The More You Know

It’s nicely done, although for awhile there I couldn’t tell if this was an anti-RMT message or something making fun of the other three hypocritical players.

What Jones is saying. But it’s probably futile to fight off gold spammers as long as they still have people buying from them; and to what extent are you shooting yourself in the foot if you go after them instead?

But what this video really lacks is a “Hi, I’m Scott Jennings, and this is a community announcement.” Preferably delivered from Alistair Cooke’s old Masterpiece Theater set. And ideally dressed in Hugh Hefner’s bathrobe.

Uhm… The microsoft add was less painfull to watch… The long haired lady was nice tho :p

So the ncsoft community coordinators pretend to be a couple of griefing ass holes that report their own friends and cheer when they get banned?Yah, that’s gonna stop real money trading. Especially with ncsoft opening up more and more real money trading cash shop items. I mean services. Wink wink.  

I like the fact that SOE has the Station Exchange so players can sell legitimately to other players. A progressive attitude in an industry hobbled by backwards thinking as far as RMT goes. When are the other companies going to get with the times? Players like convenience and will continue to patronize grey market RMT vendors if they have no officially sanctioned option. The current attitude toward RMT by MMO companies seems very similar to the whole Napster vs Big Music scene of the 90s.

Players like convenience and will continue to patronize grey market RMT vendors if they have no officially sanctioned option. The current attitude toward RMT by MMO companies seems very similar to the whole Napster vs Big Music scene of the 90s.

An officially sanctioned option just means the publishers can get double-dipping, milking you off for a subscription, then “convince” you to pay more because you want convenience. So you could get cases where publishers deliberately make a game as grindfest-heavy as possible, because there’s more money to be made that way.

I don’t think there’s that much of a comparison between this and Big Music. Napster was all about flouting copyright law, and the only “legitimate” use I can find for technically illegal file sharing is in the case of a product not otherwise available to the public, like a book out of print for 40 years (which means nobody’s making money off it at present, not even the rightful owner, if there is one; see orphan works), not legally for sale where you live (such as an European show not released in Region 1), or otherwise impossible to find through legitimate means. But Napster and current file-sharing sites aren’t really about that, are they? They mostly offer what you’re already deluged with but don’t want to pay a red cent for.

Big Music should have embraced the legal sharing market sooner, and it would have worked (iTunes does), but there is no parallel with what might happen with games if they followed your model. There is no real ethical consideration in Big Music’s case.

Was kind of weird that the advert seemed to be suggesting that griefing/exploiting is normal behaviour in an MMO, but that buying gold is a step too far. Not the lesson I would have chose to teach.

Creating new levels of stupid…
RMT only happens in poorly designed games developed my mentally retarded cannibalistic chimpanzees on crystal meth.

Poe’s law is strong with this one.

The Aion team should be talking to the City of Heroes team on how to better combat the in game RMT stuff. CoH does a great job by comparison.

There’s items that sell on the market for close to the cap on how much inf you can have in CoH. That indicates probably… or hyperinflation, or possibly both.

And of course they make the evil guy a bass player.

I am sick of being stereotyped.

Why dont they just call it “gold’ like everyone else? Pompous twits.

LOL! Lum please tell us you had nothing to do with that video being made!!!! What’s next – links to ‘Reefer Madness’ as a public service announcement against smoking dope???

Here’s a video that promotes interest in a game instead of stomache turning http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgvM7av1o1Q ?

If RMT destroys game worlds, why hasn’t WOW been destroyed after all these years of RMT? Hatch

If crime erodes the fabric of society, why hasn’t society completely dissolved after all these centuries?

The other day, there was a fly in my soup. Inexplicably, some soup remained.

Come to think of it, there was a point in which I was employed and making money. Why it is that, when I look at the balance in my checking account, there’s a number there instead of, “all money?”

(Yes, this is a collection of ridiculous strawmen, but their purpose is to be three humorous examples of the same logical fallacy you’re making here. Hmm, I’m not really so rigidly into the labels to know what to call it, this one, maybe. Though this one might be more appropriate to RMT as a whole.)

Apparently it’s because of flies in soup and bank statements. I know it might sound strange but pundits don’t feel the same need for coherency that most of us feel.  

This is because I now firmly believe that attempting to convince anyone of anything on the Internet simply doesn’t work. Upon anything anyone has taken a stand upon on the Internet, the walls of their conviction are shored up by an unlimited supply of minimal effort required to creatively misinterpret anything you have written that may undermine them.

