Monday, October 5, 2009

Gift Giving a Slippery Slope to Gold Farming?

. . . LOL. You know, you give people a wonderful tool. a SPECTACULAR tool. And what happens: begging.

Wouldn't you like the ability to give a friend something in this game? Like, say you just really genuinely liked someone in game, and it was their birthday. How cool would it be to be able to buy them a gift . . . even something small?

You can just see KI really wanting to give us a taste of this important part of social interaction . . . and the moment you give us all the ability to do "good." Someone has to come along and use it for "bad."

At some point I have to just sit back and marvel at this aspect of human nature. For the most part, we all just do our thing. We run around, play the game, and do the right things. And then you get a small handful of people who constantly try to buck the system or get a leg up somehow. "Schemers" for lack of a better word.

Before the test realm here, all we had was the ability to gift treasure cards, but now it appears the door to something more insidious could open.

. . . begging could very well just be a beginning here. Gold Sweatshops in Wizard101? Can you imagine? Well, that's exactly what some people at Central are imagining:

Central talks about gift giving. (Also must reads: Automagic talks about gift giving. mywizard101 talks about gift giving.)

So what do you think? Can you ignore the spam that's going to happen or is the ability to give a gift worth it?

Let me know what you think!

6 comments:

Quantize said...

Gift giving will definitely increase the amount of beggars and flood of general chat in the commons. It will not, however, bring about golf farming to Wizard101.

All you can do with gift giving is tag an item in the crowns store as a gift to one of your friends (and pay in crowns). There is no way for gold to transfer to crowns in this case. Sure, you could pay some 3rd party source 10$ for item X, but then they have to pay 10$ in crowns to give it to you, and they make no profit. No profit = no gold farmers.

Sierra Starsong said...

Thanks for the mention!

Tesh said...

I still say that the Puzzle Pirates dual currency system is the best way to combat gold selling problems.

As for gifting, I'll take it and just ignore people. I play on low population servers anyway. I'm all for increased freedom, even though it means some people abuse it. The alternative, clamping down on freedoms because of the *inevitable jerks* never sits well with me.

Of course, filters are great. This reminds me a lot of the fuss over the constrained chat in the game. They eventually loosened the reins for "grownups", which was a good move, but left in the *option* to set your own client to the constrained version. That's smart, letting players self-select what they experience. (Though smarter filters would enable even more player control. I, for one, would love to automatically mute any comments that use leetspeak. That would cull a LOT of the begging right there. Give me a "blacklist" of terms that I never want to see, and let me go to town.)

SorionHex said...

Gifting's gonna be awesome... But for the main part I probably can't even afford to give beggars anything xD Anyways, so long as it doesn't become anything remotely close to Runescape begging we should be fine... The day Wizard 101 releases the School of Pigs is the day Wizard implements complete trading into the game... Eek X_x

Shy said...

I personally think I can ignore the begging. I'm not in Wizard City much, but when I am, I ignore everything there except my friends talking to me. Gift giving is a very cool addition and I'd love to have it in the Live Realm. I see both the ups and downs to this, and believe I can live with ignoring the beggars.

L. R. Jonté said...

The begging has already begun. I saw it yesterday in the Test Realm Commons.

Pathetic.