Here are some old but novel and effective ways for dealing with it:

1. Allow players to block people and thus prevent them from seeing their messages - standard in every game I know of.

2. Allow players to have a auto-blocking system that filters chat based on key words such as "gold" or "www" or ".com" - currently in use through addons and extentions that people have built.

3. Ban Gold selling accounts - this helps in the short run but they plan for this and thus make use of alternate accounts, usually they spam through the use of free trail accounts with older accounts holding their earnings and thus become harder to track.

4. A FFA PVP world or any PVP world where players can exterminate bots on sight - very effective means and the quickest

5. Ghost the Spammer - make it to where they can send their chat and it displays on their chat box but it doesn't get broadcasted anywhere and they could never know the difference unless they monitor their network output. Not yet implemented in any game I know of. Keeps them on one account longer.

6. design your game where buying or selling doesn't affect your game - very hard to do indeed as that is one of the main incentives in the game.

7. Monitor backend transactions for farming activities (ie. large amounts of gold transfers or holdings, lots of rare items), can be confused with a high end guild that farms alot anyways.... takes up lots of time and people resources and is very tedious.

8. players have ability to flag gold sellers/spam bots and gm gives logic tests - most farmers are sadly, real human beings and are taught to give pre-scripted answers.... its kind of obvious though, alteast in America and english speaking countries

9. bind on equip or bind on pick up iteams our soul bound - makes the items unable to trade or drop and can only delete

10. soul bound money for certain transactions or winnings - make gold won from a given area such as arena tournament winnings unable to drop or trade and player must have that much gold in their account until they spend or destroy that much.

I haven't seen anyone using yet the Aion model as an example of what can be done to slow the appearance of goldsellers:

You limit the access to trade canals to level 5 or ten, make it so that you have to invest a day or two to reach that level, and ban the whole account on gold selling offers, not just the characters. This way, the gold sellers would have to spend the equivalent of a whole month of access on two days worth of fastgrind, and be banned within two minutes of trying to sell gold. Just not profitable.

Second option, you try to go the Entropia way: You back virtual currency with realworld currencies, and sell them yourself. Then, there is just no point in having other persons trying to sell money cheaper.

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The solution is simple - Stop users from buying items/power lvl'ing/money.

The execution is the hard part.

The developers often get blamed for the misuse of item sales outside of the game, even when it really is more about self control from the actual users.

Don't buy outside the game and the gold sellers will go out of business.

You know who you are... now stop it ....lol...

Every time you buy an item outside the game, you are eating into the budget of that game. The developers end up spending time and money trying to fight the results of your actions. Even the game mechanics have to be changed to prevent those actions.

It doesn't matter what a game does to adopt to gold selling/power lvl'ing/ item sales from outside the game, some time down the road the sellers will figure out another way to beat the system.

You can't make money if no one will buy from you. Maybe the pressure needs to be less on the sellers and more on the actual buyers.

Ohh well.. my thoughts on the matter.

Don't give players incentives or temptations to buy it. Supply withers without demand, right?

Unfortunately, this approach has collateral damage. By rendering money virtually worthless (either by making it very easy to obtain or making sure everything a player needs is quite cheap), its value is gone. "Being rich" doesn't matter anymore, except for purely aesthetic reasons, and this may bother some people. Still, if it's easy to earn money, players won't be tempted to use illegal methods to obtain it. If you earn, on average, 10 gold a day, a 5000 gold mount seems out of reach, and that gold spammer saying, "5000 gold for $200!" starts to sound pretty attractive. However, if you could earn 100 gold a day, or if the mount was only 500 gold, then it seems possible to eventually get it without buying gold.

Will some people still do it once in a while? Probably. But that's when you employ anti-bot systems that should mop up the few gold farmers that will be there. Gold farming companies, logically speaking, wouldn't waste their time with a game that they can't make money off of, right?

People will always buy what they want to buy - illegal or not. Look at drugs, for example.

Cocaine sellers make hundreds of thousands of illegal dollars a year, I would guess (on average).

The punishment has increased, therefore increasing the cost of the product (to counter-act the possible charges), but it still doesn't cure anything. I suppose the government could make it legal and then start actually governing the whole process of these drug transactions via tax and such, but then people would look at the government, shaking their heads in disgust over their behaviour - a massive PR downfall, indeed.

Now, if there was a legal drug that was just as great an experience, or if the drug wasn't appealing anymore, perhaps people wouldn't buy it, or consider buying it, at all. That's where we have to start looking for answers.

So, what drugs can we give to gold buyers/sellers?

Player-based economy, bartering systems, pvp with full loot... no idea. I figure you'd have to have a lot of your game figured out before you start worrying about bots.

