Category Archives: RMT

Pig at Wandering Goblin tries to connect the dots as to where, oh where our favorite gold sellers have gone. This time, with leaked background paperwork!

Affinity appears to be vomiting up disinformation like a bunch of outrageously dissipate fraternity boys. The company is involved in gold-selling. They are involved in virtual goods transactions. Hell, their CEO had the juevos to give an interview at the Virtual Goods Summit, while his subordinates were claiming the company was out of the virtual goods business.

It must be a fairly good month for MMO patches, because all the dramabombs lately are about external sites; most of them this past week centered around Affinity’s purchase of Wowhead.

Razorwire posted a couple of days an internal Affinity email that made the rounds of blog samizdat: namely, Brock Pierce resigning as Affinity’s CEO. For those of you without RMT Insider trading cards, Pierce was IGE’s founder, and longtime partner with Jonathan Yantis, who is rumored to currently own IGE. Again. Given Pierce’s apparent fatigue from competing with Chinese gold farming outlets, it’s possible he just simply wanted to retire on his movie star/virtual gold selling millions. Thousands. Whatever.

With the purchase of Wowhead, Affinity’s VP/spokesperson John Maffei has been making the rounds insisting that with IGE’s jettisoning, Affinity and its holdings are 100% above board, uh huh, don’t throw us in with those gold farming scoundrels, we’re just like you gamers. Specifically, when asked about Affinity’s controlling interest in Korean RMT auction sites:

There’s a big focus on content– obviously, the US content business we’re very excited about, I think we’ve made a bunch of statements about that. We have an auction division, with Korea being really the foothold for that. And formerly, we used to have this division called IGE, which we no longer have.

Or, as the Affinity internal email says:

Consumer Auctions and Asset Exchange
Under Paul Kim and his team’s direction, I expect us to become serious players here in the U.S. The team has a mission to not only offer a great service but also to make game publishers into our trusted and valued partners.

This phrase was latched onto by Warcry’s J. R. “Razor” Sutich with the triumphancy of a man who had cracked the DaVinci Code.

Consumer Auctions and Asset Exchange. Hmmm… Sounds like RMT to me. Itemmania. The RMT Strikes Back. I’m pretty certain at this point that if the IGE sale was actually completed , Affinity Media is still up to their eyeballs in secondary markets.

Yet, reading Maffei’s interviews carefully (having experience in Kremlinology helps) reveals the public espousal of their private interests:

And there are legacy things involved in the company in previous times, but we are not involved in any sort of material way in the United States in the C-to-C auction business. However, I will say this. I think if the opportunity arises, where publishers are willing to go and we have the option to go work with publishers– and again, we’re not involved in this division, so I don’t own the business, so I can’t say this 100% for sure, but I think there is an opportunity, absolutely, where I think that there are some publishers who– especially those guys who make free-to-play games– who see a benefit of having a marketplace where consumers can go and exchange assets.

Don’t twist our arms, guys! Of course, Maffei is well aware of (and in facts mentions immediately Sony’s Station Exchange, which is basically proof that if a company can manage the client/server technology behind an MMO, it’s safe to say they can probably throw up an auction site as well. In other words, Maffei and Affinity’s stated goal, as clarified after the WowInsider interview was posted:

Affinity Media as a company is thinking about how we offer US publishers services for those who want to facilitate a secondary market (like Sony has) via a C2C exchange.

So, the translation: They’re not in RMT, but you know, if any company’s feeling kinda rushed or lazy, they’ll put together an auction site for them and take 6% off the top. Or maybe they’ll just do it anyway. Meanwhile, the immediate impact of the Affinity/Wowhead acquisition: lots of flash banner ads on Wowhead. Monetize, monetize, monetize!

The collective Slashdot hivemind shoots some questions at Sparter, one of the newer RMT players.

I’m concerned that this platform is devoted to promoting activity that the largest game (WoW) explicitly forbids. How do you plan to handle the fact that the entire premise of your site is one that could get your “customers” banned from the games they play?

Sparter Executives:
Good question. Here’s how we see it: publishers do not have the right to tell gamers that they can’t accept money from someone outside of the game.

