With the recent news of China banning the exchange of virtual currency for real world currency, it brings up the future of gold farming in that country, and possibly the world. While China is certainly not the only country which employs MMO gold farmers, it's often labeled as the biggest offender. There is certainly a difference between trading real world money for virtual money and trading virtual money for real world money, but this new China legislation shows that the legalities of both practices are becoming real issues to lawmakers.

So we're curious to know how you feel about the whole process of trading in either direction. It was once a stigma among gamers, but many companies are adopting this practice in a legal way, conducted by item stores and in-game currency exchange. Besides the fact that these item malls are supported by the game studios, do you see a difference? If so, what are they? Discuss!

Agent missions are one of EVE Online's most popular pastimes. While EVE is most often lauded for its open-ended gameplay, player-determined markets and PvP action, a significant portion of the game's players use missions as their primary income source. There is something comforting about missions that seems to draw players in. For many, running missions and upgrading their ship with the ISK becomes the focus of their achievements and their primary measure of progress. The ability of mission-running to provide a direct translation of effort into a stable ISK income offers us a reassuringly linear work-to-reward scheme in a relatively risk-free environment. Missions and exploration are EVE's primary PvE experiences and new missions are released with each major expansion to help keep the game fresh for casual players. There are even several epic mission arcs planned for the future, long sequences of storyboarded missions much like the quest chains you might find in other MMOs.

In this multi-part guide, I will thoroughly examine the profession of mission-running, from the basics to ship fittings and finally some tips and tricks for maximising your performance. In this first part of the guide, I look at the basics of mission-running from mission types and rewards to agent standings and how to find the best agent for you.

Many of EVE Online's most prolific marketeers use courier contracts to collect together items from their region-wide buy orders but that's not all they can be used for. Courier contracts were originally intended as a way to pay another player to haul items for you securely using a standard collateral deal but if you know how, they can also be used for theft. Over the years, players have found ways to use courier contracts for profiteering, gambling, and even corporate theft. In EVE's Machiavellian universe, anything you can get away with is fair game. This includes twisting an innocuous game mechanic like courier contracts into a tool for theft and piracy.

In this short article, I examine some of the more creative ways pilots have used courier contracts to steal and plunder their way to the top.

In case you haven't heard, Free Realms just broke the 3M user mark and is averaging 500,000 new users per week. With SOE's aggressive Saturday morning cartoon advertising strategy targeting kids, it may actually continue to grow at this pace. Any subscription MMO would be happy as a pig in slop at these numbers because of the guaranteed revenue stream, but what about a F2P/RMT MMO?

We recently discovered an interesting tool to guesstimate F2P/RMT MMO earnings called the "89/10/1 Rule." This rule says that 89% of your players won't spend anything, 10% will spend the bare minimum, and the remaining 1% will spend extravagantly.

After chatting with Massively staff who play FR, we came up with some numbers to play around with. The bare minimum in FR is $5 per month for a basic subscription. We also think the average heavy spender could easily drop $30 in a month. Let's apply the rule, shall we?

• 2,670,000 spend nothing ($0 total)
• 300,000 spend $5/month ($1,500,000 total)
• 30,000 spend $30/month ($900,000 total)

The grand total using the "89/10/1 Rule" is $2.4M revenue per month. That fancy, made-up number isn't too shabby at all. A subscription MMO charging $15/month would need 160,000 subscribers to pull in the same amount. Now, if only we could get some confirmation (nudge nudge, wink wink)...

Hello adventurers! It's been a while, hasn't it? We've been put off track thanks to an anime convention and a certain holiday, but we're back and better than ever! Last time I said we were going to talk about the auction gouse, and that's exactly what we're going to learn about today!

Final Fantasy XI's auction house isn't your standard ebay-esque system. While there is bidding, there is no such thing as a buyout, and you can't actually buy from a specific person. Items are put into the auction house, you can see if there are any of a certain item in-stock, and you can choose to place an amount of gil for that item. This type of auction is a variant on the silent auction, where there is no auctioneer and rising bidding price. Interested? Keep on reading and we'll get into the specifics of how this system works -- it's a little tricky at first.

Several years ago, CCP released a new upgrade for EVE Online's standard system scanner. Scanner probes were deployable tools that could be used to find ships, drones and a few hidden complexes lost in the vastness of space. The system was later expanded to provide an awesome exploration experience – combat encounters, dungeons and rich asteroid belts were strewn throughout space for some lucky explorer to find.

