The Second Opium War

I only know two games very well at the moment. One is WoW, the other is Puzzle Pirates. Puzzle Pirates has servers which use a micro-credit transaction system which essentially allows you to buy “gold” directly from the game company — you buy micro-credits (which the game will force you to use to get access to certain content) and then trade them to other gamers for “gold” in-game. Its like http://www.buyourfarmedgold.com except without either the element of risk or the possibility of a player profiting monetarily from the transaction (oh, sure, you can farm gold to get microcredits… but its never to your advantage because you can’t monetize microcredits, because you can’t every underprice the folks with the License To Print Money).

Having browsed a couple of gold sites with fairly standard e-commerce shopping carts many of them have a list of “These are our most popular items”. It seems, and this is purely anecdotal data, the big purchase is 200-300g for whatever the going rate is ($30-40 ish).

If someone were to make a WoW 2.0 here’s a couple of things which could be done to drastically reduce the amount of farming.

First, eliminate world epic drops or make them all BoP. I realize this deprives casuals of a primary source of epics for them, but realistically the only way you’re going to “casually” aquire the 1200-1500g many of those BoEpix weapons command (Glowing Brightwood Staff for at least the first eight months of WoW, etc) is by casually handing over your credit card details to someone.

MC & etc loot should be BoP, period. When somebody pays 3000g for a (mediocre) purple belt you know exactly where that money is coming from.

Rework the epic mount quest — keyword, quest. Seven out of nine classes in WoW just have to turn in 800 or 900g to the appropriate vendor. Mistaaaaaaake (although its easy to see why — at launch the epic mount quests content would have gone relatively unused and consumed resources from other, more pressing, projects). Clearly, for whatever reason Blizzard wanted epic mounts to represent a commitment (and off faction epic mounts to be a symbol of incredible catassery). Assuming you wanted to respect their authorial intent in WoW 2.0, make the epic mount quest a ZG-style collect quest from the level 60 dungeons (with the parts BoP, green/blue boss drops), or a (*shudder*) faction grind (the grind is marginally more favorable to casuals, as some have circumstances which don’t permit even sustained two-hour instance running, but I suppose that line is going to get drawn somewhere). Even if you threw up a barrier like “Must have Revered with your home faction to get the mount” this would prevent people from buying it outright, and force them to farm enough runecloth to get their faction that high, which could decrease demand for a mount (of course, “force them to farm” hurts your players… even with Smash Farmers being a categorical imperitive I wonder how much you can allow it to dictate your game design if you’re striving to also be the most popular, accessible experience since reading).

Of course, with a lot less to spend gold on in the economy its possible people could have piles around and spend it on other things (Crusader, etc, which would drive up the price of Orbs which could theoretically make people try to buy crusader outright) Its a question that resists easy, quick fixes (or someone would have hotfixed it already)

I guess in the end it boils down to this: What are you willing to sacrifice to decrease, but probably not eliminate, the farmers in your game? Are you willing to tell 80% of your playerbase “Sorry, we have a tier of equipment you Just. Can’t. Get. which is so godawfully useful that after you see a video of someone using it you wonder if you’re playing the same game *cough* epic mount.” Are you willing to nerf the relative rewards for raiding? Are you willing to take a BIG risk with your capital backers by abandoning the traditional subscription model and saying “Well, we’d like microcredits, it works great against the farmers — we’re not sure it will necessarily be profitable as the alternative, or profitable at all, though”.

I suggest learning Chinese

Legalize it!

>> I say just cut the middle man out all together and offer \’e2\’80\’9cBuy your own gold\’e2\’80\’9d service. $1 for every 100 gold or whatever.

But what of those of us who want to play a _different_ game than ‘whoever has the most RL $$ wins’ (?aka RL) ?

Back when EQ was the biggest game in town (where ‘town’ = ‘world – Korea’), this group of people was seemingly that rare beast, a vociferous majority. ‘ebayer’ was the worst of insults, and not just as a comment on skill; it was a comment on _entitlement_. If Station Exchange had been proposed back then, the roars of disapproval would have been heard around the world. Whatever happened to all the people who cared about keeping RL money out of MMOGs? Did we all just get old, have kids, and stop caring?