Just find what things are of value in your game, and think how people might try to sell those valuable things.

What about having a game that has no currency as such but uses just items you craft for trade? Would the players then create their own currency, ie trading like "I give you my assault rifle for 200 iron screws and a golden shovel"?

Originally posted by maji

What about having a game that has no currency as such but uses just items you craft for trade? Would the players then create their own currency, ie trading like "I give you my assault rifle for 200 iron screws and a golden shovel"?

Then they would sell the items instead.

The only way to stop 'gold' selling is to make all inter-player trading impossible.

Originally posted by MMO_Doubter

The only way to stop 'gold' selling is to make all inter-player trading impossible.

If you mean to stop it as a possible action, yes, but to stop it as a viable money making venture is quite possible.  It has been touched upon, but to state it clearly, if an MMO existed that was not so item dependent and no item (gold or otherwise) was 100% secure then I don't think you would see large scale gold selling on an organized level.

Just think about it, if items are not the main focus of the game and things are fairly easy to acquire (and just about as easy to loose) then the incentive to purchase is low (because it is not that difficult to get what you need yourself) and the disincentive to not purchase is high (because of the risk of loss).

So even if the incentive becomes high enough, what do we care?  If we don't like gold selling, then take the gold from both the seller and buyer whenever you can.  That will be a real deterent to any viable business model that has to have predictability in projected profit over costs, and such a system wouldn't allow for that.

Anyway, I created a poll once on this and related subjects and I would be appreciative if those following this thread would weigh in as the more responses the more representative the data might be.  Check it out:  http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/211482/page/1

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Would most agree that with enough time any player of most MMORPGs can attain the level and items/gold they end up paying for from leveling services and gold farmers?

So if there is any gain over time then there will always be something to pay for beyond subscription fees.  If items and gold can't be traded, but characters gain skill and xp over time, then people will pay to save that time if the value of that time is worth more than the money required to make the payment.

Thus, all the suggestions of what can and can't be traded have no real effect if there is anything to be gained over time invested acquiring skills, xp, levels, gold, items, etc.

So at the root of the problem is the grind, and some people want to save time.  If there is no gain over time (and thus no time investment) then there is nothing to pay for, but you just have an FPS.

Therefore, I concede that beyond removing all time-based progression, this type of spending can not be stopped.  However, the title of the thread refers to stopping this activity from 'ruining your game' and that is something different altogether.

Many of the suggestions given to this point if taken with an entire design may to some degree reduce the negative impact of seller actions on the game, but I propose that a drastic change in the progression model be considered, not to the point of complete removal, as mentioned above, but to a point where there is no grind per say, and focus on actually playing the game is enjoyable, not as a means to an end, but as the end in and of itself.

In other words the entire focus of the genre would have to be shifted.  At this point the focus has become so much about gaining levels, skills, items, or whatever toward some idea of end game, or maxing out, or otherwise arriving at some point, and everything in between, no matter how fun or awesome the first 20 times, becomes tedious.  It is hard for many to image an MMORPG not based on this progression model.  Right now you grind mobs to get a more powerful character and more powerful stuff so that you can grind more powerful mobs to get more powerful stuff, and on and on again and again.

Some people want to skip this and go right to the end where they can do who-knows-what but it has got to be better than the repetitive content of most games.  If some payment to some seller can save them this unwanted experience, they will pay it, especially because once their character is leveled or they receive the gold or items there is absolutely no possible loss to them.  Would some of them pay for that gold if they could be robbed on the way back into town?  The answer is, yes, some still will, so again we haven't solved the 'problem.' but might have reduced it. It is a step in the right direction in my opinion.

However, the other thing we have to ask is how does the selling of gold 'ruin the game' for the rest of us. Is it because they get things faster than us? Is it simply not fair? If the former, there are always people ahead of us in the game, perhaps those that started at the same time but have more free-time to invest. If it is because it isn't fair, then are we admitting that the grind of the game is not fun, and that they shouldn't be able to skip it if we 'have to' experience it.

Let's think about that, and ask yourself what they would be missing if playing the game was the point and not playing through the game. If having a maxed character wasn't the goal, if the content of the game were not accessed through progressive levels or getting awesome stuff with massive amounts of gold, but rather through interaction with players and a dynamic game world, then, would we then finally stop the gold sellers? NO. But would we care? If they pay to get something that is not secure and is not the focus of the game, what do we care? If they pay to skip content that is the point of the game, what does it matter to us? It doesn't. In the end, the problem is solved not by stopping it, but by creating a design where it doesn't matter to us if it occurs, because the game itself, for once and finally, becomes fun.

(sorry it is so long, but it helps sum it all up for me)

Full loot, open PVP.

'nuff said.