A thought experiment on RMT

As part of my ongoing discussion with Raph on RMT, I came up with a thought experiment, based funnily enough on Ultima Online, the game Raph designed. The one design question UO more or less "solved" was whether people wanted unrestricted PvP. It did so by creating two mirror images of the world, one with and one without PvP. Over 90% of the population ended up in the non-PvP half called Trammel, while the PvP half called Felluca ended up pretty much deserted. So although in discussions the PvP lovers were shouting much louder, once people had the chance to vote with their feet it became obvious that unrestricted PvP was not so popular. Now lets apply the same to World of Warcraft and RMT. I'm splitting WoW into two otherwise identical copies, which only differ in their handling of RMT and trades, and you tell me which one you'd like to play.

Tobold's low-RMT WoW

1) Gold can't be sent by mail to characters on other accounts, nor can it be directly traded in a trade window.
2) The auction house is changed into a "blind auction" system like in Pirates of the Burning Sea, that is you see that there are X items for sale and that the average price for them in the last 30 days was Y, but you don't see who sells them, and you don't see exactly what the buyout is. You bid, and if your bid is higher than the lowest buyout, you receive it at the price you bid.
3) As added precaution against "selling worthless rock for 1000 gold", all sales which exceed 5 times the average sales price get flagged for inspection by a GM, who has to approve it before the money arrives.

Note that this still doesn't totally eliminate RMT, nor does it do anything against transfering your UserID and password to a company to have them earn gold / xp / honor for you. That's why this is labeled *low*-RMT, not zero-RMT.

Raph's high-RMT WoW

I'm trying to represent Raph's ideas to the best of my understanding. If I get anything wrong, I'm sure Raph will correct me.

1) RMT is declared legal. Blizzard opens up Blizzard Exchange, which works like Station Exchange in that it is a platform for legal RMT controlled and guaranteed by Blizzard, so you don't have to worry that you never get the virtual currency or item you bought. Blizzard is taking a percentage of each deal.
2) The "bind on pickup" characteristic is replaced by "bind on equip" on all items in the game, including raid items. The level limit is replaced by an effectiveness factor, so if you are level 10 you *can* wear a level 70 raid sword, it just doesn't work quite so good. Quote Raph: "They’d be the classic fantasy hero stripling given the magic sword before they know how to use it."

I didn't add "Blizzard sells gold / items" to the list, because I'm not 100% sure that Raph proposes that. And of course RMT in that world isn't mandatory. Just like there is no zero RMT game, there can't be a 100% RMT game. But as RMT would be save and legal, and you could buy raid epics for cash, it certainly would be much more RMT as the normal or low-RMT version.

So tell me, of the three alternatives Tobold's low-RMT version, Blizzard's existing "RMT is illegal but wide-spread", and Raph's high-RMT version, which one would you prefer to play?
- posted by Tobold @ 10:03 AM Permanent Link  (32) comments

 
Primary and secondary evils of RMT

RMT is bad because it is a form of cheating in a video game. You acquire something in the game the easy way, without having to overcome whatever hurdle or challenge the game put up between you and your goal. This devalues the achievements of others, who got to the same point the legit way. I'm calling this the primary evil of RMT. Primary because there is no way you could think of RMT that doesn't involve this cheating. (How opposed or in favor you are of video game cheating is another question).

RMT is bad because of regular players getting bombarded with spam, and because they are prevented from gathering certain goods in game due to lots of gold farmers camping the spot. RMT is bad because of gold sellers scamming their customers, and because they try to install trojans on your computer to steal your WoW password and sell your gold. And the list goes on and on. All these I call secondary evils of RMT. Secondary because they are clearly a result of RMT, but RMT could exist without them. Take in-game gold spam, that is a relatively new phenomenon. RMT existed for many years before the first guy started spamming gold sales in WoW.

Why would I want to make a distinction between primary and secondary evils of RMT? Because it gives us new ways to solve the problem. If some secondary evil is worse than the primary one of cheating, then legalizing RMT might solve some of the problems. How long would gold spam survive if gold sellers could get a license to sell gold on an official legit market, with a threat of spam revoking their license? Or you can attack the secondary bad effect directly, which is what some games do now with spam filters.

Look at the Ni Hao video I posted on Saturday, which besides the catchy tunes shows you that apparently people are more concerned with the secondary evils than the primary ones. The video complains about not being able to gather primals in Shadowmoon Valley due to the gold farmers. But it is easy to see how you could have exactly the same problem even if there was no RMT and there were just lots of other regular players farming the primals. The Burning Crusade already introduced some areas with dynamic spawns, where the more mobs get killed, the faster they respawn. If primals get farmed 24/7 and prices for them are still high on the AH, there are obviously not enough sources for them. If Blizzard put in dynamic spawns on the mobs that drop them, there would be enough supply for everyone who really needs the primals. And the gold farmers would just ruin themselves if they overfarmed them and crashed their value on the AH. A dynamic economy is less easily abused than a static one.

It is even possible to design games with a high inherent resistance to gold farming. Gold farmers exist because of their comparative advantage of living in a low-income country. The video says "10 cents an hour is good money if you are Chinese", which goes to the heart of the matter, even if it is probably a bit more than 10 cents per hour. By playing the same account 24/7 in shifts or by using bots, the gold farmers make use of the fact that money earning is linear with time spent in game. What if it wasn't? I'm thinking again of the harvesters in SWG, which produce resources in real time. For all we know Pirates of the Burning Sea has similar harvesters and production sites working in real time as the source of their player-based economy. But if you don't need to be online all day to make them run, then a gold farmer isn't producing any more wealth with a harvester than a casual player. If a gold farmer can't make more gold than a casual player, he can't sell that gold very cheap, and the RMT market in such a game never gets going. A game design in which wealth doesn't depend on you playing all the time is not only more fun for casual players, it also solves lots of the secondary evils of RMT.

Unless you remove the ability of players to transfer wealth between them, RMT is never going to go away completely. But if we focus on what is really bothering us about RMT instead of trying to solve a huge and abstract problem, there are solutions available to diminish many of the bad secondary evils of RMT.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:01 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments

 
Avoiding the RMT issue


- posted by Tobold @ 4:06 PM Permanent Link  (9) comments

 
Interview with a Gold Seller

Another short interruption of my holidays, for an unusual post: Instead of writing just my opinions or news copied from elsewhere, this is actual original news, an interview, and thus the closest I ever got to "journalism". I frequently receive offers by e-mail to advertise in exchange for money various companies selling virtual currency. I always tell them that I don't do any advertising on my blog, and especially not for gold sellers, and usually I never hear from them again. But in this one case I got a polite reply, which developed into a discussion about the reputation of the real-money trade (RMT) industry. The discussion of the issue on MMO blogs is heavily lopsided against RMT, because the people who sell gold usually don't participate in that discussion. So I thought it would be a good idea to give somebody from the industry the opportunity to express his point of view. Chris Bottomley, the Marketing Director of MOGS agreed to be interviewed by me.

Tobold: As introduction, could you tell us your view of what MOGS is doing, and what your role is in the company?

Chris: First off, thanks a lot for arranging this interview Tobold; we appreciate the chance to put over a perspective of RMT that's seldom visible between the forum flame wars and Chenglish press releases.

Whilst not trying to use too much marketing-speak, MOGS provides MMORPG gamers with virtual currencies and services using an approach that's secure and geared toward ingame needs. I mention our approach not as a mean of shameless self-promotion, but rather to differentiate ourselves from shady (Chinese) service providers out there.

