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Vanguard: Saga of Heroes Editorial: Secondary Market: McQuaid v Kipe
In this special guest debate, Brad McQuaid of Sigil carries the torch for the anti-secondary market faction, while Roger Kipe, formerly of YourVirtualSeller.com takes up the opposing view.
By Guest Writer on December 06, 2006
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Special Debate: The Secondary Market and MMORPGs
Brad McQuaid (CEO of Sigil) and Roger Kipe (formerly of YourVirtualSeller) square off
Editor's Introduction: In this special debate, we secured two people from polar opposite ends of the industry to debate the ethics of the Secondary Market in the MMORPG industry. Brad McQuaid, the CEO of Sigil and Exec. Producer of Vanguard, has been a vocal opponent of the secondary market throughout his career. McQuaid made his legend in the industry by creating EverQuest. Roger Kipe is a long time MMO-player and for a time owned and operated YourVirtualSeller, a secondary market service. The two square off in this special debate.
Brad McQuaid: The secondary market can be good for the average gamer if they want to purchase items or characters as opposed to earning them in-game. Many people want to have these items or characters but either do not have the time to earn them and/or the desire to put the time in necessary to earn them. By using the secondary market, they can get around the otherwise necessary time invested. That said, given that these games are about communities and not single player games, the actions of a single player can and does affect other players - the adage 'no man is an island' applies. Therefore, if the game wasn't designed for purchase of in-game goods or characters via outside means (in other words, buying them from the secondary market), they are doing something that harms that game as a whole. Their action in and of itself may not have immediately apparent negative effects on the game, but over time the more people who take part in the secondary market, the more the game is harmed as a whole. The secondary market is bad for the industry as a whole unless the game was designed to allow for the secondary market. The majority of MMOGs in their EULAs do not allow players to use the secondary market. Even if a game was designed to allow for using real world money to purchase in-game items or characters, the company or companies responsible for development, maintenance, and hosting of that game typically want to (rightfully) control these real-world transactions. SOE's Station Exchange program is a good example. Quite simply, these other 'companies' who profit from real world transactions are doing so illegally and unethically. They are making a profit that is usually against the wishes and EULA of the game. I have no problem with a game designed for real world transactions (even though Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, our MMOG currently in development and beta is not designed for this). But like I said, if a game is designed for this, the people who own the game should be the ones controlling these transactions and profiting from them if they choose to do so.
Roger Kipe: The Secondary Market is good for the average gamer and is the only way many of the average gamers can participate on an even footing with gamer zealots. It also allows the same zealots to earn some extra cash by selling off the items that they have earned through their time spent in game. The argument that "no man is an island" that some apply to this question is made useless when you take into account that more and more games are adapting themselves into having ways to give their customer bases a safe and secure method of selling or buying the items they have earned in game. If this activity was as harmful to the game or the community then surely the developers of the game would not willing introduce this destructive action into the game themselves? The secondary market is good for the industry. I believe the growth of the secondary market has made game makers aware of a need the gaming community has had for a long time. Now that need is being addressed and it will likely be the end of the Secondary Market. If the question is "Is the Secondary Market harmful to gaming companies" then I would at least see the point Brad is trying to make.... He seems to be saying that the Secondary Market is harmful to the gaming companies because it takes away their control and income. However I do not believe he is considering the tens of thousands of subscription based accounts that are paid for month in and month out by the companies that work within the Secondary Market or the initial purchase price of the games they buy and re buy after every session of banning.
Brad McQuaid: No, my main point was not that it was bad for the gaming companies, but for the game communities - the players. If you create an MMOG in which earning items in-game is an important part of character advancement such that you feel a sense of accomplishment when you do earn that item, allowing others to simply purchase that same item in the secondary market cheapens the experiences of the person who did earn it in-game. It lessens his feeling of accomplishment and discourages him. This doesn't make many/most players feel very good about the time they then put in, which then leads to being upset with the game itself. No, it might not bother everyone, but I am quite certain it bothers most people. Like I said, if the game was designed and advertised to be about the secondary market, that's one thing. But if it wasn't, it harms the community and needs to be stopped by those whose responsibility it is for the health of the game. Even when the game is meant for real money transactions, if their EULA and intent is that they, the developers or publishers, control these transactions and not third party entities, then those third party entities are not only in violation of the EULA, they are stealing money from the developer or publisher. So any way you approach it, if the game is not meant for real money transactions or if it is, but these transactions are meant to be handled by those who own the game, a third party individual or company is both harming the game as well as, in the latter case, stealing money.
Roger Kipe: I will address both of your arguments: I had a friend that once built a boat. It took him a great deal of time and was all he thought about for as long as some of his friends could remember. He celebrated with all of his friends when he finished the project and took everyone out to see how great the ship performed. He was as proud of himself for the work he had done as for the ability to show it to others. We saw plenty of other boats that day on the lake and some were much more beautiful and clearly worth more money but this did not deter my friend from gleaming like a beacon as he knew it was the work and dedication he had put in that made his special and it did not matter how the others had gotten their boats.... The morale of the story is, that you should derive your since of accomplishment or joy from the work you put into achieving something. If you constantly judge it or yourself against others you will never be satisfied with the results. As far as companies in the Secondary market stealing money, if that were true then the gaming companies would take them to court to make them stop. You are trying to make a very complicated argument into something that it is not. The bottom line is if the EULA's were enforceable in a court of law to stop companies from buying and selling in game goods, then the gaming companies would take them to court and it would all be over with. I believe the real reasons this never will see the inside of a court room is because the gaming companies have been told by their lawyers that it is very possible that the courts will decide that the player that invests all of the time and effort into a game is in fact the owner of the goods he earns and has every right to do with them as he wishes.
Brad McQuaid: It is true that many people don't care what other people possess, but I would consider them in the minority. And I also think that you may well see some lawsuits on the horizon.
Roger Kipe: I agree with you Brad, there will be lawsuits in the near future. In fact when I was at E3 in 2006 I talked to many people who were telling me of the lawsuit that was just decided in the Korea. This was a case of a man who bought a sword in game and afterwards it was deleted somehow. He sued NCSoft (as it was Lineage 2) for his sword back. The court decided that he was the one that put all of the time and effort into the game and thus he was the owner of the property. It was the court decision that he would be given back his sword. I would expect that here in the US it will follow suit soon. 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. |
"He who has the most money wins. You can't stop us, so you might as well give up now."
I'll never play an RMT game for this very reason. I just hope the people who participate in this self-destructive behavior realize that by doing so, they are completely ruining the game for themselves, and they will never truly be a part of that game's community. Having skipped the larger part (and the most fun part, for most) of character development is crippling, in most games. If you aren't enjoying the game, then go play something else.
MMOs aren't supposed to be about competition, and anyone who believes they are somehow better than the REAL players (because they have more money to spend) has some serious issues.
I am one who doesnt see how the secondary market hurts games. If the secondary market companies are doing things in a legitamate fasion and not exploiting or cheating I dont see any harm in it. If it really did hurt games then MMOs would all fail but they dont because the secondary market is there to help those who dont have the time to put towards getting something. The boat analogy is a very good one. Just because somebody buys a better boat than you built it doesnt take away the pride you have in what you worked towards. Its just many gamers are spoiled brats who would rather everyone have to do EXACTLY what they did to earn what they have but thats not how the world works. Brad says that it takes away the fun of those who earned the items, but on the other hand it adds to the fun of those who bought the stuff.
The problem with the secundary market is, it will destroy the ingame economic. if a sword was woth 100gp to begin with, then after the second market has done their thing it will soon be 10000gp, because ppl just go out and buy the gp with real money.
