Poor helpless gods with absolute power

Another game conference, another panel of game developers, moaning and wringing their hands about being helpless to stop real-money trade (RMT), people buying and selling game currency and virtual items for real money. Wait a minute! Aren't game developers by definition the gods of their virtual worlds? Shouldn't they be able, if they really wanted, to stop RMT?

Now I have no strong opinions for or against RMT. I did occasionally buy virtual stuff, like a house in UO or currency here and there, when it was impossible or too tedious to acquire in game. But if developers came up with a game which made RMT impossible, I wouldn't miss it much, I'd still play that game.

The thing that is going on my nerves is the endless discussion and claim of game developers that RMT is other people trying to ruin their games. No, it's not. It's other people circumventing bad game design with the help of cash. And if the developers wanted to stop it, they could do that easily. Hey, I'll even provide them with a list of ideas:

1) For existing games, changing major game mechanisms is obviously difficult. And removing a handful of EBay auctions and banning a few players, which is the currently widespread strategy against RMT, obviously doesn't work. And why doesn't it work? Because game companies only ever go after the small guys, and they leave the big sellers alone. Just have a look at the frontpage of IGE.com. It obviously sells virtual currency from a range of games in which such trade is prohibited. So why does no game company sue IGE? It makes you think that RMT isn't that bad, that game companies aren't really interested in stopping it, and that their legal grounds on which they claim to be able to prohibit it are shaky. If game companies wanted to stop RMT, they would have to go for the big sellers first. Easy enough to find with Google.

2) For a new game, totally stopping RMT would be very easy. Just don't put any mailboxes and direct trade windows in. If players can't send each other money, or trade virtual items directly, there is no RMT. What about the player run economy? No problem, that could still exist. You still could have auction houses, they just need to be set up in a way that one player can't sell a piece of worthless stone for 100 gold to another player. Final Fantasy XI had such an auction house, where a buyer couldn't select whose item to buy, but would automatically buy the cheapest on offer. Of course if you remove all direct trade and asymmetric transfers, you also remove twinking and monetary help from guild mates. But that might not be such a bad thing. If one of the arguments against RMT is that it gives a character access to means he didn't earn in game, the same argument is true against twinking.

3) A compromise, if you still want people to be able to send money and stuff to their alts and friends, would be to create an economy which wasn't based on levels. The main reason RMT works is that high-level characters in existing games earn so much more money than low-level characters. What the buyer is actually buying when he pays real dollars for virtual gold is the time it would have taken him to gather that gold. But as the buyer is often of a lower level than the seller, the buyer buys an amount of gold which would take him lets say 10 hours to gather, while the same amount has been gathered by the high-level seller in just 1 hour. If the economy wasn't level based, if killing a level 1 mob would yield exactly the same amount of money as killing a level 50 mob, the seller would need 10 times more to farm the gold worth 10 hours to the buyer, thus would need to charge 10 times more dollars for it, and the buyer wouldn't be that interested.

Making the economy not level based is easy, the current system is artificial and stupid. Right now, at higher levels you earn more virtual money per kill, but at the same time all the money sinks (training, buying equipment, repairing) become more expensive too. World of Warcraft is a prime example where if you just quest and kill monsters, every two levels you occur training costs which are pretty much exactly what you earned over the last two levels minus expenses. If the training and repair costs wouldn't go up with level, then there would be no need to have the gold drops go up with level. The whole "earn more at high level" concept is a relic from Everquest, where items didn't have level restrictions, and getting access to more money meant you could equip yourself with high-level gear. Now that all games have level-restrictions on gear, the level 1 sword is as valuable to the level 1 warrior as the level 50 sword is to the level 50 warrior, and there is no reason why they couldn't cost the same, as long as both characters earned the same amount of gold per hour.

4) Another solution to prevent farming and people buying money from farmers would be to make earning money more interesting and complicated. If earning money was more of a game and didn't involve mindlessly killing lots of uninteresting low level mobs, people who needed money wouldn't mind gathering it themselves. And while making it more interesting to the regular player, it would also become more complicated and thus less interesting to the gold farmer. For example if there were two types of quests, easily visibly distinguished, one type giving more experience and gear as reward, the other type more money, then people short of cash would just do more money quests instead of running to a gold seller. And I'm still dreaming of a fantasy themed MMORPG in which you can make money by transporting goods on a mule from one place to another, on a dangerous journey, with teleports restricted to people without trade goods and mules.

All these proposals should make it obvious that RMT is a consequence of game design. Of course you *can* design a game where RMT is highly attractive, and then cash in on it yourself. But you could also design a game where RMT is either impossible or so unattractive as to not be worth a gold farmers time. It is the current situation, in which games are designed RMT-friendly, but the game developers just sit there and lament how IGE is making money from them which is kind of stupid.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link