“design a game with no pvp. If someone has bought his way to the top, but it doesn\’e2\’80\’99t affect my gameplay, then why should I care?”

Uh, you mean like 99% of MMOGs? It does affect your gameplay, because they only people who can get uber items are farmers.

And there is a third option. Stop making games that are all about uber items. How much farming is there in City of Heroes?

Basically, if there’s no real Economy, there can’t be a feeling that you need money to compete in the game. As people start buying/farming gold, more cash is in the system, and it speeds up inflation (you can now sell uberitem X for 10x the price because there’s 10x the gold in the uberbuyer’s pocket)

Unfortunately, a system where items are easy to come by and advancement is xp or skill based has a distinct lack of what most people consider an ‘endgame’. CoH is a prime example of nothing to do with cash, and a lack of a thriving gold farming community. But at the same time, it’s endgame is pretty much “replay with an alt” right now. EvE has started to become infested with macrominers farming cash, mostly since the T2 market added expensive items where you can’t really PVP with a HAC unless you have a heck of a bankroll (and a friend with the plans, but hey).

Basically, the more gear matters (and is attainable in some form via cash), the more of a farming issue you will have. BoP was a nice try, but then it was randomly enforced. Why BoE epics drop in MC I do not know. I figure the idea was to let the guild distribute them, but it just leads to some iffy accounting. BoE world drops and even a lot of BoE blues for twinks inflate rapidly, as these become the primary need for cash. Stuff happens and people start buying gold, since let’s face it, for a lot of US players 20-40 bucks for 10 hours of farming isn’t really a debate, and the farming economy booms.

The other issue is enforcement. While we KNOW someone sold or bought gold, the game company needs more than that to actually bust them on it. Just because player X speaks chinese and hangs out in Tyr’s Hand for long periods of time grinding mobs doesn’t mean he’s in a strictly legal sense farming gold for cash. I actually knew someone who did that because they enjoyed it, and still had every gold piece they’d ever farmed from there.

The whole thing is pretty silly, and not going away. Though I’d like to see a game more towards UO’s equipment system, where gear is cheap and available (even if by a daoc type RP system, but where you could buy gear by spending realm ranks or something wierd). But I don’t know how you’d keep people playing without gear based advancement or any real money sink that would allow gold farming to take hold.

Time = success, skill = success or disposible income = success may not be different in some profound sense you’re looking for, but they’re different enough that one might rather play one over the other. Personally I think income=success is merely a reaction to the tired time=success model, and the answer to both is to make a game that doesn’t suck. But I take contest with what you’re saying regardless.

Any quality game will favor those with the right mix of skill, time, creativity, and especially, social networking. You think you can buy these with money? That’s a joke.

I’m not lying to myself when I tell you that RMT does not affect my game experience in WoW. Period. The REAL capital in that game, which for me would be endgame achievement, advancement of my guild, enhancing and broadening my skill as a player, socializing and building lasting relationships, reputation (real rep, not Timbermaw made up crap) is not sold on eBay.

RMT happens all the time in this game, and I don’t care because you can’t buy what I’m looking for. And epic mount? A few BoE epics? Your epeen is rather flaccid, even if that is your only motivation. A lvl 60 character? Congrats on skipping of few weeks/months of enjoyable gameplay and learning opportunities. /yawn You’re playing a whole different game if you think a spare $25 can make you successful.

It can, in most games, let you skip boring things you’d rather not play. Personally I don’t, but I really don’t care if you do. I’ve yet to see anything to convince me that RMT negatively affecting a game is anything but a design flaw. Its presense may be nigh impossible to eliminate, but if you make it so I don’t care you’ve won.

My nonexpert recommendation to game designers concerned with the effects of RMT is stop trying to remove the economy or dumb down player interaction to the level of ProgressQuest with chat, and start recognizing the type of rewards which really motivate players.

Ah, the tired ebay debate rears its head again…

If it is cheating to catch up by using real world money to jump start my character with a few hundred gold, it is cheating to catch up to use real world social capital to jump start my character with a few hundred gold.