The bottom line is that they’re usually way too emotionally invested in keeping their walls up to be talked out of it, either because I’m coming off as an arrogant prick (as I usually do) and they’ve now an emotional need to defy me or because of a pre-existing condition which has created an emotional stake (e.g. Hatch does RMT is under an obligation to defend his doing so).

Because of this, I’ve been experimenting with alternative approaches. The easiest is probably just to entice them out with promises of free beer via an simple emotional appeal, but honestly I think that’s a bit unethical because it doesn’t really address the logic of what’s on the table. What I’m doing here is pointing out they’ve built their castle on the side of a cliff and seeing if gravity will assert itself.

Now that you mention it, this whole situation is a whole lot more conductive to legitimate punditry than I realized. I need to find better ways to spend my time than Internet forums. I’m getting too good at it, and that can be likened to learning to think madness in order to better interface with the residents of the asylum.

Apparently it’s because of flies in soup and bank statements. I know it might sound strange but pundits don’t feel the same need for coherency that most of us feel.  

lol

Stop designing your games as giant time wasters. It makes sense when you are in an asian market, in a pc bang, changing by the hour or doing “f2p”. It doesn’t make sense when your customers are paying a monthly fee. We know that this is a cheap trick to make content last longer but that’s your fault, not ours.
[...]
You want a quick fix to get rid of gold farmers and power level services? Bump the drop rate and exp rate by something ridiculous like 10 and watch the gold sellers go out of business.

Hell, yes this is a problem. But, to interject a complication: a major draw of MMORPGs is the existence of power acquisition mechanics. Killing the grind does more than remove the necessity of gold farmers. It removes a major part of what it is that makes MMORPGs worth playing by making achievement too trivial.

I think you can keep the grind, but what you need to do is make sure the game is fun to play. It’s a kneejerk reaction to think that filling the leveling bar is the problem. No, the problem is that you no longer enjoy the activities that fill it. If you are enjoying those activities, it’s hard to even refer to it as a grind anymore.

The tricky problem behind this is that different people get bored at different times. If you base your power acquisition mechanic mostly on x amount of time to get y levels, and you shoot for the average rate of burnout, you’re sure to cause anyone who has less tolerance than the average rate of burnout to be grinding.

The solution? Offer shortcuts. This is what gold sellers do… but you shouldn’t patronize them because they cause a lot of damage in the process. Their motive isn’t to make players happy or to protect the integrity of the game world, they typically steal from the former and damage the later in their dealings. Their only motive is to make money. The game developers should be the ones providing the shortcuts. Perhaps allowing players to earn levels instantly based off of where the challenges appropriate to them exist.

Two things make it hard for me to see anything positive in this video:

First, the “nobody’s perfect” angle is ruined by the girl who claims that she trains elite mobs onto newbies. All of the other things mentioned (fake DC, crossgender characters, spending the bugged trillion kinah) are fully accepted as reasonable behavior by the majority. Okay, so the last one might not be, but that was a rare occurence and a chaotic shitstorm to boot, with no lasting damage done thanks to the (obviously inevitable) rollback. Training mobs for fun goes beyond “mildly unacceptable behavior to some” and well into “majorly frowned upon behavior by nearly all” as well as being a punishable violation of the game rules. The message that RMT is less acceptable than training mobs is a bizarre addition to this video, especially when you consider that training has a much more direct and much more immediate negative effect on other players.

Second, how does buying kinah = getting your account hacked? Using a bot program? Yes, that would do it. Handing over your username and password to a powerleveling service? Well DUH. But short of contacting NCSoft with your CC number to find out your account name and reset your password (if that’s even possible without knowing additional information), there’s no possible way that you’re in danger of getting hacked when you buy kinah. If you were to use a different CC than you used for your game account, I feel pretty confident in saying 0% chance.

So the lesson doesn’t make sense. If you RMT, NCSoft will know to banhammernate you because a.) the people you walk around telling about it will report you, and b.) somehow the RMT company will take over your account. Neither of those things are even remotely threatening to anyone with an ounce of sense. And neither is the threat of having even people who are jerks (and griefers) dislike you if they find out. A message about how easy it is for NCSoft to catch you participating in RMT would have been a far more effective video…

…if they were in fact good at catching people at it.

However, some games are much better than others at emphasizing the journey than the destination.[...]The best of these which I have tried recently is Dungeons & Dragons Online, and, paradoxically, this very success at journey over destination is probably to account for its failure as a subscription game. It was a game you enjoyed for the present moment, rather than for whatever carrot they were dangling in front of you

The way I look at Dungeons and Dragons online, its inability to be a subscription-based game was not based on the gameplay — which was excellent, compared to most MMORPG’s “sandwich combat.” (So named because you might as well just turn on autoattack, go get a sandwich, and come back.)

