I can’t claim too deep knowledge of this but I’ve played a couple of these games (helps being able to read Japanese). Essentially, there are two things that help these games avoid RMT predation. The first is being too small to sustain a market in farming or transactions for them. Lets say that, over the course of the year, your marketing operation can get 1% of the installed user-base of a game to buy their foozles from you. With WoW, 1% x 1.5 million US users = 15,000 customers = profit. With, I don’t know, Puzzle Pirates (US game) that calculation works out to 200 customers (assuming you count from their paying customer numbers, not their free acount numbers), and with some (profitable!) Asian games I know that number hovers closer to 100. You can’t justify the expense of having an in-game operation with 100 customers a year.

The second thing is micropayments mean you can’t beat the house. Imagine, for a second, Blizzard made epic mounts your choice of 800g or $19.95. IGE, et al, can’t beat the house — they can’t magic up 800g from nothing (at least, I hope to God they can’t). That puts a price ceiling on how much you can charge for one epic-mount worth of gold. There are a lot of micro-transaction models, but lets take Puzzle Pirates for example. Puzzle Pirates allows you to, effectively, buy in-game “gold” on some servers (you buy a microcurrency which you then sell to other players for “gold” — the microcurrency has in-game value to whoever possesses it). You could set up an Internet cafe full of Chinese college students to farm Puzzle Pirates, get the “gold”, and then try to sell that for USD — but Three Rings will always have the best rate, because they can do the entire process without any marginal transaction fee or the necessity of that whole “pay people to farm” bit. The farmers are, essentially, all of their own customers who want content locked by the micro-currency but don’t want to actually shell out USD for it.

Alternatively, you can have a micro-payment model which doesn’t much inhibit RMT at all. For example, the game featured three posts below this has in-game trading of “phat loot” and micro-payments which you can swap for certain items and certain abilities (like XPx2 for a week), but you can’t swap the micro-payment for phat loot. Which means, theoretically, they’re still open to RMTing, if they develop a subscriber-base big enough to justify it.

So, in short, to quote you: “Nope.”

Nope. In general, people who buy gold/items/accounts do it because they want to be uber. They don’t want a level playing field, they want to be better than everyone else. They will not play on a station exchange server, even if it happens at launch, because their dollar buys them so much more uberness on the normal servers.

This is the real problem, and it is a problem that station exchange does not address at all.

Now if they do this starting on opening day for EQ3, that’s where I bet we’ll see some positive results towards reducing the black market RMTs.

Gold farmers still farm gold on the non-SE servers, and players still buy gold on the non-SE servers. Nothing has changed except for the fact that SOE now gets a cut from a fraction of the money that’s being made. Will SOE be content with this minority stake? (that’s a rhetorical question for a statement that should have read “SOE will not be content with a minority stake.”)

Had SOE truly had the player in mind, they would have worked on trying to eliminate the impact of real-world money on a virtual economy. Scott is correct–it’s SOE’s game, and they’re free to run it how they see fit. But players need to understand that SE is not about the players, and it’s not about player choice. It’s all about SOE.

Mox

Has the world ended bcause of SE? No. But Smed is really asking for it. Especially when some guide or GM takes part in things like duping or just using a /create command of some sort. But, like it or not, someone has to go there first and prove what a bad idea it is. I mean, think about the geniouses who built a little boat named Titanic who thought “Why do we need flood doors that go up to the top on an unsinkable ship?”