Blizzard: Gold Buying Is Bad, Mmmmkay?

It’s not the same thing, J. Habbo and Puzzle Pirates are to a large extent, fancy chatrooms (in the case of YPP mostly just because there’s no way that the devs can create unique, well-designed puzzle games faster than the old ones get worn out). Also, for YPP the transferrable doubloon system (if that’s what you’re referring to) functions more like a tax on otherwise completely in-game transactions than an actual RMT system what substitutes for grinding.

People really do play games like WoW and EQ for the loot. That’s why people bother buying gold at all. They use it to buy loot, stuff that they can use to make loot, or consumables or item mods that they can use to try to obtain loot from bosses and/or PVP–if you don’t care about the loot grind, the need for money and powerlevelling evaporates.

What this actually means for the game system is that RMT isn’t about GOLD. Like in the real world, gold is not the end objective but a medium of exchange with which to buy the services of other players. Making an official RMT system where you pay money and the game magicks you up some gold certainly does reduce the grind for the player who buys the gold, but only at the EXPENSE of everyone else, because even if everyone buys lots of gold, the amount of goods available doesn’t increase. You could make those goods directly available through official RMT, but in order for that to eliminate outsider RMT you’d have to make those items nearly as cheap or cheaper as they could otherwise be obtained from farmers, in large quantities, at which point you completely destroy the scarcity of desirable objects and with it your economy at large.

To be clear I don’t mean to denigrate either YPP or Habbo, there’s nothing wrong with them. They just don’t produce nearly as much of the obsessive behavior that’s associated with mainstream MMOs and the allure of loot. Without it, they are both free from the problems of mainstream MMOs and unable to achieve their immense size and appeal.

I did see the madness, once, in YPP. This was when they first opened the islands for blockade. It was the first time in the game when your loot actually mattered–how many ships you could get and supply and how many people you could get to crew them would dictate whether you would reach the pinnacle of YPP achievement, winning an island. More than one person called in sick to work and stayed up for solid 24-hour blocks to fight in the ensuing blockades.

Would you consider me a user of Habbo because I have an account and logged in a couple times? You don’t have to pay to be a user, yes? A user in Habbo’s therefore not the same thing as a user of an MMORPG. Go to their page and you see ~9000 users on as of this moment, 8 million visits over the last 30 days. Do you really think that fewer people are logged onto WoW at this instant? At ANY TIME?

Oh, you’re real slick, J. Real slick.

Pander, I know a fellow who sells arena titles for actual cash. It seems to work just fine for him. I don’t agree with the practice, but it’s ultimately not my business

Mr. Moore, I think that’s much too simple of a characterization. Obviously, if the game were not fun in any aspect, people simply wouldn’t play it. It must be fun in some places and tedious in others. You believe that the elements that are fun are completely or at least mostly separable from the elements that are tedious, and I believe that they aren’t.

For example: many people like tradeskills and crafting systems. Crafting systems add another dimension to player interactions with the game world. But on the other hand, tradeskills are inherently bound up with the idea of a limited supply of resources in the game. Profession skill, whether by time investment or ability at some minigame, must be limited in supply or it becomes meaningless. At the same time, some mechanic must prevent people who have the skill from simply churning out items by the dozens–either they must be limited by availability of materials, or by number of items that can be created (which increases the value of the capital invested in raising that skill, but which can be problematic if the skill mechanic is based on a minigame rather than time investment). If you remove these limitations, tradeskill items become ubiquitous and the practice of those tradeskills ceases to be special and meaningful. But the very existence of these limitations ensures that at some point tedium will enter the game, because at some point someone will want lay claim to production that’s greater than the amount he can obtain incidentally, and to do so he will have to go out and “farm,” or pay someone else to do it for him.

One idea that’s often floated to get around this is to have skill-based requirements rather than time-based ones. In truth, this doesn’t help very much because repeated tries to pass a difficult test, in essence, constitute a form of time-based obstacle that quickly devolves into tedium. Anyone who has ever been part of a raiding guild knows all about this. Usually, the designer will end up building in some time-based method of grinding through the obstacle so that the players who are unable to do it don’t get completely stuck. He is forced to strike a balance between making the game challenging and interesting, and making the game accessible (by being less time-consuming). Take levelling systems. WoW has a very casual levelling system, which can still be tedious if you’ve done it before. But the flipside of this is that the game does not put a lot of pressure of the player to become skilled in the process of reaching the maximum level. If the player does not, he will find the later challenges in the game very difficult, and in the process will meet failure, which will cost him (and perhaps others) time, and result in tedium. People I know who reached max level in EQ on the other hand, assert that other people who reached that level were more likely to be reasonably knowledgeable because the levelling system was so punishing (tedious) that people who failed to learn wouldn’t make it there.

People who find a game too difficult will think the skill-based tests tedious, and people who find a game too easy will think the time-based tests tedious. In all cases, people will seek faster ways to get past these obstacles. If you have enough players, some of them will inevitably turn to ways outside the scope of the game. That’s where RMT comes in.

Mr. Moore, the point is that every system in the game has to strike a balance between separate “bad things.” Crafting doesn’t have to be tedious, but if it’s quick and easy without any barriers to entry, it won’t be meaningful to the players who do it. Without “cool rare items” that are difficult to learn and difficult to craft, people won’t even bother, they’ll just extract whatever’s convenient to their own play and ignore crafting otherwise. Given that player crafting is supposed to fit into a system of economic and social interaction, this would be a tragic waste of a system.

Likewise, you keep talking about making the game “challenging and fun” but the problem is exactly that, that your playerbase will come with widely varying skill levels, and that the ones for whom the difficulty is not tuned will find it tedious! Those who can’t will get stuck and bored, and those who can too easily will reach the end and, if there are enough of them that reaching the end doesn’t make them very rare and help them stoke their egos, they will also get bored.

Designers have already recognized this previous bit, which is why time-based barriers EXIST. They will persist even in well-designed games, because their purpose is not at all to sift out “unworthy” players. Their purpose is to allow player who are “unworthy” with respect to your SKILL-based challenges to continue to play the game! The real “weeding out of paying customers” occurs when you make your game punish failure too heavily.

I regret to say that I can’t comment on Tabula Rasa’s gameplay because I can’t play it; the whole “we were consumer whores so we were unprepared for an alien onslaught” story makes me want to vomit.

At any rate, I’m only arguing that some degree of tedium is inseparable from game mechanics, in a fashion similar to structural unemployment. I don’t think that it excuses developers who put in additional, unnecessary timesinks (Blizzard’s weapon skill system comes to mind), just like the fact that you will have say 5% structural unemployment excuses an economic policy that results in an additional 10% on top of that. That is just bad design. My main assertion is just that you cannot eradicate RMT through clever systems; any mechanic that does so will destroy too many other parts of the game. In any game with persistence you’ll find people who are willing to pay others for prestige, not just convenience, such as my former arena teammate who sells arena titles.

Some people say that official RMT should be introduced and I feel that is wrongheaded, for reasons relating to game economics that I’ve already discussed. By outlawing it on the one hand and removing bad timesinks where possible on the other, you can reduce the size of the RMT market. A little RMT is basically harmless, so long as it’s much smaller than the economy at large.