Professional Farmers

[Occhidiangela]

3) Macro-Economics: I argue that a "professional" players killing the same monsters in a single location for 12 hours straight has a nearly identical impact on the macro-economy as would 12 separate "casual" players, each killing those same mobs for 1 hour each. In both cases, roughly the same amount of gold is being "created" from monser drops and trash loot sales. In addition, about the same number of useful items are "created" as well. I assume that the number of "professionals" is very small in comparison to the general server population. I would also expect that the sum of the /played times for all professionals is vanishingly small when compared to the total /played times for all other casualy played characters. Even if professionals' mob kills accounted for 1/1000 of total kills on a server (which I think is probably an over-estimate by several orders of magnitute), then the mobs they kill would have to drop 10 times better loot than the average mobs to even have a 1% impact on the overall economy. Overall, I'm extremely skeptical that professionals have *any* measurable effect on the *aggregate* economy.

I think a better estimate would be to consider the percentage of a given server population is made up of 24/7 farmer accounts, then consider the average hours per day of a non "professional farmer" player account. Then consider the min max approach the farmer takes in terms of funneling gold and items into the system. Your 3 to 1 does not remotely come close to approximating the delta, IMO. (Or did someone else suggest a 3 to one casual farmer versus regular farmer.)

I was under the impression that 2000 per server was the max population, but that may be "max on at a given time." I don't know where that number comes from deep within the recesses of my memory, nor how many total accounts/players are the limit on a given server.

If 20 accounts are farming professionally for their living as described in the article, out of 2000, that is 1% of the population producing a significant proportion of high end goods. I'll suggest that their Min Max approach makes them contribute a good deal more than 1% of the gold in the economy, due to their motivation and set up, and the percentage of their time on mechanical tasks versus all other tasks. (Chatting, having fun, etcetera.) I don't have the time to make a model with a few variables to try and compute that, but I hope you get the drift of my idea.

Farmers logged on 24/7 on busy servers each pre empt someone else from playing for X time if there are waits to log on. That is a cost to the player that you can't measure in gold.

No one seems to have addressed that issue, has waiting gone away as an aggrivation?

Occhi