It’s more of a change in the attitude of gamers who simply want the cheat codes and go to god mode and skip the actual game.

I’m sure a few people were like me who had bard’s tale for the apple II, and with graph paper mapped out things to understand it. was before cheat codes. but we explored and finished the game. Wrote done differet things in Ulitma as well trying to figure it all out.

To say WoW is a grind is pretty laughable. Esp comparing it to EQ.

EQ was just a painful timesink. When a new game came out the top reason why people in EQ didn’t go to another game, the answer was “I invested too much time in my charachter”. I’d venture to say most who remain in EQ subscribe to that mantra.

Agreed on all counts; technically trivial, needs to be designed in, and largely a business decision.

Nor are you the only person who could reach such a conclusion, and RMT well predates the release of any of the current-gen MMOs – so one is left to presume that the business decision was made by various companies to let RMTing proceed with only the minor hampering of manual action.

I can’t say that the market will punish MMO companies for this decision as it appears that the genre is thriving as is. In fact the population using the laissez-faire method (e.g. EQ2′s RMTable servers) indicates to me that people quietly prefer the situation where RMT is under the table to one where it’s open – people prefer the illusion that hard work pays off? OTOH MMO games in which RMT is not beneficial are not relatively popular. Well, someone else can do the sociological analysis for this.

For myself, I’m growing disenchanted with the idea of an MMO as I neither wish to dedicate my waking life to one nor pay people to play for me. The sense of camaraderie is better in private server games with trusted friends or very small MMOs where ‘community self-policing’ is good for something more than a laugh.

I disagree wholeheartedly about “Blizzard taking a cut”. If they’re going to officially sanction gold sales, then they might as well just sell it themselves and take 100% of “the cut”. There’s no way the gold farmers can undercut the source of the gold. I don’t necessarily agree that they *should* sanction gold sales, I just think that doing it themselves is the only realistic solution.

Second…
“Can anyone in the industry honestly tell me that they couldn’t track to see which accounts have abnormally high rates of money transactions between themselves and other players?”

I am the sr. database engineer for an MMO company, so I think I can at least comment. Yes, it is possible to log each and every transaction (gold exchange or otherwise) that a character makes. Recording these transactions and reporting on them are *trivial* matters. i.e.: Given the facilities I could do it in my sleep. It’s just an OLTP problem.

The problem is (in my experience) that you need to make sure your database code is there from the very beginning. This sort of stuff can’t just be tacked on to your game haphazardly. The additional infrastructure (hardware and software) to log these transactions has the potential to be very expensive. It’s a question of whether or not the outcome is worth the additional expense.

Meanwhile players don’t seem to mind buying game-gold although nobody owns up to it. Obviously both players and creators realize the practice is wrong – I don’t want to say ‘morally’ wrong because a whole class of people get their hackles up when the word ‘moral’ pops up, but let’s say unsportsmanlike.

If I play Monopoly and am losing but because I’m Dad in the family decide to ‘exchange’ $5 real money for $5000 Monopoly money but the two young kids only have $0.25 allowance and therefore always lose to me, it’s not a game any more, and further they aren’t going to want to play with cheater Dad.
Nobody likes baseball players who dope up with steroids or wager on their own games or football teams who cheat.

A game is a game only because it has its own set of rules that are self-contained and are followed by all players.

Now since this standard of game is ignored by so many that the RMT ‘industry’ pulls in ~$1B, the present course of action isn’t working.

IMO accepting the idea that along with the game purchase and monthly sub people should just expect to pony up some $ for game gold in order to keep up with the Lamers is an admission of total failure in game design. “Yes! We have made a game so FUBAR that you have to break our own EULA in order to enjoy it!” What an achievement.

Or MMO companies could use obvious automated means to deal with the situation. Can anyone in the industry honestly tell me that they couldn’t track to see which accounts have abnormally high rates of money transactions between themselves and other players?

Or take the visible end of the RMT business, the dummy accounts that are used to spam players. Maybe (this is an LOTRO example) after the 450th time a human loremaster is created, follows exactly the same pathing to reach the minimum level to leave the newbie instance, and parks in exactly the same spot in Bree and starts spouting spam advertisements with exactly the same boilerplate text, MAYBE the IP range these bots are being generated from should be blocked without requiring regular players to report each and every one?