Suddenly the normal players can't afford this sword because it will be impossibel to earn theese kind of gold in the game.
if you look at linage2. the secondary market has completly made this game about bots. who is a bot and who's not. i think its sad that you have to pay for a monthly fee (thats ok) but besides that you have to buy money on the side just to get a decent sword, these games is about companies earning money not players having some good fun.
sorry for the grammer
Asked this question before but never an answer - with the majority of high end items in games like WOW etc typically bind-on-pickup in an dungeon requiring 40 people to complete. Or quest based / level based - what do gold buyers do with their ill-gotten gains?
Come on, we wont judge you guys / girls - any gold buyers here brave enough to tell us about thier secret shame?
Interesting read, yep yep. The only problem is they picked the wrong guy to interview for the anti-RMT point of view. They should have tapped the CEO of Mythic, Mark Jacobs, instead. Brad's credibility is a little iffy as a champion of anti-RMT these days since he's now working with a company (SOE) that has RMT transactions built into the game itself -- part of the reason for his previously unheard of and now oft-included statement that RMT is OK as long as the game developer is the one making a profit off the transactions.
At that point, you're going to lose some of the support you enjoyed previously from the gamers themselves. If your argument is that the cash from the individual transactions is simply going to the wrong company, you're going to be hard-pressed (as the company receiving monthly payments from the gamer anyway) to hear even a very, very small violin playing. You've switched from guardian of game-play and economics to, frankly, whining that the money should be yours, not theirs.
Like I said, interesting read. It doesn't change GuildPortal's stance on RMT (we're against it, won't advertise it) by any means, but it's time to take away the anti-RMT crown and hand it to someone that holds their ground more firmly, regardless of who their new publisher is. Mythic after all, has never changed their stance on the topic, and as far as lawsuits concerning RMT go, they've actually won.
I do not believe that whether RMT is harmful to the economy of a game and/or the players of the game or not is in any way affected by who gets the money from the individual transactions. It either is or it isn't, regardless of whose pockets are being lined. IMHO, it's harmful, whether the cash goes SOE, Verant, IGE, or anyone else. The practice is the problem, not the routing of the gains.
Let me elaborate. Traditional MMORPG's have an EULA which clearly states that all virtual property and intellectual property belongs to the company. These same companys do not assign a dollar value to an item. These items have no dollar value, nor should they.
Let's ponder the legal example illustrated where the individual in Korea sued for the return of a lost item. Now let's assume the company in question had lost their entire character and item database, and were unable to restore or recover the data. In the law suit the company was required to re-issue a single item to a single customer. Assuming you no longer have any record of whom owned what item or what character, how could you prove or disprove a claim? Add to that, what would happen if a court determined the company to be legally responsible for the fair market dollar value of said items?
So I'll stand by my twisted outlook as to why gaming companys must stick to their guns, and refuse to acknowledge the legitamacy of the secondary market as doing so would lend precidence to allowing a third party entity to establish a fair market value of a virtual item; which in my opinion, is the sole property of the gaming company.
The secondary market is setting the stage for a very interesting legal scenario in which the producers of a game could be sued for the value of virtual property that they created.
Honestly I don't care if people buy gold, just not on my server. Go do it on your own server where you can play with all the rest of the people who don't see the value in achievement.
I really don't see why people with no time but lots of money shouldn't be able to buy something that someone else is willing to give up.
Takes me a couple months to quest/save gold to get an item, takes someone else a day and $100(no clue what ppl buy for but we'll use $100 as an example). BIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIG DEAAAAAAAAAAL.
anyways, just my opinion of course. Doesn't bother me a bit.
Edit: I suppose this doesn't count for games that say explicitly they don't want you selling stuff. Then I agree you shouldn't since you signed up agreeing not to.
I am going to stir the pot a little.
The secondary market not only emerges from items. But anything of virtual value. Character accounts, rare trading components, mounts, status points, power levelling services, guides, bot programs, etc.
Capitalism finds a way. If there is a demand, someone wiith ingenuity and resourcefulness will find a way to meet that demand.
As long as there are people willing to buy that lvl 60 character, that cheat sheet to get the best exp and loot areas, that 3rd party program which gives them an advantage, a UI program which makes your game easier, that virtual sword, etc. there will always be a secondary market.
Not so sure Brad won that debate. Those ominous words by Mr. Kipe:
"I agree with you Brad, there will be lawsuits in the near future. In fact when I was at E3 in 2006 I talked to many people who were telling me of the lawsuit that was just decided in the Korea. This was a case of a man who bought a sword in game and afterwards it was deleted somehow. He sued NCSoft (as it was Lineage 2) for his sword back. The court decided that he was the one that put all of the time and effort into the game and thus he was the owner of the property. It was the court decision that he would be given back his sword. I would expect that here in the US it will follow suit soon. "
In other words, the players who buy the game may actually be the owners of their virtual items. We shall see.
BTW - This was the best debate I have read since I have been a member of MMORPG.COM
AWESOME JOB !
The Value of Achievement? Great words. But the entire morale is twisted. I worked hard for my money, so why not spent it on a new sword or horse in my hobby - my MMO? My RL money is my achievement as well? I assure you, to me it doesn't come easy. For me a MMO is a hobby as every other. If I collect something, train models, stamps, whatever, well there a person with more money usually also has more. So what? None care a damn, and none should.
In capitalism a person with more money always has more and bigger things, that is how the world goes. You may dislike it, but I'd suggest change the real world into a more fair place first and care for simple games later. I can put my RL achievement - DOLLARS - into every other hobby, even if I then have more, so what?
Essentially a gold or item seller does what free market advocates since the rise of the idea of capitalism: to find a niche and exploit it. Free market means to leave all to demand and request.
Oh and just FYI - inflations was always there, WAY before gold sellers existed. Inflation is the natural flow in free market. The fact is, all really free markets have inflation in numbers, but usually the value relation remains the same. In SWG most things now cost much more credits than when it started, but people also HAVE much more credits, so overall things did not really become more expensive.
All this moral crusade against gold and item sellers is only self-righteos pretense. A gold seller does a job like any job. He works for money in a niche where there is demand. It's as simple as that. That is how the world is running. The alternative to capitalism just proved not to work roughly 16 years ago.
I do not want your real world achievements affecting my game at all. I want to know that if I am hunting with a few other people I just met that they all have the experience that their gear implies they do. I do not like cheaters in real life, or in games.
Your analogy doesn't work either. If you start making your own rare stamps because you happen to own a nice printer, and have a surplus of paper, would you really expect stamp collectors to do anything but deride you? At best, your forged stamps would be worthless. At worst, the forgeries would devalue the value of the stamps owned by real stamp collectors, and eventually get you thrown in prison for fraud.
I am willing to bet that the only reason the farmers who take part in RMT get banned is so they will buy another account. Seriously, do you think any company wants to spend the resources required just to try and stop this market? They actually make more money per person off these people than anyone else so do you think they really care that they are there? Sure, they will ban a few to show that they care but in the end I dont think any of the companies actually care about the secondary market. Plus when they ban these people it nets them more money so I personally think the companies want the secondary market there. I would rather the game companies themselves offer the same things all the RMT people sell so its safer transactions instead of having to buy off the black market but then you get all these whiny people who cry all day about people buying stuff they worked for. But no matter how much you whine you cant stop RMT without designing the game to fight it from the start.
You take the boat analogy wrong, if having a boat is a matter of having money in real life, then the ones owning those boats are either old enough ones having the needed real life money, or the poor ones that has to spend time in playing the game to have that boat. If you think that those poor ones will be proud of having that boat anymore, you are definitely wrong.