To everyone else in the game, there is no difference between those two transactions. In both cases, Avatar A received an anomolous gift from Avatar B without any in-game rational.

There is an entirely separate arguement where the addition of RMT may fuel additional cheating/betrayal/farming over and above that which happens in the absence of RMT, but that is independent of the question of whether the actual exchange is moral. I’d also contest that in the pre-RMT days there was no shortage of cheating/betrayal/farming, so really don’t see where this perceived increase came from. Whether it was the guild camping the spawn to ensure there entire 80 members gets the epeen of destruction before you, or the professional camper doing so to try and sell the epeen on ebay, the spawn is equally blocked. I also do not see how there will be *more* epeen camping in the farmer model than in the uber guild model – in both cases the demand for the epeen is the same, so the farming will be the same.

The essential problem is, of course, the “farming”. The ability to regulate XP gain or Gold gain to simple and safe repeatable bashing of bags of XP/Gold. This destroys the game for the player and builds the market for the short-circuit option.

When I played UO, I never played to farm the dungeons. We’d instead clear out the dungeons end to end, despite the fact there is only one room that is officially “profitable”. The reason was that our goal in adventuring was to *challenge* ourselves. If there was a way to make the game too easy, one owes it to oneself to voluntarily not use that tactic to keep things interesting. We’d fight the balrons without using the box exploit, for example. This meant we died a heck of a lot, but, as one player put it; “If you don’t die once a day, you aren’t trying hard enough.”

This accounts for my hatred of modern level-based /con systems where a quick colour code dictates my success in battle. Why can’t a new player join in on a Molten Core run? Why must there be such an insane disparity in power? Why do players play these games like jobs, their actions indistinguishable from the foreign farmers they villainize, min/maxing there best return on xp as they grind their way forward? When we went on dungeon crawls in Ultima Online we could take brand new players with us on a trip to any dungeon. No need to say: “Wait till your 60 before you can join”.

The people with the epeen problem are those who demand that spending there time in game should result in direct in game power. Spending your time in game should result in the much more useful powers of in-game social capital and knowledge.

There is no such thing as a PvP-less game. There are different implementations of PvP that range from direct contact, resource management, economic, socialization, up to and including creating an army but there is no such thing as a PvP-less MMO game.

Put three people in contact with each other and there is an element of PvP in their behavior. It is unavoidable. Put 120 people in contact with each other and there will be war on the highest level possible almost before anything else happens in your game.

Hell, I’d go so far as to say that many of the most direct and pure PvP games like FPS have the simplest forms of PvP and games like the orginal EQ on the “blue” servers have some of the most ruthless and complicated PvP there is in the MMO game market today.

Killing each others pixels is hardly the most complicated form of PvP.

Watching the feudal political systems develop in EQ for six years was probably the most awe inspiring display of PvP I’ve ever seen. I should add the second most awe inspiring and it is a close second was the development of war in a game called Air Warrior during scenarios. Complex PvP doesn’t get the credit it deserves.

Regardless… The solution to “farming” etc. is of course PvP. Complex PvP but none the less PvP elements when truly understood will be implemented and “farming”, “gold buying” etc. will die at the hands of the players. The players are the only ones that can kill “farming”. Of course, most devs know this. They just don’t know how to implement the PvP to do it. Yet.

So, you’re asking people on the Internet to not be racist? In the spirit of global understanding crossing language barriers?

Noble.

The simplest and most effective solution to this problem is to have specific RMT Optional servers, just like you might have PVP servers. On these servers, RMT are allowed. On others they are not.

The end result: people that want the RMT option will be on the RMT servers where the prices are low enough that the farmers cannot make a worthwhile profit. People who do not want the RMT option will play on regular servers where the farmers will be unable to find customers. It completely solves the problem, and allows the players to decide for themselves whether they wish to play a game that is time-based or cash-based.