We also work closely with gamers and suppliers in the USA and Europe to buy-in currencies on a variety of games. We've developed a network of trust among Western suppliers so that we don't need to rely on workrooms in China.

My role within the company is to communicate our unique position to gamers, make them aware that they can deal with a reputable American company without paying a premium. Many of our new customers are under the illusion that Chinese RMTs, though a risk to deal with, are significantly cheaper than companies like ourselves – they're pleasantly surprised when they discover that's not the case.

Tobold: In our e-mail exchange you mentioned Chinese competitors destroying the reputation of your industry. How does your company differ from other RMT companies?

Chris: Like night and day. MOGS has been born out of a passion for gaming, all our staff are MMORPG gamers themselves and thus have a deep-rooted understanding of gamer needs. In contrast, the companies in China are almost all established on the back of venture capital, so they've no need to understand or respect the needs of gamers or the standards we have in the West. I don't make this judgement based on ignorance or prejudice; prior to working with MOGS I spent 12 months with a large Chinese RMT company, so I'm very familiar with how the RMT business is treated in South East Asia.

MOGS is completely independent and registered in the US, so we have to be accountable. Operating in a way that's legitimate and sensitive to the needs of our customers is the only way we can operate. If we were to indulge in the practices of our Chinese counterparts (stealing accounts, not delivering currency and then lying about it, using leveling accounts to farm Gold etc) then, as an American company, we would be liable to be sued for malpractice. Have you ever tried suing a Chinese company? It's virtually impossible, and the Chinese RMTs know and take advantage of this on a regular basis. This is what has given the industry the reputation it currently suffers from and it hurts more than just the practitioners of these ill deeds. In my view, this lack of accountability is the core reason for gamers mistrusting RMTs and who could blame them?

The problem is amplified when you bring in venture capitalists as a factor. By pouring money into these illegitimate operations, they are enabling them to spread misleading information to millions of gamers in the hope that they can gain their trust long enough to take their money. Due to their lack of service quality these companies cannot grow organically; they can't retain customers and so must spend to bring in new ones. Conversely MOGS is independent, free from outsider investment and unable to match the advertising budget of the likes of IGE and THSale. We've gotten to where we are today through delighting customers, having them come back again and again, and ultimately growing the company through word-of-mouth.

Tobold: Virtual items paid for via PayPal are not protected, the buyer can't charge back the money if he doesn't receive the virtual items or currency he paid for. But gold sellers demand payment in advance, so there is an obvious danger of being scammed when buying virtual currency. How can legit RMT companies build trust? I'd guess it would be hard to get references even from satisfied customers, because few people would admit buying gold.

Chris: This is an issue that works two ways and we would love to see PayPal deal with both. If you're making a purchase with your account balance, then a dispute will almost certainly go the way of the illegit RMT. However, if you use a credit card you can reverse the payment with the credit card company directly, and there's literally nothing the RMT can do about it. Obviously this is a much safer option for the gamer but it also leads to large amounts of fraud with cyber-criminals purchasing currency, reversing the payment with their credit card provider and then re-selling the currency to the same company. PayPal need to recognise both issues and put in place measures that protect legitimate buyers and sellers against the undesirables out there.

Tobold: What drives your business? Why do you think that players are buying virtual currency for real money?

Chris: I don't think there is one single reason. Buyer motivations range from not having sufficient time to go through the grind and enjoy other aspects of the game, to simply wanting a competitive advantage over friends or rivals.

We've established ourselves and continue to operate on the basis of enhancing gaming experience. Some players don't agree with these "enhancements" and believe it goes against the spirit of the game, which we completely respect. We're not in the business of making everyone agree with us or enforcing ourselves onto gamers (which is why we don't conduct ingame advertising or mass-mail spamming); if a player does not approve of our services then they have the choice not to deal with us.

Tobold: Blizzard recently won an injuntion against RMT company Peons4Hire, but interestingly was sueing them for spamming, and not for gold selling. Do you feel at risk from possible lawsuits from game companies? Do you think that the legal argument of game companies that all virtual currency is part of their intellectual property and thus can't be sold would hold up in a court of law?

Chris: The legal issues faced by RMT companies is certainly an ever-present risk and should encourage RMTs to operate in as fair and legitimate manner as possible. The Peons4Hire injunction was completely just and I'm glad Blizzard are taking measures to minimize ingame spamming. There needs to be more action of this type in games such as Guild Wars, where there is often more spam than legitimate chat.

Where does the intellectual property line lie? I'd feel uneasy answering that one not being of legal background. For years gamers have debated over whether developers will take legal action against RMTs and whether or not virtual trade is legitimate. Personally, I don't believe Blizzard would ever take action because it simply does not make business sense for them. MOGS doesn't force customers to buy virtual services; we're not holding your family with a list of demands. The fact is that gamers, for whatever reason, feel they would benefit from these services and Blizzard recognizes that RMTs keeping World of Warcraft gamers happy and continuing with their monthly subscriptions makes sense for them.

After posing this perspective I'm often asked, "So why do Blizzard ban RMT accounts then?", and the answer is always the same. To open a WoW account requires both a CD Key and subscription, but as Chinese credit cards are not accepted this become a 60-day pre-paid game card. A Chinese workroom would pay around $35 for both these resources, the majority of which goes right into Blizzard's pockets. As a rough estimate based on experience within Chinese workrooms, I would say 200,000 workroom accounts were banned in 2007, 99.5% of which would have been replaced by a new account (with a new CD key and pre-paid card) right away. Based on these numbers, the banning of Chinese "Gold Farmer" accounts was worth approximately $7,000,000 last year alone. Now you can better understand why RMT continues to exist and why legal action against RMT is extremely selective.

Tobold: One of the main tools of game companies in fighting RMT is banning the accounts of the sellers. Is that just a cost of doing business for you? Interestingly there is very little known evidence of gold buyers getting their account banned. Do you think your customers are safe, or do they risk losing their account when they buy gold from you?

Chris: Second question first; we have NEVER had a customer lose their account on World of Warcraft, or even incur a suspension, due to purchasing Gold. Going back to the points above, the last thing Blizzard wants to do is alienate gamers who feel they need the support of RMT to better enjoy their gaming.

Accounts being banned is a factor for the majority of the industry, though I'm happy to say we've not had a WoW account banned since April 2007. Blizzard has introduced a lot of processes to identify Gold farmers and sellers, including advances in Warden and a metrics-based system, but mainly it comes down to an IP sweep. They know that Chinese workrooms will continue to buy accounts regardless of how often they're banned and that they are the most likely to engage in undesirable practices, so this tried and tested method claims most RMT accounts.

Tobold: Recent changes to World of Warcraft delay the arrival of gold by mail, whether sent directly or via the auction house. Does the future of gold selling in WoW involve meeting in dark alleys of Ironforge or Orgrimmar?

Chris: The mail delay was brought in shortly after the introduction of metrics testing; looking at character behaviour as a means of identifying farmers/traders. As far as we can see this is a buffer period in which Blizzard can further inspect who you are and whether you're legit. Gold can still be sent via mail securely, but extra measures must be taken in order to ensure this. Rather than give up on mail, we've developed a system that allows us to continue to utilize it and guarantee it is not deleted in the inbox.

This is another measure, however, that whilst hindering illegit RMTs in one sense, benefits them in another. It seems that many Chinese RMTs are using "it must have been deleted in your inbox" as an excuse for incomplete Gold orders. If you request Gold to be resent you will either be ignored or schooled in the fine art of Chinese RMT logic e.g. "We sent it, you didn't get it – it's not our fault!".

The mail delay is another half-baked measure put in place by Blizzard to create the perception that they're fighting RMT, when they're really counting the profits from all those banned accounts!

