Category Archives: RMT

Moneypet! Blizzard Adds Convertible Currency to World of Warcraft

Posted on October 12, 2011 by Scott Jennings| 20 Comments

"Do You Still worry about Buying Gold? Old brand provides cheapest and favorable price for you! Fastest delivery Speed! WWW.BLIZZARD.COM Discount code: CUB Welcome!"

Well, this is fairly large news. Blizzard is set to add a new vanity pet for World of Warcraft to its out-of-game shop – the difference being that unlike all the others they sell, this one is freely transferable in-game. And Blizzard is not shy about pointing out exactly what that means:

While our goal is to offer players alternative ways to add a Pet Store pet to their collection, we’re ok with it if some players choose to use the Guardian Cub as a safe and secure way to try to acquire a little extra in-game gold without turning to third-party gold-selling services. However, please keep in mind that there’s never any guarantee that someone will purchase what you put up for sale in the auction house, or how much they’ll pay for it. Also, it’s important to note that we take a firm stance against buying gold from outside sources because in most cases, the gold these companies offer has been stolen from compromised accounts. (You can read more about our stance here.) While some players might be able to acquire some extra gold by putting the Guardian Cub in the auction house, that’s preferable to players contributing to the gold-selling “black market” and account theft.

If this back door to monetizing in-game gold transfers looks familiar – well, it should, as Eve Online has a similar scheme where players can buy monthly game-time codes and then sell them for ISK (in-game currency) – CCP even has an out-of-game secure transfer website set up to facilitate this. Trade in these GTCs are very active, and the player base has essentially embraced this pegging of in-game ISK to out-of-game currency value (currently US$ 1 / ISK 40m). It hasn’t eliminated in-game botting but it has put a stake in RMT dealers – why bother, when everyone is an RMT dealer. It also, ironically, at the highest end of the game turned Eve into a free-to-play game since it is possible in nullspace to earn more than 400m ISK / monthly and thus pay your own way via purchasing game time from people who don’t want to bother to.

Blizzard’s moneypet isn’t the same, and that may be its weakness. For while Eve’s GTC traffic is based on an actual good (a monthly subscription, which already has implicit value, at least to people who want to play Eve), WoW’s moneypet is literally created from thin air. Which, while better financially for Blizzard in that it literally is printing gold and/or money, it also inherently has less value than a more tangible good. There is also the small matter of the moneypet being an in-game manifestation of “Hi, I like to sell gold”, and that, to put it gently, may not be a popular opinion.

So, unlike Eve’s GTCs, investing in Blizzard moneypets for resale is far from a sure thing. The irony may well be if a game company sells a moneypet and no one actually buys it, does anyone care? It would, after all, be a market-driven response of disapproval that would say more than any message board post…

…oh, who am I kidding. Blizzard is going to sell 9 trillion of these in an hour.

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Posted in Blizzard, RMT, World of Warcraft

Blizzard Adding Player-RMT Services To Diablo III

Posted on August 1, 2011 by Scott Jennings| 54 Comments

Well, there you go.

With the Diablo III Auction House, players will have a fully-integrated marketplace that allows them to buy and sell items, gold, and components with real-world currency (tentatively divided into U.S. dollars and euros, among others) in their respective territories. According to him, it’s based on theWorld of Warcraft Auction House, but with refinements. Diablo III‘s iteration allows for auto-bidding and instant buyouts, smart searches based on class, a shared stash, and secure item transfers.

Pardo was swift to mention that it’s not an official “Blizzard Store,” but a clearinghouse for players to have an open market to facilitate the trading of in-game items with each other. Players will be anonymous during trades, and there will be restrictions on the buying and selling of goods with real-world currency for those who choose to play in Hardcore mode.

He then outlined initial details of transactions. There will be a fee for both item listings and sales. Should players accept in-game currency, their payment will go toward their Battle.net e-balance, which covers auction items, WoW subscriptions, and pets. Should players decide to cash out their items, a currently-unannounced third-party payment provider will handle the transaction and take a percentage of the sale. There won’t be any limits on item trading, but there will be a 24-hour cooling period before players can resell a purchased item.

And why are they doing this? According to Pardo, because, well, if they didn’t, you would.

“Players want this… We could take a harder stance, but with Diablo, we think [the Auction House] will end up being a good thing,” he said. The fact that in-game bartering and selling had “become a metagame of its own,” in his words, was another motivator for launching the new feature.

