A brief shoutout

Posted on May 4, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 24 Comments

Good job, yo.

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  • Ajeba

    Meh, you can’t win against evil. (Refer to my 5th Element-Gold Farming Analogy) You can only delay it.
    Today’s Moon is tomorrow’s Moon Raper. (you can quote me on that)
    The middle-aged MMO players who have money and a real job will eventually win out over the teenagers who have no money but time.

  • http://www.boogaloogames.net/andrew Andrew

    It looks like Alla has really dropped the ball on this one. It’s interesting to see the other database sites trying to use this to their advantage. “We’ve said no to these companies when others clearly haven’t.” Ouch. This will be a good watermark by which to judge exactly how damaging RMT affiliation is, if the community takes action, or if they’ll all just talk.

  • Lophat

    Talk. And update their MySpace pages again.

  • http://www.theworldtakes.com damijin

    I’m not sure if I’ve been oblivious, or if this trend is something new in game journalism. It wasn’t too long ago that I read a letter from Dan Hsu in the front pages of my EGM, flaunting a holier-than-thou attitude.

    His little letter wasn’t about RMT, but instead, about certain companies pulling ads when their games didn’t recieve adequate coverage. EGM, he professed, would never compromise it’s coverage even if ads were pulled!

    The point is the same though, game journalists are flaunting their morals, and in doing so, polarizing the readers. Read EGM because they can’t be bought. Read WarCry because RMT is bad …. right?

    To be honest, I don’t think these arguments are swaying significant amounts of readers one way or the other; they’re only creating a deeper divide between the already swayed. Perhaps we’re on the brink of “Conservative” vs “Liberal” gaming. Moderates are of no concern, they’re too busy being content to post on the internet.

  • Aufero

    Um. The sentiment is great, and I believe Shannon Drake means what he says. However, “any affiliation was terminated as soon as we found out who we were dealing with” rings a little hollow in the face of that quote from Alex Macris (Ex-CEO of Warcry and founder of Themis, which owns Warcry) in the press release still up on IGE’s site -

    “The virtual property business is fast emerging as one of the most important aspects of the MMORPG industry,” said Alexander Macris, CEO of Themis Group. “We are very excited to have the opportunity to work with marketplace leader IGE to help build out this major new consumer offering.”

    Obviously whatever went wrong there, they had no problem at the time with RMT, or with the idea of dealing with a company that specializes in farming for profit. Did “finding out who we were dealing with” involve discovering just how dirty a deal with IGE could get?

  • http://www.themis-group.com Alexander Macris

    I have gone on the record as saying positive statements about RMT, including a panel at the Austin Games Conference where I called for new business models for online games that included RMT. In that, my views have never changed: It’s needed to attract larger audiences, and it’s coming, because it’s needed. We said it in Themis Report 2004, we’ve said it on WarCry, we’ve said it in The Escapist. But the context has always been *legitimate* RMT, such as you see in Second Life and Project Entropia or even M:TG.

    When we took the engagement with IGE, we were told that their goal was to achieve industry legitimacy, and that retaining us was part of that goal.

    Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that our views on this goal were not in alignment. They saw their chief obstacle to legitimacy as negative buzz from a “vocal minority.” We saw the chief obstacle to their legitimacy as their provision of a service against the wishes of the game operators. The solution they wanted from us was just publicity aimed at the players, the solution we wanted to provide was a comprehensive marketing strategy aimed at doing business with the game operators.

    When this difference in opinion became apparent, the relationship ended. The difference of opinion was substantial enough that we have not retained or permitted any affiliation since then.

    Zero affiliation. I hope that is blunt and clear. It’s intended to be.

    As a businessman, I can’t do more than put my money where my mouth is, and I have. We turned down a substantial (at this point well into the high 6 figures) amount of advertising income on WarCry by not accepting RMT ads.

    Kind regards,
    Alexander Macris
    Themis Group

  • Aufero

    Clear enough, and thanks for the clarification.