Disclaimer: I have not bought any gold from MOGS and thus cannot vouch for their claims. No currency, real or virtual, changed hands in exchange for me posting this. This post is an honest journalistic attempt of showing a subject from a different angle, not an endorsement of RMT.

So here you have it, the other side of the story. I do find the concept of there being "white hat" gold sellers interesting, as most of the complaints I hear about RMT are about things like bots or gold spam, and not so much about the selling of gold itself. Earlier claims that RMT will bring the WoW economy to a crash haven't come true, after over three years the WoW economy actually appears more stable than the real world economy, in spite of a multi-million dollar RMT industry all selling WoW gold. If it was really possible to separate RMT from it's secondary negative effects like scams and spam, the only remaining objection is that buying gold is cheating. Which it certainly is. How serious a crime you consider cheating in a video game to be, I'll leave for your personal ponderation. I'll just give you to consider that the answer very much depends on whether you consider MMORPGs to be competitive or cooperative games.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:31 AM Permanent Link  (52) comments

 
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  (1) comments

 
Real Money Trade (RMT)

The MMORPG glossary is gaining one more acronym, RMT, for real money trade. This is the buying and selling of virtual items for real world dollars. Surprisingly the discussion stemming from SOE entering into the RMT market as broker hasn't ended, and the issue is still hotly debated in places like Terranova and Grimwell.com. Lots of people are predicting the end of the world, because RMT sullies the purity of virtual worlds, and would by that infection destroy them.

Now I'm certainly aware of the negative sides of RMT. And I probably have more experience in fully RMT enabled games than most people discussing them, because I played Magic the Gathering Online for years. In MtGO over the years I spent over $3,000 for virtual items, most of this going directly to the game company. And I didn't recuperate any of this money; I still own, no, make that "have usage rights of", my huge library of virtual cards. If I sold them in bulk, I wouldn't get much for them. If I sold them card by card, I could probably get most of my money back, but it would take me hundreds of hours, which I don't want to spend. So I'm waiting for MtGO v3.0 to come out end of 2005, which maybe improves the game enough for me to come back to it.

MtGO taught me two valuable lessons about RMT: a) It works. People are quite willing to spend a lot more than $15 per month on an online game. As long as the game is good, and they feel that the additional money is getting them some advantage in the game, they will buy. b) The problem with people selling virtual goods for money is often only a lack of transparency. The market area being rather chaotic, MtGO offers huge opportunies for profiteering by buying low and selling high, up to the point of scamming. If there was an auction house of FFXI / WoW style, where the current going rate for cards was clearly shown, there would be less problems.

For MMORPGs I don't see how they would be destroyed by RMT. First of all RMT isn't new, it just crawled out from below the rock it was hiding under before. All games lived with it perfectly well. Game companies have done some token efforts to ban a handful of players they caught on EBay. But they never dared to sue companies like IGE which quite openly sell virtual currency and items for all games. On MMORPG sites which have enabled Google ads, half of the ads are for such companies. So if RMT really destroyed games, the games would have gone under long ago.

The more likely prediction is that RMT will make MMORPGs more popular, not less. RMT already exists because there is demand from the players for it. It is hard to imagine a company going under because it fulfilled a demand from their customers, thereby taking away business from a black market. They just need to look at the example of MtGO and make the whole affair as transparent as possible, to avoid people "playing the system" to their financial advantage.

Some people are highly afraid that in the future game companies will sell you things directly, and not just brokering trade between players as the Sony Exchange does. They certainly will. Probably not virtual gold, although even that wouldn't make a difference; virtual gold is already created out of thin air by "farmers", and a programmer creating it wouldn't make a difference. But game companies will certainly try to sell you status objects, things that look good but have little or no effect of the virtual world. Actually I already bought one. And in WoW, no less. I paid $20 more for the collectors edition, so all my characters start with an extra non-combat pet, my choice of panda cub, mini diablo, or zergling. That certainly made some other players jealous, but I don't think they quit the game because of it.
- posted by Tobold @ 3:09 PM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Nobody forces you to read this blog!

I'm getting sick and tired of people telling me what I am not allowed to write about on my blog! There was that wave of people telling me that I couldn't interview the gold seller because that would be advertisement. And there are some people (or one anonymous guy posting several comments, who knows?) telling me that I should stop asking questions about my warrior. Newsflash: You don't get to tell me what I can write about! If you don't like a particular post subject, don't read it. It is not as if the content of a post with the title "interview with a gold seller" could come as a surprise to anyone. Of course the gold seller is pro-RMT and would like to advertise his business. And the same is true about the "WoW warrior question" thread, you could see the subject from the title and if you don't want to read about that, just stop reading!

For all I care, if you think that my opinion on a subject, or me asking questions sometimes instead of preaching invalidates my whole blog, feel free to not read anything here. If all you do is complaining, you are not a valued customer of this blog. I'm not making a lousy cent of any of my readers. I am writing my blog for those readers who value my opinion, and especially for those readers who are willing to engage in intelligent discussion about various subjects, mostly centered around MMORPGs. Posting about controversial subjects and asking questions is very much part of trying to engage my readers in that intelligent discussion, and not an invitation to trolls to tell me that I'm not allowed to post that stuff.

My opinion on RMT has remained broadly neutral and unchanged over the now nearly 5 years of existence of this blog: I would like RMT to disappear by better game design. If grinding an exchangeable currency wasn't part of MMORPGs, RMT wouldn't exist. Having that sort of gameplay element and then trying to forbid RMT is hypocritical and doesn't work, because game companies basically try to regulate something that happens outside of their sphere of influence. If I send you 1000 gold because you are my mate, it is perfectly legit. If you in return and outside of the game give me $50, both of our accounts theoretically should be banned. But first of all the game company has no right whatsoever to meddle in the real world relationship between you and me, and second they have no way to control whether you gave me $50 or not. As it is, game companies make millions of dollars from gold farmers replacing banned accounts, and nothing ever changes. If Blizzard or any other game company really wanted to stop RMT, they could easily do it. Hey, my warrior got 3 epic flying mounts, one for gold and two for reputation. If mounts never had cost gold in the first place, and you would have to grind only non-tradeable reputation to get one, instead of tradeable gold, the RMT companies would have lost millions of dollars of business. So I do think that the responsability for RMT is a shared one between the game designers, the gold selling companies, and the gold buyers. Making that a taboo subject on which there either is no talk at all allowed or only rants against gold sellers is counterproductive. After all the RMT debate touches on the much deeper subjects of virtual property rights, and the influence of game design on player behavior. This will come up again and again on this blog, so if you don't like it, feel free to either ignore those posts or leave. But if you are willing to argue your point about the evils of RMT in an intelligent and polite manner, you are more than welcome to do so.

