IGE On Why Power-Leveling Is Like Day Care

simoniker writes "In a rare interview with the COO of MMO item-selling giant IGE at Gamasutra, topics discussed include the ownership of in-game items, why gold selling can be a "great business opportunity" for Chinese suppliers, and why power-leveling (paying other players to increase your character stats) is something IGE will be moving into." From the article: "Clarke also noted that, in pure economic terms, paying people to level your character is 'a market which tends toward commoditization.' Of course, those handing over their character have 'a high degree of sensitivity' to what's happening to their virtual avatar — the COO quipped: 'It's almost like day care... you'd be amazed how much they check in.'"

Do you want to get rich, or do you want to get ...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.fuckedcompany.com/den/ [fuckedcompany.com]

Re:Just enjoy the ride

[C0rinthian]

I'd agree with you if it's your first character in a game. However if it's a re-roll then the levelling process can be VERY tedious. I've gone through the barrens on 3 characters in WoW, and I'd be happy to NEVER do that again. I don't agree with power-levelling, but I can understand the desire to let someone else do the grunt work for you...

Re:Just enjoy the ride

[crystalattice]

True. It kinda defeats the purpose of playing the game if someone does it for you. Okay, so your a level 60 badass. Did you have fun getting there? Oh wait, you wouldn't know.

If the game means enough to you to want to get a high level, then it should mean enough to earn that level. Otherwise, why are you playing? If the game play sucks at the low-levels, then why bother continuing?

Re:Just enjoy the ride

[Coffee Warlord]

Probably because in every MMORPG I've ever played (and I've played a whole lot of them), leveling is the most repetitive, dull, mind numbing time sink in the known universe?

There's no entertainment in killing slightly different colored sprites for 50-60 levels. It's a treadmill, and god awful boring.

Want to stop gold farming and powerleveling?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to stop gold-farming and power-leveling you have to design your game in a way where skill, rather then time invested, is the primary attribute that determines advancement in your game. Consider (for a moment) that you're using a Mouse/Stylus or Wiimote to draw Runes onto your screen in order to cast or choose your combat action, with this setup you can have hundreds of possible actions you could perform at any given time; if rather then 'auto-blocking/resisting' you have to draw the appropriate block/parry rune or the correct counter spell rune there (suddenly) is far more skill involved in the game. In a game like this you might consider the experience a person collects to gain a level as a trial before further training. Equipment (in a system like this) is almost un-necessary thus gold suddenly takes a back seat, and powerleveling is useless because higher level spells would require more complicated runes (which would be difficult to draw quickly, in the correct situation, without the practice from leveling).

Re:Just enjoy the ride

[linuxkrn]

It depends on the game.

I do droks runs in guild wars for a few reasons. I've not only been the runner, but been ran by others myself. In guild wars the lvl cap is 20. You are free to change your secondary class as much as you want. But you cannot change your primary class. This means there are several other builds you could try out. However, before Factions, it took a very long time to get where the good stuff was. Droks armor is highest in stats (not best skin/but AC rating), plus the skills trader has more advanced skills.

If you've already played the game through say 4-5 times then doing it again and again for each new character type is boring and painful.

And before factions, we were limited to 4 characters per account. Which meant you had to delete your old ones before trying out different classes. Guild wars isn't a level grinder like most other RPG games. After you hit 20, that's it. You just focus on better skill combos and different areas. Why make the players go through the entire noob areas again?

If you look at factions, this is what the game devs did. They made it so you can level up to 20 in two days with 3000+ XP quests. In GW1 it took week(s) at 250-500XP per quest.

And finally, running is a quick, not always easy, way to make some money. They have nerfed all the good farming areas and made it so money is much harder to aquire. Granted green/gold drops help, it's a pain trying to do player-player trades. In one droks run I make 10-15k in 35 minutes. When a full suite of nice looking (15k) armor cost me 150k it's still hard work.

And if you're wondering, playing with skills and builds is what it's all about. I just got my ele to do 2,672 damage in one spell hit. (4x-668 damage to lvl 5 guys). =)
http://www.linuxlogin.com/public/2672damage.jpg [linuxlogin.com]
BTW, that's wine 0.9.19 running a test this morning. Why health bars overlap.

