The rise and fall, or perhaps the vaguely downwards sauntering, of Brock.
Quote: “The year 1998 was a great time for bullshit, especially if you were selling it and especially if it came with the magic suffix .com attached.”
Thanks to Firor for the link.
A few comments:
Several interview subjects are lying in some way.
I do think gold/item sales hurt games that are not designed for RMT.
But, as a side note, I once made close to a thousand dollars by selling my EQ character. I loved that character, but I was never going to play her again, and I was brooooooke. It didn’t hurt Sony, either, as someone (who might otherwise not have subscribed) happily sent monthly fees. Of course, making account sales legal just clears the way for asshats to load up naked accounts with gold or a particular item and sneaking in that way.
And I was chatting with a friend recently about IGE, and I said, paraphrased, that at one point Kennedy money and even Rockefeller money was dirty at worst and at best obtained in a quasi-legal way, doing active harm all the way. But now both names are practically hallowed when it comes to patronage of the arts. The formula seems to be “giant pile of money + time + liberal donations = legitimacy.”
I read that article earlier today, found it very interesting indeed. A truly bizarre series of events.
Per usual, I can’t stand to read that much of a WIRED article all at once.
Article’s a pretty good read, and I also cashed in my EQ accounts when I got tired of them… did it twice for about $2500 total. Paid the rent for a couple months with it. And the best part was… when Sony did their “free” account activations this past summer, I was able to login on all of the sold accounts (still linked to my e-mail) and the characters were still there, dressed and all.
Of course now they aren’t worth a damn thing, but it was still very amusing.
Er, so did you know station cash was coming today?
Premium In-Game Items in EQ and EQ2…
Yeah. Here’s the thing about that – it’s designed in, for one thing, it’s not a question of farmers preventing people from PLAYING. For another thing, it’s designed in, so it can’t really harm the economy the way uncontrolled farming can. And for a third thing, EQ Original Recipe has survived this long – frankly, it’ll survive the end times at this point, let alone tinkering with microtransactions (and that’s what I think this is, as opposed to IGE-style shenenigans) . For all its faults it was a solid game, or else it would not endure.
I think there’s three things associated with current RMT in games where it’s not allowed by (eg WoW etc).
1. Farmers griefing other players in an attempt to maximise income
2. Farmers playing long hours and increasing the supply of money in the game
3. Farmers passing in game items and currency to players in exchange for real world cash
Taking these in turn:
1. Grief play does harm the game, but this is a problem with how farmers play their characters, and is not a result of the RMT market. This is therefore not a reason to ban or decry RMT, but a reason to amend the game or introduce punishments so that griefing doesn’t happen. Whenever I’ve been playing I’ve had people steal mobs, resource nodes, etc away from me and I’m fairly certain most of those were normal players, not farmers. Or at least just normal players on a farming spree – not professional farmers.
2. Most game economies are based on a tap and drain economy. New money enters the system when players loot corpses or complete quests. This money sloshes around on the local auction house etc and finally exits the system when players pay for repairs (technically buying an item from a vendor doesn’t change the wealth in game, it just changes it from being in currency to in items). The supply of wealth is therefore a product of loot and quest generosity, repair etc costs, and how much people play. The first two are in control of the company the last is up to individuals. If the long play times of farmers seem unfair as they drive prices up, then you can also sell your loot for more. Also complaining that they play too long and drive prices up doesn’t seem to square with complaints that people who play shorter times and buy items through RMT should play more rather than buying stuff – if you believe the latter, why complain about farmers playing longer than you? OK you’re probably not going to be able to play 24hrs since you have to sleep, but other people can’t play 12hrs since they have to work etc all down the line. I don’t play long hours and I think I benefit since my loot sells for more on the auction house.
3. Moving items around for real cash. Why does this harm the game? From the game view, it’s the same as someone giving a friend item for free. The main complaint seems to be that people should “earn” their items, by playing for long times. As mentioned above I don’t really see that. I can go to the shops and buy a ready meal – I don’t get varous farmers, chefs, etc complaining that I should have to grow the crops and cook the meal myself and that somehow exchanging money damages the system. The whole point of currency is it’s a way to exchange goods without having to barter. I swap the stuff I produce (work in an office) for cash which I can then exchange for anything.
I know I’m drawing a big generalisation, but complaints about RMT seem to me to be sour grapes from the time rich / cash poor population that the time poor / cash rich population can attain the same benefits in game that they can.
To quote “Chinatown”:
Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.
To me, the major issue with the RMT traders boils down to human decency. If I go to Sanya’s house and she says “I’m sorry…men aren’t allowed to wear pants here, have a mini-skirt” then I am realistically presented with two choices: 1) Wear a mini-skirt or 2) go somewhere else. To ignore Sanya’s wishes, however ludicrous I personally find them, is being rude to the host and it’d be wholly expected that if I defied those wishes Sanya would ask to me to leave and have the police remove me if I didn’t. My opinion doesn’t really matter, it’s *Sanya’s* house. Sure, I could have used the example of a black-tie formal restaurant there, but that one was more fun I think.