On the subject about me asking questions, about my WoW warrior or other things, I actually think that the threads evolving from those posts are among the better ones of this blog. I certainly don't want a blog about me preaching ex cathedra and declaring my limited knowledge and opinions to be absolute truths, with my readers all posting "I agree" comments. Even after spending thousands of hours playing a wide range of MMORPGs, there are still a lot of games I haven't played; and even in WoW there are a lot of classes I only played through to level 30ish, so I can't possibly know about lets say paladin raid healing. And I'm only human: I do arrive at situations in game where I don't know what to do, feel a bit lost, or could use some help. Admitting that one doesn't know and asking for help actually takes more balls than keeping up an illusion of being all-knowing (which is actually a typical immature teenage behavior). And I am quite proud about the high quality of the responses I got to my questions, revealing that my readers are no less knowledgeable than me. It also revealed how easily some people are willing to accept simple messages as gospel, like "you need 490 defense", and are also willing to spread these simple messages as absolute truths. Only a few people did dig deeper and came up with a more nuanced message of how you could replace one point of defense by two points of resilience and still remain uncritable. Both the subject of resilience (why is this considered to be a PvP-only stat?) and me asking questions will come up again in the future. If you think that me asking questions is so lame that you don't want to read my blog any more, bye bye, and don't let the door hit you on your way out. If you just aren't interested by detailed theorycrafting, just skip those posts. And if you have detailed knowledge and are willing to share it, it is that what makes you a MVR, a most valued reader. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (47) comments

 
The Forge on RMT = Prostitution

Matt from The Forge has an interesting article on how RMT is like prostitution: the secondary crimes surrounding the activity are often worse than the primary activity. From that he concludes that the easiest way to avoid RMT problems is to legalize it. SOE agrees and transfers their Station Exchange to Live Gamer, a company running legal RMT for any game company that wants to legalize it.

Me, I agree that gold spamming and scamming and botting is worse than the gold selling itself. But when I read about the RMT is like Prostitution analogy, the one thing that comes to my mind is the following: RMT is like Prostitution, because everyone blames the sellers, but obviously for every seller there are multiple buyers, which are generally ignored. I'm not saying it is all the buyers fault, but looking at the buyers and understanding their motivation has to be an important part if you want to get rid of the problem. RMT would die if gold farming wasn't both boring and necessary to support "fun" activities.

In WoW, which is by default the biggest RMT market, I have the impression that gold selling is in decline. There is still some gold spam, but less of it. Blizzard apparently is now scanning mails for large sums of gold being sent from one account to another and intercepts those. Even AH mail gets an one hour delay to give GMs the chance to look at suspicious transactions. And Scott Jennings from Broken Toys reports that IGE is imploding.

I noticed that as long as I was playing casually, things like doing daily quests or fishing are extremely profitable. I have two epic flying mounts, and enough gold to buy the epic ground mount for my mage when he hits level 60. Only raiding is extremely expensive. Not just the repair costs and consumables, but the expectation that if you raid you should have all your gear gemmed up and enchanted up to the max. I used mats worth 500 gold just to get one +81 healing enchant on my new raiding mace! You don't need primals if you play casually. So I'm wondering whether the reason that Blizzard never looks at the RMT customers is due to the fact that it is their favorite players. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 3:42 PM Permanent Link  (15) comments

 
Live Gamer

A reader alerted me to a new company named Live Gamer, who is trying to provide a legit platform for RMT with the support of the game companies themselves. Several companies, including SOE, back the venture. Raph thinks that "Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly. But a heck of a lot of them will pay up quietly." and calls the idea a no-brainer because uncontrolled RMT is "impossible to eradicate" and "worth billions to someone else". Controlled RMT would be "controllable and therefore potentially less damaging". Blizzard disagrees and won't use Live Gamer.

I think that RMT is possible to eradicate. You just need to make gold "bind on pickup". That is, you need to remove all possibility of asymmetric trades where one player can give or send gold to another player. And you need to change the auction house system to make it anonymous and blind, so that players can't buy a worthless rock for 1000 gold and transfer money that way. This is totally possible, but it would have a cost: it would also remove twinking (unless you program a shared bank) and sending money to friends or guild mates. But possible it is, the only thing that is missing is the will of the game companies.

I still believe that Blizzard, in spite of their public anti RMT stance, is secretly regarding RMT as a feature, and is therefore unwilling to eradicate it. They did a good job in reducing secondary negative effects of gold selling, like gold spam. They *could* eradicate gold selling itself, but they won't, because lots of players do buy gold and would be annoyed if they couldn't.

So in a way the companies signing up for Live Gamer are more honest. It just isn't a "if you can't beat them, join them" attitude as Raph suggests. Game companies just realized that RMT is a way to close the gap between people playing a lot and people who don't have that much time. Far from being damaging to the game, RMT actually prevents millions of players from quitting the game because they can't keep up with the Joneses. And once you realize RMT as a feature, of course the game companies want to cash in on that feature themselves, and not leave it to third parties and potential scammers. Right now Blizzard is only "taxing" gold sellers by periodically banning a huge number of them as publicity stunt, and then selling each of them new game boxes and accounts to let them back in.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:54 AM Permanent Link  (17) comments

 
Runescape blocks unbalanced trades

A reader alerted me to the fact that my big discussion with Raph on whether you could eliminate RMT by blocking asymetric trades was actually a bit late. Runescape did exactly that on December 10. Unbalanced trades in Runescape are blocked, that is you can't trade money or items unless the value of the things traded is similar. If the difference in value depasses 3000 gp (sorry, no idea to what that would correspond in WoW currency, I don't play Runescape) the trade is blocked. In a development diary article the devs explain that with these changes they hope to remove RMT from their game. I wish them luck with that.

Will this completely eliminate all possible forms of RMT and "cheating" using real world money? Of course it can't. But it certainly will significantly diminish the the amount of RMT going on in Runescape. I made a mistake by taking up Raph's expression "eradicate RMT" when I wrote my post about asymetric trade. "Decimate" would probably be more correct. I was just too exasperated by his claim that game companies should join the RMT bandwagon because RMT can't be eradicated. Sure, you'l never be able to remove the last guy doing it. But if RMT goes from widespread to rare, we have already won a big battle. And how widespread or rare RMT is is a design question, because it very much depends on how easy it is to transfer funds in an asymetric way. Runescape blocking unbalanced trades is going to help a lot.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:46 AM Permanent Link  (9) comments

 
Raph not open to new ideas

In a typical example of how little developers are open to new ideas, Raph tries to discredit me by saying that my proposal to remove asymetric trade is equivalent to removing groups and guilds and all forms of cooperation from MMORPGs. Apparently he didn't understand or chose to ignore the important word "asymetric". A group in which one person tanks, another person heals, and other people deal damage is *not* asymetric as long as the characters involved are of roughtly the same level. Each player performs a different role, but each of these roles is equally important. I never proposed removing groups from MMORPGs, Raph did. Nor did I propose to remove all trade from MMORPGs. One person selling a Primal Water to another person for 20 gold is totally fine. One person selling a worthless rock to another person for 1000 gold is not, because nobody would do such an asymetric transaction if there wasn't a real world counterpart to it.

Lets have a look at a real world example: A politician needs his house renovated, and the work to be done has a independantly estimated market value of $50,000. If the builder send the politician a bill for $50,000 and the politician pays it, we have a symmetric trade, and everything is fine. If the builder send the politician a bill for $1,000 and the press gets wind of it, everybody will assume that an illegal counterpart for this asymetric trade occured, like the politician getting a big city contract to the builder. Raph saying that to prevent asymetric trade you have to eliminate all trade and cooperation in the game is like saying that a politician shouldn't be allowed to renovate his house or buy anything at all. It is an invalid extrapolation, trying to make a reasonable request seem crazy by exaggeration.

Yes, removing asymetric trades from MMORPGs would remove *some* forms of non-RMT assistance from these games as well. You couldn't send 1000 gold to your friend or girl friend for example. Sending it to your own twinks could be enabled, for example with a shared bank account. But you don't have to remove guilds and groups from a game to achieve this, although you might want to remove the ability of level 10 characters gaining xp when grouped with level 70 characters to prevent that form of powerleveling as well.

