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A short essay on RMT
Necronomatron
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
A foreword: This is written for a perspective of gamers and non gamers alike and as such defines several terms, some of which you may already be familiar with some you may not.
If there's currency in an MMO (short form for MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that can be traded there will be a RMT (Real Money Trade) for it. If there was a quest/mission that a player could do once per day that gave them10k currency units and an item costs 100k currency, as an example, a player could either spend 10 days repeating the quest/mission or 10 minutes paying for the 100k and have their new item today. Many suggest that RMT destroys the in game economy of a given MMO, however the laziness of many players combined with MMO players' propensity for consumerism creates a place where RMT is assured.
One could be lead to believe that it would be more logical to simply sell your own currency under a disguise of RMT. Under this line of thinking, the in game mechanic for "earning" currency would not need to be changed, and the MMO companies could be in direct control of the RMT pricing market for their own game as they could effectively "print money". That combined with the EUM (Eternal Upgrade Model) by which as soon as a predetermined percentage of the player base has the "best" items available to them a new "best" is released for a higher price. EUM is a trend in MMO gaming I have personally seen develop over the last nearly 2 decades of online gaming. Games like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains, EverQuest, LOTRO, Lineage, FFXI, SWG, etc… well you should get the idea, they all have a huge RMT, some say millions of dollars or more annually per game. If there are millions to be made and a game developer can make a functional EUM for their game, the companies would be passing up guaranteed money not to burn the candle at both ends, especially when they can just code more candle.
Most current “pay to play” MMO companies utilize an EULA (End User License Agreement(s)) to among other things, directly prohibit RMT. This is commonly enforced by means of a ToS (Terms of Service) document, basically a set of rules for a given MMO. Both of these agreements must be “agreed” to before entering the MMO’s game world(s) they are not optional at this time. Contrary to the trend of prohibiting RMT, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) seems to be one of the first and one of the largest companies sanctioning a controlled RMT specifically for EQ2 and Vanguard (with some limitations) via their “Live Gamer Exchange” service. Will more MMO companies adopt this posture officially, I think it is likely, if not required.
If there's currency in an MMO (short form for MMORPG or Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that can be traded there will be a RMT (Real Money Trade) for it. If there was a quest/mission that a player could do once per day that gave them10k currency units and an item costs 100k currency, as an example, a player could either spend 10 days repeating the quest/mission or 10 minutes paying for the 100k and have their new item today. Many suggest that RMT destroys the in game economy of a given MMO, however the laziness of many players combined with MMO players' propensity for consumerism creates a place where RMT is assured.
One could be lead to believe that it would be more logical to simply sell your own currency under a disguise of RMT. Under this line of thinking, the in game mechanic for "earning" currency would not need to be changed, and the MMO companies could be in direct control of the RMT pricing market for their own game as they could effectively "print money". That combined with the EUM (Eternal Upgrade Model) by which as soon as a predetermined percentage of the player base has the "best" items available to them a new "best" is released for a higher price. EUM is a trend in MMO gaming I have personally seen develop over the last nearly 2 decades of online gaming. Games like World of Warcraft, City of Heroes/Villains, EverQuest, LOTRO, Lineage, FFXI, SWG, etc… well you should get the idea, they all have a huge RMT, some say millions of dollars or more annually per game. If there are millions to be made and a game developer can make a functional EUM for their game, the companies would be passing up guaranteed money not to burn the candle at both ends, especially when they can just code more candle.
Most current “pay to play” MMO companies utilize an EULA (End User License Agreement(s)) to among other things, directly prohibit RMT. This is commonly enforced by means of a ToS (Terms of Service) document, basically a set of rules for a given MMO. Both of these agreements must be “agreed” to before entering the MMO’s game world(s) they are not optional at this time. Contrary to the trend of prohibiting RMT, SOE (Sony Online Entertainment) seems to be one of the first and one of the largest companies sanctioning a controlled RMT specifically for EQ2 and Vanguard (with some limitations) via their “Live Gamer Exchange” service. Will more MMO companies adopt this posture officially, I think it is likely, if not required.
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Second of all, three paragraphs is hardly an essay.
Third of all, the EUM, as you call it, inherently depends on in-game items taking gameplay time, effort, and likely coordination with groups, or other hurdles to overcome to make the new upgrades as valued as they are. A large motivating factor in getting the newest shinies is the e-peen value it carries, being the first, or being the best. In any case, challenge is always an important gameplay aspect, because if everything is truly extremely easy, then it becomes quickly boring, quick enough that a given MMO developer cannot possibly release content fast enough to keep up. In offering items or currency for RMT, the developer of an MMO using the EUM undermines the addictiveness of their game, which is severely detrimental.
The only MMOs I have seen use RMT without ruining the appeal of their game were games that didn't use the EUM to begin with.
But the problem, and the inherient reason that "the company" dosent control their RMT, is because they print the money. They want a full on economy, and them creating items out of thin air to sell you, removes you the player from such an economy. They want you doing work, spending time, dealing with people in the game who do work. One could argue that the farmers do the work getting the gold, but its become recent tradition for the farmers to steal gold from accounts that they are selling. The arguement here could be made, that they are making more money over time by forcing you to play and earn the item, then just buying it. If you can buy a character at the level cap for xx money, but on average it costs y months to complete, equaling out to xx*2 dollars, why should they directly sell you a character?
An alternative is for the "game company" to act as escrow for these transactions, and take an amount of money as such for part of the deal. Sony has tried this by being the escrow between players to handle RMT/item trade for cash, while taking in a fee. This was immediately matched by players going "how do we know you arent creating items out of thin air, and selling them to us, on top of taking in a profit for making the deal?" I don't know where that system is today, but it wasn't looked well upon when it hit. Also when this gets done, it lowers the value of the work other people do. Say the items were invented for the trade, thats an extra item now on the market that removed demand, lowering the price of the supply.