Or the existing situation could continue, which is profitable for both RMTers and MMO companies in the same sense in which the war on drugs makes the crime bosses rich and keeps lots of police busy but doesn’t seem to have really impacted the availability or the social damage of drugs (just running with the metaphor suggested by the thread title).

This “it’s bad, and don’t cry if after buying gold you find the bad people have stolen your account” line is nice CYA but bad policy.

WTF?!? is the point of making a game that won’t appeal to 30 million paying customers? Everyone seems to fear being the first Columbia Broadcasting System of online games…”

Quote for Truth!

Thats the problem with hardcore fanboi devs writing for hardcore fanbois. Brad McQuaid got lucky with DikuMud with a graphical interface but essentially we’re still mired in 1999 “grind for victory!” groupthink.

WoW got it half-way right, they got the sub numbers but is plagued with RMT. I suspect that they cannot get the other part of the equation down for fear of losing favor with the “Timmy ToomuchfreeTimeHavenolife” crowd faction. Small in number but vocal and very influential in forums like these. It also doesn’t help that most devs seems to fall into the “Timmy ToomuchfreeTimeHavenolife” category.

At any rate, I’m only arguing that some degree of tedium is inseparable from game mechanics, in a fashion similar to structural unemployment. I don’t think that it excuses developers who put in additional, unnecessary timesinks (Blizzard’s weapon skill system comes to mind), just like the fact that you will have say 5% structural unemployment excuses an economic policy that results in an additional 10% on top of that. That is just bad design. My main assertion is just that you cannot eradicate RMT through clever systems; any mechanic that does so will destroy too many other parts of the game. In any game with persistence you’ll find people who are willing to pay others for prestige, not just convenience, such as my former arena teammate who sells arena titles.

Some people say that official RMT should be introduced and I feel that is wrongheaded, for reasons relating to game economics that I’ve already discussed. By outlawing it on the one hand and removing bad timesinks where possible on the other, you can reduce the size of the RMT market. A little RMT is basically harmless, so long as it’s much smaller than the economy at large.

I also play DDO which has some RMT happening in it but they have redesigned the mail so that spam for RMT goes into a different section of my mailbox so that I can ignore it. I have traded items with other players but not bought gold/items from the farmer.

I don’t see how we can get rid of RMT once it happens in a game. But future games should be able to do something before release (hopefully).

JMHO

Thank You

Urban

Yes, I agree that crafting should not be too easy or quick. But if the barrier is simply a mindless timesink, then stop and think about what the developers have doen. They have said” We do not want this to be easy, so we are going to make it so very boring that most people will choose not to do it.” That is a twisted logic. And it will not succeed in the future game market.

And I disagree as to why developers put timesinks in the game. Timesinks were put into games to stretch out content. Simply put, playes consumed content faster than developers could create it. So, raids designs based around guilds running a dungeon many times. The game company has to get it’s money from the dev time of the dungeon.With PVE, this is still a concern. But when you move to PVP, it is less of one. PVP is player created content. In WOW, the Gulch is just as valid today as the day it was made. Player burn out is the only factor, and grinding does not affect that.

But I do agree that it is a balance in the game design. To easy, and it’s boring. And, I admit there are places for grinds in fututre game design. But , the way things stand right now, the balance is not good. Grinds are easy to make, and as long as players pay for them, gaming companies will provide them. But, the system is starting to break down. And the profitability of gold farming is a sympton of that. What people are willing to spend money on is the truest test of their priorities. And gold farmes make a lot of money. Simply because so many people are willing to spend money rather than time. Players want more from thier game time. They want fun.

And tedium is not fun. We could debate forever over what “tedium” is. And every person posting here could have a different idea as to what is to tedious, what is to easy, and what is just right. But , again, I say just look at the marketplace. Millionaires are being made because of what the freemarket defines as “tedious”.

Regardless, point being making things no drop isn’t the answer to RMT isn’t the cause of a lot of RMT. Why create a game where crafting is tedious?

It seems like everyone creating games these days just insists on having some level of “how long can you hold your palm over the candle flame element” in order to appeal to Timmy ToomuchfreeTimeHavenolife.
WTF?!? is the point of making a game that won’t appeal to 30 million paying customers? Everyone seems to fear being the first Columbia Broadcasting System of online games…