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[future12]

Hello. I am coming from MMO industry. I want to discuss about a problem of in-game economy. What is the key to making it well? I see that some new and older games to have similar problems. Lots of bots and trading currency with real money. For example look at site [sneaky spammer link removed. I see what you were trying to do.] It is very hard to prohibit this and making huge differences between players in the game. I do not want a talk about any example because I am looking for a global solution.

[Raptor85]

You say you don't want a specific example but honestly that's the easiest way to define the core of the problem.  While RMT trading did exist for housing (as it was a very scarce good) in UO back pre-2000 there were no real issues with gold farming and botting until the hyper-inflation started.  The game was originally balanced to reduce prices on items as people purchased them more often and since you lost everything on death it kept money flowing out as much as flowing in and kept prices low on most normal items, any player could easily afford normal items and could save up in the long run for the luxuries.  When items with stats were introduced, players were too afraid to lose them as it took time to farm the "perfect" items and the game implemented rules against looting, making death almost meaningless.  This created a spiral of item prices inflating like crazy, and money grinding bots were showing up everywhere doing things like auto-mining minerals and farming endlessly low level mobs for gold.  Things that once cost dozens of gold (easily obtainable by killing a few mobs) now cost thousands, and things that costs hundreds to thousands now cost millions, which of course made gold farming even MORE profitable as more people decided to avoid the grind and just buy gold.

The TLDR version

1.  If the game is too grindy to do normal actions without excessive amount of time spent people will cheat, the "WoW" style of rare items and item progression promotes grind and will invariably lead to inflation and attempts at botting, there is no real way around this as the entire design of this is around intentional grind.
2.  Without some form of continually filtering the majority of gold back out of the economy, prices will constantly inflate.  You see this in every game where there's essentially no risk to dying as every single player, no matter the skill, constantly gains a larger and larger fortune and it gets to the point where the convenience of buying items outweighs the cost and the prices start to drive up for everyone.

Most games that have issues with botting and  terrible ingame economy do both these things, the only real exception I can think of is eve, which while it has a fairly functional economy it still has pretty bad botting and inflation issues on some things due to how exceptionally grindy the game is.  The only reason it's kept as minimal in overall impact as it is a MAJOR GM presence in game, they have a massive number of admins watching over everything.

[droqen]

I have had this problem for a while... the 'global solution' you're looking for requires a defined 'global problem'

I think it's this:

Games in general have a habit of strongly rewarding playtime. Time investment. Etc. Play more, rewarded more.
Bring that into a situation where you can trade, where people are faced with lots of things they can't have without playing a lot, and suddenly people with cash are willing to spend it on... basically, buying time.

If anyone can spend TIME to get something worth REAL MONEY,
people will make BOTS to get at that REAL MONEY.

~

I see three general solutions:

#1. Don't reward playtime. (Reward something else.)

#2. Make your rewards something entirely nontransferrable. Keep in mind people even sell entire accounts so "quantitative and generally valuable, but just not tradeable" isn't good enough.

#3. Figure out how to stop bots from being able to pretend to be human. Do it well enough that nobody slips through the cracks, or at least be able to detect when someone does & react swiftly.