Over at Raph's some commenters propose removing "bind on pickup" and "bind on equip" features altogether. That shows a disturbingly naive view of human behavior. To anyone with half a brain it should be obvious that if you make all items in the game tradeable, you would much increase RMT. Especially in a game like WoW, where raid epics are designed to be accessible only to a small percentage of players. Next thing you'd see would be the "Chinese Raiding Guild", just keeping the most essential epics for themselves and selling the rest for dollars.

The whole discussion started with Raph's blanket statement that "RMT cannot be eradicated" which he used as argument that game companies should get into that business as well. I found his accompanying statement of "Will the gamers like this? Flatly, no. At least not publicly. But a heck of a lot of them will pay up quietly." somewhat insulting to players. My problem here is that players do not even get the choice to prove that they would really prefer a game without RMT, because developers aren't open to new ideas that could actually remove it. Raph having to try to ridicule me and turning my proposal into something monstrous that I never said just shows that he doesn't *want* RMT to be removed. Because he sees it as the revenue model of the games of the future.

As so often, one of the most insightful comments to the whole discussion comes from Darniaq, who said "What is the real problem with RMT? That it exposes the underlying truth of mass acceptance of inequality." There is huge inequality between players of a game like World of Warcraft, from the most casual player who never even reached level 70, to the guy running around in Black Temple epics. Unrestricted RMT where everything is tradeable somewhat levels the playing field, as now some of the players who would never be able to reach top end raid epics otherwise now would be able to buy them for real money. But having played Magic the Gathering Online, I have already experienced how such a model can destroy a game and turn it into an ugly bastion of unrestricted greed which would make even Gordon Gecko flinch. I can live with a restricted RMT model, like WoW has it, where gold can only be used to buy things like epic mounts, but not dungeon / raid loot. But if game companies would be running the RMT themselves, simple business logic would encourage them to make larger and larger parts of the game available for money. The moment where the players thoughts go from "Wow, I found the fabled Sword of Uberness" to "Wow, I just earned $50", the game is dead.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:36 PM Permanent Link  (17) comments

 
My monocle theory

You might have noticed that my blog post on the monocle affair was extremely short. That was a typical case where I didn't say everything I had to say because of the obvious possibility that the combination of two very contentious subjects, EVE and RMT, would result in a flame war in the comment section. Now with comments turned off, I can say what I believe happened. I think that the EVE item shop is not a sudden decision, but a natural result from previous decisions by CCP on RMT.

In my opinion the whole story started years ago, when CCP introduced their PLEX RMT. For the players the PLEX system looks like an indirect way to buy any item in the game with cash: You buy a PLEX from CCP, exchange that PLEX for ISK in game, and buy whatever you want with the ISK. The obvious advantage is that the players who buy virtual goods for real cash this way support the in-game economy.

So does this make the PLEX system the ideal RMT system? Well, not from the point of view of the company: The PLEX system has the curious effect that regardless of how many players engage in RMT, CCP doesn't make any more money from their game than if they had no RMT at all. All they actually sell is subscriptions in advance. That increases the short term cash flow, but in the long term they still only make as much money as they would have with a regular subscription system. Originally there was no way for PLEX to disappear from the economy except for somebody paying his subscription with one. The more PLEX accumulate in game, the less likely it becomes that somebody pays for his subscription with cash. It's a bit like a mortgage: Get money now, but the obligation sticks with you for a long time. A PLEX is basically an IOU from CCP.

For CCP to make money, the PLEX had to be removed from the in-game economy. Their first attempt at that was making them destructible. That obviously wasn't a very reliable method of removing PLEX, and it tended to very much upset the player who got shot down with over $1,000 dollars worth of PLEX in his cargo hold.

So what CCP needed was a way for players to voluntarily destroy their PLEX. And that is where the item shop and the monocle come into play. The fundamental feature of EVE's new item shop is not that you can buy a monocle for $68. It is that to pay for items from the shop, you need to destroy PLEX by turning them into Aurum. Every PLEX destroyed means somebody at some point will have to pay for his subscription instead of using that PLEX.

I think that the plan in itself is a good one. What CCP failed at was the implementation. On the one side the vanity items are overpriced, on the other side they don't fulfill the most basic function of a vanity item: Showing off in front of other players. Nobody but you can see your avatar running around in the space station, so it doesn't really matter what he wears.

According to the leaked memo from CCP the next step will be selling items with some use in game for Aurum, like ships or modules. From the point of view of the buyer, that doesn't change much: Instead of exchanging PLEX for ISK and then the item you want, you now exchange PLEX for Aurum and then the item you want. From the point of view of CCP that is a huge difference: Any item bought via Aurum is an actual income for the company. CCP will finally be able to financially profit from the RMT they had going on already for a long time.

So why the outrage? Well, money tends to be a zero-sum game. If CCP gains more money from their RMT, somebody else has to be on the losing end. In this case the people who lose are those who used to pay for their subscription with PLEX they bought with ISK they earned in game, effectively the "Free2Play" players of EVE. Remove a lot of PLEX from the game, and their price in ISK goes up. It will become more difficult to finance your EVE subscription strictly through ISK earned in game.

Is that the end of EVE? Not bloody likely. As Raph Koster once pointed out, every MMORPG has the same shape of curve of subscriber numbers over time. Just the height of the peak and the width of the timescale changes. It is likely that EVE has peaked, and will now begin a slow decline, just like it is likely that WoW is now on the decline. But for games who took years to peak, it will also take years to decline. And it is rather common for companies with a product that already paid off its development cost and is slowly declining to milk that cash cow to the maximum. It isn't the milking that causes the decline, but the decline that causes the milking. The fans would like EVE to be a special snowflake, but in the end CCP is a company like any other and has to make money.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:55 AM Permanent Link  (0) comments

 
Zen of RMT Design

Damion from Zen of Design wrote an excellent article about RMT and basic fairness. Quote:

Most current MMO players perceive buying power as cheating. Even the ones who are doing it do. These same players do not bat an eye at mailing some unused gear to an alt, or dropping a hundred gold into the mail for their girlfriend’s brother. But if the brother buys it from Goldfarmers R Us… well, that’s just DIRTY. At it’s core, it makes achievers feel that other achievers got handed what they had to WORK for.

Is it entirely rational? No. But the concept of what is right and wrong is, ultimately, a societal concept, and ultimately, while designers can try to change player perceptions of what’s fair, there are also times when the community makes the declaration, and the company is forced to respond, or risk becoming irrelevant.

Brilliant! He also mentions that "the debate about RMT is ultimately a debate between those who have money, and those who have time" and that the perception of fairness and acceptance of RMT could possibly change if the demographics of MMORPGs shift towards the over-30 players who have more money and less time.

I just want to add that the eternal "casual vs. hardcore" debate is actually very much related to a similar problem of perception of fairness as the RMT debate. If you consider MMORPGs totally objectively, they are not fair games. Damion has a comparison with baseball, but in baseball one team doesn't get to go out on the field and play and score while the other team is still sitting in their offices working. "Achievement" in MMORPGs is very much linked to time spent in game, and as some players spend a lot more time in game than others, comparing their achievements is inherently unfair. Of course RMT is still cheating, and overcoming one sort of unfairness by trying to balance it with another sort of unfairness is never going to achieve a fair result.