I think that the main people who do it right, is CCP with eve online. you can pay real money for game time cards, and trade the cards in game for in game goods, legitimately. Because of the free and open nature of the game, CCP still gets their cash at some point for the cards, and the cards themselves become part of the digital economy.
So the main problem right now, is there isnt a good way to handle RMT.
edit: changed specific companies like "blizzard" to "game company" or "that company"
If this is a issue of profit or money, WoW has hit the nail on the head. Provide goods and services for a premium that cannot be done in game. This means changing servers/faction/race/sex of characters, and providing in game pets for $10 a pop. They are now providing items for direct cash, (RMT's) that have zero effect on the economy. And before saying that a character transfering servers effects an economy, they have a distinct physical limitation on how much gold and items they can move when transfering, minimizing the effect that move will have on the previous, and new economy.
Exactly.
EVE stands alone from every other MMO because the nature of the game is about managing risk and accumulating/wielding power, not collecting loot and leveling. Dying in EVE hurts. How much it hurts depends on how much you put at risk. Wealth can be destroyed in EVE, and at an astounding rate (If Shrike be thy name, then dying be thy game; 4 avatars down and counting).
The PLEX->ISK trade in EVE is of little concern. ISK changes hands but the idiots who buy it will give it right back by buying fancy ships which they will promptly lose and have to replace. Their stupidity subsidizes the gameplay of the elite, who play with PLEXes using ISK made from blowing up, salvaging, and manufacturing ships to sell to the people who bought the PLEXes to sell in the first place.
If the symmetry were any more perfect, I should think one of us would break into tears.
-G'kar, Babylon 5
essay: A short literary composition on a single subject, usually presenting the personal view of the author.
sounds like "a short essay" to me, hence the term, not to nitpick but the term applies just fine, thank you. In the future I'll ask you that if you feel then need to start a reply by discrediting what I have written with a straw man argument, please refrain and stick to discrediting me by the content of my post (or lack there of)
I posted this here because I felt after years of observing this community this would be the best place to foster an intelligent conversation on the matter and with system like XBOX Live and Sony's markeplace, it seemed to apply to more than conventional MMOs (especially with DCUO and FFXI being available on consoles).
I have to say, specifically regarding WoW, the RMT has had a major footprint in that community since very shortly after it's launch and that is the largest MMO community (if their numbers of 11 million are accurate) that there is. The volume of in game currency traded in that game, by all logical standards, should have crippled the entire game's economy, but it hasn't. Has there been damage done, sure, but Blizzard has managed just fine, how? They say money sinks like riding skill, mounts and vanity items were implemented to specifically counteract the damage done to the economy of the game. That combined with mass ban sessions of farmers should have wiped the RMT from the face of Azeroth, but before I posted this I google searched "wow gold" and 28,000,000 hits were the result, the first 10 pages (100 links) were exclusively for purchasing in game currency in WoW, I stopped clicking "next" but I am quite sure that thousands more pages are dedicated to just such a service. Some of the "top" sites (in my recent google search) I recall as being specifically named in official "blue" posts about the previously mention mass bans are still active. How can this be?
Let me pause there for rebuttal, as I want to foster good conversation on the matter.
K. Thanks for the info.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Unfortunately, you don't get to decide.
Anyway, RMT and EUM don't mix well together.
Thank you, a very informative link, with many more links in it's text.
First, wow is far from the largest MMO community.
Well since you are getting more specific now, there were tons of theories behind this, including wow taking kick backs from the major players in the gold selling/farming game when it first hit. Some evidence that was shoddy at best surfaced, denials were had, but there were definite connections made from what I remember.
You with your own subject seem to be playing dumb. RMT wiped of the face of azeroth? really? The bannings are every few months in large groupings, and its a lucrative business, so the farmers buy new accounts and come back. $5 for a wow account is all you needed around black friday. Im sure for the cost of 20 accounts they make more then $100 back overall, otherwise they wouldn't be in the game. Banning the players for the company dosent make the company fall off the face of the planet, it makes them buy new copies of the game and continue. The argument also here is that this alone makes a large amount of money for blizzard, if it has the resources to handle the influx of farmers coming in.
This isnt even to mention the fact that while you havent given an statistics on the matter, RMT could very well be a very small part of the current economy, but by membership size alone of the game as a whole, looks very big.
Edit: And I made specific comments about Sony's system, that you havent responded to in regards to effectiveness. I don't see how their style of legitimate RMT is the best way, or even good. Xbox's system (I guess you are refering to DLC based on specific games? that is still on the specific developer to utilize.) has no relation to this subject as far as I can tell.
Uhh, what?
You're going to have to cite something like that.
This is very true, it's not hard for farmers to get back into the game. But I doubt Blizzard sees much profit or benefit from the constant resubbing
Another game I think would be great to look at is EVE Online. There is a massive ISK (the game's curreny)/gametime/character market for that game which the developers have tried to counteract and regulate themselves to keep it all under their banner instead of being ported out to third party companies. There are alliances in the game that even protect macro-miners (gold farmers essentially) and there is also an entire secondary server for China which I last heard was completely controlled in-game by a few ISK-farming companies
They cannot compete to win in this second business (RMT) without destroying their other business, since free currency would beget dissatisfaction from players and would obliterate the economy.
One would think it would be intellectually dishonest to compare a free side scrolling game from South Korea to a pay for western MMO
And you do?
There are to be no comments on where something "belongs."
No, you wouldn't. Maple Story is closer to the common definition than something like, say, Guild Wars.
- The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2017, colorized)
Its free. Its 2D. Its a poor comparison.