What is the difference between Fallen Earth and Aion? Ok, sure, there’s the wings, the combat, the currency, the crafting system, the point of view, the lore, the engine, and pretty much everything else. But what is really different about Fallen Earth? Given up? Fallen Earth doesn’t have the same problem with gold farmers that Aion does.
But how does Fallen Earth do it, you may say? In a recent interview with Massively.com, Project Manager Colin Dwan had these points to make, which he did after this break.
- Logging: Here is a feature many MMOs try, but few get to the true root cause. Sure the mule gets banned, but what about the gatherers, the multiple transfer accounts, and other slightly less “throwaway” accounts hidden in the process? With Fallen Earth’s built-in logging system, the company is able to see exactly where the money came from, all the way from point of sale to where it was harvested. This way the financial hit for getting caught is much higher, as gold farmers can’t hide more valuable accounts behind a traffic line of trades.
- Random Placement: One of the easiest forms of botting in the game, Fallen Earth battles the harvesting bots by having resources spawn in random nodes across the wasteland. Similarly done with NPCs, who are given similar position and respawn variance.
- Punishing Buyers: Most MMOs will ban you, without a second thought, for buying gold. In World of Warcraft it is considered altering the economy. Fallen Earth takes a case-by-case approach, and only bans players who bought a large number of chips (multi-millions). Sellers, of course, are banned with extreme prejudice. The idea is that chip farmers know they won’t be running free, and buyers will have second thoughts before making that purchase. Fallen Earth does believe that people who buy chips are not looking to alter the economy, but are simply looking for a boost to buy a skill/vehicle/item.
- Moderated Chat: For those of you who have played Fallen Earth, you are well aware that the chat channels are moderated, almost at all times, by a member of the Fallen Earth staff. The only global channel, new player, is well moderated, and any attempt at advertising gold farming services would be quickly squashed.
- Legal Real Money Trading: Although he didn’t give a firm answer, my money is on a no in this category. Fallen Earth won’t be adding in a legitimate form of real money trading, although Colin did take the time to talk about how adding such an update, as seen in the past, can cause even bigger problems in the game.
So there you have it, other MMOs (I’m looking at you, Aion, Runescape, and the long list of free to play games). Random nodes, moderated chat, and more detailed logging is what you need to stomp those gold farmers into the ground.
It will, of course, be interesting to see how the gold farmers react to Fallen Earth, as to whether or not they consider the game to be worth continued investment despite all of these setbacks. In Aion, we saw the gold farmers retaliate not only by hacking the servers, but now they are phishing accounts in large quantities.
My farmed gold is leaning towards leaving the game forever, but I may just be an optimist.
MMO Fallout 
While I agree with all these great things I’m sure the Fallen Earth staff is doing, and I fully admit Aion needs to do more work — the real problem is this:
Size.
It’s simple, any large-ish MMO, WAR, WoW and now Aion have been plagued with problems. Can they do all of what Fallen Earth has done? Sure, but there is a pure numbers and how many bodies the often out of country farmers are willing to throw at it in the case of the larger MMOs versus smaller.
Champions online doesn’t have a gold farmer issue nor does a plethora of smaller MMOs. I’m sure Champions is also doing some neat things, but at the same time, I guarantee the farmers don’t feel they have as much of an audience. Also smaller MMOs means having one of your resources take 25% of their off time to work on a solution would have a measurable impact, whereas 25% of a devs time on something like the huge Aion issue? Very little impact.
On top of all this, games that have been released heavily in Asia (where we know many of these gold farming companies operate) are going to naturally have more cheat/exploit/farm resources devoted to them. Smaller games based here in the US? They may not know or even care they exist.
It’s also true that in F2P games (also often released in Asia first) they have huge issues.
While I agree more customer service and dev dollars need to be spent to combat this issue, some of this is kinda a “where you live” situation. Akin to comparing how much security a farmhouse has in the midwest and then crowing that you don’t have the crime issues of Chicago or Dallas.
Hello Xianthe,
You make a lot of good points I would like to address.
Foremost, during my time playing Aion, they did a pretty good job of policing the chat channels and bashing bots (Most of the earlier posts here on MMO Fallout related to Aion are related to their efforts to ban thousands of bots per week). Aion seems to be a big interest for gold farmers, so much so that they are attacking the players and stealing accounts to keep their investment in the game going. Much like WOW, Aion is not a hard game to bot, at least long enough to get your gold and transfer it over.
Champions Online’s lack of gold farmers is partly due to the game’s small size, but much like Tabula Rasa, it’s partially because the game’s economy is virtually nonexistent, making the currency and items useful to a very small number of people.
One part I wanted to bring up was the overwhelming occurrence of bots in Asian games, as you’ve pointed out. I believe I said this in a WoW article, but reportedly WOW China is full to the brim with bots and gold farmers. The same can be said about free to play games. I wanted to post a few pictures of Dungeon Fighter Online, but it’s hard to get a good screenshot of a populated player area without a bunch of gold spamming messages blocking the picture.
Every game has its own priorities. Champions Online needs to work on the economy and team-building aspects. Fallen Earth needs to work on giving weapons a real impact, among other issues. Aion? Aion needs to work on the bots and the grind.
I saw this happen with Runescape, as Jagex attempted to cut off methods for them to pay for their accounts, the gold farmers eventually started using stolen credit cards to pay for membership. Eventually the fees from processing back thousands of accounts a month using stolen credit cards threatened to shut the game down, resulting in what the players know as Jagex’s version of the NGE (Heavy trade and pvp restrictions, no more drop on death, and other updates)
I don’t mean to imply that Aion is being lazy, considering they opened and hired an entire new division just for busting bots and silencing spammers. The thing with gold farmers is that if you build a better trap, they will build a better mouse. This ongoing upping of the stakes always ends up in disaster, as the developers usually end up making a move akin to throwing your brownie in the mud so the other guy can’t steal it from you. Sure, mission accomplished, but now everyone loses.