Having fun is not the point here. It is a matter of having equality, if hackers are having fun on breaking into the systems by their special tools purchased by their legally owned money, then you can have trouble there finding a game to play.
There is no such thing as innovative, unique, and risky in the gaming world anymore. Its all mass produced crap, like McDonalds. Oh well, at least I can always play Pac man and pong, god knows they are simple games but I still love my classics, because they were fun.
You speak of equality but equality also comes in the form of possesions. If someone buys some items with real money then it puts them on equal playing grounds with those who worked for those items. You dont want equality you just want to be better because you can spend more time playing than the other person. Besides, having fun is the point......... if you dont think it is then you shouldnt be playing games. I mean, cheating to have fun is crossing the line but having fun within the boundaries of the game is the whole point. So what if people buy items or money in game to be on a level playing ground with others who can spend more time playing. It doesnt affect the other people at all. I understand how buying maxed out characters causes others pain but just buying gold and items is not a problem.
Being a former gold farmer I've seen both sides of the coin. The monetary gain and the decline of online community.
As a farmer: There is MUCH money to be made doing this if you can keep the influx of money, chars and goods coming in non-stop. I was a school teacher that decided to just stay home and play online games and farm. My wife didn't complain because I made more money as an ingame farmer than a regular school teacher. I was happy at home waking up to put on my suit (my bath robe) and going to work at my desk (just 4 feet away) all day every day for over 2 years.
As a regular gamer: I've been killed out of areas where farmers are applying their trade in several games. Knowing what they were doing I just took my character elsewhere and returned later to see if that area of the game was open so I could complete my quest or grind. Since I NEVER bought any gold or items I have to acquire them in-game by myself, with a group or in a guild. It's tough to pull this off if you have SEVERAL farmers that are in an area non-stop. WoW is a good example- Tyr's Hand (or whatever that area is called in Eastern Plaguelands) I can't even go to because Alliance farmers are there ALL DAY LONG! It sucks, but I know what they are doing and they will defend their livelihoods all day long. I did the same.
Overall: I think any company that wanted to make some EXTRA money should do like Sony and make Exchange Servers (servers where you can buy/sell items and stuff) and make a profit out of it. That's how you can get rid of IGE and the other gold selling websites. Companies are missing out on MILLIONS of dollars by not opening that door.
Eve Online has guilds that are PAYING people to do the PvP for them. OMG- you can be a virtual hit man and not go to jail. The gaming companies need to wake up and smell MORE money. There is no way they will be able to stop it because I've even sold items just by asking a player if they were insterested in buying such and such. Money was wired and I did the trade. Just that simple to do.
If you can't beat them, join them- THEN BEAT THEM!!!
If a game is developed to allow the secondary market like Entropia, or Second Life then I see no problem. Games that are not built for it suffer. The economy suffers, and most of all the community suffers. It is frustrating for a player to put in the time and effort to earn nice equipment only to see joeblow take his or his dad's credit card and buy enough gold to let him purchase everything you have and more. Sure some players don't mind but MMOs are played by many. If we subscribed to the logic that since some people don't mind then it should be allowed then you could say duping and other cheats should be ok as well since some players don't mind... MMO's can't work that way. A company has to look out for the wellbeing of their community overall. not just a few, and if they perceive something to be detrimental to their game, regardless of who else agrees, then they need to act.
If a player likes the idea of a secondary market then they should seek out games that allow it and not screw up games that do not and try to say it should be ok.
Paks
The entire debate could be boiled down to one simple and digestable truth;
It is going to happen anyway.
Many other mmo developers, even some of the most reputed in the field such as this fellow might be successful in their own right, but seem incapable of grasping this fact and thus will always be their folley in one form or another.
I also appreciated the statement that yes, the secondary market is detrimental in games which were not designed with the secondary market in mind which basically equates to the subsequent suffering the develoeprs games themselves [let's say Vanguard] are soon to encounter.
In avoidance of being called a "plug" I'll leave the name of the game we're developing out, however numerous studies and debates back and forth have proven without a shadow of a doubt that if managed, ingame currency sales and the secondary market in general can be turned from a negative force to an overwhelmingly positive force for game developers.
The phrase we used in the past when sitting down with prospective investors was, "Just think if all of that money was going back to the developer instead of the overseas companies..." which has so far yielded really great results because well, it's undilluted truth.
Look at Entropia Universe for instance.
Dated technology with no physical product for revenue-draining retail stores and free to download, yet still rakes in over $160 million a year from only one source of income; Ingame currency sales. Now guestimate that 1/3 of that might be hosting fees, bandwidth and the half a dozen people they have on staff to simply monitor and maintain their one server. Just one server!
As with everything in the modern world, those who can grow as the world around them grows will prosper. Those who cannot adapt and change with the times are doomed to be plowed under.
If there is flaw in my logic please someone let me know. Perhaps there is some minutia of obscure data that I haven't had access to purtaining to why the secondary market is so oft overlooked.
Yes, if they want to stop the booming trend of MMOs as a growth industry, then they should make the secondary market a standard, where you can buy all your great stuff for money, then go and PvP the real players to death. Sure.. Because MMOs are not built upon its community, and do not survive because of that community. I am sure Counter Strike would have been huge today if aimbot was allowed as long as you had bought it from the original company. I am.. Some good points from the Ebay defenders.
Do it... Sure, go do it. All companies create a secondary market, or equipment stores for real money in all MMOs, on all servers, then see where all your costumers went. And when the servers are empty, just with a a few hundred exploiters in each game, you come back here and say its good for the companies again.
I can promise you.. 100% without a doubt.. If one company in such a scenario would release a game without a secondary market... they would take the number one spot in less than a week.
When MMOs began, we paid 15 bucks an hour for a constantly evolving game, patches adding new adventurers and equipment constantly. Today, we pay 15 bucks a month, and they cant even have the servers up for a full week, all new game material we are supposed to pay for and we can be happy if even the expansions add anyhting to the game for a new retail cost.
Now they want us to pay 15 bucks a month for a buggy game that cant have the servers open 7 days a week, dont add anyhting in patches and hardly in epxansions,, and then we have to pay to get new equipment each level as well? yeah... Your ideas to make more money do not hurt the costumers at all. I am sure you are not hurting your industry more than helping.
The flaw is you're not anticipating moves by the Tax Dept. to audit these transactions. How would you like it if:
Gold farmers had to register as traders.
Every transaction had to be reciepted.
Individuals had to declare all transactions, providing receipt and citing trader license.
All international transactions faced tariff's and trading regulations.
Having fun yet?
Ok, sometimes I really think some of you people are still have a 2nd grade comprehension, or maybe you are really just in 2nd grade. There is no reason to debate. I'm gonna make this simple for everyone.
1. Sure there are those of you that "have no problem" with RMT. Uh... you are either an RMT buyer, seller, or one of the people that have simply had good fortune in the game. You really need to put yourself in someone elses shoes. Be that person that joined the game 3 months after release and are already behind. Guess what, you also are not a rich person so you dont have extra money on top of the monthly fee to throw away on a game.. maybe you got kids and stuff, or other responsibilites. Maybe you also have a life so you cant play the game but maybe 2-3 hrs a day or so... and the prices have all raised because of RMT. That item you have spent the last week trying to make gold for is now triple what it was.. thats fair? Sure you may think so if you are rich in real life or the game.. but thats because it just dont affect you.