Dont Trust IGE and Their Offspring sites

[Croakyvoice]

Just so you know, IGE are also the people who own the QJ/PSPupdates sites who have also tried to buy out sites like PSP News [dcemu.co.uk]. The QJ sites charge 3 dollars a week to forum users so they can remove ads/popups (which firefox moves ok), Like IGE they are buying out the competition, the recent buy was a Podcasting site, they have also Paid Homebrew coders Like Fanjita for exclusives and threatened Legal proceedings against PSP Homebrew sites who didnt link to them for the release. For the "premium forum acess" QJ people get money off vouchers for other sites owned by IGE. All in all a real scam network

Re:Time is money

[Wornstrom]

What I would like to see from blizzard is a feature where if you are on your 2nd character and you already have a level 60, then you have the option of purchasing rested XP from the innkeepers in major cities. Like, check into a room, and you have full rested XP, they could even pro-rate it, based on how far from fully rested you are.

Re: I'm just going to say it

[26reverse]

With respect to the specific WoW problem... the reason most people don't know "how to play" their characters is because the game setup encourages bad habits. For example, I got to 60 with a warrior by dumping everything into damage. My reasoning was simple: kill it before it kills me. But once I got to 60, I had NO idea on how to keep aggro contained... and I had a very rude awakening while trying to tank.

My entire skill set had to shift from dealing damage (while solo-ing) to taking massive amounts of damage and holding aggro. There was no learning curve for this. The game doesn't "teach" you along the way... like most "leveling" based games do.

Re:Just enjoy the ride

[hazehead]

Power leveling is the opposite of wishing your life away, it's like taking steroids. Same results as everyone else, but you get there so much faster!

The two MMOs I've played (FFXI and EverC) I would have paid decent money to skip certain segments of wandering through the same places, fighting the same monsters, over and over...

Re:Enough with the analogies

[steveo777]

Pretty much why I just have my brother do it for free. I just let him keep most of the spoils. He'll call me and tell me he's gained two levels on one of my char's every once in a while. But he's the kind of guy who enjoys the grind. And I am not. I like the interaction, and getting things accomplished. So I level my main, but the alts don't offer much of anything new except editing your strategy in killing different MOBs in WoW. Just my 2 cents.

Gil Sellers Are Evil Incarnate

[TheZorch]

Around December of 2005 gil sellers were killing prices on the Auction Houses of Final Fantasy XI. Prices were outrageously high. Not long after SquareEnix banned several hundred players and removed several billion gil from the game. After that prices returned to normal. A few months later I noticed some characters with funky names running around a zone farming mobs. They were moving like a highly trained squad. This was not typical player behavior. Their names were something like "BK1A, BK1B, BK1C" and so on and so forth. I asked around on my Linkshell about it and they told me they were gil sellers.

Around that time wierd things started to happen in the AHs. Prices on items that players would normally put up there in order to make money were dropping rapidly. Someone was undercutting prices like crazy, and outrageous amounts of items were flooding the AH also. Take Fire Crystals for instance. Crystals are the basis of the crafting system of FFXI, without them you cannot craft at all. A stack of 12 Fire Crystals would normally sell for 8,000 gil were undercut to 1,000 to 2,000, and you'd see 60+ stacks on the AH. You'd think that a drop in price for these items would be a great thing, but for players who sell crystals on the AH to make money its a bad things. It makes it harder for players to make money needed for upgrading armor and weapons, and otherwise being able to buy other crafting materials. The overall economy suffered as a result and is just now starting to recover.

To combat gil sellers SE implimented a number of countermeasures. The servers, all 32 of them, have packet sniffers which watch for bot programs that snif packets watching for NMs to pop. Now, there is a delay between the initial packet sent from the server to the client announcing the pop of the NM so that bot programs can't claim it first before the players can.

Another countermeasure they did was to put an EX (Exclusive) flag on certain items dropped by NMs associated with popular quests. EX items cannot be sold on the AH or traded. Characters can only have one RARE flagged item in their inventory. This includes personal inventory, MogSafe, and Mog House storage. You can store then in the delivery box by sending them to yourself. Many quest items dropped by mobs and NMs have both the RARE and EX flags.

Lastly, the amount of gil that can be sent to any character via the delivery boxes is limited to 1 million gil. All of this is common knowledge.

Now that Chocobo Raising has been implimented and Chocobo Racing is just around the corner now comes the issue of rampant gambling. Gambling has been in FFXI for a long time thanks to the /random command. It lets you do a dice roll. Typically gil sellers aren't involved the in this form of gambling because Chinese gil sellers don't like drawing too much attention to themselves. However, gambling on Chocobo Races could easily be exploited by gil sellers. SE must decide to impliment a game-supported gambling system for the races or risk having gil sellers run even more rampent than they already are.