Category Archives: RMT

While visiting the virtual-economy.org blog for yet another wacky SL story (“Sweden establishes an embassy in SL! OMG!“) I noted something interesting; some anonymous comments to a very old story about IGE’s acquisitions, that read as though they are sour grapes from persons recently let go.

Bear in mind this is just random anonymous comments, and thus could be just fantasy, but the level of detail is, if nothing else, easy enough for Real Journalists(tm) to confirm!

ige is not profitable. they bought the korean rmt platforms with investment money they got from goldman sachs. but now gs wants its money back because they discovered that ige did not fully disclose financials. ige is in the process of trying to sell allakhazam and thottbot to raise the money to pay them back. they are closing the office in california and relocating everything to china so they can’t be sued. another thing i heard is that they are hiring a new ceo and cfo and plan to offshore all their money and assets to china until they can sell what is left of the business in the usa. also that the guys running the company are trying to hide money from the investment that they got in swiss bank accounts and trying to change the name of the company. a lot of people have lost their jobs there in the last few weeks and they think there is something big going to happen in january or february because they closed the california office and told everyone there is no forwarding address.

Its not surprising IGE is going down. The two owners Yantis and Alan who were the brains of the business left beginning of last year (I wonder why) and now those people who are running it are jokers. I’m sure anyone who has dealt with them would agree. It will be interesting to see what trick IGE and goldman sachs will pull out this year with half their management team gone

Hard to say, but this screenshot is making the rounds:

eBay’s proactively removing RMT auctions is huge in and of itself. However, there’s another side to this: note the MMO being referenced in the CS chat. Note that UO is one of the few MMOs that permit RMT, so eBay removing UO RMT auctions would be… pretty huge.

Previously, eBay’s official policy is that they would pull an auction at the original copyright holder’s request. Of course, this then mandated a race between an MMO’s CS department and the thousands of RMT dealers to see who could keep an auction up the longest. This back-and-forth is what instigated the Blacksnow vs Mythic lawsuit; Mythic asked eBay to pull Blacksnow’s RMT auctions, to which Blacksnow asserted was stomping on their business. (The whole sordid story is up here; it ended with Blacksnow disappearing into the midst to their legal team’s consternation.)

In any event, there are still hundreds of RMT auctions on eBay last I checked.

Discussion ongoing in the UO community here and here. Markee Dragon, a large UO gold seller/news site, claims to have been contacted by eBay here.

Gold farmers form trade association. Or more accurately, apparently, the Korean version of a PAC. You know your little industry’s all grown up when it has its own lobbyists! Clearly, there are soil preservation issues that must be addressed by any RMT industry group.

Snark aside, considering the amount of money changing hands, and the consistent search for legitimacy among the larger RMT companies, this isn’t that surprising.

Julian Dibbell, author and UO gold monger, was recently interviewed by the Escapist, and he wants you to know that you gamers hurt him deeply.

More than anything, he seems bemused by the occasional blast of negative attention paid to the industry he worked in and documented. “I’m certainly aware that RMT [real money trade] and people who actively engage in it are hated by a significant faction … of gamers and game developers,” he says. “I quote Mark Jacobs standing up at E3 in 2003 and saying that he hates the RMT market with ‘every bone in his body.’ So, there you go.

And more personally…

“I have an assignment from the New York Times Magazine to write about the Chinese gold farms. And I went to a few of them, and I actually pulled a shift at a leveling shop. And, you know, not a half hour into my shift playing as some European player’s gnome mage, I was spat upon,” via the game’s emote system, “by one of my fellow players.”

He says it was different during the time he was writing the book. “For one thing, I was working in Ultima Online, which has a different culture about this stuff, right? The gold, the RMT market has been tolerated there from the get-go. It was even kind of encouraged in the beginning. … For another thing, you know, it just kind of rolls off my back, to the extent that people do single us out for opprobrium.” Indeed, he seems like a very laid-back, affable guy that just happened to indulge in a trade that gets the MMOG industry spitting mad.

He also, apparently, thinks I don’t write very well.

He describes the arguments against the RMT industry as “often very crude. … They’re along the lines of, ‘Hey, I worked my way up to level 60, and then daddy’s little rich kid comes along and bought his way up to level 60, and that takes away the meaning of my achievement.’…

…let’s look at the metrics by which you’re measuring achievement. Everyone knows that MMOGs are tests of your ability to sit on your ass in a chair for a week, or whatever it takes to get to level 60. If someone has the will to do that, or the time to do that, more power to them. If somebody has the commitment to the game to plunk down $800 or $1,000, that’s a kind of crazed obsession, too. I’m perfectly willing to honor either way of measuring [that].