2. It is a game, if you really can't earn it yourself, don't ruin the game for hundreds of others, take one for the team XD. Seriously, it does affect other peoples game play, there is no doubt about it.. there is noway to defend that. It's a simple consept on how it does. With 2ndary companies.. they have people simply go out and farm all day.. it becomes peoples job basically.. which brings more currency into circulation, and everything costs more ect ect. So like I said, if you dont have tons of money in RL to keep up.. its hard, only other way is to have had tons of time to play online, or been really lucky.. thats not how a GAME should work.
All I want to say in ending, if a game isnt supporting RMT please let it alone for the rest of us. I think all MMO's should just make servers that allow it.. and ones that dont to make it simple really.. if you wanna buy then play on those servers.. would be much easier.. and maybe less hassle for everyone. I really don't know how you people really dont care about others enough to ruin a game. Sure it dont seem like it to you because everything is good for you now, but it does.
Haha i missed alot I wanted to say because I had to eat and had some interuptions, but I think it gets the point across.
If I understand correctly, and you are wondering why more companies don't do it, then I suspect the answer is two fold. 1) The people who create the games are also gamers who themselves do not like the secondary market. So they create the game they want. 2) A good chunk of the market still claims to despise the secondary market. If they are telling the truth, then it's possible companies are afraid they would lose a good chunk of their customer base.
To say that "it will happen anyways" is...well, agh, how to say this without being overly dramatic. If there had been message boards 100-300 years ago, people might have said "slavery will happen anyways, so deal with it, or find a way to take advantage of it". Or "racial segregation and prejudice always be there, why put up a fuss fighting it?". Extreme examples, yes, but it highlights that activities which are a natural easy way to advance in life, that seem part of human nature almost, can be effectively combated. Maybe not everywhere. Maybe not 100%. But in one country at a time, headway can be made if enough people want to and don't give up. So maybe, one game at a time, the secondary market can be weakened.
So I will never, ever, acquiesce to the disease that is the illegal secondary market. I will not knowingly associate with those that do. If I have a chance to strike against it, I will.
Where it is legal and sanctioned...cool. That's fine. I won't play those games because they don't appeal to me, but I don't think less of them or anyone who wants to play them. It's sorta like playing the stock market in a way, only there are virtual worlds to toodle around in. :D
Once again, I see the argument that "RMT Is good for people who simply don't have the time to put into the game to work for something and would like to buy it instead". That is such a hollow, ridiculous statement that it baffles me how many people stand behind it as though it's some rock-solid ace card they're playing. Another is how it "levels the playing field and makes it more fair for people who don't have the time to invest..." Excuse me? It's "unfair" that some people have more time to play a game than you do? Oh please... bring out the violins. Sorry... that's called *life*. If you have less time to play than someone else it's *common-sense* that it will take you longer to acquire an item than someone with more time to play. It's only unfair to those who somehow feel they are entitled to have everything they want without having to earn it simply because they don't feel like putting any effort into it.
All games are designed to be a challenge - each in their own way. In MMORPGs part of that challenge is developing your character and earning the better gear, etc. When other players look at you they believe you have put alot of time into the game and really have accomplished alot when all you've really done is whipped out your credit card. Lame. Lame. Lame.
I've said it before and I will continue to say it - people who RMT and buy their way through a game are completely missing the point of playing in the first place. The games are designed with everything in place to allow any player to acquire and achieve anything they want in the game.
There is no excuse to RMT. Stop being so damn lazy, stop with the ridiculous excuses and rationlizations, accept a damn challenge for once and play the damn games the way they were designed.
If it will take you longer than you'd like to get where you'd like to be in a gmae - then perhaps you should pick a game better suited to your time availability.
In the end - RMTers lose becuase as the developers and support teams catch them - admittedly much more slowly in some games than in others - they are suspended and/or banned. Square-Enix is doing a fantastic job with this in FFXI. Perhaps you people in here trying to state your case about "free-market societies" and "not having enough time to play the game properly" should take a clue from that and realize, once and for all...
No.. RMT in a game not designed around and expressely forbidding it is *not* okay. Not by your rationalizations. Not by any rationalizations.
You're obviously BS'ing yourselves.. but for the rest of us who have the brain-cells enough to see it for what it is - you're not fooling us at all.
At least have the integrity to accept it for what it is - cheating.
Poor old Rodger - whats so funny about his argument is that its the people who are comparing themselves to others in game who have better gear who are the ones out buying gold/items from the farmers. And how many of those are satisifed after spending their money - as one poster pointed out he quit soon after.
Well I would provide several examples for you
- Rodger's example of someone suing a Korean company because an item he bought off an RMT was deleted. He won. Imagine how strong his case would be if the company was the one who sold that item to him.
- Richard Garriot of Ultima online fame said in an interview the major problem is if you sell a customer something, and then nerf it you are wide open for law suits.
So good luck with that game.
Not exactly the comparison I would have used but I understand what you're saying.
Slavery does happen, even today. Are you fond of the shoes on your feet? The shirt on your back? Most of the materials what went into the very computer you're using right now?
Slavery in a more politicaly correct form however it is managed.
Much of the problems with the world stem from our proclaimed desire [and ability to] suppress human nature. One such example is our so-called "War on Terror" but people tend to forget that you cannot I repeat cannot defeat a human tendency inherent in all of us however large or small.
You cannot per say defeat the secondary market any more than you can defeat the black market for instance because your enemy isn't the adena farming internet cafes in China or the sweatshops in well... areas... around China or the Mexicans who *stole* your daddys job.
You're argueing against a virtually uninforceable ideal and a shakey one at that.
No person in history has ever quit an online game because they didn't agree with the sale of ingame items and I doubt they ever will. Anyone who says "I will not associate with those who do" is just another form of snobbish elitism.
Everyone does it.
And even if you could champion a global wave of anti-secondary marketeers and somehow manage to convince the community that the secondary market is somehow wrong, who would want to live in a world like that? A world [and the world of gaming] where any idea regardless of what it is even about and who it affects is only taken for face value and blindly accepted values are not challenged.
That my friends is a world without salt, because everybody knows salt leads to heart dissease. Right?
I like my salt dammet! I likes it alot! >.<
The secondary market provides hope to those of us who have lives and jobs outside of the game by allowing us to earn it where we can; in real life.
Simply stating as I have that it is going to happen anyway isn't a defeatist standpoint, it's a realist standpoint unless your game is Dark and Light and not even the koreans want to play it.
Oh you might [after a lengthy lifelong careers in politics and a final federal law pohibiting the sale of nontangible merchandise] begin to lay the foundations for a system which could possibly limit who all can and cannot do so, but you're only shifting the sand around.
Can you successfully police thousands if not millions of people in asia for what they do in a videogame in North America?
No, you cannot.
Why is this?
Because Lineage 2 and Ultima Online were not designed with the secondary market in mind. You've effectively missed the point of the initial debate on page 1 and made my point for me.
I agree completely with Roger Kipe on this - and the Korean decision. The in game property should belong to the player who invested the time, fees, and energy to get it. If that person wants to sell it, that shouldn't concern the developers at all.
Certainly it has no affect on game economy. Somebody earned the item or gold at sometime. It didn't somehow magically appear.
I think having a place where people want to trade things they have earned is a good thing, and I fylly support the secondary market.
You may find going into some area and spending 50 or 60 hours killing the same mobbies over and over again entertaining but that doesnt mean that others share your opinion. Someone once wrote that the proof of the existence of hell is repitition. Yet thats what these games encourage, mindnumbing reptition over and over again only so you keep paying a subscription fee like the other lemmings.
