Divine In(ter)vention

Some time after its completion, Tjuhl’s master thesis is garnering some attention by online world researchers at http://virtual-economy.org.

Throughout his thesis, Tjuhl developed a framework and mechanism for an online world economy free of goldfarming. Those pesky goldsellers have become a major annoyance to the players, but also to virtual gods, people and companies that operate and develop online games. While flashing those persons to virtual death with lightning is fun for a short while, at some point it just takes too much time and effort to deal with that nuisance.

Tjuhl’s approach to tackle this issue: (1) Install a compulsory-to-use auctioneer that conceals all transaction partner identifiers (time, price, amount, location, name) to trade participants and that designates trade partners. (2) Validate auctions based on the full trade data provided by the users and the minimum price effectively established by computer-controlled shopkeepers.

To find out how this mechanism works in detail, go check out the article at http://virtual-economy.org/blog/resolving_goldfarming_through_. Congrats to Tjuhl on your  publication!