Left unspoken of course, is that with the arbitrage fees from Diablo III Blizzard will make enough money to fix the Greek debt crisis. I’m sure that was a very minor consideration, though.

As a game developer, I can see Blizzard’s logic behind this move. There’s obviously plenty of a market for RMT transactions, and in the long term a clear benefit over and above the strictly financial in channeling them into an outlet controllable by people who at least theoretically have the game’s best interests at heart. And given that it’s similar to a system I had designed for a free-to-play title, that makes it even more difficult to argue against!

But as a player – I have no interest to pay to win. At all. For me the ideal F2P experience is one offered by titles such as Lord of the Rings Online - one where I can play on or off at a whim, and occasionally dig into my wallet for conveniences such as a horse or such, but never feeling as though I was missing a huge chunk of the game play by keeping my wallet in my pocket. Explicitly pegging the in-game currency to a real-world analog (the implication of Diablo III’s announcement) – well, that certainly is a fairly huge chunk of game play to bypass.

Is this a good decision? For Blizzard’s business, yes. For Blizzard’s design, yes. For Blizzard’s players? Probably not, though the actions of people who can’t resist the immediate gratification of RMT make it inevitable.

From a long term standpoint, I think this also makes it fairly clear that World of Warcraft and Starcraft II will be the last Blizzard titles that aren’t driven by RMT. Thanks, usual suspects!

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Posted in Blizzard, RMT

"You'll End Up Naked And Alone"

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 29 Comments

A typically moderate public service announcement from my day job.

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Posted in Aion, RMT

A Public Service Announcement From The People Who Give Me Money On A Regular Basis

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 31 Comments

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Posted in Aion, NCsoft, RMT

My God It's Full Of Stars And Also Money

Posted on April 15, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 87 Comments

Blizzard up until this point has pretty clearly insisted that all items being upsold on their item shop were cosmetic in nature only. Today that distinction blurred a bit: for $25 you can buy the fastest mount in the game for all your characters.

You do need to have previously unlocked a super-fast mount in-game to unlock the fastest speed possible, and you’ll still need to have paid for the actual skill to use the mount, which is by far the most expensive part of the equation. Still, this is actually a concrete item to be used, as opposed to a vanity pet that follows you around.

Expect the line to be blurred a bit more. Especially since at the moment, there’s actually a queue to give Blizzard $25 to get a Edward Cullen-sparkly mount.

No. Really.

Yes. Over $600,000 worth of orders for a sparkly virtual mount, waiting in line patiently…

(When learning this, I immediately heard the plaintive cry “It’s for my girlfriend!” shortly thereafter. Uh HUH.)

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Posted in RMT, World of Warcraft

The More You Know

Posted on March 19, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 65 Comments

The latest from the Aion community team:

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Posted in Aion, NCsoft, RMT, Touch My Awesome Button

The Scourge Of Google

Posted on August 24, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 44 Comments

Richard Bartle indulges in understatement on contextual advertising.

When my book first came out, there were ads for gold farmers on its Amazon page and there were also ads for them that popped up for Google searches on my name. My name was being associated with a service of which I disapprove. Was there anything I could do about it? No, there wasn’t. Well, I guess I could have retaliated by buying ads for their names, but there wasn’t enough room to write BUY GOLD AND DECREASE YOUR SENSE OF SELF WORTH YOU LOSER LOSER LOSER in them.

He goes on to condemn the practice of contextual ad placement in general. It is fairly blipverty and the MMO community in particular has long struggled with the inability to filter advertising for things that their members violently disapprove of (yet still manage to stay in business anyway). Much of that is due to Google’s effective monopoly of affordable Internet advertising. There’s no alternative “MMO friendly” advertising network, simply because there’s not enough money in it. Not many really want to buy advertising on your guild’s web site… unless they want to sell you gold, that is. And the amount of money that changes hands is so ridiculously low that most reputable sites simply don’t bother selling advertising any more.

Ironically, it’s quite easy to ensure that Google Ads meet community standards. Your community merely has to be an authoritarian dictatorship! Failing that, you have to reach Google Ads’ bar for Things They Don’t Like. Their policy, which they apparently inherited from Youtube, is somewhat arbitrary. Cheating on your schoolwork reaches that bar, but cheating on your online game does not. Google Ads DOES explicity prohibit “e-gold”, but that’s not online RMT, but more direct money laundering. And, of course, nothing to prevent someone from advertising on a Miley Cyrus video with a “Buy the clothes Miley likes!” tag line. In fact, that sort of “targeted advertising” is what Google explicitly sells. And in such volume that, of course, they can’t be expected to police that, can they?