Fact of the matter is this: The way these games are developed the "rmt" does not take anythign away from you. Someone is still out there for those 50 or 60 hours, mind numbingly grinding away on mobbies then turning around and selling that stuff to someone else who doesnt enjoy that. If you feel a sense of accomplishment for being able to grind away to get that extra gold piece then more power to you. Someone else feels a sense of accomplishment by spending time with loved ones, playing a bit of a vid game, reading a book, having intercourse with someone other than themselves and having a good nights sleep before going to work in the morning.
You say people are missing the point of playing in the first place. I dont see how. They are able to log in, spend time with friends and log out. Isnt that what the point of these games are? I think the only one's deluding themselves are the ones that equate mindnumbing repetition with a challenge.
Same old Brad - a lot of emotions and words twisting but not a single solid argument or any sign of logic. The truth is - as a developer he wants this money from secondary market but as it was mentioned already he can not openly say it. And then we have to read all this rubbish about "offended player’s majority".
I can not say if secondary market is good or bad. It was always there. Hidden, yes, but always there. Does it affect game-play? Hard to say. If the game is interesting, if the process of obtaining those items is fun - then you can only pity people who buy there items instead getting them by normal way. Brad's defense is for games where you have to WORK for your in-game stuff. And sorry but in these games I do not see difference between someone, who has a lot of free time and can farm for hours, and the one who has money instead and buy the thing he wants. What is the problem? Money and even ruined economy do not remove the game-way to get items - questing, hunting, crafting. If the processes of hunting and crafting are interesting - then you lose nothing because of the secondary market.
Make it interesting, make it fun, combine with some restrictions like binding stuff - and you can regulate this market without lawyers.
While I am against the whole secondary market thing; Roger Kipe is a much better debater than Mr. McQuaid if I may say so.
I'm against people who are conducting profitable business on property that they do not lease. I wouldn't walk into Disneyland and start hawking lemonade - made from their lemon trees and with cups I swiped from the soda vendors, no less. I'd be thrown out and possibly banned for life from all things Disney. I paid the admission fee, but that doesn't mean I have the right to profit on someone else's private property.
The fact that people are lined up halfway around the park to buy my cheap lemonade does not excuse the fact that I'm there getting something for spending time acquiring that which I had no intent to use for entertainment.
Here is my take on the premise of a monthly fee - some marketing exec, please tell me if I have this wrong:
You pay to log in anytime you want, but the monthly fee is based upon the average consumers' usage of the game's resources and upkeep during that month. The more that play, the more profitable it is and although more upkeep is necessary, it irons itself out and still remains profitable.
If "Player A" plays 8 hours a day, they are getting more than their fair share of entertainment value by the way the books see it. They impact the upkeep, as they are seeing more content and doing more things to cause traffic on the servers; the least impact is using bandwidth and keeping other paying players from logging in (queue times are a #$%^) - which costs money too.
"Player B," who spends maybe two hours a day playing is not affecting bandwidth very much and had less time and, arguably, less inclination to locate and report problems. they are not completely getting their money's worth, but that's where the fun factor and entertainment value comes into play. It's still cheaper than either dinner or a movie.
Then comes "Player C," who "plays" for 12 - 72 hours a stretch. They are using up their share of the monthly fee they pay in the first few days of being online. Not only that, they are continually incurring bandwidth traffic while doing things that other players normally would not do - at least not for the lengths of time with no risk being inviolved. A player looking for entertainment would only do something so mundane for a comparably short time to pay for a mount and/or gear, then move on.
"Player C" is the lemonade vendor that takes more than is offered and attempts to profit by it without being offered a job and/or offering to pay extra for the extra resources used.
Can you imagine going to Disneyland and everyone arrives at dawn and leaves at midnight? It would be the unhappiest place on earth - or the price of admission would be so astronomical that only the very rich would be so flippantly arrogant to pay.
Devil's Advocate sez:
With total control of the market where a business uses outside currency on its property, the owner can charge whatever they want for the little things that make life easier. That's why it's $2.50 for a 16 oz. soda at Disneyland. That's also why you can buy a preferred pass and go to "elite" short lines at Disneyland. Class separation at Disneyland. Walt's been rolling over in his cryo-stasis chamber over that greedy decision. This is something EQII wanted in on. Amateurs. Without security guards at the gates, no less.
It is not allowed in WoW or any other MMOG where the people running the show and the players wish to keep outside income from influencing how successful you are at a game. It's bad business to cater to the marginal amount of gamers who can't afford to buy a leg up. They will likely quit over it sooner, rather than later. When all 120,000 players that can afford to buy a level 70 toon and deck it out with full blue gear and mounts and potions are playing, what then? Welp, I'd say you cut off 5 million other players for a short gain. Got five employees? Maybe that will work for you. Otherwise, you are sunk. The other thing is... what's the freaking point? A rich man's paper, rock, scissors, mushroom? Worked for Simutronics' text games, apparently. (As a role-player, I had to cringe at such a generalization, but I'm a member of an increasingly small group of people who like to mix game mechanics with acting.)
A game needs to be designed from the beginning with tools to detect and remove those who are looking to make a living off their GAME. It should be illicit. I'm shocked that it's not already. Shouldn't give a damn? You damn better! If it gets bad enough, the wrong laws will be passed - and the government starched shirts of the U.S.A. DO NOT like the software entertainment industry. I don't want to see monthly fees go up and/or keeping the game card crowd out because they can't get or afford a credit card. I also don't want the secondary market given litigous legitimacy! Players will be next, demanding that they legally be paid for their stacks of dragon leather in cash!
On a very basic level the entire question can be reduced to this: do you agree with the idea of capitalism (free market) or not. There is nothing else.
Yeah, you can tell me it damages prices or your achievement pride - but that all goes into the same bag. The idea is, free market aka capitalism aka niche exploiting is either good or bad in the long run.
All this has nothing to do with how you feel. IMO it was quite unfair to take Brad McQuaid into this, a developer and CEO who will split many ppl into disagree or agree more based on if they like him or not. A less controversial person would have been better. I am quite sure some ppl just agree with him because they like Vanguard. Sorry, but humans often fuction that way.
Ppl are talked into moral frenzies to ban gold or item selling, without any logic. If I buy 10 castles 100 horses and 2000 golden axes with $$$ in my fav MMO, so what? It is MY matter, MY decision and no one elses. Sorry if anyone feel degraded, but such is life. Our free society is based on those liberties that I can spent my own money on every legal good, and there is no objective damage done to anyone if I buy myself an entire house full of weapons, characters or whatever. Not that I would do, but I think everyone has the RIGHT and it is no bodies business.
I think those EULAs stand on quite weak feet, and usually the companies still can enforce them because players are easily made afraid and banned. In the end, it is a matter of monetary interests and has nothing to do with morals.
On the left corner Robin Hood, aka Kipe.
On the right corner the Sherift of NerverHam, Brad.
LOL, reading this is funny as hell. Brad is just not getting to understand what a "GAME" is. He is right on the fact that most peoples care about who get what and how. I will never care about the fact that someone who waste his money is equal as I am while I never spent any money to get there.
Just in case you didn't remember the story guys, Ivanhoe remain loyal to King Arthur, althought favorable to Robin Hood, he never really join with them. King Richard is coming back from the Crusade eventually, prolly when BioWare release their MMO. Both sides, Brad and Kipe alike will be left fighting an empty and meaningless conflict as the masses rally the King of RPGs while the Sherift is put aside, BioWare is coming back from the crusade.
A good design is impervious to Kipe black market(just as when King Arthur is naturally kind to his peasants and Robin stop fighting for them, as it become unecessary), but poorly design games that try to enforce foreign gameplays if you want to play the real gameplay, they have everything to fear. Fear of these black market is for the weaks....and the raiders!
