Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Buying success in online gaming

Filed under
Gaming

With the spread of broadband connections, multi-player fantasy gaming, in which thousands of gamers can play simultaneously, has taken off.

Stunning virtual worlds promise adventure and glory, often for a monthly access fee of around $10 to $15 (£6 to £8).

The most popular titles have attracted more than three million subscribers. The social interaction between players often leads gamers to develop tight-knit communities, forming in-game allegiances.

It is a formula that has also led to some seriously dedicated playing. Around 20 hours a week is the average.

"You've got a lot more human emotions coming in to play, you're getting friends, a social group and you may have a social standing within the group," says Rhianna Pratchett, a gamer and games writer.

"It can be very addictive and the hoarding of weapons or getting the best weapon or getting to the next level up or getting the next spell is addictive."

One gamer in China even killed a fellow player over a sword used in an online game.

Paying to win

But dedicating so much time and effort is not the only route to success.

Over the past year the trade in virtual items and currencies used in these online games has been booming, despite it being outlawed by most of the game producers.

It is called the secondary market. Rather than relying on skill and guile, players can use cash to buy the items they need.

Hundreds of dollars can change hands for anything from swords to flying carpets on auction sites such as eBay. And many online companies have started offering direct selling services.

This year in Asia the amount of money changing hands for in-game goods is expected to be more than for the games themselves.

But there has also been a backlash from many gamers.

Matt Royle, who spends four to five hours a day playing World of Warcraft, says richer players are getting an unfair advantage.

"People who spend money to buy gold or weapons or even to have their characters levelled up are just plain cheaters, to be honest.

"People who play for the real amount of time and for the gaming experience are getting a raw deal because other people come along and just ruin it with their high-level characters or their weapons that they haven't actually earned."

And some experts, including lecturer and games consultant Professor Richard Bartle, who helped invent the first online multi-player game, agree.

"Most of the players hate this kind of activity, really, really hate it. As far as they're concerned, they're playing a game," he says.

"And if someone comes along and turns it from a game into work, they think: 'I work all day, and now my fun is being spoilt by these people buying success.'

"You can't buy a gold medal and then claim you're the world high-jump champion. You have to jump something."

Powerful market

Sony Online Entertainment, responsible for EverQuest 2, at first tried to ban the trade in virtual artefacts. But just a few weeks ago it did a u-turn, opening up its own official trading site to US players, called Station Exchange.

Chris Kramer, of Sony Online Entertainment, says: "The decision for our company to create Station Exchange was kind of a long road for us.

"Over the last five years we've seen the secondary market for sales of virtual goods go from a few guys selling our characters on eBay to about $200m in sales annually.

"We can no longer ignore a secondary market that has reached levels as high as that."

Sony Online says it offers casual gamers who are time-poor a way to keep up with friends who play more often.

It also gives new players the option of joining a version of the game that allows real-world trading or one that aims to control it.

Some players clearly like the shortcuts that cash offers as well as the chance to make money.

Rhianna Pratchett says: "It's always a kick when you find a great weapon in the game anyway, and if you're actually thinking: 'That's great, I can go and sell that on eBay and get myself some DVDs or buy my Mum birthday present' or whatever, I can imagine that can be a lot of fun."

Trading in fantasy games can make you serious cash. One player made $4,000 in one month.

With real money at stake, these virtual worlds are being used as very real sweatshops.

In some countries, groups have been set up simply to collect valuable items and gold, a forbidden practice known as "farming".

Others use automated programmes or bots to do the job, but the result is fewer in-game goodies for the genuine players.

Taking action

The gaming companies try to stop them, but it is unclear how much success they are having.

Two online sales companies told us it was possible they were being supplied by "professional" players.

One, which claimed to do 300 sales a day to World of Warcraft gamers, reassured me that I was unlikely to be banned from the game, or taken to court, if I traded with them.

The games developers hold the intellectual rights to everything in the game. So, technically, even if you buy or sell gold or items, they are owned by the game's developer.

Blizzard Entertainment, publishers of World of Warcraft, says it monitors what happens in-game as well as on the internet regarding real world trading of items, but it would not reveal how it does this.

It says it has taken action against more than 1,000 players. While it does not support independent companies buying and selling its in-game creations, it has not yet decided what action to take about this problem.

Blizzard estimates more than 90% of its own World of Warcraft subscribers disapprove of buying virtual items with real cash.

Because most real world transactions are completed in-game between characters, some think they will never be stopped.

Others believe the gaming hosts are not doing enough to curb it.

For those who like to use their cash to get ahead, it enhances their gaming experience.

But those seeking a level playing field, where success relies purely on skill and dedication, may soon be left high and dry, dreaming of a fantasy world.

By Dan Simmons
BBCnews

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.