With EVE's latest expansion, the exploration system received a complete overhaul. A new scanning system was devised, complete with new probes and probe launchers. As if that wasn't enough, a new "True Exploration" mechanic was introduced with the appearance of wormholes all throughout space. Many wormholes lead to one of the 2500 new star systems that aren't on the main system map, each of which contains lucrative but dangerous sleeper NPCs that drop components for tech 3 ship production.

In this article, I delve into the new probing system with complete strategies that have been proven to work. Read on to get an edge on wormhole exploration.

The Simple Lifeforms blog went through a recent DFC Intelligence report on the most commercially successful MMOs and pulled out some interesting points. World of Warcraft took home the most revenue for a single game in 2008 with an estimated $500M+ and all MMOs combined (worldwide) earned an estimated $1,875M.

The top 10 earners list for 2008 included only one game that launched in the 1990s and that MMO was Lineage I. The majority of the top 10 list also featured MMOs of the fantasy genre, which probably won't come as a surprise.

Simple Lifeforms classified four primary ways that make MMOs money: retail, subscription, virtual goods sales (aka RMT), and hybrid models. While the retail/subscription model is generally considered the tried and true way to run your MMO business by most of the big publishers, you might find it interesting that only half of the top 10 list is comprised of these types of MMOs.

An unfortunate drawback of the DFC Intelligence report is that the revenue figures for the nine titles other than WoW have very large spreads. We see they made more than $150M and less than $500M but aren't given anything more specific than that.

E-ON, the official magazine of EVE Online, is running a contest where your best screenshots could net you 100 million ISK for each shot they publish in the April issue. E-ON editor Zapatero, who we interviewed in November, said what he's looking for on the E-ON blog, 'Postings from the Edge':

"What we're after are your screenshots. They can be of ships mining, travelling or fighting. They can be pilots tending to starbases, searching for wormholes or epic battles against Sleeper ships. In fact they can be of anything from inside New Eden, they just have to be good-looking images. The very best that we receive will be published in the edition of EON that's out next month."

Yesterday Joel "Raijinn" Sasaki announced on the official Vanguard forums that players will soon be able to use Live Gamer Exchange to sell their virtual items for money in the real world. Sony Online Entertainment, the developer behind Vanguard, already works with Live Gamer on EverQuest 2 to provide users a way to trade their in-game loot for cash in the real world.

The ethics of RMT aside, the addition of Live Gamer to Vanguard gives players interested in participating in the service a sanctioned, safer means of doing virtual-to-real-world business, forcing the deals through official channels rather than leaving players at the mercy of eBay, PayPal and other third-party sites to resolve disputes.

Live Gamer's pending arrival in Vanguard has been announced a little over a month after John Smedley, President of SOE, said in an interview with Virtual Goods News that the RMT service wouldn't make an appearance in the game. We reached out to SOE for clarification yesterday but as of this writing have not received a response.

[Thanks, Chris!]

EDIT: We were contacted by Mr. Smedley after this article went live to clarify that in the interview he gave last month he said that StationCash wouldn't make it into Vanguard, not that no RMT service would ever appear in the game.

Hello again Adventurers! So we've fought through the tutorial system, braved the Fields of Valor, and this week we get to go to WAR!

No, not Warhammer Online. We're going to learn about Final Fantasy XI's conquest! The conquest system is the weekly determination of who gets control of a region in Vana'diel. Remember that signet buff that you learned about in the tutorial? Well we're going to need that, first and foremost.

Signet may be a buff, but it enters you as a participant in conquest. Each time you destroy a monster, you will gain some conquest points and add to your nation's total for the zone. Each week, the Grand Dutchy of Jeuno will calculate all of the points and declare one nation as the winner of that zone. The nation that won gets to place their guards in the zone and will hold control of it until the next Sunday.

But what does control do? What can you get from the conquest system? Follow me, and let's find out!

Hello there Adventurers! I hope everything is going well for you in Final Fantasy XI since we last spoke. Where we last left off, we were speaking with the initial NPC trainer and getting through the opening "tutorial."