I'm nto saying that I don't understand the reason some people have a problem with the secondary market.
I hated dealing with bots and hearing "USA DOG YOU GO NOW" spewing from avatars in L2 as much as the next guy but in keeping with what I believe the initial point was, the overwhelming majority of these concerns are derived from the fact that this is because the secondary market wasn't accounted for in lineage 2.
Can anyone cite an mmorpg which was designed around 2nd market transactions that has failed? Even that new Korean game "Silkroad" is doing well being f2p and has an ingame item mall for real currency sales.
It had to be said sooner or later and I don't want to open a can of worms but it's amazing how much this whole debate sounds exactly like the debate to legalize merijuana.
Pro Legalization: Legalizing marijuana has a number of benefits. People are going to buy it anyways! This way, nobody get's thrown into prison and their lives ruined over a stupid law that shouldn't be anyway, plus think of what a boost to the economy it would be!
Anti-Legalization: That doesn't change the fact that it's wrong! It just is! We don't have to explain to you why it is but it just is alright!
People who are aggressively anti-2nd market are statistically those among us who play the most and typically either have no jobs or cannot/choose not to be successful in real life. The ability for those with money irl to purchase goods and services in these games means that those people who have no lives can no longer lord over those with lives so easily and that adults [I went ahead and said it] can buy their way onto the same level.
Maybe that sounded a tad crass but necessary
If you notice I didn't ask why the sellers do it, that's obvious they are making a lot of money. They don't care about the game, they care about the coin. The one's that are beyond me are the players that justify buying with such dandies as well I don't have time to "grind" the money. I equate that to a tennis player who lets someone else hit the balls for him because he doesn't have time to practice and learn how to play as good as his opponet. If you buy the goods you aren't playing the game.
Your equating a game's timesinks with tennis is laughable at best. You are overcompensating by thinking that you gain some sort of valuable skill by sitting there hitting f3 for 12 hours a day. Like I said earlier if any of these games actually required some amount of skill to be competitive in, the entire argument would be a moot point because all the money in the real world will not provide you with the hand eye coordination and intelligence to make proper use of a high level character or that uber piece of equipment.
The only thing that the arguments against amount to is its not fair that someone else has disposable income that they can throw away on a virtual item.
changed my mind
How long has WoW been out?
How many currency exchanges happen every single day on every server in the world on both sides?
Is wow ruined, or is it exactly the same as it was at launch?
The games' method of economy determines whether a game will be *ruined* by the secondary market.
WoW and L2 both have economies which are both stable and healthy despite rampant and persistant currency sales from outside sources.
The argument that said selling of currency in general harms the games economy therefore is moot.
We can get very off the wall about it, and I can say it also doesn't bother me if someone breaks into your house and kills you and your family, because I don't know you why should I care. Because its wrong, illegal, etc are some reasons why, but Reidan says it much better than I do so check his post. The bottom line, its not just the economy that uber sword is worth much more to people if they have to work hard for it because then it's rare and unique. If everyone with 10 bucks or whatever can get one, then I would lose the incentive to go for it. Do that too much and you lose the incentive to play. I should be noble minded and not worry if others cheat to get the gear because I know in my heart mines earned? If that's truly how you would feel then we will never understand each other so I'll just agree to disagree with you.
BTW If it was just the money i'd buy everything, but then why would I play?
LOL
Talk about flogging a dead horse.
RMT is the way of the future for MMO's. There has never been ANY impirical evidence presented by ANYONE that RMT actually hurts games, game companies or communities.
This is the latest in a long line of "I think it does" statements by another of the hundreds who have gone before.
Show us your statistics to support your argument is all I can say.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claims.
If your going to say Secondary markets hurt MMO's then put up or STFU.
So now you can go ahead and flame me.... but the one thing you WONT BE ABLE TO DO, is support your own argument with facts. Good luck with that.
The argument on a philosophical level can be made very convincing for either side. However, I was dissapointed that neither side touched on the destructive force rmt are within a persitent game world. They monopolize NMs that drop some key equipment, which forces a casual gamer to a) either buy the peice of gear or b) spend an excessive amount of time to try to out camp the rmt for an item the game makers did not intend to be made that difficult. In a very literal sense the rmt create the demand for their service themselves and then claim that the demand is there, we are providing a service... So, which came first the chicken or the rmt?
MTV recently had an rmt news moment where an rmt owner/operator was stating his case. At one point the rmt, that his teams of people do nothing to interfere with in game players... Maybe this particular rmt was not lying, maybe his teams do have ethics, but he would be an extreme minority of the rmt groups that you will encounter in games such as these. On FFXI I have had rmt out right steal mobs that cost us millions of gil or days worth of hours to spawn. In one of these cases an rmt tried to justify his actions by saying that other ls's steal mobs from thme. Well, good, but either way, it wasn't us, so by his logic if some random guy punched me in the face while walking down the street I would be justified in pnching the next completely random guy in the face I saw walking down the street? I'd like to meet a few of these rmt and test some of their logic my way.
L2 was a really great game, I left it because of the bots/buyers, if you don't think it affected the economy your very wrong.
Now, I do not see how the secondary market is stealing from the company. They pay their subscriber fees just like everyone else, they arent duping nor hacking to get the items to sell and are not providing items that do not exist within the game world that they are farming in. I do not see the "theft" that people speak of here. Granted the game designers could, if they so desired, offer a marketplace service and increase their own revenues but apart from some asian mmo's and sony with their exchange servers this isnt the case. Now if this happens on those aforementioned games/servers then there may be grounds for calling theft. Otherwise it is filling in the demand that exists.
Now, I will agree that if someone does not enjoy the grinds etc then yes they should most likely quit. However, for example lets use wow here, Joe has a family, a good job, and friends and distant family that plays as well. Those friends and family, because of whatever reason, have more time to spend in game than Joe does. Joe only plays the game to be with those friends and family. What harm is there in buying the gold to purchase an epic mount or whatever so he can go on one adventure or raid per week and not drag down those friends and family? His skills are as good as the next player, he knows his role, he knows what other's roles are. The only thing Joe is doing here is maximizing the enjoyment from spending time with family and friends. In essence playing a game to play a game, not work in a game for a hundred hours to play for a couple hours.
Now, for the most part the secondary market is against most EULA's. No argument here. But the strength of EULA's has yet to be tried in court. Most every EULA out there violates state and federal laws on some level, and regardless of agreeing to it or not there are some rights that consumers can not sign away on regardless of the legalease put into those agreements. It is not illegal and morality about it is something for a philosopher to discuss and I doubt that any of us here have the time to really get down into the morality of it while putting our own prejudices and motives out of the equation.
How someone spends thier money is not for any of us to decide. Someone spending $400k on a ferrari seems to me to be silly but to that person it is a very valid purchase. Unless the money being bought and sold is created through dupes etc it has no effect on the ingame economies. For one thing the very design of the ingame economy is flawed. You can not have a vibrant thriving economy without a limit on the amount of money available at any given time. But NO one wants to play a game and kill super badbutt boss mob alpha only to loot an IOU stating "Sorry there is no available funds in the game to pay you for your effort. Please cash this in at your nearest bank when funds are available." As to the community aspect, I have met some farmers that were rude and some that were very kind and generous, just like the players who can be as disruptive to the game community or even moreso.