The other aspect of the RMT is the seedy side. The gold spamming ads that players revile because of their obtrusiveness…imagine going to the movies and having someone stand in front of the screen yelling “BUY BUTTERFINGERS FROM THE PLACE DOWN THE STREET” during the actual movie. The stolen credit card information (some from their own customers) to purchase throwaway accounts to do said spamming which costs the cardholder, the credit card company and the publisher time and money. The cracking of people’s accounts (keyloggers, retaining information for people who sign up to be power-leveled, etc.) to sell off all their items and send the gold off to other parts of the RMT network to sell, which causes players anguish and costs the hosting company real money to restore the stolen items. The list actually goes on with “real-world” crimes being used to further the virtual money market. I’m not affiliating all of these activities with IGE directly, but given the track record of the company to date, I would be completely and utterly surprised if they had no dealings with people who employed such underhanded tactics. These activities DO have a measurable, negative impact on the game and society at large. Some of those activities are prison-time illegal for a reason, after all.
I can understand the desire for people to convert real-world assets into virtual ones because time = money and just because it’s supposedly to be a leisure activity doesn’t change that equation. In a business sense, if I make $30 an hour (how I wish) and can earn 400 gold in an hour, but could buy 2000 gold for $20, then I’m not making the best business choice. In two hours of “work” I could have over 9 times the gold. Presuming you forget you’re playing a game and that the journey is supposed to be just as important as the destination, of course.
From my viewpoint, CCP’s approach to RMT is a good middle ground. Their GTC trade allows you to take real money, convert it into virtual currency quickly, but in a secure guaranteed manner that in the end allows someone else to continue playing the game without real-world cost to them. You get your virtual money, the seller gets free game time, the hosting company makes just as much money. The implementation of course isn’t perfect since oftentimes the ones who can afford to buy it are RMT farmers, but I think that’s the most solid core concept out there.
Enough early morning rambling out of me though…
P.S. – If for some weird reason I’m ever at your house Ms. Tweety, I’m not wearing a mini-skirt
It’s for the good of humanity really…
I just don’t buy that RMT is damaging the game. How it’s done – griefing, hacking accounts, spamming talk channels, fraud, etc – does however damage the game. I think these two aspects (what and how if you will) get mixed up in some arguments.
To come back to Sanya’s comment that RMT for gold and items hurts the game but selling an account/character doesn’t – I don’t get that. Surely the rationale that buying items and gold to power up your character when you haven’t “earned” it is the same as buying a character already levelled and equipped. You say that this way around someone who wouldn’t otherwise have played started to pay sony, so sony didn’t lose out. I would argue that by letting people short cut boring parts of the game by buying items/gold you will get more people playing. There are games I’ve given up because the grind looked too long and boring with no way around it. Life is short and free time is shorter, no point in spending it being bored.
To my mind one of the reasons that RMT is banned by various games is for legal reasons. If you “owned” your loot that you picked up in game, and had the right to sell it to someone else, then presumably if you lost it due to a game crash or had it devauled (ie nerfed) then you could sue the company for loss of property. Not something they want to cope with, so they retain ownership of everything and don’t let you sell it.
Having played various MMO’s since 1997, I feel I’ve witnessed several environments ruined by RMT or exploits, which I see as one in the same especially when the exploit introduces more gold in some form or fashion.
In UO players exploited duplication of items and gold. Suddenly you had numerous players buying the largest houses and taking up large amounts of space preventing others who earned their gold as designed from placing even a small house. Guess which players left the game? When players started selling gold or rare items, the intended balance was thrown off. Players who spent cash obtained numerous items that made them much more powerful, and either able to slaughter monsters and rake in more gold easier or prey upon lesser equipped players. Again this drove the struggling players away.
For the past four years of WoW, I’ve seen that WoW has it better and worse than other MMOs. The economy is a much larger scale than any other game, so there is much less of an impact when a few hundred players improperly introduce more gold or when a player buys farmed gold. However, the little pebbles eventually grow to a mountain. Money is easy enough to make in WoW if you have the time. One class Ethorad left out is the time poor/cash poor group aka casual players. This is where most of the WoW players I know fall. Limited amount of time and only enough cash to buy and play the game. These players play the game as the designers intended: questing and killing to earn items and money and then returning that money to the economy by purchasing items or paying for services.
Personally, I despise any player who has taken one of these shortcuts: character leveling, buying gold, buying items with cash. In my eyes they have not earned it in any way, shape or form. What I wear and have in the bank speak volumes of what I have accomplished. More over, the few people I know who paid to have their characters leveled were some of the worst players I’d ever seen. I never wanted to group with them again because they didn’t know how to play. The two people I knew who purchased gold completely lost interest in the game. By paying cash, they immediately removed several of the challenges of the game.
If players don’t have enough interest in the game to spend the time in it, then why play at all? They should play FPS’, driving games and others that do not require the time investment for quick gaming fixes that fit their busy lifestyle. MMOs are not for every gamer.