  • Jurrasic

    Awesome. I hope that enough sites like this hold out against the ‘fall of night’ where RL cash-for-IG currency becomes acceptable and normal, if not outright required to succeed in MMOGs to possibly reverse the flow instead.

    I hope.

  • KEtCHUP

    Ahhh idealism.

  • slog

    Themis is slimey. You went for a quick buck with IGE, and it bit you in the ass. No amount of Spin is going to change that.

  • Nicademus

    Can I just on the record to say that unrestricted PvP with looting ala UO would solve your gold mining problems in a blink. Why pay for lewt when you can just kill the f-ers and take it.

    I know every dev just labeled me as a short sighted moron, but I figured I’d just point out that this problem grew out of the “bore them but dear god don’t hurt them” mindset everyone seems to have taken from the admitted pvp clusterfuck that was early UO.

    People won’t buy things when they can take them for free and they won’t buy things when they can lose them the next day to some r33t Dreadlord. The only market in UO, when it was a viable game, was really for gold and status items that would be immediately banked/locked down. You never lost much gold to PvPers and lockable/banked items were immune to loss.

    Currently there is zero risk in RMT, only cost and reward. The first time some idiot loses a 200 dollar spear of unholy Orc Smackdownness 10 minutes after he bought the thing, he will have effectively been turned off to RMT for the remainder of his stay in the game.

    RMT is endemic to the current gaming paradigm, the only way you’re going to kill it is introduce a risk metrics system based on in game behavior that identifiers farmers/dealers/buyers and punishes them, or introduce some risk of loss for all items so that acquiring them is not nearly so important as retaining them. Either way you’re going to piss off a segment of your customer base.

    But shaming people and appealing to their sense of fairness and courtesy on the friggin internet is nonsensical.

  • http://www.drypulse.com drypulse

    wish i could view the rmt companies as the evil people out to destroy the mmo industry, but my time is more valueable to me then spending hours farming just for an enchant…

    i want to play the games and have fun, not grind every single thing. bad enough tryin to get my cenarion circle rep up, or clearing mc/bwl for the zillionth time (honestly still fun tho so i guess i can’tuse it as an example). or farming just to pay the repair bills…

    simply put, i wanna play, i wanna have fun.

  • KEtCHUP

    Nicademus- Allowing looting is not what will fix gold farmers, as much as I wish it would.

    Games that give you power dependent on the items you have are the problem.

    Sure, items are important. Like a grappling hook that would let you get over that real big wall. Or a candlestick that lights up dark rooms. But when it comes down to fighting, everyone (who has maxed out their character) should have an equal chance, and it should be based on player skill.

    Take a look at Ultima Online. Everyone wore GM armor, and some dexies were light years better than others.

    Take a look at Counterstrike. If your team won, everyone got paid, and bought the big bad weapons. Too bad not everybody could shoot with them. And if you were poor, but you were good, you could kill someone and take their expensive gun, and use it better than they did.

    These are two of the greatest games played over the internet, and they both emphasize player-skill over the items you have. And while gold-farming/selling might have started in Ultima Online, it just made you rich, it didn’t make you good. These item-centric games are feeding the gold farming market, especially when you have to pay assloads to repair items that you know you will never lose.

  • http://www.theworldtakes.com damijin

    What would the alternative to an item-centric game be? I had high praises for Lineage 2′s support-based game, where the buffs your party could provide you with were far more important than the gear of the players in the party.

    But considering that Lineage 2 was the START of Chinese involvement in RMT, and basically brought RMT up from being a couple of people on ebay to a country of industrious farmers… something clearly went wrong.

    Still, I agree with KEtCHUP, even if you could drop all of your loot, people would just buy it all back. Or at least buy SOME of it back. It would be more farmer-friendly than anything you’ve seen today. Try not to let yourself look back at older systems and say “Oh, no one bought anything because of ,” because that is NOT the reason. People didn’t buy gold because there wasn’t a massive country of people outsourcing their labor to American gamers prior to 2004.

