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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!