“And furthermore, it’s such a limiting view of the complexity and open-endedness of these games to say that it’s all about getting to level 60 or Warlord or whatever you get to before the other guy does. There’s so many ways to play these games and so many reasons to play these games that if you think that’s what the game is entirely about, that’s fine, but that doesn’t define it for everybody else who’s involved.”

When asked what developers could do to stop RMT:

[He] uses one example he’s gotten from the farmers themselves, such as “completely anonymous trades. [Make] the auction house the only way to trade, and [make it] completely anonymous, so there’s no mapping an eBay buyer onto an in-game player,” though he acknowledges that would be “breaking the socialization effect of the economy.”

So, destroy the village so we can save it. Gotcha. But the kicker:

“My impression is that the anti-RMT stuff is stronger in America than it is anywhere else, even more than Europe. … I think it has a lot to do with American culture’s kind of Horatio Alger individualist pretensions. You know, you come into the world and everybody starts off on equal footing, and you raise yourself up by your bootstraps, and nobody has family money to help them along.”

Paying money to gold farmers to short-circuit gameplay, of course, being so much more rational, worldly and European an attitude. Maybe it could be like a tax. Only, you know, not paid to the government. OK, so Russia’s in Europe, so the metaphor could still work. Sort of. Oh wait, I’m making crude anti-RMT arguments again, sorry!

MMORPG.com has a “debate” between Brad McQuaid (you know, Vanguard, Everquest, vision, supercore, yadda) and… a self-righteous gold farmer. I guess Brad was bored that day (and actually seems to have just shrugged and wandered off near the end).

The actual points you’ve all seen before dozens of times. Bad for the game. Money grubbing companies. Taking money off the table. Fighting for the little man. Purity of the game. Etc. I did like the farmer just devolving into threats at the end:

In closing it does not matter if a game is designed with RMT in mind or not, the transactions will continue to take place. It is simply a matter of time before the gaming companies choose a RMT company to work with so that they will get the piece of the market they deserve.

“You sees, Mr. McQuaid, it’s an offer youse can’t refuse.”

One thing I’ve noticed though, with RMT partisans, is a sort of dumbstruck fury that someone is trying to stop them from this great free market they’ve discovered. Damn it, they farmed that gold fair and square, and companies are banning them and taking their gold and threatening them and what the hell? Isn’t making a buck American? Whatever happened to free speech and capitalism? I paid for this game, why *can’t* I sell what I do to someone else?

Of course, I would respond that for much the same reason that I can’t run a crack dealership out of my office. I mean, I *could*. I paid for the crack. It’s my office. I don’t get it. Why can’t I sell crack? I give away a lot of crack anyway with my design docs. This is just …better crack! I’m fulfilling a service. I don’t get it. Isn’t this America? Did al’Qaeda take over and prevent people from selling crack?

Clearly, there are social reasons to block some behavior. And in most games, gold farming is a harmful behavior. The RMT partisans (at least the honest ones) can’t really make this connection, because they don’t see MMOs as a society, but merely an entertainment medium and unexploited resource rolled into one. Since to them it’s not a society, they see no harm in their actions. It’s just, you know, making stuff. Virtual stuff. Then selling it, to wacky people who pay real money for it.

So, at the other end of this spectrum is something else today I found illustrative. Second Life is as far from most MMOs as you can get in, well, most things, and among them is their RMT policy. They’re all for it! Sell all the “Lindens” you want, knock yourself out, make it a convertible currency! That after all simply validates the worth of the “second life” within the first one. (WARNING: NSFW links follow. This being SL and all.) Of course, quite a bit of those Lindens are going to things Linden Labs doesn’t issue press releases on, but, well, that just makes it more like real life, I guess. We have a real economy here – an economy driven by cat-girl harlots, but we have to start somewhere out here in Multiverseland.

Which brings us to a blog entry by Kunikos, a Quarter to Three poster who seems confused by this whole virtual economy thing. He asks, plaintively, what’s to stop Linden Labs from just, you know, messing stuff up? What’s to stop them from just printing money, since people seem to let them… print money?

How long will it be before such “real economy” virtual worlds are regulated by the real world governments? How long before the bubble bursts or an Enron style collapse occurs? Do we know that Linden Labs isn’t already siphoning off $1000′s of dollars from the economy of Second Life already?

