This has to be the most annoying thing for me in a mmo, the gold spam. For the last three days I have bin receiving junk mail in SWTOR, I was actually hoping that they (EA/BioWare ) would have found a innovating new way to stop gold selling and power leveling in there bran new game…no, I was a fool.

So I have been thinking about it and here are two ways too at lease slow it down that should be in agreements with EA’s philosophy:

1- Sell credits to players for real money (People will buy credits no matter what, might as well be legally).

2- Charge 1 cent per mail pass 100 mail per week (possible exception for guild officers).

I realise that there will be a lot of criticism towards this idea but that is the internet.

If you have other solutions please post them.

Neither of those will stop gold selling whatsoever.  The most it will do is cap the market.  And people will flip out on EA for trying to do so.  Blizzard can do no wrong in the face of the internet, and people flipped out on even them with their Diablo terms of service.
 
If the fact that someone somewhere is buying credits is really bothering you that much, I don't know what to tell you besides handle it.  You can't control what other people do, you can only control your reaction.

I have no solution. As I dont care. Other people have money to pay for slave labor. Thats there sin. Not mine.

They already have an innovative solution in place by banning people for entering high level areas or attaining high level items at an inappropriate level. Nothing bad can come of this.

The solution to gold sellers and power leveling isn't to.. you know... make it legit so that it's literally everywhere and legal. That just makes it ok. ...Wait, you want to buy credits in game for money, don't you? That's why you came up with this stupid idea of making gold selling legit. Hey, just because you don't want to have your account banned because you don't want to work for the things you get in the game doesn't mean you should ruin the game for everyone else.

Pretty sure Blizzard already solved this on their end by making it actually possible to make high amounts of gold without being insane whilst also somehow not trashing the economies on many servers. Like seriously I have more gold than I know what to do with I only play about 9 hours a week tops. There is still gold selling but it's a very quickly dying market and just to get by they have to sell huge amounts of gold super cheap. 
 
As for power leveling, it is literally non existent in WoW with things like Recruit a Friend (you and a friend gain 3x xp when leveling together all the way until 5 levels before the level cap) and even without that you can get a character to max level in less than a week nowadays, it's not a time consuming process at all.  
 
Both of these problems are very easy to solve, companies just need to do what they've been doing for the past 6 years and continue to copy/paste what WoW continues to do.

wait, those emails were REAL? I thought they were just a joke done by bioware

now I'm super disappointed

I don't know how you would even begin to do this, or what it would cause, but my solution would be to get rid of the grind.

No one wants to do the grind. That's why it's called what it is. But currency and power-leveling are ways to lessen the amount of time doing things you don't want to do.

So what's the solution? I don't know. Maybe make the grind something that's not dependent on time and more dependent on skill. Make gear something that is found or crafted not based on resources, but the amount of people willing to help you make that thing. Make crafting skill-based, like putting together disparate pieces of a puzzle. I can come up with many ways to divorce the grind from currency and gear (which are, in MMOs, really one and the same), but if you implemented them, they would completely break an MMO and/or make it not fun. And if you did it well, and somehow pulled it off, we'd be looking at a very different MMO than what we're used to.

@Brodehouse said:

Neither of those will stop gold selling whatsoever. The most it will do is cap the market. And people will flip out on EA for trying to do so. Blizzard can do no wrong in the face of the internet, and people flipped out on even them with their Diablo terms of service. If the fact that someone somewhere is buying credits is really bothering you that much, I don't know what to tell you besides handle it. You can't control what other people do, you can only control your reaction.

Im with this guy, stop your whining...and buy some of my gold

I would liken it to Gaben's opinion on combating piracy: Provide a superior service.

Offer legitimate pathways to achieve the same end results that power leveling and gold selling provide. WoW introduced heirloom items that gave the characters bonus exp to make leveling easier once they had already done the grind once. Smart players could use professions and the auction house to make massive gobs of gold with a relatively low time investment. I think the underlying issue is that people are playing MMOs with an aversion to spending too much time in them. They don't have the time to achieve the level they want or the currency amount they want within the time frame they have deemed acceptable.

As you age you tend to have more money and less time, as opposed to being young and having more time and less money. As long as there is a way to throw money at their problem in lieu of time, this problem will likely always exist. After all, these farmers are providing supply to meet this demand, regardless of whether or not it violates the ToS. Eliminate the market and they will go away.

If you play this game normally, even if only a few hours a day, there's no shortage on cash.
You can get all the gear, credits and materials while leveling.
You'll have enough for a speeder and you can buy something of the trade market too.
 
A friend of mine plays very little each day but he's still rich enough to buy whatever he wants, credits are useless at the moment.

I've never gotten any mail like that in the game. Now I feel super left out.

Wait, is this an in-game mail thing, or via email? If it's in-game then it wouldn't bother me much. The private messages are the only bothersome part of the gold selling to me, and I just ignore those too. Not a big deal for me.

I would liken it to Gaben's opinion on combating piracy: Provide a superior service.

