Making a Fair MMORPG

The MMORPG world is still buzzing with the aftershocks from SOE's announcement to create Exchange-enable servers, on which trading virtual items for real world money would be allowed. There is a significant lack of outright enthusiasm for the plan. Pragmatists (like me) are on a "yeah, why not?" line. And lots of people see it as the event that will destroy MMORPG, this camp including some famous developers like Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic, makers of DAoC, who calls it "one of the worst decisions in the history of the MMORPG industry". Well, he should know, he has personally taken some of those worst decision, like launching the Trial of Atlantis expansion, which turned DAoC in a mega-grind.

Most of the arguments against the Exchange-enabled servers revolve around notions of fairness and integrity, or what Mark Jacobs calls the "spirit of entertainment". Unfortunately for SOE to be able to destroy the fairness of the MMORPG genre, that genre would have to be fair in the first place. And it is not. So I wonder if one of the game developer critics of SOE would step forward and change *his* game to be more fair.

Mark actually did a tiny step in that direction, by asking DAoC players whether they would be interested in a server with one of a list of different rule-sets. For example a server on which Trials of Atlantis was disabled. Lol, at least he recognizes the thing was a mistake. But he also proposed a server in which there would be a cap on how many xp you could earn per character per day. That would be "more fair", because it would prevent people from using a out-of-game resource they happen to have plenty of, time, to outlevel the competition.

But to make MMORPG really fair, you would have to disable trade. For example a real world friend of mine from my D&D group just reached level 40 and is 20 gold short of the cash needed to buy a horse. I'd sure be willing to give him 20 gold (he isn't sure yet whether he wants them). But would me giving him 20 gold be fair? I also just twinked my low-level undead priest with money and equipment gathered by my high-level warrior. Is that fair?

In the strictest sense, both are cheating. One character, who did not "earn" a reward, receives the reward nevertheless, from another character. What the out-of-game relationship between the two characters is doesn't matter. They could be the same person playing both characters, or the two players could be friends, or the two players could have exchanged money in the real world. The effect in game is the same.

And developers as "gods" of the virtual worlds have jurisdiction only inside the game. They have no way of knowing whether I send 20 gold to my friend because I like him, or because he paid me a beer, or because he paid me $5. Saying that sending the 20 gold for a friendly word is okay, staying silent about the beer, and threatening us two with banning if there was money involved is highly hypocritical.

To make it fair, it would be easy enough to design a game (or even change an existing game), so that there is no possibility of one character to transfer money or items directly to another character. You would need to set up the auction house differently, I've used the way it works now in WoW to transfer money between Horde and Alliance, by buying worthless items at a high buyout. GuildWars has interesting NPC traders, where players sell their loot to the NPC trader, who resells it to other players. The buying and selling price depends solely on how much of the goods in question the NPC vendor has in stock. So you still have a system in which players end up buying items from other players, but they can't sell something overpriced to another character to transfer money.

If any game company decided to do this, there would be a HUGE outcry, probably a lot louder than the excitement over SOE's decision. People value the ability to twink alts, and to give stuff to friends and guild mates. Fairness be damned. I wouldn't be too hot on a no-trade game either, I like twinking and helping guild mates. But I do realize that this is cheating. Just like buying 100 gold from IGE is cheating. I'm honest enough to not condemn people who basically do the same thing as I do. And I challenge people like Mark Jacobs to either make their games fair, or to stop preaching their double standards. SOE's decision of "if we can't beat them, join them" is far from being ideal, but at least it sounds more honest to me.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:40 PM Permanent Link