Of course, many people immediately pointed out that Blizzard siphons off considerably more than $1000 a day from World of Warcraft. It’s called, you know, profit. But here is someone who admittedly isn’t that familiar with all the associated arguments surrounding RMT, who asks, quite rationally, are we all playing with Dutch tulips?

Combined with the tax mania currently going around the web (OMGZ BLIZZARD IS GOING TO SEND YOU A FORM 1099 IF YOU LOOT THAT EPIC) and the recent news of the Korean government getting in the act… well, pretty soon we may have Mr. McQuaid debating someone who knows the law considerably better then Mr. Gold Farmer. And no matter what side of the RMT argument you come down on… that way lies madness.

Because I’ll just come out and say it – over-regulation can very easily choke the MMO industry in its crib. No company is going to operate an entertainment business with anything close to the liabilities being bandied around. It simply will cost too much. No sane MMO publisher will fund a project that requires more lawyers than world builders. Thus, no MMOs, as we currently know them, will be published.

And that will definitely settle the argument.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t link you to gold farmer sites, because, well, it’s not like you can’t just trip over 60 of them on your way to Ironforge or Faydwer or whatever. But… they’re nothing like these guys.

NOTE: If you work for Blizzard, DO NOT FOLLOW THAT LINK! Really – their terms of service tells you not to.

By entering the Site and browsing any content on the Site, you declare under penalty of perjury, pursuant to 28 USC \’c2\’a7 1746, that you are not employed or affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment, Vivendi Universal Games, Inc., and their respective affiliates and subsidiaries (individually and collectively, the \’e2\’80\’9cUnauthorized\’e2\’80\’9d).

But… they can’t be THAT bad. Can they? I mean. Come on. Look at them. Wouldn’t you buy a used Tauren for them? I mean, come on, the one on the right looks like MOM.

This is totally not stock photography.

Reading through the Yeh! offers, the Yeh! philosophy and the Yeh! catalog, one finds a striking brave statement that rings throughout – YEH! FIGHTS FOR AMERICA.

As a U.S. company, we respect the intellectual property of others and thus, refuse to use any game logos and pictures on our site. These images are the intellectual property of their respective owners. Using these on our website would violate intellectual property laws. Frankly, all websites that use game logos and pictures are foreign sites that do not respect U.S. laws. It’s no wonder that many of these unlawful websites claiming to be a company end up stealing and scamming many accounts.

Yeh! is quite proud of the fact that they are a LEGAL US COMPANY INCORPORATED IN NEVADA! They mention that several dozen times. Luckily, thanks to the previous story which had almost nothing to do with gold farmers or Yeh! or America, we learned a little about incorporating about America. And a lot about love. But for now, let’s just remind ourselves about Nevada’s advantages offered to virtual companies discovered by curious Horizons players.

Asset Protection:

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• Officers and directors of a Nevada corporation can be protected from personal liability for lawful acts of the corporation.

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• In Nevada, liability stops with the corporation. As an officer or director, you cannot be held responsible for lawsuits against your corporation except in the case of outright fraud. You also have the ability to use nominee officers and directors.

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• Nevada also does not require corporations to file a list of assets. Therefore, the corporation’s assets are not linked to you in any way.

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• Learn more

Privacy:

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• No other state takes privacy as seriously as Nevada. In Nevada, there is no requirement for the names of stockholders to be filed with the state. Stockholders are anonymous-not a matter of public record.

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• No Reciprocity with the IRS. Nevada is the only state in the union that does not share information with the Internal Revenue Service. Many tax professionals also believe that this reduces your chances of an audit because less matching of tax return information means fewer chances of something standing out.

NOT THAT I AM IMPLYING ANYTHING. No siree. I’m sure Yeh! For Games, Inc. is completely above board. Look! They have their own office building.

Photoshop was not involved in this picture at all.

And because the friendly and helpful Yeh For Games! staff are TOTALLY AMERICANS, HELL YEH!, they offer services that no other inferior, foreign, ASIAN company can match. Like… actually playing the endgame for you.

We will ONLY respond in fluent English to incoming tells by fellow raid players to cooperate effectively in the instance. All other incoming whispers not relevant to the raid instance will not be responded.

See, this is the kind of service you get from America’s heartland. It makes me want to stand up, salute, and buy a T-shirt and/or classy thong.

USA! USA! USA!