What price would *you* be willing to pay for an MMORPG which had enough trained customer support representatives to monitor all transactions within the game with enough scrutiny to detect RMTing? Would you consider that money well or poorly spent if after sixth months you inadvertently got ban-sticked for wholly innocent conduct that tripped the wrong algorithm (say, mailing your little brother 100g as a stake to get him started with his new account)? And are you quite sure your little brother (or the little brothers and stupid friends of other players) is smart enough to avoid falling for an online Nigeria scam (“Farmerskirtingban whispers you: Hello Sir or Madam. My name is Glomnius the rightful king of Ironforge and I have here 1000 (One Thousand) gold pieces which I need to transfer to my cousin Tiberion. Unfortunately, I have a math final in the morning and he won’t be on for an hour. Could you please take this stack of gold and give it to him when he logs on? You can keep 10 of it for yourself. kthxbye”)?

Increased enforcement is not, unfortunately, a panacea.

And even if the isk-farmers stay in empire space in EVE, they’re not entirely safe – recent flagging changes has added a new window for messing with the macrominers: Steal from their containers (which flags the thief as hostile). If they do nothing, load up your own transport with ore for personal use. If they attack, warp away and break out the battleship of miner-ownage…because they’re flagged as hostile towards the ore-thief as well. EVE even has a ‘Macrointel’ in-game global chat channel for reporting the macrominers.

And there’s always the suicide kestrel squads – a reinvention of the old ‘Lootless Army’ concept from UO. Nothing new under the sun(s).
/tangent.

Someone really ought to point Sigil towards this post, because they seem to think that they can beat the farmers the ‘old-fashioned’ way despite the fact that they’re designing pretty much the optimum game for said farmers (no instancing, very little no-drop/bind-on-equip gear, slow levelling time, in-game-world player housing, etc, etc). OTOH, maybe that’s Microsoft’s secret plan – a playerbase of 400K and half of them are farmers….

The problem with RMT-allowed servers is this:

Players almost invariably choose a game and a playstyle where they expect that their particular talents and skills will give them an advantage over other players. For instance, someone with fast reflexes will generally gravitate towards twitch-oriented games where they can out-compete slower-reacting players. Someone with a knack for politics will tend to enjoy games where they can advance through social means, whether directly such as in ATitD or through, say, guild leadership in a game where big radiing guilds are the route to success. People who buy game assets for RL cash also choose games where their abilities give them an advantage — in this case, their willingness to cheat at a game and the available currency to cheat with.

That’s where the RMT-enabled idea breaks down: The cheaters don’t WANT a game where everyone else has the same options they do, and possibly (even probably) more money to spend. They want a game in which they are among the few who can get an edge by cheating.

Imagine if someone running a FPS server — CounterStrike, let’s say — advertised that all hacks, cheats, and bots were allowed and welcomed. Come play and bring your aimbot! I don’t think they’d have much of a server load problem. If anyone did play there, it would most likely be people who are intrigued by the concept of some of these cheats, but too ethical to actually cheat with them; they might be fun to try out if they were legal. But a few curious tourists do not a population make. This is why FPS server admins are more apt to advertise how hardass they are about detecting and preventing cheating and banning cheaters.

What it breaks down to is that you have two kinds of players: Regular, who want a level playing field, and cheaters, who want an illegal advantage — its very illegality, and their willingness to do something which ethical players will not do, being part of that advantage. If you permit RMT, that takes away the unfair advantage, so your cheaters will not play there. Instead, they’ll head straight for the non-RMT servers where their cheating will, once again, give them that advantage they seek. And for everyone else … well, I already have a world where success is defined by how much money I can spend. It’s called “real life”. I can get that 24/7 for no extra charge.

I think what designers really have to look at, and few seem to even recognize, is the basic game model derived from the pay-per-hour days is not necessarily the best way to run a game in today’s flat-rate systems. When players paid by the hour, it was profitable to make them spend as much time as possible to get what they want. Now, on the other hand, the bottom-line difference between a player grinding for 100 hours to get his Armor of Uberness and that same player putting in his order with the Ubersmith and being told to come back and pick it up next week is that the player in the first example is going to be using a lot more of your bandwidth, cpu cycles, etc., per dollar spent on the game. Obviously the reality isn’t so simple. For instance, the player grinding for his armor is providing “social content” to all of the people he groups with, chats with, etc. That’s worth something, too, so he is contributing more to the game than just his monthly fee, something the game wouldn’t have if he just played Civ4 all week and then logged in to pick up his armor. I don’t know where the balance point is.

