Massively^™

Look, Tobold is obviously being an idiot, but is essentially right in core principles. RMT is inconsistent with the purpose of online gaming. Yet you obviously can not engineer it out of the game because Raph is right too; there is no technological way to prevent it completely.

So the thing is, games will have to be designed in such a way to minimize the importance of RMT and other game breaking services. One way to do this is to make them expensive and risky, as Blizzard is currently doing.

The goal is not to completely eliminate RMT; the goal is to simply minimize its relevance to the average player. Just as buying "Boardwalk" for real money kills the point of playing Monopoly, buying advancement and currency kills the point of playing WoW.

Reply

"Just as buying "Boardwalk" for real money kills the point of playing Monopoly, buying advancement and currency kills the point of playing WoW."

Excellent quote from Coherent, here. The same principle applies to nearly every MMO I can think of, and in some more than others.

My MMO is CoX, and as anyone who's leveled a 50 knows, there is no endgame. The game is in the journey, rather than the destination. Paying for PLing is even more foolish here, because unlike WoW with it's highlevel raids and such, there is only so much to do at 50.

I must say that I am dismayed at this 'legit' RMT, though. I do not see it curbing the growing problem of illegitimate services spamming the playerbase, and I see a major unbalancing of game economy.

I commented on another piece, and I will comment here: I see no need for RMT in City of Heroes, and furthur, I fully support NCSoft in their approach to these people: /ignore_spammer.

/ignore_spammer.

Reply

Coherent sums it up... dont play if you dont wanna invest the time getting money.. your just wasting your money.

Reply

One thing to note about CoX: Before inventions 'loot' came onto the scene, there was virtually zero RMT spam.

Yes, there was still a RL money to influence exchange rate on the gold trading sites, but the very thought of paying real money for something that fell like manna from the skies, and had no significant personal use to level 50s, was ludricrous.

There was no desire for influence because there wasn't much you could do with it besides buy SOs (once you upgraded to the max, that was it, HOs tended to be traded with PLing rather than inf because the currency was relatively valueless, and it was easy to just pick up a HO lottery ticket from turning up at a daily raid anyway), change costumes or give it away free to low-leveled characters.

The downside was that the game then failed to hold the attention of a number of players, once they hit 'endgame' and realized there was nothing much to do and were unwilling to repeat lvls 1-50 by making another alt.

With all the new systems from pvp, to loot, to SG bases, to ship/hami/STF raids, etc, one might say that CoX has improved on its depth of game, providing new niches that might appeal to various types of players.

Alas, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, one very strong driver of player motivation is Achievement: making their in-game character 'stronger' or 'richer' or 'more of anything.'

Inventions as 'loot' piggyback on this motivation of greed, and once greed sets in, RMT is bound to follow. Hence our recent plague of gold spammers.

There's still an established community of honest vocal folk who wouldn't dream of touching RMT in CoX, and the devs are doing a fairly good job of nipping it in the bud, but let's not kid anyone, the spammers wouldn't be around if there wasn't an underbelly of buyers and sellers. Desire for loot is all it takes.

I'd have preferred if this nasty loot didn't taint my game in the first place, but if it's there, we all have to deal with it. It's my opinion that better the devs of a game you like should profit from this infantile desire to 'have it now, I have $$$' than a third party.

In an ideal world, I'd be playing a game that's designed to be inconvenient and of low value for gold sellers to consider profitable. That's dev responsibility, though.

Reply