It sounds to me like the real complaint here is that the game (whichever one it is you play) needs more servers or more spawns to service the needs of a cramped playerbase.

While game design can minimize those behaviors, I’m not sure any design with an economy (and what fun is a game world where you can’t trade with other players?) can eliminate them altogether.

Secondly, I don’t see that RMTs are something that developers should be fighting against. Developers seem to have this mindset that “the players must play the game the way WE intended, not the way they enjoy playing it”, and I think that’s horrible. These people are paying to have fun, and everytime a developer decides they aren’t having the right sort of fun they just annoy their customers. Sure, if player A’s gameplay is directly interfeering with other players’ enjoyment of the game, then something should probably be done. But don’t go making arbitrary rules to force your players to do what you wanted them to when their actions aren’t interfeering with others.

No actually the end result is very similar.

An uberguild/hardcore players monopolize content just as much.

All diehard players cause the economy to skew. Singlehandedly I could change the average price of an item across the server in WoW and I wasn’t even all that much of a heavy player.

General nuisance … that’s broad enough that it definitely covers a LOT of non gold farmers.

No at the end of the day I don’t view that there is any order of magnitude difference between the two. Everything that they’re accused of causing I can point to history of many, many guilds/etc doing the causing.

At the end of the day it all boils down to the system’s design honestly.

Robin: I don’t deny the motives of the buyer. What I blame the buyer for is encouraging the sellers and all the things that come with them.

http://rivercottage.net/foodmatters/article.jsp?ref=foodmatters.200304115126

Um, no. What I’m saying is that I buy gold the same way I buy meat…without a lot of thought for how it got to me. Even if I did think about it, I wouldn’t accept responsibility for encouraging other people’s bad behavior through the simple act of buying gold/a cheeseburger.

> Maybe, the solution is make games without un-fun activities?

I dunno. I think Warcraft did a pretty good job with that…it’s easy to level up, quests are for the most part fun and rewarding, hell, everything is fun, in moderation. Yet people still buy gold. Why?

I think that most people are using gold-buying to tailor the game to fit their playstyle. Most people don’t want to buy thousands of gold and twink out all their characters with every conceivable purple BOE. They just want a little extra to get their level 40 mount, or to get some healing potions for PvE, or something, because they don’t have the time or inclination to farm for it themselves. And that’s what you’d have to do, FARM for it, because just saving up the gold you get through normal play through natural progressions up the levels is not going to get you enough to get the items at the level where they’d be most useful.

So is the answer then to increase the gold supply? Make all mobs drop ten times as much coin? No, because if they made gold that easy to accumulate, something else would just become the de facto currency, and then people would be buying THAT instead, to fund an increased “standard of living”.

No, RMTs are a natural outgrowth of any system that allows unregulated player-to-player trades. If players can do it, the will do it. The only answer I can think of is therefore not to allow unregulated player-to-player trades. That’s the only way to ensure everyone “earns” their own way. And then you’re right back to a situation where you can’t hope to compete with the people that have unlimited playtime, which is a whole other argument.

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