I do know, however, that few if any games other than MMORPGs make players work for an extended period of time for a brief reward of fun. Would anyone play chess or checkers or Monopoly if that’s how it worked? Hours of boredom and a few minutes of excitement? I doubt it. The dangling carrot model, the tantalizing reward always being moved out of reach, is excellent for keeping players online for hours on end … but when having them online for all those hours isn’t bringing in any additional money, and in fact is costing money, is it the best model for a game?

As has been said before: When people will pay to not play a game, there’s something wrong in the game design. If the players percieve the only source of fun to be in the endgame, after endless levels of “no, it’s not fun yet, but get another level and it will be, we promise!” then they are going to take shortcuts to get there. The only viable solution that I can see is a game where players are having fun doing whatever it is that they’re doing, rather than anticipating fun at some future point and working, rather than playing. If I knew how to design it I’d be knocking on Mythic’s door, not rambling in Scott’s blog.

One of my major sources of entertainment other than computer games is, of all things, gardening. And like any garden, mine is always under siege by what seems to be most of the rest of the natural world, from the simplest plant viruses up the scale to mammals, the latter in form of a persistant squirrel with a taste for fresh strawberries. I learned a long time ago that there is no one solution to the problem of garden pests — not even to a single kind of pest. There are many approaches to getting rid of, say, the insects that have their compound eyes on my tender young tomatoes. I could pick them off bug by bug, I could drench the plants with poison, I could launch a counter-attack of predatory insects, and so on. No one solution works. In a lifetime of gardening, I have found that to really keep the plants protected, what I have to do is everything. I use limited amounts of pesticides when necessary. I invite and encourage the enemies of my enemy. I pick tomato worms off my tomatoes and lily beetles off my lilies. I plant companion plants that repel the troublemakers. I put up traps. I use many different approaches. There is no One True Answer; there is only the gestalt of many answers.

So, why am I talking about my tomatoes in Broken Toys? Because in many ways, RMT in games is a very similar problem. You have an organism — the game community — and you have parasites on it that need to be controlled or destroyed before they weaken and kill the crop that you’re tending. There is no one solution. Every design I’ve seen for a RMT-proof game has looked to me like a fun-proof game as well. Automated systems for catching these game parasites are the chemical pesticides of MMORPGs, useful as an adjunct but toxic in large doses. Picking the parasites off one by one is effective but time-consuming, and there are always some that hide under a leaf and escape your scrutiny. Using predators against them, in the form of rewards for other players who turn in cheaters, has its own problems because some of those predators eat each other rather than the parasites, and for various reasons (popularity, for instance) find some parasites inedible.

I think the quest for the One Solution is as fruitless in MMORPGs as it is in my garden. The only solution is to use all of them. Bulid a parasite-resistant game. Use automated detection systems. Encourage other players, the people who are losing out to the cheaters, to be your eyes and ears. Make cheating less beneficial. Have staff dedicated to finding cheaters and removing them. Set up traps for them. Encourage player disgust for the parasites cheating in their game. Kill the nest — sue the gold companies. You can’t get them all, any more than I get all of the bugs that are eating those tomatoes, but you can get enough of them to keep the tomatoes, or the MMORPG, strong enough and healthy enough to survive the parasitism by the few that got past you.

“”One key factoring you aren\’e2\’80\’99t considering is the price difference between an open market and a black market. If you are the type to want to do RMT, why in the world would you choose to play on a non-RMT server where you\’e2\’80\’99d have to pay black-market prices, when there are servers where it is pefectly legitimate and the prices are 1/50th of what they are for you to cheat? Why would you choose to pay $10 per plat when you can get it for $0.20 per plat?”"

Because on non-RMT server, it grows your e-peen to epic proportions.