  • Wanderer

    What it comes down to is that the rules of any game should be defined by the publisher, not by a bunch of stinking cheaters.

    If you don’t like the rules of the game you’re playing, find a different game — don’t say “If I don’t think a rule is fun, I’m just going to break it” and happily cheat your way to success. Try that in Monopoly … “I think I’d have more fun if I got twice as much money when I passed Go as other players, so I’m going to grab some extra from the bank” … and see how long other people will want to play with you.

    If players really want RMT, then the Station Exchange servers on EQ2 should be bulging at the seams and Sony should be opening new ones at a fast rate. I don’t have any figures on this — are they?

    Question for you, drypulse:
    My RL schedule means that I can’t be on WoW much during primetime, and therefore can’t join a raiding guild. (sadly, they all have this bizarre requirement that members actually put in an appearance at raids) If I were to find an exploit that would allow me to, let’s say, solo Onyxia, would you have a problem with me doing that?

    After all, I am (was, anyway) paying for all the content in WoW, not just as much as can be soloed or experienced in random pickup groups. I’ve never even seen Onyxia, other than her head anyway, and I’m not likely to have my name announced with a dragonslayer buff any time soon. So would it be okay if I used an exploit to go pay her a visit? I’m paying for the game and I want to be a dragonslayer too!

  • http://www.psychochild.org/ Psychochild

    Nicademus wrote:
    The first time some idiot loses a 200 dollar spear of unholy Orc Smackdownness 10 minutes after he bought the thing, he will have effectively been turned off to RMT for the remainder of his stay in the game.

    Unfortunately, no. That idiot will put in a support call to the game administrators, usually of the variety of, “Some cheater came along and took my item I PAID A LOT OF MONEY FOR! Go get it back, or I’ll tell everyone you support cheating!” Trust me on this one.

    And, in these cases the RMT just moves to whatever else takes time and effort. In M59, people started buying and selling whole accounts instead of items, since built characters were the “hard” thing to acquire. (Note that we disallow account sales in our EULA, but that didn’t stop people.)

    So, it’s not quite the silver bullet it might seem.

  • The Alien

    People seem to like to use cheating at Monopoly as an example. Okay, fair enough. But they use black and white examples, which is wrong.

    RMT is not grabbing bills out of the bank. It’s offering real money to another player for their Monopoly money. The person who owns the Monopoly set then complains that they own that Monopoly money and you aren’t allowed to sell it. And that’s where we are today.

    Can I just give another player some money? Under just about every MMORPG we have today, yes. If I’m famous in some way and have legions of devoted fans(Gabe, Tycho, Scott Kurtz), can they give me cool stuff, powerlevel me and get me taken along on raids? Or maybe I’ve just got an awesome girlfriend who can hook me up like that. Is that fair?

    The reason I am less upset about RMT on a conceptual level(cheating?) and more concerned with it on a practical level(economy-hosing) is that I come from the school of old. I cut my teeth in MU*s from 1992 on. The MUD I loved the most Had particularly draconian rules in this regard. No multi-charing and enforced roleplaying. So, no having more than one character on at once. No leaving stuff somewhere with one character and the logging on and ‘finding’ it with another. No helping someone out just because you know them in real life…or even because you know one of their other characters. And this is in a system where characters die of old age after a certain number of house played.

    So from that point of view, pretty much everyone is cheating all the time. Yes, I recognize that those aren’t the rules adopted by modern games…but they are what define my basic sense of right and wrong in these games. So if you’re going to let someone have a special advantage in your game because they’re famous IRL or some other real-life-related reason…

    How much of a difference is there between me paying some guy $10 for some gold or some people giving me $10 worth of gold because they like my web comic, rant site, etc? It’s still getting the gold for out-of-game reasons. I didn’t earn it either way.