Offer legitimate pathways to achieve the same end results that power leveling and gold selling provide. WoW introduced heirloom items that gave the characters bonus exp to make leveling easier once they had already done the grind once. Smart players could use professions and the auction house to make massive gobs of gold with a relatively low time investment. I think the underlying issue is that people are playing MMOs with an aversion to spending too much time in them. They don't have the time to achieve the level they want or the currency amount they want within the time frame they have deemed acceptable.

As you age you tend to have more money and less time, as opposed to being young and having more time and less money. As long as there is a way to throw money at their problem in lieu of time, this problem will likely always exist. After all, these farmers are providing supply to meet this demand, regardless of whether or not it violates the ToS. Eliminate the market and they will go away.

Most of my friends work for a certain "Mmo" company or companies. I took my ex gf who was Chinese to one of these parties and had a good ol time when everyone was giving her a hard time saying "STOP SELLING GOLD" a bit racist but pretty funny. I don't think you can stop it and well I'm glad her family makes money doing it...wait

@EightBitShik said:

Most of my friends work for a certain "Mmo" company or companies. I took my ex gf who was Chinese to one of these parties and had a good ol time when everyone was giving her a hard time saying "STOP SELLING GOLD" a bit racist but pretty funny. I don't think you can stop it and well I'm glad her family makes money doing it...wait

She's your EX-girlfriend you say? :P

BioWare already has a ton on their plate with disgruntled customers, patches, and crappy UI. It'd probably smart on their end if they did "sell gold". It cuts into competition and opens up another market before they inevitably lose subs for people who are too lazy/dumb/etc to make their own credits.

Hrm i havent gotten any spam mail in it yet. Something to look forward to i guess.

@TaliciaDragonsong said:

If you play this game normally, even if only a few hours a day, there's no shortage on cash. You can get all the gear, credits and materials while leveling. You'll have enough for a speeder and you can buy something of the trade market too. A friend of mine plays very little each day but he's still rich enough to buy whatever he wants, credits are useless at the moment.

To some extent that is true, the games economy hasn't really taken place yet. I guess that will happen once high level characters get their skills up and whatnot. But credits arent useless i think, i know more people who are actually close to broke in the game. And in comparison to me my friend who is nearly a lvl 25 Sith Warrior now, he has just enough cash for his speeder and the skill, but after he gets those he has pretty much nothing left, and he hasn't been trowing money around.

While i at the same level had 180K, so more than enough for the speeder and the skill. Now at lvl 35 i have over 400K on my Bounty Hunter. It kind of comes down to your play style i think, i use no money almost, except for buying stuff from my trainer.

It isn't a big deal.

And when auctioneering in WoW I had about 300 mails per day.

If EA begins selling Credits for real money then I will lose all faith in both EA, Bioware and Star Wars (not that I have much left for any of those anyway but still...), also I doubt that would solve anything as the "gold-sellers" (or credit-sellers I guess?) would just undercut EAs prices.

@Ulain: Yes :(

The easiest solution would simply be to lock out China and the rest of the Asian markets. Of course gold farming might move to Russia and eastern Europe then.

@Village_Guy said:

If EA begins selling Credits for real money then I will lose all faith in both EA, Bioware and Star Wars (not that I have much left for any of those anyway but still...), also I doubt that would solve anything as the "gold-sellers" (or credit-sellers I guess?) would just undercut EAs prices.

But at a certain point it would actually work in favor of EA. The RMTs have to spend time and money collecting the credits to sell. EA on the other hand just presses a button and more credits are generated. Once the price drops low enough, the Illicit farmers will move on to a game where they can turn a better profit. If a company had the balls to RMT themselves and engaged the illicit farmers in a price war there's no way they could lose.

@SteamPunkJin said:

@Village_Guy said:

If EA begins selling Credits for real money then I will lose all faith in both EA, Bioware and Star Wars (not that I have much left for any of those anyway but still...), also I doubt that would solve anything as the "gold-sellers" (or credit-sellers I guess?) would just undercut EAs prices.

But at a certain point it would actually work in favor of EA. The RMTs have to spend time and money collecting the credits to sell. EA on the other hand just presses a button and more credits are generated. Once the price drops low enough, the Illicit farmers will move on to a game where they can turn a better profit. If a company had the balls to RMT themselves and engaged the illicit farmers in a price war there's no way they could lose.

This. Not sure how many games with subs already have their own gold-selling markets in place, but it seems like this would be a more likely outcome. You aren't really removing the effect of illegal gold-sellers, you're just deterring them and they'll try a different game instead.

I can't imagine them having a preference in which MMO they farm for hundreds of hours for their share of 2 dollars a day.

I still think EVE Online has the most workable solution. The company sells items (for roughly the cost of a monthly sub) that can be redeemed for a month of playtime, or sold for whatever you want. The only currency removed from the game is via AH sales tax. So it's effect on inflation is no more than the other AH items. So they aren't actually selling gold, they are letting players with more gold play for free and players with more free actual cash, get in game currency. It helps that nearly everything in that game is player made so the currency is used for everything. In WoW there are many things gold can't get you. Sure there are some crazy expensive vanity mounts and such. But the best gear isn't had via gold.