So, if you must buy farmed gold, buy it from Yeh! For Games, the only gold farmers proud enough to not have a freakin’ clue what “Ni hao, Zhonguoren!” means. And, you know, ignorance is what MAKES US SO FREAKIN’ GREAT. YEH!

…at least with interviews like these being posted, regarding the somewhat mindboggling cojones that it takes to “monetize” single player games that, you know, you already paid for.

Chip Lange, Vice President of Online Commerce at EA, stated that the publisher was only providing consumers with a choice and that players can instantly unlock something – such as a golf course in Tiger Woods, rather than put 40-50 hours into the game – something which Lang claimed only 20% of people would do.

When drawn upon the issue of charging for what once might have been a cheat code, Lange argued, “There are places where cheat codes are free but those are on websites and those websites are making money by selling advertising.”

Setting aside for the moment that you can’t get actually find a paid Xbox360 unlock on “a website making money” through tiny classified ads (something the EA PR person responded to with “Uh, I need to research that”), the point remains that, according to Mr. Lange, there’s a pressing market for people too lazy to actually play games. Which, judging from the success of some folks in the MMO sphere, you might think he’s on to something, hmm?

Well, no. One of the quickest ways I can usually start an argument with others in the MMO industry is by saying, flat out, that if your MMO has an RMT problem, then your MMO has a design flaw by definition. Simply because if someone is paying money – the measure, by almost any criteria, of the value of a person’s time in our society – to avoid part of your game, that part of the game is not fun. Because if it were fun, why would they not, you know, play it?

After all, they theoretically are paying you already for the privilege of playing the game. Why should they pay for what essentially is a fast forward button? It’s like picking up a DVD of the Lord of the Rings, and then paying an intern/illegal alien/teen runaway/whoever you prefer to exploit to constantly skip straight to the battle of Helms Deep. Sure, you COULD, but you miss a bit of, you know, the rest of the movie. By doing so, you’re saying you don’t care about the rest of that movie – it holds little value for you, and your time is valuable enough that you’d pony up the cash to skip ahead.

This is an arguable point in MMOs, because of the multiplayer nature and people wanting to catch up to their friends, engage in the social community that congregates on the high end, et cetera. But in single player games? It’s just mindbogglingly stupid. If you feel the need to skip ahead to the end of a single player game… why did you buy it again? I am reminded of Old Man Murray’s reaction to when RMT was first announced in Ultima Online; they immediately threatened to sell their Half Life save games on eBay. Which makes about as much sense as anything else.

Now on G4: RMT: Doth It Suck?

If you don’t like Flash movies, here’s my HANDY RECAP. Note that I have not made up ONE SINGLE QUOTE.

Greg Vederman: “It’s against the terms of service!”

Julian Dibbell: “The whole idea of cheating is bogus!”

Vederman: “It is cheating, because the rules say not to do that!”

Dibbell: “Blizzard can put in a rule to say you have to be a Pastafarian, but that doesn’t mean you will!”

Vederman: “Julian, you’re wrong!”

Dibbell: “The idea that these are competitive games are absurd! They’re collaborative games!”

Vederman: (rolls eyes) “The fact of the matter is, it’s against the Terms of Service!”

G4: “Isn’t it.. uh, incentivized?”

Vederman: “In WoW, it is expressly forgiven!”

G4: “Here’s my issue. A “friend of mine” paid to be powerlevelled to level 30. It should be a crime! If you want to support a sweatshop…”

Dibbell: (rolls eyes)

G4: “Julian, some people on some of those gaming blogs paint a picture of a sweatshop, you know, a guy with a black mask cracking a whip….”

Dibbell: (snickers)

G4: “… but you’ve actually worked in one! What are the conditions like? Should they be banned for being so deplorable?”

Dibbell: “Nononononono. These guys are gamers. They’re not, like conscript armies of peasants, forced to whack orcs all day long. Twelve hours a day, one day off a month…”

Vederman: “SOUNDS AWESOME!”

Dibbell: “If you have a problem with this, you don’t have a problem with gold farming, you have a problem with the global capitalist order.”

Vederman: “You know what I got a problem with, buddy? There are six million players in World of Warcraft! Most of them don’t want this, despite what the G4 poll says!”

Dibbell: (shrugs)

Vederman: “And concievably, they’re going to be taxed! Because their money, their gold in WoW, which should not have a monetary value, does… because of people like YOU!”

G4: “Greg, how dare you discredit our G4 poll!”

So, basically, today we’ve learned that the issues of importance to the MMO community can be made as banally trivial as much more important issues! The progress brings a single tear to my eye, truly.