However, as reader Dana noticed, "They want me to go out and grind dagger skill... so... more endless grinding." Well, you're right and wrong, Dana! You're right, they do want you to go out and level up your dagger skill and that can be a bit boring. But the endless grinding has been lessened by the advent of a new system -- one that could easily be missed by long-term players. Today's article will be focusing on that brand new system, the Fields of Valor.

What makes this system so good? How does it help you in the lower levels? How do I use it? These answers and more are a short distance below, across the divide manned by the pretty blue "continue reading" link.

For many players of massively multiplayer online titles, the crafting side of these games is especially appealing. Quite a number of EVE Online's players are drawn to the crafting side of this particular sci-fi MMO, and those in large corporations and alliances have learned how their collective efforts can allow them to produce vast quantities of items and reap equally vast sums of ISK.

EVE's crafting system is also very much the backbone of the game. Almost every ship and module used by players in the game was created by another player. Those who are into the combat aspects of the game are reliant upon the producers to supply their tools of destruction, and that destruction in turn creates demand (and fuels profits) for EVE's industrialists. It's an interesting bit of symbiosis (despite that animosity towards those on the other side of the fence) that keeps New Eden thriving.

Would you consider your MMO-gaming habits to be detrimental to your performance as an employee? Lucky for us, we here at Massively are kind of expected to be invested in the MMO world, but it seems that it may be best to keep your playing a secret when looking for other lines of work. Raph Koster picked up on a thread at the f13 forums in which we learn that a recruiter in the online media industry has been told by employers numerous times to straight-up avoid World of Warcraft players. The original poster, who was chatting with the recruiter in question, mentioned some of the positives that can come from playing MMOs, but the recruiter said that none of that mattered to the employers he dealt with and WoW players would not even get a second look.

Some of the reasons cited for the rejections include bad sleeping habits, and an inability to give 100% due to a wandering mind -- presumably wandering to the next Azerothian adventure. Poor WoW has been taking all the heat lately, but it's doubtful that the fans (nor Blizzard) care too much about the bad rap. When it comes to your next job-hunt though ... we're not going to tell you to lie or anything like that, but just be a little wary of the chatty interviewer when they ask if you've checked out the latest WoW expansion, kay guys?

Over at MMORPG.com, their Lord of the Rings Online correspondent Jim Braner has written a comprehensive guide to finding riches in LotRO entitled "Lord of the Rings Online: Making and Keeping Silver in your 20s." This is a great little guide, as it explains many of the common-sense nuances of the game that can be used to your pocketbook's advantage. For example, instead of paying for a ride from the Forsaken Inn to Ost Garuth, why not just run there? Sure it will take some extra time, but think of the drops and resources you'll be able to gather along the way.

One of the most underrated points of this guide is one that I firmly believe, yet can rarely convince others to trust. Keeping up with new armor every 5-6 levels will actually help you save money. Of course this only applies if you are a Tailor or Metalsmith, or know one fondly, as buying armor from a merchant is a complete waste. As stated in this guide, that new armor is more durable, and with a higher armor rating, you'll die less. This will cut down significantly on your item repair bills, and ultimately keep more money in your pocket.

While these suggestions are all great, I couldn't help but add a few more to the list. Check out some of my own tips on making and saving money in mid-level LotRO just after the cut below.

Everyone who plays MMOs will be familiar with the concept of "grind", possibly one of the most debated topics in the MMO industry. Grind is essentially where users are forced to repeat something over and over again to get what they want. An example would be killing a certain type of monster repeatedly to get a certain piece of rare loot they can drop. Some people, such as World of Warcraft's Jeff Kaplan, suggest that grind and progression are essentially the same thing. Jeff asserts that we call progression a "grind" when it's not a fun experience and that grinding can be properly tuned. Whether you love it or hate it, repetitive elements exist in all MMOs and are necessary to maintaining long-term playability.

No grind in EVE Online?:
EVE Online is a game that's often lauded by players as having eliminated the grind present in other MMOs. However, it's clear that EVE still has a large amount of repetitive gameplay that can be considered grind. While nothing is forcing you to run missions over and over again or mine for hours on end, those areas of gameplay where heavy grind exists are very heavily used. When given a universe in which they don't have to grind, why then do so many players actively seek out something repetitive to grind on?

Join me as I take a look at the industry obsession with grind and identify where the grind is (and isn't) in EVE Online.