Lots of people call me pro-RMT, a label I can just shrug off. I'd prefer to call myself anti-pseudo-achievement. An epic mount or full epic gear is fun, but *not* a life achievement you should put into your CV, regardless of whether you achieved it by spending hundreds of hours or hundreds of dollars. Buying yourself an epic in-game "achievement" is like buying yourself a huge plasma TV: it'll cost you a lot of extra money without adding all that much to the entertainment value, as you'll still have the same TV program / game in front of you. Only that building that plasma TV yourself in hundreds of hours of work isn't any better.
- posted by Tobold @ 12:59 PM Permanent Link  (34) comments

 
Sex, drugs, and RMT

Prostitution is evil. Selling drugs is evil. Selling virtual currency (called real money trade or RMT) is evil. Some people live in a world of moral absolutes, which is most easily achieved by not thinking too closely about the issue. While there is a good argument to be made that the resignation of Eliot Spitzer over his prostitution affair is justified, it is harder to argue that the woman involved was evil. What if the man hadn't been married, and had paid for sex in a place where that wasn't illegal, would it still have been evil? And what about selling drugs? If I drive 2 hours from here in my car to the Netherlands I can visit a "coffee shop", which isn't selling coffee but cannabis totally legal. The guy selling the stuff is probably some old hippie, and there is no reason to consider him as evil.

On RMT I was a bit disappointed how the discussion about my recent gold-seller interview was limited to the question on whether one should talk about the subject at all or hush it up. The far more interesting question of the morality of it was pretty much ignored, because most people had a preformed opinion already and were unwilling to discuss in terms other than moral absolutes. So I'm asking again: Is gold-selling in itself evil? Or is it just the spamming, scamming, botting, and breaking of the EULA that is evil? Is somebody selling EQ2 currency on the SOE Station Exchange, where it is legal, still evil? Is somebody selling UO gold on EBay evil, again totally legal. What about virtual worlds without a game component, like Second Life, is selling virtual goods there evil? If selling gold isn't evil in games where it is allowed, then how "evil" is it to do it in a game where the EULA forbids it, compared to other intellectual property crimes like file-sharing? Does all virtual currency really belong to the game company, and do they have the right to tell you what you can do with it? You see, once you start digging a bit deeper, and to actually *think*, there is room for discussion about the morality of RMT.

I admit that the interview wasn't perfect. I didn't have access to the "Tobold's MMORPG Blog" company jet to fly over to the states and interview Chris Bottomly face-to-face. By sending him all my questions in one bunch I missed the opportunity to ask him further questions based on the answers he gave. And some people accused me of having been too soft, which was due to me not wanting to scare him off. But all is not lost: Chris is willing to answer more questions if you guys can come up with a couple of good ones. So this is your chance to learn more about the RMT business from inside: Simply post here in the comments section what question(s) you would have asked when interviewing a gold seller. Obviously if your question is downright insulting or delving too deeply into the commercial secrets of the company, Chris won't answer them. But if you thought that in principal it is okay to interview someone from the RMT industry and just would have liked a different set of questions, maybe together we can design the questions for a second interview. So, what would you ask him?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:21 AM Permanent Link  (42) comments

 
Sensible people struck down by RMT allergy

There are many bloggers in the MMO blogosphere, many of which I respect very much. But something is very wrong if in a current blogosphere debate the only reasonable comment is written by John Smedley, president of SOE. The issue is that SOE hired a new guy named Dave Christensen. And the guy worked for IGE in the past, which is the worlds biggest gold-selling company. So now Scott Jennings, Heartless, and Michael Zenke, among others, are all proclaiming that this is the end of the world. No, the new guy isn't supposed to introduce gold selling into all of SOE's games (they already have that in EQ2), he'll just try to sell SOE games in Asia. His only "crime" is to have worked for a gold-selling company before. In the opinion of my peers that apparently totally disqualifies him from ever being hired by any game company. And SOE is supposedly causing the end of civilization by hiring such a pariah. What a hogwash! Apparently these otherwise sensible blogger are so overcome by their RMT allergy that their brains switched off.

Michael Zenke at least posted a clarification, with excerpts from a letter from John Smedley, stating some very reasonable things: 1) He left IGE. Isn’t that a good thing? 2) We put it in the press release precisely to avoid anyone else thinking we’re trying to hide a part of his background. I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to think we put that in there as an advertisement for why we hired him. Believe me IGE has image issues worldwide, not just in the US.

Real-money trade (RMT), the selling of virtual currency for real dollars, is a highly complex problem, which has been around for many years. And one reason why we aren't any closer to a solution is that everybody insists that the problem is *caused* by gold-sellers. Everybody pretends that we have a system of perfect game designers and perfect players, into which the evil gold-selling criminals invade to destroy the lives of the innocent. The truth couldn't be further away from that. Game developers design bad game systems, where advancement doesn't depend on your skills, but on the time you spend in the game. And where advancement and time can be tranferred to a certain extent from one player to another via gold. And we have not-so-innocent players who decide to cheat by buying this advancement. The gold-sellers just exploit the existing weaknesses of the game systems, and of the players. Painting gold-sellers as the only evil guys in this story is simplistic and not helpful at all.

IGE is not a criminal organization. The exact legal status of RMT is unresolved, because game companies don't feel confident enough in their legal position to actually take IGE to court. And the worst you can accuse them of is breaking the contract represented by the terms of service and end-user license agreement. If you ever let your little brother or girlfriend play on your account, you committed exactly the same crime. It is understandable that game companies don't like it, but it's hardly the crime of the century. Somebody who worked for IGE doesn't deserve to become a pariah because of that. Game companies opposed to RMT might even *want* to hire people from IGE, to gain better insight in how RMT works, and how the game company could change their games to prevent it.

What do you think made the CEO of IGE more happy: SOE mentioning IGE in a press release, or Blizzard introducing epic flying mounts costing over 5,000 gold pieces? For once SOE isn't the evil company in this story.
- posted by Tobold @ 4:31 PM Permanent Link  (28) comments

 
SCANDAL ! Secret Blizzard - IGE Deal Revealed !!!

Our investigative reporter for the MMOG Tabloid News, Carl Woodward, discovered shocking news when he stalked followed Jeff Caplan, Chief Hardcore Designer at Blizzard to a secret business lunch. Jeff was meeting no other than Brock Piercing, former child star and now CEO of IGE, the world's biggest company in the Real Money Trade (RMT) business, selling millions of dollars worth of virtual currency. Our intrepid reporter confronted Jeff and Brock and got the following interview with the help of a hidden tape recorder:

Carl: You two having a business lunch? Is there a secret deal between Blizzard and IGE going on?
Jeff: Nothing is official until you see the IGE logo on the World of Warcraft website.
Brock: If this isn't official yet, why am I paying Blizzard such a big slice of my income already, Jeff?
Jeff: All items and currency of World of Warcraft traded by IGE are the intellectual property of Blizzard, and thus we deserve that slice.
Brock: The question whether virtual items and currency are intellectual property of the game company or property of the players has never been fully resolved.
Jeff: Yes, and I think you agreed that it is not in the interest of either of our companies to get that question resolved in a court of law. That is one of the most important points of the contract we signed.

Carl: Brock, why are you meeting with a game developer from Blizzard, and not with some financial guy?
Brock: Game design is very important for RMT. Jeff and I are currently discussing the Burning Crusade expansion. Talking about intellectual property: the 2,000 gold price tag for the flying mounts was *my* idea.
Jeff: And that idea will earn you millions.
Brock: Us, Jeff, us.
Jeff: Money sinks are very important to the RMT business. Buying epic items on the auction house looks expensive to the player, but it doesn't remove the money from the economy, and unless the epic is sold by an IGE employee doesn't earn us anything. In hindsight the level 40 mount was too cheap, and the epic mount not useful enough, not everybody bought one. The flying mount will be absolutely needed to get to some zones, so the profit is assured. Few players have the time to farm 2,000 gold on their own.

