Today, on a very special episode of After School Special, Blizzard teaches us how gold buying and powerlevelling is harmful.
Through our normal support processes and the assistance of players, we also find that many accounts that have been shared with power-leveling services are then hacked into months later, and all of the items on the account are stripped and sold off. Basically, players have paid money to these companies, sometimes large amounts, and they’re then targeted by these same companies down the road. We come across stories every week of the aftereffects of players using these services, and some players now have to deal with long-term repercussions — In addition to consequences such as possible account suspension or closure, in many cases the companies they paid then use their personal information to perpetrate identity theft and credit card fraud. These are long-lasting effects on players’ personal lives that can take years to recover from.
In virtual worlds, there will be prohibition and there will be mobsters. And, eventually, prohibition will be lifted.
#1 by Ed on February 26th, 2008
Two quotes from different folks to respond to:
First…
“Its too late to ’save’ WoW from RMT without causing weird repercussions to the game. At best, Blizzard can only hope to create some sort of exchange system to get a “cut” of the action and mitigate the worst of the RMT downsides.”
I disagree wholeheartedly about “Blizzard taking a cut”. If they’re going to officially sanction gold sales, then they might as well just sell it themselves and take 100% of “the cut”. There’s no way the gold farmers can undercut the source of the gold. I don’t necessarily agree that they *should* sanction gold sales, I just think that doing it themselves is the only realistic solution.
Second…
“Can anyone in the industry honestly tell me that they couldn’t track to see which accounts have abnormally high rates of money transactions between themselves and other players?”
I am the sr. database engineer for an MMO company, so I think I can at least comment. Yes, it is possible to log each and every transaction (gold exchange or otherwise) that a character makes. Recording these transactions and reporting on them are *trivial* matters. i.e.: Given the facilities I could do it in my sleep. It’s just an OLTP problem.
The problem is (in my experience) that you need to make sure your database code is there from the very beginning. This sort of stuff can’t just be tacked on to your game haphazardly. The additional infrastructure (hardware and software) to log these transactions has the potential to be very expensive. It’s a question of whether or not the outcome is worth the additional expense.
#2 by No.6 on February 26th, 2008
Ed: “It’s just an OLTP problem. … This sort of stuff can’t just be tacked on to your game haphazardly. The additional infrastructure (hardware and software) to log these transactions has the potential to be very expensive. It’;s a question of whether or not the outcome is worth the additional expense.”
Agreed on all counts; technically trivial, needs to be designed in, and largely a business decision.
Nor are you the only person who could reach such a conclusion, and RMT well predates the release of any of the current-gen MMOs – so one is left to presume that the business decision was made by various companies to let RMTing proceed with only the minor hampering of manual action.
I can’t say that the market will punish MMO companies for this decision as it appears that the genre is thriving as is. In fact the population using the laissez-faire method (e.g. EQ2’s RMTable servers) indicates to me that people quietly prefer the situation where RMT is under the table to one where it’s open – people prefer the illusion that hard work pays off? OTOH MMO games in which RMT is not beneficial are not relatively popular. Well, someone else can do the sociological analysis for this.
For myself, I’m growing disenchanted with the idea of an MMO as I neither wish to dedicate my waking life to one nor pay people to play for me. The sense of camaraderie is better in private server games with trusted friends or very small MMOs where ‘community self-policing’ is good for something more than a laugh.
#3 by pat on February 26th, 2008
RMT to me is the equivalent of the spoiled brat in the original willy wonka “I want an Oompa Loompa now!”
It’s more of a change in the attitude of gamers who simply want the cheat codes and go to god mode and skip the actual game.
I’m sure a few people were like me who had bard’s tale for the apple II, and with graph paper mapped out things to understand it. was before cheat codes. but we explored and finished the game. Wrote done differet things in Ulitma as well trying to figure it all out.
To say WoW is a grind is pretty laughable. Esp comparing it to EQ.
EQ was just a painful timesink. When a new game came out the top reason why people in EQ didn’t go to another game, the answer was “I invested too much time in my charachter”. I’d venture to say most who remain in EQ subscribe to that mantra.