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.

And it has all the same side effects – innocents being banned, disruption to games, people refusing to innovate because it’d be seen wrongly…

…and with the same degree of success, driving the RMT sellers onwards to ever-greater success.

Plus, bluntly, fighting Ebay is fighting the future (Fighting IGE is a different story, and is based on their tactics not their results).

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.

One key factoring you aren’t 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’d 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?

If you have doubts about such an extreme price difference, then look at the prices of marijuana in countries where it has been legalized versus countries where it hasn’t. You will find that I am not exagerating in the slightest. And if the company is doing the legitamite RMTs they can make them as cheap as they want to, since they can create it with just a flip of a bit.

The War on RMT is just like the War on Drugs: hopeless. The only solution is to find a way to live with it. Or keep things as they are and keep complaining about it but never solve it. Where there is a demand, there WILL be a supply for it.

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.

If you want gold to be desirable, then not everyone can have as much as they want. There are two basic barriers you can inflict against this: gameplay difficulty and time investments.

If you make the gameplay difficult you reduce your market and you will make less money on the game you have spent tons of money developing. If you make the gameplay tedious, someone will pay someone else to do it for them.

If you make every world epic drop BoP farmers will just calculate the average time to mash buttons on a toon before a given BoP drops and amortize the cost of their time spent farming for the BoP drop on someone else’s toon over the price of selling the epic. (Just like levels, now).

Switching to difficulty based challenges has a likewise problem, in World of Warcraft you can (for instance) hire a hunter with better gear and more playtime to complete your epic quest for you and get one of the top 3 bows in the game without having any skill yourself.

As long as people can interact with one another with persistent results, you will have a market for RMT as someone has more ego and capital than sense.