On the RMT server you are just doing what everyone else is doing. The actual $$$ amounts are mostly irrelevant – as far as hobbies go, MMOs are almost free if you ignore the upfront cost of a gaming computer. Nobody cares if ‘winning’ by getting l33t epix costs 2$ or 200$. In fact, the 2$ epix is a worse deal if everyone else around you is already strutting around in bought gear, and you are just forced to plop down 2$ (or madly grind) to match them. But if you can look uber l33t by plopping down 200$ and make everyone think you are super pro player, it’s worth it for a lot of lowlifes who do not care if they are cheating. And as long as demand exists, there will be chinese/eastern european farmers and shady companies ready to provide ‘services’ – that 200$ is a ton of money in china..

I think that games where real $$$ = win (even indirectly), is silly and beats the whole point of a *game*. It’s the exact reason I also fail to see the fun in micropayment games – I know some of them are wildly popular in Asia, but I could never see myself paying for one. Okay, I played Magic: The Gathering online for a bit, but even there I found paying for ‘virtual cardboard’ to be silly – even if it doesn’t affect the actual gameplay in limited events that I exclusively played. I just don’t like being nickel’n'dimed to death while I’m trying to have fun. Monthly fee for unlimited access is the only pay-to-play model I could see myself to use for any lenght of time.

Tho if you want to see a silly micropayment ‘game’, look up ‘habbo hotel’. It’s basically a glorified chatroom / isometric dollhouse where you pay obscene amounts for virtual items – in europe they charge kids via expensive SMS messages. And apparently even they have a market, so I guess I’m just and old geezer unable to grasp ‘modern markets’.

As far as gaming companies doing their own RMT making them dirt cheap – dream on. They will have highly paid consultants predicting the highest price they can charge and get away with. See: MTG Online. They could have had a wildly popular online trading card game, but instead they priced the virtual card packs identical to MSRP of the cardboard version. Yes, they wanted to protect their cardboard printing operations, and they have enough nutcases paying & playing to run the game even at the high prices, but for most oldtimer MTG players paying *more* for virtual cards (nobody ever paid MSRP for real ones) and losing the RL social aspect just killed the idea. Yet I’m quite sure MTG Online guys calculated well in advance that it’s a better deal to have 10 000 users paying thru the nose than 500 000 users paying one tenth of current price per virtual card pack. Even if the second option would mean five times the sales in absolute numbers, it would mean 50 times the CSR & server hardware needs. So why bother? Run a small niche game and milk the core audience dry with the highest possible price you can get away with… 99% profit for virtual stuff is much cooler than 90% profit, especially if your mad coding skillz won’t allow painless scaling of operations to hundreds of thosands of customers.

The War on RMT is different from War on Drugs in one way: In the RMT wars, you have the capability for ironclad tracing of every single transaction in the game if you so choose. And you can log all ingame communications. Yes, you need staff, tools and training. It’s just a matter of cost/benefit – currently gaming companies dont’ see the benefit in killing RMT peddlers off when considering the cost it would take to do so. Can’t blame them – they are just busineses after all. However, all you really need is to make sure that RMT sellers cannot recoup the cost of rebuying game boxes – and while doing so, you must count every ban as instant 45$ or whatever at the cash register as the RMT seller goes to buy a new account. Now I dont know if in the end it’s possible to eradicate the pests for good, but I’d love to see someone try – and nobody really has done so, at least not yet.

In the future a MMORPG which can account for RMT and design an economy around it will have greater success than the current two extremes: MMORPG which oficially doesn’t allow any sales (see Sony, Blizzard) and at the other end of the spectrum you have 2nd Life and MMORPGs like that where Everyone is pretty much forced into RMT, which makes game less fun.

On Bidera Auctions (mostly real items, basically eBay redux), early on we decided that we would allow RMT on our site, partially because even a few years ago it was such a big market. So yes, money talks.

My personal opinion is that farmers have limited means where they can hurt game-play, while outright duping (see Lineage2, Ultima Online) even Everquest 1 these days) can have horrible effect on “honest” players who want nothing to do with RMT.