Following up with last week's news report and interview with game designers. Gamespot interviewed a veteran game designer and creator of Ultima
series,
Richard Garriott addressed the issue of gold farming in his new
MMORPG, Tabula Rasa.
Gold farming first originated from Ultima Online, gamers obtained large amounts of virtual currency and sold them for real money. Although Richard did
not approve, the activities were fairly common from casual gamers to gold farming start-ups.
This time, Richard will try something different, something that does not involve players grinding monsters for gold. From what we know so far, Tabula
Rasa will feature an innovative AI system that will constantly change the world so no longer can farmers camp around and wait for creatures to be
respawned.
In the interview, he admitted that it is a complicated issue and probably needs to experiment and learn from mistakes over time. With the subscription
based business model, the demographic group of customers will have credit cards, willing and purchasing power to buy gold for convenience and time.
However, Richard and NCSoft will definitely be trying to resist it.
Tabula Rasa is scheduled to be release on October 5, 2007.
Coming back to other news around virtual world and RMT industry,
Virtual World News reported UK have started to look into the possibility of taxation on virtual transactions particularly in
Second Life ahead of the US.
Via
Raph the videos from Virtual
Goods Summit 2007 are available on
VGSummit website. Check them out for talks on
the impact of virtual goods, business opportunities, success stories and much more from the experts of the industry.