This wouldn’t be an issue if you (yes, you) would actually pay for content on the Internet. But all evidence empirically states that you (yes, you) won’t, so Google teaches us that we can’t have nice things.

“Don’t be evil.”
— Google’s mission statement

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Posted in Google Ads, RMT

Um… This Is Kinda A Big Deal

Posted on June 29, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 27 Comments

The People’s Republic of China bans real money trading.

No. REALLY.

“The virtual currency, which is converted into real money at a certain exchange rate, will only be allowed to trade in virtual goods and services provided by its issuer, not real goods and services.” it said.

China has the world’s largest population of Internet users, with 298 million people online as of the end of last year.

According to media reports, the virtual money trade topped several billion yuan last year after rising around 20 percent annually.

China being the largest MMO market in the world, and many Chinese MMOs being dependent on RMT for their income — this will have some ripples.

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Posted in RMT

Oh, COME ON, People

Posted on June 8, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 43 Comments

Porn star paid $500,000 to have an RMT site’s logo and URL engraved on her assets.

I mean… really. Come on. I know it’s Monday, but… really. I see terabytes of “pics or it didn’t happen” in our future. And it’s an ugly, cold future.

But as always when gold farming is involved, THERE ARE SHENANIGANS.

I have done the unthinkable and actually researched this mindblowingly retarded press release, and apparently “Anna Morgan” hasn’t appeared in any films, pornographic or otherwise. The IAFD, the porn version of the IMDB, returns no hits. Googling “Anna Morgan porn” returns… pages of entries about this press release.

I really hate to point out the stupidly obvious here, but if I was going to spend $500,000 on body modification advertising, I would spend it on a nubile starlet who had actually, you know, some notoriety. Heck, I’m pretty sure Paris Hilton would be down.

But really, if you want to know what’s going on… go to the source.

So, to recap:

The porn industry is probably not branching out into WoW gold sales
One RMT web site has discovered a new way to gain tons of publicity through exploiting both the credulity of the media and, most likely, his girlfriend.
The Easter Bunny doesn’t exist, either.

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Posted in RMT, Told You They Were Hardcore

SOE Adds RMT To Vanguard, Vision In A Corner Weeping Softly

Posted on March 16, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 31 Comments

SOE continued its adding RMT components to its games last week with the addition of LiveGamer support to Vanguard.

Notably, unlike Everquest 2 where Station Exchange (now operated by LiveGamer) was limited to a few new servers, Vanguard players were told that it was being added to the entire game. This is similar to the Station Cash item shop which was added to all Everquest and Everquest 2 servers last year; the differences being while StationCash is an “item mall” where SOE sells low-impact items such as decorative clothing and XP boost potions, Live Gamer is a player-to-player items-for-cash arbitrage. It was pitched as ‘voluntary’ since, you know, no one is actually forcing you to buy anything!

The ensuing discussion was somewhat heated. An SOE-penned FAQ which resulted from the thread had probably the clearest defense of corporate-sponsored RMT ever put to virtual print:

As several people have pointed out in the discussion thread, Real Money Transactions between individuals and 3rd party sites have been happening since the early days of MMOs. What you may not know is that there are significant costs to game companies that result from homegrown transactions or unsanctioned 3rd party web site sales in our games. Personal trades go bad (fraud) and 3rd party sites scam people and strip accounts, it’s a fact that SOE Customer Service been dealing with here since day 1 of EverQuest.

What happens when unsanctioned transactions like these go south? Customers petition for help and sometimes it can take hours for a GM to research and get everything back to the way it was. By providing a safe, secure, and sanctioned way for these types of transactions to take place for those that wish to participate, SOE is reducing CS costs while providing a little more to the bottom line.

So there you have it, RMT is here because you people keep doing it, so you might as well get it all sanctioned-like and save us some time.

The irony, of course, is that Vanguard, before its launch, positioned itself as the haven of the EQ hard core, standing bravely athwart the ramparts of history, watching the waves of easier gameplay and gold farmers break across the bow. In fact, IGE (back when they were the Bad Guys And Still Somewhat Relevant To The Discussion) actually funded buyouts of Vanguard player-run sites as a pre-emptive strike against… well, it’s not really clear what, any more.