then they would target them out of spite (I may or may not be one of these deviant players....).

If the game runs as it should, then all the actions of gold sellers could be replicated by anyone/everyone as everyone would have the tools.

EDIT: I have thought about over this time and realized that one way for gold sellers to be successful is to get those in high influence positions to either give them newly minted currency either directly or giving them the ability to mint. Of course, that is highly unlikely due to how it is easily preventable, but something to be aware of...

As a further example: In other MMOs you might have a gold farmer who goes out and camps a mob spawn. When they kill the mobs they drop gold and items, the player then sells the items to NPC vendors and takes the gold to sell for RL money.

In CoE if you go out and kill 10 wolfs, all you are going to get is 10 wolf corpses. You need to bring them back to your town and sell them, or process them yourself, and then sell the products. At which point you are playing the game, not gold farming.

They should still monitor for gold seller activities and ban the IPs of the offenders. They are an atrocity to be burned off the face of the planet! Don't get me going on the geopolitical makeup of these thieves, as it would get me serious demerits for improper forum conduct.

Obviously one of my major pet peeves...

Logistics is going to kill most ways a Gold Farmer would be successful.

How will you get gold to the purchaser? You can't mail it like in other MMO's. You have to either have the seller or the buyer travel to the other person, to handle the transaction, or have some trusted middleman deliver it.

One way I could see that might work, would be to form an Org in game, that taxes it's members, and "mysteriously" hands out sums of money to "random" people. Doing so wouldn't necessarily be to someone's advantage, seeing as it makes it easier to target the Org, and shut it down if it were disruptive to the game.

SBS wouldn't probably have to step in in that instance, as we the players would probably handle it.

You probably wouldn't even see too much spam from someone shouting in a Town advertising such a service, as once again players could shut it down through in-game actions. The Mayor of the town could banish them, someone who has less than legal ambitions in the game, would probably target them for fun, or some other such action.

It just doesn't seem to me that there is a good viable plan to make it work, that wouldn't backfire on the people trying to run the Operation.

Caspian has done a number of video Q&As with Bicycle Walrus and this topic came up:

Bicycle Walrus: "IP blocking, that something that comes up every now and then and the reason why because there is a general fear from MMORPG, it’s a stigma for MMOs that gold sellers from china, are going to come on and interfere with the game. Do you have any plans for IP blocking or keeping or blocking certain regions from participating on NA or EU servers."

Caspian: "We don’t plan to at this point, and the reason why is because we feel like the game pretty well self-regulates those types of players. So at this point we’re going to open it up to whoever and if we find that with our chat system being fairly isolated and local. You cannot just spam in general chat that doesn’t exist. With us it’s kind of separating players from characters and being able to lock chat channels that you create, so that people cannot just join it. We want several communities spawning up, there will be the ability for players to moderate those chat channels so they can kick people out of those if necessary.

When it comes to people gold farming or being in the game, solely for the purpose of raising money in the economy, well you cannot really farm gold in this game. It’s not like you go out and clear away the wave of NPCs and then the next NPCs spawn… you farm the gold congrats but now the money's gone. It’s in circulation and as soon as someone pays you real world money to take the in-game currency that is no longer in your possession and is now in some other person's possession and they’re going to turn around and do whatever they want and it’s going to filter through the economy. And similar to OPCs people keep asking us ‘what about botting’ and it’s like the NPCs and they’re doing their thing but ultimately when bots or NPCs or OPCs they go out and do something that raises money, that money has to come from somewhere and it has to go somewhere. So as a closed economy there’s a lot less concern for us. Especially when it comes to gold farmers and the need to block IP. So at this point, unless we have a distinct need for it we’re not planning for that."

It'll happen. Every game ever that has a currency it happens. However, based on the info we have, it will have a greatly reduced impact on the economy. And will probably make the price of purchase of the currency even higher than other games, further reducing the market for it.

The one you need to worry about is the people that find the glitch that lets them dupe the system itself. People that make a business doing these kind of things are well versed in what can break the code in most online games. These are not people killing hundreds of rabbits to turn a profit but loopholes and such to create huge amounts of money overnight. This throws the entire games economy off once people start rolling around with X100 the amount of money anyone one else has.

I remember a game I played had a merchant that would sell potion ingredients for less then he would buy the finished product. So people just sat there buying the components for like 5 silver and sold it back for 1 gold. Over and over and soon the entire market spiked because people with tons of duped money could buy everything raising the value overnight.

This is what the alpha and beta test really need to find. I know most people are looking to get a early look at the game and iron out what they plan to do in the real things but finding loopholes could save the entire game from some very slippery slopes.

The logistics of farming and selling gold, currency or whatnot have already been touched on.

But there is also something else you have to consider:

Does it even make sense to buy gold?

We know this will be actively discouraged so buying gold will be inherently risky, putting your account on the line. However, in CoE we will have better options than buying gold on a black market of sorts.

Ultimately, you want to use the gold to aquire something else and everything will be physically in the world somewhere.

If you desperately want something, why not just try to get it directly?

