Yes, but will Station Exchange advertise on PC Gamer?

John Smedley, on his new “Hm, I think these blog things might catch on!” site, gives a shoutout to PC Gamer for /rude-ing IGE. (Note to SOE’s web team: permalinks are cool.)

Let\’e2\’80\’99s face it\’e2\’80\’a6farming does happen. People do get cheated. I\’e2\’80\’99m not going to suggest that IGE or any of these companies cheat people, because I don\’e2\’80\’99t believe that. What they are doing however is saying, \’e2\’80\’9cIt\’e2\’80\’99s ok to break the rules, as well as the EULAs,\’e2\’80\’9d which I think is just plain wrong. It\’e2\’80\’99s like being a fence for stolen merchandise.

(To be fair, IGE does insist they don’t break any rules. It’s just that, well, no one believes them!)

While Station Exchange’s introduction rubbed me in several wrong ways (since as an MMO player RMT trading makes me ill and as a developer I see people trying to buy their way past a game as the ultimate symptom that the game has issues), at the end of the day it’s SOE’s game to run. They – and they alone – have every right to run an RMT exchange from it; they suffer the economic and CS decisions from it and they presumably out of enlightened self-interest, if nothing else, have the game’s best interests in mind. And since they’re the ones who sunk money and sweat equity and their own ideas and labors into the game, for some reason I think they and their customers should be the one to see the financial benefits from it.

With outside arbitrage dealers such as IGE, none of the above applies. And interestingly, despite IGE’s initial “Gosh, Station Exchange is great, it legimitizes our business model, happy happy!” press releases… oddly enough, IGE still sells things on non-Station Exchange EQ2 servers. Funny how that works. I guess the people who specifically chose to remain on non-RMT enabled servers for that game? Yeah, they shouldn’t get to make that choice. It should be made for them. Yeah.

I’d go on, but I’d just start spewing random obscenities at this point, and I’m trying to quit.