Sanya, you may want to bear in mind that your admission would probably earn you a permaban from the player association I belong to — and not just in the game I play, but in ALL the games this multigame players’ group plays, and the group’s website. They have very strict policies regarding any sort of RMT.
Personally, I think the protagonist of that biopic sounds like exactly the sort of sociopathic jerk I had imagined as the founder of a business based on grey-market RMT. But as far as the act of RMT itself, I have two things to say: 1. It does indeed adversely affect the games, especially those games with a strong PvP component, but also to a lesser extent the overall game balance of the combat structure — after all, if the majority of players are decked out in moderate-quality gear, the intensity of the in-game challenges would be lower than it would be if every player were decked out with the Uber Set of Impregnable Ancient Dragon-Skin armor and an Ancient Axe of Instant Cleaving of Anything’s Head; and 2. Playing a MMORPG with RMT-obtained money or gear is like playing Monopoly by manually placing your token on the Short Line Railroad every time you passed Go. Such shortcuts miss the point of the game.
All of you guys saying that RMT misses the POINT of these games… amen.
Iakimo – well, I’m not entirely proud of it, and it’s more than possible I’ve rationalized it, but I was pretty desperate. Some people sell their cars, guitars, or jewelry in tough times, but my only asset was literally that EQ character
I’d long since sold off anything else I owned of value. And not one item on that character had been camped for the purpose of selling it, and I was a pretty good citizen of the world while I was in it. I harmed no one. I don’t remember the details, but I think the buyer was someone who’d already played the game and wanted to try a monk.
I personally have nothing against buying or selling in-game items, but it does open a path for thieves and exploiters to steal from players.
I used to place houses in Ultima Online, and sell them on eBay. It started out because I was helping guildmates get houses. But then I became unemployed in 1999, and $150 for a log cabin was enough to buy food I didn’t have.
I got so good at placing houses that GMs would summon me to locations to explain to players why a house would not fit somewhere, or to explain to the GM how a player loitering in the area was ‘blocking’ the appealing character from placing a house (with a water barrel or boat sail). I was the founder of a ‘house placer’ ICQ group, and we used to assist each other in placing houses, or barter and swap locations (“I know this villa location that is falling when I won’t be online… what you got to trade for it?”)
By the time UO stopped all houses from falling in 2001, I had 10 accounts placing houses, with 3 to 4 hidden at each falling house, and each of my characters running a macro that attempted to place a house deed and click the accept button 15 times per second. I became so infamous that people arriving at a falling house would ask “Is Chiapet hidden around here?”
But… I never attempted to harm, exploit, or steal. One time a player logged in just after his house fell. Once I verified it used to be his house location, I transferred the new house to him, and didn’t even charge him for the price of the deed I had used. After each placement I always offered to port people to the next house that was falling. And people often asked me to help place a house for them… and I frequently did, even if I had the house on my list of place-and-sell locations for that day.
It took a lot of effort to get the houses. I walked around UO looking for locations 16 hours per day, 7 days per week. I would grab two hours sleep and then sit at a house from 2am until 7am, only to lose it to someone who had snuck a water barrel inside a corner and then placed two tiles to the left. All in average, I made about minimum wage for my time, but I worked 100+ hour weeks, and it paid my rent and food.
But when I joined other games I found that most gold farmers are far less moral than I and my UO compatriots. In Lineage 2, Korean IGE farmers camped spider spawns north of the dwarf town… and dragged aggro to anyone who came to the area trying to do a quest there. If you fought back they logged in a permantly ‘red’ character to kill you. And I have lost count of how many of my DAoC and WoW guildmates lost everything because they hired a leveling service, or simply visited a website that inserted a key-logger onto their computer.
The biggest problem is that since MMO companies ban gold selling, only criminals sell MMO gold. Exactly like what happened with alcohol during the prohibition. There will always be people who want to buy game gold (just like alcohol), and if you ban legit people from selling it… it just increases the value of the gold, and creates a black market of criminals stealing and then reselling the gold. It could be said that the gold farmer market was actually created by the MMO companies not allowing players to sell their accounts or gold.
I think the best option for the market would be MMO company sponsored trading sites… with secured account trading, and the MMO company acting as a the ‘broker’ between players wanting to buy and sell game gold. Much like the model that Second Life currently uses.
If selling items in game breaks the game, then the game is designed broken.
From the perspective of the game, if I buy a giant pile of game resources with real life resources, it is the same thing as a friend of mine quitting the game and handing me all of their stuff.
Disruptive behavior is a different issue, and linking them is scapegoating.
Personally, I think that Ultima Online had the right idea in the beginning, despite the fact that the original concept failed. MMOs need to mature in a way that creates a closed economy. No matter how players behave, if you generate gold/items out of thin air, there will be problems that are very difficult to manage, such as rampant inflation.
Designing a world with a balanced economy and procedurally generated quest content is difficult, but in the long run will create a healthier game that requires less maintenance.