Instead, it was something else entirely: the game was too heavily instanced. It wasn’t worldly enough. In a way, a subscription price rests on a player’s psyche as a key to a virtual place. When you instance the game heavily enough, the gameplay becomes too much like any other game. The primary thing a game is selling is an experience, and if the experience you get from a subscription-based game is the same as the experience you get from a non-subscription-based game, why pay extra?

I don’t find having a compelling “carrot” and good gameplay to be mutually exclusive things. I think there exist such games, although they are rare and not particularly perfect in their implementation of one or the other. Lets not go giving developers the wrong ideas that they need to make their games boring or else they won’t hook players.

[In Navy Field,] Whoever gets better at this repetition (and, as smaller ships are useless, this means the big boys) always wins the game; and I was surprised by how many wins were actually achieved by wide margins, despite both sides being theoretically balanced at the beginning.

I have played MMORPGs whose PvP was balanced in such a way that a first level character can actually harm a top level character. Win? Not likely, but the lowbie could contribute meaningfully. So, again, I’d like to suggest this is an unrelated aspect to the existence of the grind (other than, perhaps, to point out that a grind does bring about some power differential that benefits the persistent more than the skilled — something that could also be solved via an alternate mechanic).

Training mobs for fun goes beyond “mildly unacceptable behavior to some” and well into “majorly frowned upon behavior by nearly all” as well as being a punishable violation of the game rules.

It was a deliberately exaggerated example to indicate that buying RMT is so much worse than that.

Second, how does buying kinah = getting your account hacked?

Actually, even in this supposedly innocent transaction, you leave yourself vulnerable in lots of ways.

In buying the gold, you might have used a credit card, which also required passing your name and billing address for the transaction to complete. You’ve now provided them with all the information they need to call up the customer service of the MMORPG and convince them that they’re the real owner of your account – it’s not like you give NCSoft your social security number. “Oh deer, forgot password and phone no work. Halp!”

Just in coming in contact with them, they find out you’re an active player, apparently one whose account might be lined with bought gold. They can procure your login name either by weaseling it out of you or simply finding it out on one of the many MMORPGs that does a bad job of hiding it. That goes on their list of accounts they attempt to hijack through brute force password hacking.

And yes, identity theft and brute force password hacking are two things they have been known to do.

I’m also wondering why Mr. Jennings decided to bring this video to our attention, as he obviously can’t comment on it himself

Seems clear enough to me. If you previously worked for NCSoft’s anti-gold seller division and saw this, wouldn’t you? Bonus points if those were really some of his ex-coworkers and not actors.

If a game forces me to spend 100 hours getting something I need to play said game in a manner that is acceptable (say epic flying mounts in WoW) and I can just buy the in-game currency for cash that I can make in less then an hour at work, you bet your ass I will buy that currency and simply aquire the item needed. Its about the value of my time. When I get a few hours over I want to enjoy playing my MMO, I do not want to feel I come home from my work just to log into my “second job” where I have fun 20% of the time and the rest is devoted to timesinks ala “grind for epic mount” “grind for reputation” “grind for materials for the 2000 potions that you need to raid”.

Design the game without these timesinks and you will remove the reason people aquire ingame currency to start with. RTM is a sign of faulty design, not that people are assholes.

If the currency comes from hacking you can; Beef up the security, get identicators like Blizzard, use one-time codes, anything thats normal in internet banking should work just fine for MMO developers. Solutions DO exist for security, we are not stuck at “Enter username/password” these days.

If you want MMOs to be less grindy then stop paying for grindy MMOs. That’ll get the message across to developers quicker and better then anything else. And a game doesn’t force anyone to do anything because there’s nothing in a game that we depend on for our survival. There’s always a choice each individual make. Always.  [Quote this in reply]

I don’t live in the black&white world you depict; I see more choices. For example you provide 2 choices: suck it up and play the grindy game and don’t play the grindy game. Like the poster before you I see a third choice: pay extra to avoid the non-fun portion. I prefer to pay extra to the company that owns the game such as time cards&plex in EVE online or the DDO shop in Dungeons & Dragons Online but I would be willing to give the money to a third party.

You prefer the stick: punish grindy developers by not buying the game. I prefer the carrot; show them that there is money to be made by doing rmt themselves.

