Is it such a stretch for a MMOG company to do a spoiler website (paysite even) to their own game? Its another revenue stream that games company management is leaving for the RMT peddlers.

How? The game company is encouraging people to pay money to play their game by providing easy access to information people want about the game. Where, exactly, is the conflict of interest?

I suppose the game company is less likely to tell you about possible exploits, but that’s about it.

Blizzard’s goal should be to ensure that the players have the freedom to not to care about the existence of gold farmers. Just like players should not have to care about the hardware configuration of the game servers.

As a side note, I find it disturbing people would rather have a fansite run by the Game Company than by Affinity. The conflict of interest of a gold farmer to an item site is a bit less than a game company to an item site. At least Affinity represents a third party.

As for caring who owns what site though, no. If it gives useful information in an easy format to use, it’ll be used. The best fight against that seems to be the armory, if it could scale well enough to support the number of hits it gets without coming to a thottbot style crashing halt.

Bah, just stop writing gameplay that make it too easy for the RMT industry to make a lucrative living off it. “Engaging the 95% players etc.” is like determining what colors to paint the barn doors after all the horses have bolted.

The reality of the situation is that most people really don’t care. They don’t know who IGE, Yantis, et al are and wouldn’t care if you told them. They may agree that gold pharmers/sales are bad, but until it directly impacts them they will just nod and make the “coo-koo” sign in their mind as you talk.

These people (the vast, VAST majority) don’t care about the health of the industry. They don’t care about the economic and political ramifications for future games or even the possible legal problems that could arise. They play the game they play and use the sites they use. The rest is just bug guts on the windshield.

If the developers of these games want to truly strike at the hart of RMT purveyors they need to engage this 95% of players in the fight. Make RMT, farming and the associated behaviors something REAL to them beyond tell-spam or junk in their mailbox.

Don’t get me wrong, a million smackers would tempt me too, but I’d like to think I’d have the guts not to LIE about it.