Carl: So your main customers are casual players, people with a job and family, with little time and lots of money?
Brock: These are our most valuable customers. The average age of MMORPG players has gone up over the years, most players have a good income, and playing World of Warcraft is considerably cheaper than playing golf. So there is a lot of potential and people willing to spend more to get ahead in the game. But we are trying to serve the less casual customers as well.
Jeff: Don't worry, Brock. Wait until you see what a repair bill on level 70 epic armor after a typical raid costs. Not to mention the cost for potions, this again only feeds gold back into the economy and isn't a money sink.
Brock: But don't forget to make the loot in the level 70 raid dungeons just like the loot in Molten Core. Epics, to motivate players to go there, and worthless junk like coal or lifeless stones, so the money earned in the raid doesn't cover the repair bill.
Jeff: Understood. We will also continue the system introduced in patch 1.11, where players will need to spend money or resources to get access to raid dungeons, thus removing the resources from the economy. And we are thinking of more quest series like the tier 0.5 upgrade quest, where doing the quest would cost you hundreds of gold.

Carl: When you announce your deal, will that not cause a huge outcry and a loss of customers for both of you?
Brock: You learn to live with bad publicity. All these rabid anti-RMT people on message boards and blogs, their bark is worse than their bite. 9 out of 10 uber-guild main tanks are already customers at IGE to cover their repair bills. Who wants to go gold farming between raids? Many people just buy gold and keep mum about it.
Jeff: The Station Exchange hasn't hurt SOE's business a bit. We don't force anyone to buy gold, farming it for yourself is always an option. And our deal includes a clause that IGE employees are not using bots and cheats to farm gold. We will continue our policy to ban every account found cheating to farm gold.
Brock: Thus conveniently eliminating the competition.
Jeff: Having official RMT is much more convenient for our customers, as it prevents scams, and gives them better legal security. We never banned anyone for buying gold, but haven't been able to get that message across up to now.

Carl: Thank you two for the interview, I'm looking forward to see the official announcement.
Brock: Interview?
Jeff: This was completely off the record. WAIT! You taped this?
[Sounds of falling chairs, angry shouts, and running footsteps]

Disclaimer: All characters and events portrayed in this work are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. Only the link between game design and the profitability of RMT is very, very real.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:53 AM Permanent Link  (13) comments

 
Changes part 2: Items

Part 2 of my series on how MMORPGs have changed between 1999 and 2006 is discussing items, and by extension the virtual economy of games. Actually the most surprising thing when you compare the Short Sword of the Ykesha (Everquest) with the Krol Blade (World of Warcraft) is how little has changed over 7 years of MMORPG development. People still can wield a one-handed weapon and a shield or off-hand item in the second hand, or they can wield a two-handed weapon. They still have a number of slots for armor items, from helmets down to boots. And there are slots for jewelry. Weapons play a role in determining the damage you deal in combat, armor determines your armor class, and all items can have bonuses to your stats.

The biggest difference between then and now is that while the Short Sword of Ykesha (SSOY) dropped from a level 47 Ghoul Lord deep in the Lower Guk dungeon, it was often seen on very low level characters. Everquest did not have a minimum level to use items. So if you had a second character of higher level, or enough platinum pieces, or a friendly guild mate, or you bought the SSOY on EBay, you could equip your level 1 warrior with it. This "twinking", equipping characters with items they couldn't possibly have acquired themselves was very widespread. Needless to say that the difference in power between a level 1 warrior carrying a rusty level 1 weapon and a level 1 warrior wielding a level 47 SSOY is huge.

In World of Warcraft the Krol Blade drops from random level 55ish mobs, but you need to be at least level 51 to wield it. Twinking still exists, and there is still a market for items like the Krol Blade, but the boost to the power of your twinked character has become a lot smaller. It isn't perceived as a big problem any more, and the words twinking and twink have largely disappeared from the vocabulary of modern MMORPG gamers.

The SSOY was famous because it was one of the best 1h-weapons you could twink with. The Krol Blade is famous because it is one of the *few* 1h-weapons you could twink with at the higher levels. While items that could not be traded already existed in Everquest, they have become much more prevalent in World of Warcraft. All quest rewards, and the large majority of rare (blue) and epic (purple) items are "bind on pickup", meaning the person acquiring them can only use the item for himself, or vendor it, or disenchant it, but not pass it to another player, or put it up for auction. Thus Krol Blades are rare and very expensive, and you don't see every level 51+ warrior running around with one.

The introduction of minimum levels to wield, and making most of the good stuff "bind on pickup" has positive effects on game play. It makes questing and dungeoneering the prime source of equipment. Given the time and organizational effort needed to organize a 40-man raid, it is pretty certain that a lot less people would be raiding if raids weren't the source of epic items that can't be gained by any other way. Compare that to a game like Star Wars Galaxies, where the best items were player-made, and there was no compelling reason for people to seek out and overcome big challenges.

On the other side, making the best items come from loot is doing tradeskills and crafting a disservice. Search any auction house in World of Warcraft, and you will see that less than 1% of the items traded there are player-made. Crafting is occupying some niches of the market, notably for bags (which was as true for EQ than it is for WoW), and for some those potions that can't be found as drops. But for crafted armor and weapons there isn't much of a market beyond the first couple of weeks on a new server. Pretty soon there are so many looted items floating around in the economy, that they become better and cheaper than crafted items.

What has changed in the player economies from 1999 to 2006 is the way people trade with each other. Early Everquest did not have any automated trading systems. People would gather at certain places, like the tunnel in West Commons, and just shout out the items they were looking to buy or sell. The Shadows of Luclin expansion added a bazaar for automated buying and selling between players, and different forms of bazaars or auction houses have been with us ever since. Games where the economy is based more on crafted items, and which have player housing, starting from Ultima Online and peaking with Star Wars Galaxies, have houses turned into shops. Instead of a central shopping station like the auction house, people wander around and search shops for goods. Relationships between shopkeepers and customers develop, with players that always have a good selection of items at reasonable prices developing quite a reputation. In spite of Napoleon's opinion of the English, most players prefer to play heroes and adventurers over playing shopkeepers. But as crafting is still quite popular, it is to be hoped that future games will find a better balanced between a loot-based and a tradeskill-based economy.

Related to the changes in trading items, the ways to transfer items between players have also improved. In Everquest you could still drop items on the ground, and pick them up again with another character, and that was the main way to transfer items between two of your characters. Not very safe, as other people could come and pick the item up while you were switching between characters. Dropped items have disappeared from games, but now you can transfer items between players on the same account using shared bank slots (EQ2) or by mail (WoW).

In any game where you can transfer items and virtual currency from one character to another, there exists the possibility of people trading virtual items for real world cash, the so-called Real Money Trade (RMT). Nothing much has changed there from Everquest to World of Warcraft. Officially RMT is against the terms of service of these games, and can get you banned. But the practice is widespread, with a market estimated to be worth an incredible $800 million per year. There are big companies like IGE selling virtual currency in nearly every game and every server. And the game companies are on shaky legal ground when claiming that all virtual items belong to them, not to the players, and are thus unwilling to sue IGE. They just occasionally ban some small fish, especially those gold farmers that use cheating programs or bots, then proclaim the bannings loudly for public relations reasons, but let the majority of the RMT continue. The biggest change since 1999 is that on some servers in EQ2 the RMT is now sanctioned by the game company, and done via a secure trading interface on the game companies website. With the obvious advantage of the game company earning money on the trading fees, instead of third parties. Sanctioned RMT with secure trading also removes a major source of costly customer service calls in which players complained about being scammed. At the moment it is not very clear where RMT is heading. Will it become sanctioned by more companies, or will it be eradicated by disabling transfer of virtual currency in games? My bet is on the former, but many game developers hate RMT with a passion, and so it could go either way.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:25 AM Permanent Link  (3) comments

 
WoW monetary policy

Relmstein thinks that daily quests are Blizzards federal reserve rate of WoW, effectively controlling monetary policy and driving RMT by oversupply of money. I am not sure it is that simple, or Blizzard really intended it that way. I had more of an impression that patch 2.4 is a kind of a bribe, trying to keep people from leaving by showering them with gold, badge loot, and other assorted goodies. But even if it was intended, would it work?

