Why? Because in Eve-Online, you can sell currency…but only for gametime codes. And gametime is what MMO companies really do “print”.

Mr. Catass can sell his in-game currency and not have to pay real cash for playing the game.
Mr. IHaveAJob can buy game currency for real cash.
AND the company gets their share.
AND no inflation.

To be, this is a far, far better answer than letting IGE run rampent.

Actually WoWs EULA and TOS are part of the rules that affect the game, they are part of the rules of the game.

The place the game takes place in is the Internet. There are rules to using the internet and they vary depending on who you pay to connect and if you break those rules your ISP will kick you off, but that doesn’t make you a cheater at WoW.

Thats the correct way your analogy works, Wow is not both a place where a game can be played and a game, it is just one thing, a game and all rules that Blizzard choose to impose are rules of the game and if broken then you are cheating.

Can there be an agreement that RMT is a symptom of bad design, and not a problem in and of itself? After all, the people who buy the gold aren’t your power gamers out to exploit every advantage they can find – they are those trying to keep up, but the nagging wife and those damn kids…

WoW is actually a pretty good example of how to make gold farming somewhat irrelevant. There\’e2\’80\’99s enough free-floating items and gold sinks to make gold valuable, but once you\’e2\’80\’99re level 60, all the gold in the world isn\’e2\’80\’99t going to help you get a Tier 2 armor set.

Actually Scott, from my readings I gleen that some uber-guilds are selling at least T1 armor in WoW, and perhaps even T2 now. And that is because they do run out of gold actually, it’s never irrelevant.

Farming gold in WoW is, inasmuch as I can tell, pretty mind-numbingly boring, even for an uber-guild. So if you have level 60 wannabe’s with enough gold and not enough time, and uber-guilds with enough time and needing that gold, the inevitable marketplace will occur.

“I want to welcome you all on your tour of Black Wing Lair. I’ll be your tour-guide for the evening. You’ll notice a paritcularly phat dragonkin over on the right-platform, his name is Razorgore and that’s where your first souvenirs will come from.”

As long as MMO game designs support any economy remotely resembling RL economics, RMT will happen. Either design it out of your game or roll with it.

So I have a dictionary that lists one definition of \’e2\’80\’9ccheat\’e2\’80\’9d as \’e2\’80\’9cTo violate rules deliberately, as in a game.\’e2\’80\’9d Is the ToS not considered a rule anymore? It\’e2\’80\’99s downright silly to think that the only rules are those enforced in code. Under that reasoning, duping is allowed simply because it is possible.

Let’s say you want to play tennis. So you and a friend rent a tennis court for a couple of hours. The rules of the court say such things as “Shirt and shoes must be worn, no food or drink” etc. Your friend gets thirsty and stops to buy a drink and comes back and drinks it in the court. The owner of the court, for argument’s sake, kicks you out of the court for violating his TOS. So does this suddenly make you a cheater at tennis? There’s no rules about having a drink on the sideline in tennis. It doesn’t affect the game. It’s just that the owner of the court doesn’t want any food or drink and since it’s his court he sets the rules.

The point is there’s two types of rules:
- Rules that affect the game (cheating)
- Rules laid down by the owners of the place where the game takes place (TOS)

These two sets are not mutually exclusive but there are some rules that exist within one camp and not the other. To try and pretend both sets are one and the same is absurd.