As you know when new MMOs get launched, most of the time they are plagued by gold farmers and gold sellers and bot-ing. Well maybe in this case UEC farmers and sellers. They tend to affect economy and many other various things. How are you going to approach this issue with the economy being so important to the PU?asked by Villaovi

We're pretty aware of the gold farmer, gold seller, and the "botting" side. It's one of the reasons why the one form of revenue that we were thinking the game would have, besides selling the initial package (because we're not gonna have subscriptions like you have typically on World of Warcraft or something) is that we would sell UEC credits within a certain limited amount to players. So you don't actually have to go and buy it from someone farming, because that's always going to happen. We're sort of thinking of different ways that allow money transfers to happen in the game, that hopefully potentially could curtail a certain amount of gold farming, and all that kind of stuff. I will say that in general it's pretty hard to clamp that down because people can always even sell an account if you prevent people from sending money to someone else inside the game. We haven't made all the full rules, but in our universe it will be like the real world, so you just can't willy nilly transfer money and transfer items and equipment to other people without having to pay some form of... you know, like in the real world, you have to transfer title and it costs you to transfer title on a car, and if you give people something they have to pay taxes... and so we have various things that are trying to be like the real world in the Persistent Universe design that will hopefully replicate some stuff that's in the real world. And some of that may or may not help to reduce some of the "botting" and the gold farming. I think the biggest thing is if they can get it from a trusted source, i.e us, and that's all guaranteed, then you'd tend to go for that unless someone is radically undercutting you on prices, and that's obviously something that we would try to go after because we don't want to have the game destroyed by someone saying "here, I'm gonna sell you my account and I've got 20 billion credits in it. I'll give it to you for 5 dollars!" ... Those are all sort of things that would be no-nos against our policies. But like I said it's early days, so we'll see. It's always a constant struggle, and I think no one has got a magic silver bullet for that, but we're aware and we've got quite a few people that have worked on some big MMOs and so they have some ideas and solutions, but I don't want to share too many of them because obviously you want to keep some of that in reserve.