The danger there of course is that the wrong lessons might be taken away from that and future games will add extra grind in order to further monetise the path past it. I’d rather pay for more fun than for less suck.  [Quote this in reply]

I too would rather pay for more fun than for less suck. But in the short run I have to do the best I can with what I have to play with. Your point about the wrong lesson being learned is a good one…but lets talk about learning in the world of MMOs.
Here’s a mostly rhetorical question: after years of whinging about ‘grinding’ and millions of dollars spent on various forms of rmt allegedly spent to avoid ‘grinding’ why are there so many games with grinds? Is it stupid game developers that are really slow learners? I don’t think so. I don’t think they’re that much smarter than the rest of us but they’re not any dumber either. Personally I think there are sound economic reasons for developers to have some grind in games having to do with the psychology and motivations of players (Dr. Bartle and Raph Koster have been known to muse about this sort of thing).
I don’t expect developers to somehow learn that grind=bad and bring nirvana. I’ll be happy if they just include shortcuts. Since I have good disposable income I’ll settle for shortcuts based on spending money.

I don’t think of boycotting the game as punishing the developers for making a grind.

I will not pay an unauthorized third party, who I know sabotages everybody else’s play experience to operate, and whose dealings are known to put my very identity at risk, out of desperation to circumvent what I feel is an unacceptable play experience.

No, I simply try to avoid the situation outright by avoiding paying for that unacceptable play experience to begin with (with varying level of success depending on how good I am at detecting it). That not wanting to play or pay for their game harms the developers isn’t punishment. It’s simple Darwinism.

“It’s like buying a movie and then paying someone else to watch it for you.”

No, it’s like paying my cable company for access to movies but using technology to watch shows and movies when its convenient for me instead of when the cable companies have it scheduled.

“No, I simply try to avoid the situation outright by avoiding paying for that unacceptable play experience to begin with…”

So what games are you playing these days Geldon? What provides you with no unacceptable play experiences?

“No, I simply try to avoid the situation outright by avoiding paying for that unacceptable play experience to begin with…”
So what games are you playing these days Geldon? What provides you with no unacceptable play experiences?

There’s a difference between having “no unacceptable play experiences” and “avoiding paying for that unacceptable play experience” in that the former suggests that the game is flawless – and no game is – while the later suggests that if the game has an overall poor overall play experience one shouldn’t pay for it (some F2P grinds actually get off the hook with me provided I can find something novel about them).

It’s a good question, though, it does put me on the spot. Truth be told, I don’t grind a whole lot these days. I stopped caring about virtual baubles completely in my 20s. I’ve been looking for some other reason to play. To go down the rest of Bartle’s stereotypes:

* Socialization would have been that reason, I’m even fairly content with pick-up-groups, but with so much casual-friendly focus these days everybody’s soloing.
* Killing would have been that reason, but I honestly never got that much satisfaction out of tormenting/besting others.
* Exploration would have been that reason, but the “wow” effect of virtual terrain gets exhausted quickly, especially when instancing is involved (and it typically is these days).

I’m left with the aspects that make me a gamer in the purist meaning of the word: I play for the novelty of the gameplay alone. (It’s part of the reason why I’m so against RMT: it deeply undermines the gameplay element by both providing an alternative and interfering with legitimate players.) In terms of gameplay, EverQuest was novel for awhile. Most everything that followed has been novel specifically in the way in which they deviated from EverQuest, which is not a whole lot.

So, what have I been playing lately? Mostly things that aren’t MMORPGs. It’s not from lack of trying. There’s a few on that list I think I can wring some more enjoyment out of the mechanic. However, for the most part, I’ve stopped fooling myself by trying to enjoy something that I don’t. Instead, I play offline games that don’t target the casual niche (which I couldn’t be any further from). It’s been an approach that’s paid off – games suddenly seem fun again. I’ve even tried making my own, a deep and satisfying game in itself, but I’ve yet to see through a completed artifact.

Do you really enjoy MMORPGs? What aspect makes them enjoyable to you? If it’s for the achievement, exploration, or killer mechanics, doesn’t having these things handed to you without earning them diminish their meaning? It would totally blow it for me. I could understand the social hook, that you’re paying RMT to keep up with your friends, but it’s sort of like you’re being stringed along without there being any merit to the game at all.

Honestly, I hope you can think of some reason. Maybe it would revitalize my interest in the genre. If you can’t find any reason, it begs a certain question: could it be that you’re just paying a bunch of criminals who harm peoples’ play experience to trick yourself into thinking you enjoy playing?