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Enter at Your Own Rift: How gold farming really hurts the economy
Recently, Trion Worlds CCO and RIFT Executive Producer Scott Hartsman talked to Gamasutra about how gold farming is a much bigger threat than we assume, particularly because of the large amount of credit card fraud. Those who played RIFT at launch probably recall the large wave of hacked accounts early on. According to Hartsman, the hacking attempts were so quick and so intense that the game could have been "denial-of-serviced off the internet" when it launched. As I was browsing the Auctioneer the other day, I was reminded of Scott's statement because gold farming has sucked a lot of the fun out of in-game economies in virtual worlds. Markets early on were lively, unpredictable, exciting, and full of freedom but very vulnerable because of the growing illegal trade of in-game currency for real money. In an effort to combat the rising real-life value of gold, games like RIFT have moved away from gold toward a system of non-tradeable tokens. But while these tokens have helped to curb the value of gold and reduce the demand for third-party RMTs, they've also removed a lot of the freedom from players. After the cut, we'll take a closer look at how exactly that's happened and why it hurts the economy.