That shiny armor the chief guard struts around in? Study his daily routine and get it! This will be a far more thrilling and rewarding experience than paying real money to order it from an artisan. And it is very much an option you do not have in most games. I expect players will rather become deviants than go the black market route.

If you are determined, you will find a way.

Things that will make this harder then other games.

No universal chat channels - Its hard to advertise in game. This does not stop someone from looking online but they have to go out of their way to see who is doing it.

Gold needs to physically be moved - this is probably the best one because if I was to buy 5,000 gold, so that I can upgrade my house, the online seller has to have that sitting in a container somewhere (risk of being stolen) they have to put in on a horse drawn cart (no instant mailing system) and walk it to the player (could get robbed on the road). This might be not to bad task if you start in the same county but what if your a half a kingdom away. That could be hours of riding your horse/cart.

Buyer needs to store the money - Like the last part if you buy large amounts of gold you have to find a place to hide it because it is vulnerable to theft. Whats to stop the guy that sold you that gold from using his other characters to break in and take it back so he can resell it.

Would actually be fun to hear someone in a Tavern selling gold, every deviant player would shadow that character and see were the gold is stashed. Do not think there will be many happy goldsellers in CoE.

Posted By Kaisarissa at

In almost all MMO's there are people who farm and farm to sell gold(or the games standard currency) to impatient players. Most MMO's prohibit this because it allows players to buy gold instead of loot crates. With the absence of loot crates and the presence of finite resources and closed economies, will Soulbound Studios prohibit and ban gold sellers or will they allow players to do this?

The main thing you have to remember is that CoE is fundamentally different than MMO's when it comes to aspects like this, so much so that Gold Seller type activities are both impossible and encouraged at the same time.

Typical Gold Seller

Your typical Gold Seller needs to make a bot (or few) that farms gold from drops, builds up an inventory, sells stuff for gold, and rinse and repeats the process over and over.

You can't do this in CoE, when you kill stuff, the corpse doesn't drop what it doesn't already have. No creature is going to have 1000 gold to hand and it won't respawn and wait for your to kill it again. You kill it, it's gone.

CoE Gold Seller

The only effective way to get gold would be to steal it from players houses, as money is a physical item and even if you find a player to kill carrying gold, they won't have much. Banks and Carts carrying money will be very well guarded, so a bot isn't going to be able to wander up and take what it likes without dying. So in this case, CoE encourages Gold Seller, because it'll be a hard process to steal from players, and you become a criminal for doing it... bounty hunters will track you down, and a gold seller account is going to get killed repeatedly and die off pretty quickly.... this isn't to mention the fact that even if player breaks into your home, they can only leave with what they can carry.

As the Gold Sellers character is now classified as a criminal, how do they sell the gold? If they try doing it outside game, they may have to travel across the whole continent just to sell it, and they'll be dragging piles of gold while doing it. Good luck to them getting to where they need to be within a week, while bounty hunters are tracking them and other nasty things lurk out in the wilderness ready to steal all the gold they are about to sell.

If they want to sell it in the local area they are at, well thats just dumb, simply because who in their right mind would go to the effort of stealing all that money and then standing out on the street trying to sell it. The local authorities would arrest them and return the gold to it's rightful owner, and then if they are seen around that area again, they'd be run out of town.

For a gold seller to actually work in CoE, they have to play CoE. Using a bot to make money would be next to impossible, and even if they found a way to do it, the other players around them wouldn't stand for it, get bounty tokens put on them, and run them out of town.

I think this is where Banks come into play, a Bank could sell in-game gold if it's powerful enough or even loan it to people. If you refuse to pay it back/can't pay it back your assets get "liquidated". Even then, buying it with real money doesn't guarantee you get to keep it.

You know, looking at this thread (as someone who was/possibly still is planning to wage wholesale war on any RMT company I discover setting up in my area), I realised something reading through the posts that I don't think really clicked with me before now. The question popped up in my mind: What purpose do gold sellers serve in other games? What's their role?

Yes, their profit is derived from selling gold (realistically, from the accounts they scam and clean out amongst the ones they service), but the base means they use to start funding their racket and the baseline that keeps it going is basic resource accrual and sale. Despite not having a place in most MMOs on the market, there's a need that they meet that people generally don't like playing to meet: feeding basic resources into the economy. They're able to function so successfully because they set up an ingame function to do something almost nobody wants to do to produce enough common resources to fund an economy.

Which means that CoE will be mostly useless to them as a cash cow. NPCs will already exist to do their jobs. Sure, players might farm faster, but the niche they would send their bot armies to occupy is already going to be completely covered. They can mass produce common craftables such as horseshoes, swords, and the like... but so can the entire NPC smithing population. Anything they would want to farm for profit, they would have to actually play the game to produce and sell.

Which is a win for everyone, really. SbS solves the problem of RMT maggots eating the ass out of their game, the poor bastards the RMT companies employ to monitor their bots get to have fun, and one of the legitimate worst aspects of online gaming is transmuted into a positively contributing niche within the game's economic systems.

Or they just quit and ply their trade in other titles. Either way, it's a pretty solid win all round for the rest of us.