Example being. I'll use FFXI as that's the game I play the most. If I want a sword that's 75k gil I know that it would be 20k if it wasn't for the gil sellers. But I can craft a Bronze Bed for about 2k worth of materials and sell it for 35k. So after about 2 beds, I can buy that sword. Now, whent he gil buyers/sellers got banned the market bottomed out. Who gets left holding the bag? Who really gets hurt in this? The ones who bought that sword at 75k and now wanna sell it but have to at 20k. Gil Sellers/Buyers are a given. They will be back in FFXI and prices will go back up. Why kill the economy and the game for the people who choose not to buy gil when the punishment for the seller and buyer is a mere ban. I'd take a ban over a crushed economy any day.
Now, am I defending the gil buyers/seller? Absolutely not. I think the market would be much more stable without them but they will come back to the game. It's not stoppable. I see FFXI's point in that banning that many people will stop some but only people like myself who've grinded and grinded and just have entertained the thought of gil buying. I've definately been scared straight but that's me. The ones who are going to do it will do it. Bans be damned. So what is the answer? I think it's a lose-lose situation. I think that mass bannings are a bad idea but perhaps periodical smaller bannings. Slowly taking the bought gil out of the market where it can recover easier and with progression instead of just this void that is created.
Right now, FFXI has become less fun because now when i'm crafting, i'm having to go out and farm every little resource to the item i'm making just so I can keep the cost of the materials down because my profit margin becomes thinner. If I buy the stuff for around 2-2.5k and sell for 10k It's hardly worth the effort and time put into it and that's if it crafts first time with no materials lost on "breaks". The Guild Wars community and economy is able to take the Aftermarket hit with the Platinum buyers (and I have a theory that they are somehow the ones selling the said Platinum) because it lets Supply and Demand take effect. When a new weapon hits the scene it's 100K. If you are patient and can wait about 4-5 months it's 15k.
All in all, i hate the fact there is a market for this stuff, but its going to happen. No matter what you do. I dont see a problem in it if the seller isn't using some mega exploit. I look down at the people who do it a little because when they sport the new armor they brag they got the new armor. Not mentioning that they did nothing for it.
(As a side note, I just wanna say I am so happy now that I've found a place where people can discuss topics such as this without resorting to the "Yeah, well you're a nub!!!11!11one!1!". Thank you everyone for instilling my faith in the time honored tradition of debate. I'm glad to know it can happen online without insults flying across the room)
Aah - the old smoking doesnt cause cancer argument.
Why dont you show us some evidence that it doesnt harm the communities, drive up prices of items, affect the economy of games.
See thats what Im talking about.
When you use the word "know" do you mean "know" as in "suspect" or "know" as in "I have evidence to support this assertion ?"
Like for example a server where gil selling is much lower and the same item sells at a corespondingly lower price.
I mean you people cant just keep making these claims and basing it soley on you "gut feelings"
Ive been seeing this argument now since UO.... thats almost 10 years people!! I have yet to see a single table, graph, study, server statistcal set or anything that substantiates in any way the claim that out of game sales affect the in game prices of goods.
Now dont get me wrong... I can see the logic behind the argument, but I can see the the logic behind the argument that more cash in the economy = inflation. But MMO economies arnt RL economies and lack of evidence = shakey argument.
I have still yet to hear one strongly anti gold farming person explain sensibly why it matters to the game economy whether my part time character grinds the gold in game or some kid in China. NPC's in most MMO's have unlimited funds and supply and demand economics do not apply. Spiders guts are worth the same whether there are 1 or 4 milllion of them on sale.there is no comparison with RL economics whatsoever.
The whole argument revolves around the completely flawed notion that if you play the game yourself it somehow has a different effect on the games economy than if someone else plays it for you.
I dont think I did - you missed my point.
If you are making a game with the secondary market in mind - then you better not change or remove any item I pay money for or I will sue you in court and win.
As a player, I feel as if my work to get a rare item loses all of its value if the next bloke can simply ask daddy for the credit card and simply buy the same item I put in X weeks of work to get. Personally, I believe that RMT is harmul the normal player's gaming experience. It's pretty much the same as cheating, only it's "legal" because you paid money for it...
Wrong
End User License Agreement
My arguement is that L2 got sued because they simply neglected to anticipate and contort to the secondary market.
If they had anticipated the secondary market, I'm sure there would be a few lines in their EULA simply stating that all ingame items are the expressed property of NCSoft and that purchasing ingame currency through any means not sanctioned by NCSoft voids any and all claims to legal ramification at the loss of said currency and items.
Obviously it would need lawyered up some, but the point is they didn't take the possibility of this happening into account and thus suffered accordingly.
The problem is that developers short-sightedly refuse to accept the secondary market into their games equation and then whine about the reprocussions.
With a good enough EULA, I could sue you very easily for intellectual theft and win. The reason you don't hear about Blizzard sueing people about the amount of Gold being sold on websites around the world is because like most people on this forum, they've accepted the secondary market as an eventuality and realise just how much it's benefitting them right now. To due even one individual would cost money by itself not to mention the ramifications it would have on the playerbase. Then multiply that by the millions of people who do it and you have the end of WoW as we know it.
Seriously - If people dont have time to play a game then they should play something else. Play a game designed for casual play rather than a grindfest.
So you are designing a game where you plan to sell me items - and want me to sign a EULA where you reserve the right to delete or modify the item I purchase whenever you feel like it.
Luckily for you there are plenty of stupid people around to play your game. I wont be one of them.
And you're one of them friend because you agree to those terms every single time you log into World of Warcraft, Everquest and practically every mmorpg out there aside from a few of the asian ones such as the Lineage franchise.
Future proof that absolutely nobody reads the EULA that you agree to every single time you log in :P
A. All title, ownership rights and intellectual property rights in and to the Game and all copies thereof (including without limitation any titles, computer code, themes, objects, characters, character names, stories, dialog, catch phrases, locations, concepts, artwork, character inventories, structural or landscape designs, animations, sounds, musical compositions and recordings, audio-visual effects, storylines, character likenesses, methods of operation, moral rights, and any related documentation) are owned or licensed by Blizzard. The Game is protected by the copyright laws of the United States, international treaties and conventions, and other laws. The Game may contain materials licensed by third parties, and the licensors of those materials may enforce their rights in the event of any violation of this License Agreement.
13. Changes to the Agreement. Blizzard reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to change, modify, add to, supplement or delete any of the terms and conditions of this License Agreement when Blizzard upgrades the Game Client, effective upon prior notice as follows: Blizzard will post notification of any such changes to this License Agreement on the World of Warcraft website and will post the revised version of this License Agreement in this location, and may provide such other notice as Blizzard may elect in its sole discretion. If any future changes to this License Agreement are unacceptable to you or cause you to no longer be in compliance with this License Agreement, you may terminate this License Agreement in accordance with Section 5 herein. Your installation and use of any updates or modifications to the Game or your continued use of the Game following notice of changes to this Agreement will demonstrate your acceptance of any and all such changes. Blizzard may change, modify, suspend, or discontinue any aspect of the Game at any time. Blizzard may also impose limits on certain features or restrict your access to parts or all of the Game without notice or liability. You have no interest, monetary or otherwise, in any feature or content contained in the Game.
QFT
exactly
I don't believe that RMT messes up the game economy either. The game design itself does that fine on it's own. Economies get screwed up so quickly no matter what. If there is anyone to blame on that it's the developers for not properly making sure players would be able to afford things at the level they should be using them. There is a reason people buy gold online. It's because they can't get enough for the items they need in the game any given time at their level. The reason for that is the game design itself. It all leads back to the game design and the flaws in it. Mostly the time sinks that are put into the game.