You gotta fight! For your right! To parrrrrrrlay!

Most of their answers actually center around Sparter’s conceit that it isn’t really gold farming, but innocent trade between actual game players. A quick browse of the auctions disabuses that notion fairly quickly — in the above link at the time I checked, literally every single listing appeared to be from a gold farming shop. (RMT executives would never lie in interviews, would they?)

This section in particular amused me:

Sparter is trying to be proactive on this issue by requiring that all our users recognize the rights of content originators and the limitations of gamers’ rights. Third, we estimate there are several hundred B2C web sites in operation, most outside of the jurisdiction of US courts. Lawsuits are not going to be effective in shutting down RMT. As long as there is a demand, there will be a supply. So let’s figure out the best way for the demand to be served and take control of the situation for the benefit of gamers and the industry as a whole.

So… Sparter requires that its users recognize the rights of game publishers, but you know, everyone ignores them anyway, so why not just let us make some money off of your work, hm?

If you want the tl;dr version, a comment by a Slashdot reader is +5 insightful/funny:

For those unwilling to read, they essentially said: “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and then, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.” and one more time, “We think it’s certain behaviors such as spamming, bot farming, hacking and duping that cause the most concern.”

This is a common refrain by RMT merchants. “Oh, it’s those other bad people that cause all the misdeeds in games that you see. Not us. Gold sales in and of themselves isn’t bad… it’s just when bad people do it. We’re not bad people, oh no. We’re the good guys. Trust us.” Ironically, that is how IGE got started, as the white knights fighting manfully against those bad people at Yantis Mysupersales. Just before IGE bought Yantis. Now Yantis owns IGE, IGE…er, Affinity doesn’t own IGE, and every observer involved is suitably confused, as befits a completely above board and ethical business.

So what can we learn from all this? Yes, boys and girls, it’s time for a PUNCH LIST.

• RMT isn’t going away. There is a market for it. Litigation and regulation will shape the market but it will not remove it.
• RMT-related abuse is one of the largest challenges facing MMO providers; there’s no motivation to lie, cheat and steal quite like cash money. RMT gold farmers, without fail, aggressively use whatever exploits are available: speed hacks, teleport bugs, dupe bugs, scripting, botting. They have to – the more that they sploit, the more money they make. Business is serious business.
• MMO providers can’t afford to stick their heads in the sand about RMT. Either they need to have aggressive enforcement of their policies (which will send their customer support costs into the stratosphere, as World of Warcraft is discovering) or they need to co-opt the farmers and take the money off the table somehow (see: SOEbay).
• The future of MMOs is in Korea. This means that going forward MMOs will have what Korean MMO players tend to call “item shops” or “character shops” – things you buy with cash. Usually these are cosmetic items that have little to no impact on actual gameplay – but not always. Many games sell gold, items… everything an RMT provider would.
• The Western market is not the Korean market. Attempts to simply clone a Korean-style character shop often blow back on their creators. To date successful Western company-run RMT shops simply sell alternate currencies or in some cases the real thing. However, in my opinion, this doesn’t scale well; for larger games this won’t actually solve the gold farming problem, but will actually encourage it as people try to bot farming in-game currency and converting it to out-of-game currency.
• Why do I keep going on about this? Because it’s the future. Because game companies HAVE to take control of the RMT market, whether through bringing it in house (the “capitalist” approach) or making the game’s economy RMT-resistant (the “socialist” approach). Because if nothing is done, online games will become like email traffic – 99% spam for gold farmers aggressively chasing after ever-shrinking margins. And that, more than anything else, will spell the death of the online game industry.

Julian Dibbell, friend to all RMT, writes for the New York Times on the emerging new markets in Chinese gold farming.

At the end of each shift, Li reports the night’s haul to his supervisor, and at the end of the week, he, like his nine co-workers, will be paid in full. For every 100 gold coins he gathers, Li makes 10 yuan, or about $1.25, earning an effective wage of 30 cents an hour, more or less. The boss, in turn, receives $3 or more when he sells those same coins to an online retailer, who will sell them to the final customer (an American or European player) for as much as $20.