The economy of World of Warcraft doesn't work like a real world economy, because it has two totally different types of populations: the player-controlled avatars and the computer-controlled NPCs. Real world inflation touches all parts of an economy, some faster, some slower. But virtual world inflation usually is limited to the player economy. Thus if dailies increase everybodies income, and there is far more gold in the economy, NPC-sold goods like epic flying mounts effectively get cheaper, because they stay at the same absolute cost amidst rising incomes. Training, repairs, and NPC-sold consumables like spell components or food all remain at the same price in absolute terms, thus get relatively cheaper compared to the amount of money everyone has.

The same isn't true for everything which is gathered and sold by players. For players the only real currency in WoW is time. A stack of herbs or ore or a primal still needs exactly the same time to be gathered. But if in the same time you can now earn twice the money, the value of time in gold terms doubles, and thus the prices for everything in the AH doubles too.

Whether this drives the gold farmers out of business depends on what players used to spend their money on. The gold farmers too make more money per hour now, just like everyone else, be it through doing dailies themselves, or by selling farmed items for more money. So while the price of 1,000 gold goes down, the gold farmers make up for that by selling more. But whether they sell more depends on whether players buy more, and that depends on what for they need gold. If the majority of the RMT gold was spent on epic mounts, the current gold inflation will hurt the gold farmers. But if lots of RMT gold was spent on things like gear from the AH, crafting materials, enchantments, and player-made consumables like potions, the gold farming business is effectively unchanged. Everything just doubles in price, and you get twice as much gold for your dollars, so in the end you still pay the same amount of dollars for the same high-end enchantment. Thus the "federal reserve rate" fails to do anything for the player-run part of the economy. Because what RMT is at it's core is one player paying somebody else to "work" for him for a certain time in the game. The gold is only the means by which the work is transferred from one character to another. How much one hour of work costs has a lot more to do with average salaries in China and the US than with the rate Blizzard floods the WoW economy with gold.
- posted by Tobold @ 11:54 AM Permanent Link  (6) comments

 
How WoW could ruin gold farmers easily

A commenter assured me that gold farming in WoW isn't so bad any more. So I entered "WoW Gold" into Google, got 5 million hits, and checked how prices are nowadays. On US servers you pay $80 for 1,000 gold, on Euro servers €40. Lots of supply, it appears the business is booming. Maybe WoW got less spammers now, but the gold farming hasn't gone away. Now some rejected my opinion that dev-controlled gold selling was better than black market gold selling. I respect that as a valid opinion, even if I think that Blizzard makes more money from gold farmers than SOE does. Just multiply all the bannings per year with the cost of a new account, it's effectively a tax on gold farming. But if we don't want to get the gold farmers out of business by sanctioning RMT, we have to come up with something else. How can we stop gold farming in WoW?

Well, the farming itself you can't stop, unless it's done by bots. A guy in the Chinese sweatshop I keep reading about in all major newspapers farming 5,000 gold to sell them will be indistinguishable from a guy farming 5,000 gold to buy an epic flying mount for himself. If we want to stop gold farmers / sellers, we need to stop them from getting that gold to their customers. And for once that is actually an easy task. Because all the gold farmers use the same method to supply their customers: The WoW mail box. So we have to ask ourselves:

Does World of Warcraft absolutely need the ability to send gold by mail?

I think the sending gold by mail option could easily be removed and replaced by options that don't help gold sellers. I don't know about you, but most of the gold I mailed went to my other characters. So why not have a gold transfer functionality on the character selection window? Hey, add the ability to transfer gold to all your characters there, even from Alliance to Horde, and the new option will be hailed as being more player friendly. The other legit gold transfer, to friends and guild mates, doesn't really need a mail box. You can give them the gold when meeting them. Yes, a bit less convenient, but you should be meeting your friends in game often enough anyway.

But for the gold sellers the removal of gold sending by mail would be a logistical nightmare. It wouldn't totally stop their business, but slow it down considerably if they would have to meet every single customer avatar to avatar.

Human nature is hard or maybe even impossible to change. RMT is a form of cheating, trying to get ahead faster by spending some money. Appeals to the better nature of 9 million WoW players will never stop RMT. But if buyers and sellers certainly are responsible for the existence of RMT, so are the developers. Game features like easy money transfer and big money sinks are aiding and abetting gold sellers. World of Warcraft shouldn't be designed for the maximum convenience of gold sellers. Removing the option of sending gold by mail would be a big step to reducing gold selling to a far more manageable level.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:08 AM Permanent Link  (26) comments

 
Nobody minds EVE's legal RMT

I'm not a big expert on EVE, but I do follow several general MMO blogs which mention that game occasionally. So I was scrolling through my Google reader and in short succession stumbled upon two blog entries on EVE. In the first potshot proudly proclaims a new record for him in EVE, having reached 200 million ISK (EVE's currency). In the second Ancient Gaming Noob Wilhelm2451 reports on EVE's ingame game cards, called PLEX, which pay for a 30-day subscription and sell for 300 million ISK. CCP sells them for $34.95 for two. So in other words, if I started EVE now, I could buy two game cards for $35, use one for myself, sell the other on the ingame AH, and end up having more ingame currency than potshot after who knows how many hours of boring mining grind.

And unlike buying gold in WoW that would be completely legal. And unlike gold in WoW, you can buy pretty much everything with ISK, there are no bind-on-pickup epics or alternative currencies like emblems preventing gold buyers from reaching the best gear. And there aren't any xp and levels in EVE either, there are skills, that only real world time and ISK to train. Theoretically speaking, you could start EVE, fly to the next major space station, stay there forever, and still earn all the skills and gear the game has to offer. Without ever firing a single shot or mining a single asteroid. You don't even have to log on and play all that often. What is the point of EVE offline? And why does nobody seem to mind that RMT in EVE is legal?

I think the answer is that EVE simply isn't a game about achievements. In a game like WoW making your character more powerful or rich involves doing stuff. In EVE you can get more powerful by waiting (paying a subscription fee to CCP) and get rich by selling PLEXs (which you bought from CCP). That is obviously a good business model for CCP, but somehow unsatisfying for the achiever Bartle type player. Instead EVE seems to be very much about social interaction, politics, business deals, spanning from the honest to the downright scam. Which, like RMT, is legal in EVE. The advantage is that instead of the challenge being some raid boss, the strategy for which you can find all over the internet, including by video on YouTube, the challenge of EVE is in interpersonal relationships, which are by definition unpredictable. When you read about EVE, you rarely hear people talking about big fleet battles deciding a war; instead most stories deal with assassination, betrayal, scamming and treason. And the occasional multi-trillion ISK exploit.

And in a way, that is okay. It just means that EVE is a very different game than most other MMORPGs. There is no real competition between WoW and EVE, because those games would appeal to very different types of players. And it explains the different attitude toward RMT: Buying gold is equivalent to buying an achievement, which is a big deal in a game like WoW that is all about achievements. In EVE achievements are a side show, and if somebody decides to spend dollars on them, it isn't a big deal.
- posted by Tobold @ 9:15 AM Permanent Link  (12) comments