    Yes, there’s a difference. But I would argue it’s less of a cheating vs. playing it straight difference and more of a breaking the game vs. not breaking the game difference.

  • KEtCHUP

    Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it cheating.

    Personally, I liked UO’s system for a few reasons.
    Even if you could buy gold, it didn’t help you except that you could die more often than someone who was broke. Sure, you could bring along a top-end magic sword that you paid for with chinese gold, but someone who was better than you could kill you and take it. While this system inherently discouraged gold buying, people had houses. And secure areas. And you could display all the cool crap you had collected (or bought) for everyone to see. And as long as it’s just a cosmetic thing, it’s fine to use RL money on it, because it’s not game-breaking.

    In World of Warcraft, it is game-breaking. Because time is the currency of WoW, people who are good at the game might not necessarily have enough time to get all the good items. And because WoW is item-based, and you really cannot expect to compete if you don’t have high-end items, people are FORCED to buy gold to buy items to compete. Because player-skill is almost a non-factor, the people who don’t have time to play will never be able to top the people who do, at least in PvP. And it will take them longer to do something in PvE, if they can do it at all.
    So what’s wrong with that?
    Essentially, as long as a game’s combat is based on the items you have (and keep forever), it will encourage and almost necessitate gold farming, unless all items are no-trade. Then you will just have a lot less people at end-game, which translates to a lot less people playing in the long run.

    The solution to gold farming? It’s really pretty simple, and I think UO is the only system to have perfected it, and they did it by accident. Their housing system and the market for “rare” items that developed over time is what kept the gold market in check. Most of the items in the game that you NEEDED to compete were either cheap or player-crafted. If you didn’t have a Grandmaster-crafted weapon, well, you did. If you had a high-end magic weapon, you were a target for thieves and PKs, and you were an idiot, because you could do almost as well with a GM-crafted one. This resulted in a low “cost of living”, I guess. And you only had to buy gold if you wanted to live lavishly, in a massive house among tons and tons of rare items.

    Eventually, this led to hoarding, which led to inflation. And the answer to inflation was gold sinks, and gold sinks (like repair cost in WoW), is what really started the gold farmers working, because it went from wanting lots of gold to needing lots of gold.

    So it looks to me like it’s a trade-off. Either we have a fucked up economy because everything is way too expensive, or we buy gold from China for real money…
    Or the company that runs the game sells “rare” items, and keeps them rare, for real money.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Uh-huh.

    When Eve legitmised RMT, nobody noticed.

    What Eve allows is people to purchase Gametime Cards/Codes and sell them for in-game cash. (They also allow character sales for in-game cash..work out how you can “power level” with real money…). This has crashed the Ebay market for Eve ISK quite nicely, but it’s still a form of RMT.

  • Nicademus

    I’m guessing EVE could give away free bj’s from porn stars to every third high level player who logged in for a month and no one would notice, b/c the the newbie game just wouldn’t be worth the effort to find out about the free BJ’s.

    But hey at least they solved RMT when it comes to screensavers, hopefully the world can learn from that example.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    110,000 people disagree with you. That ain’t niche anymore.

    Shrug, Eve isn’t designed for everyone. If it’s not for you, move on. Don’t sling shit because it’s not for you.

  • KEtCHUP

    In a market of 6 million, 11,000 is niche.

  • Ian

    Not when 5.9 million are n00bs just getting their first taste of an MMO. Don’t need to set the skill level high, just make it pretty and shallow. Depth and skill just piss n00bs off. World of Whatan00bz!

    Yea I cancelled my account, too boring even on the PvP servers. Might go muck around in EvE again but I doubt it, I think I have gamers burnout. Started about 1978 (arcades), giving up about 2006. Who will carry on the torch!!? Oh yea, the 5 mil n00bs! Horray! Good time to cut out if you ask me, too many normals in games now… and “normals” are a mess.

  • http://www.corpnews.com Andrew Crystall

    Ketchup? Missing an 0 there. And 125k now, apparently.