You slow down the rate of money drops, keep the amount loot sells to NPCs (not reasonable at all no matter what game I've played) very low, and make the system item based to keep playing longer then you have to accept the negative result of it. I can understand them wanting people to keep playing longer but by forcing this slow down on the actual gameplay people aren't going to stand for it. Which is why people are actually willing to pay month for items and money. They don't have the time to waste getting it in game cause the rates are so low. The economy is usually messed up as well and not by RMT systems but by the extreme powergamers or just people that generally have a LOT of time on their hands. There is no inital guideline to determining what something is worth so you go through a lot of ranges until it gets to the point where a few (the ones that play the most) can afford certain prices and things tend to stick after a while until something better comes along and either the price drops or those items just aren't collected anymore. Then the system continues but with newer items instead.
At least this is what I've seen from my exeriences over the years. Putting all the blame on RMT services isn't right. Yes they do add to things but that's after the fact I think since the problem starts before they even enter the picture. Don't blame those taking advantage of the situation but the actual cause of it if you are really serious about stopping things or really slowing it down. However I don't think companies are willing to do that at all. They want the time sinks in. They want people to play for long periods of time with very low money drop rates. They want things to be slowed down to the point where you struggle to get to the next level and then repeat. As long as players keep playing they get money. Which is why I think they don't mind the RMT in private. They know those people will buy more accounts with his more money as well. They'll never get serious about solving the problem cause that means losing money on both fronts if they did and they are willing to take that risk.
At least this is how I see things.
I couldn't agree more.
The next generation mmorpg has the job of both anticipating the secondary market into their game and making sure that although buying ingame items with real world money is an option, the economy must maintain that buying money and so forth is not REQUIRED to advance your character.
If you can pull that off, you will prosper. At least, that's my understanding.
Wrong
End User License Agreement
My arguement is that L2 got sued because they simply neglected to anticipate and contort to the secondary market.
If they had anticipated the secondary market, I'm sure there would be a few lines in their EULA simply stating that all ingame items are the expressed property of NCSoft and that purchasing ingame currency through any means not sanctioned by NCSoft voids any and all claims to legal ramification at the loss of said currency and items.
Obviously it would need lawyered up some, but the point is they didn't take the possibility of this happening into account and thus suffered accordingly.
The problem is that developers short-sightedly refuse to accept the secondary market into their games equation and then whine about the reprocussions.
With a good enough EULA, I could sue you very easily for intellectual theft and win. The reason you don't hear about Blizzard sueing people about the amount of Gold being sold on websites around the world is because like most people on this forum, they've accepted the secondary market as an eventuality and realise just how much it's benefitting them right now. To due even one individual would cost money by itself not to mention the ramifications it would have on the playerbase. Then multiply that by the millions of people who do it and you have the end of WoW as we know it.
Pretend you have the perfect EULA, that does not cancel the law or how some judge might interpret the law. It wont' be long before issues of property will come into play in our court system. There are people who debate any number of potential issues in games such as hate crimes by use of hate speak. Could stealing an item in an FFA game cross into the real world? Some legal professionals think it should be that way.
Once taxation comes into play, that will make a real world impact.
Thats all there is. You summed up the entire problem 100%
We marvel at the developers ability to create virtual worlds, but allow them to completely abbrogate thier responsibility to secure them in a way that makes it enjoyable for all players.
bah.... there are more people living in a fantasy realm in this thread than playing WoW.... this argument is so last century....
You're missing the *r* in "Henry Rollins" in your avatar space.
If I have to make it my life's goal one day I will shake that damn guys hand I swear on it.
Sorry to get off topic.
The EULA says to not sell or buy in-game material including items and accounts. When you do this you break the rules and we ALL know what happens when you break the rules. Your a cheater and should be banned and hopefully those secondary markets will be sued for going against the EULA they signed and broke with full intention to make profit off it as well!
This is a clear case of stealing as well! in the EULA it says you DO NOT own anything in-game, you are just paying for the entertainment, and everything in-game is the property of the company! selling something that is not your IS STEALING MONEY!
this is like going bowling and taking the pins, the shoes, and the bowling ball (if you didnt bring your own) to sell to some one else and complaining you payed for your time bowling and you own those now because you put in the time and money into the game.
Sorry to prove you wrong but the only MMORPG like game I play is Guild Wars - and since I dont pay real $ for in game items (other the the original game purchase) they can change what they like and it doesnt bother me at all.
But the point I was trying to make is if you sell someone something, then change it - certainly here in Australia I think that violates our fair trading laws, so you have a problem.
i.e if I buy a sword matching description A and then you change it so it no longer matches description A you are in violation of the Trade practices Act and have a problem.
For example in regards to your underlined part, which I assume you did because you are trying to make a point; In china recently laws were passed protecting those virtual items and the individuals that possess them. If you are in china, hack my account and steal my broadsword of uberness +20 you will be jailed. This in and of itself sets precedence that contrary to what blizzard wants you to believe, you do have ownership of your items.
Brad McQuaid is a creator of leveling simulators. I don't know if he gets it or not, but the things he (and almost everyone else) produces are depressing and beyond boring. RMT is a *logical* consequence of today's games design (and stunning amount of simply broken game mechanics, that noone bothers to fix). Unless of course everyone is braindead zoo monkey enjoying very, very simple things - in 99.99% fedex & spawnpoint camping for many months. Most people don't fall into that category. Also most people tend to automate repetitive and boring activities.
It's an incredible hipocrysy for McQuaid (or NCSoft, or ...) to say that their games are not designed for RMT, while in reality the design of almost every part of them smells of RMT and botting for 100 miles. That sadly, includes Vanguard as well.
Games like L2 would be long dead without RMT. Especially in Korea, where RMT *is* the reason to play the game. And L2 has been carefully designed to be RMT dependent. Not only that, it's been made more dependent on that with every update so far (note that I don't care about official BS called eula, roc, or whatever else - I look at game design and, in most cases completely broken, game mechanics).
A very nice summary of current mmorpgs: The noob comic strip 227
As long as McQuaid and others don't realise what terrible crap they are producing and pushing on market, nothing will change. If you want to see RMT gone, for once, produce something else than boring, buggy, repetitive, crappy, unfinished leveling simulator.
BS. There's NOTHING lost by the game company. Somebody paid the subscription fee while the item was being farmed. Suppose all the farmers stopped all at once. How much revenue would the game company LOSE because they were not there paying monthly fees?
If you buy a character, that character didn't automatically appear somehow. Someone played him up to where he is when you buy him.
If I create a painting, then some months later discover that it's being used in an add campaign by X company without my permission, or perhaps more importantly if it violates the terms of my copyright that company would lose in any US court should a case be brought to trial.
Sure, the designer spent "their own time and efforts" looking at my painting, and then finding a way to exploit it in their own work, but does that time invested equate to ownership ? Not in the least.
There are very strict laws in place to protect people's creations, no matter the format or medium. Look at what happened in the music industry in terms of 'sampling' other people's music in the late 80s / early 90s.
A third party who sells virtual items that were not their own creation, and were not given express written permission to do so A) has zero ownership of said items and is a thief who SHOULD be taken to court and B) has zero grounds to stand on using the very weak argument of 'time invested', as again, you can look at the Mona Lisa for 20 years solid, but that doesn't mean you own it.
They know how to play and have enough people to fend of even the most dedicated guilds.
How can this be good for the player experience?
And yea, sure that guy in China might face legal charges... because he hacked an account. If he went to a friend's house, logged onto his friend's account and vendored that sword or gave it to a friend there would be zero legal means of proving anything illegal had occured, only that the sword was sold or traded.
Sadly very turem so I do my bit by not buying.
Can you imagine if it wasn't against the Eula and it was common practise for people to go to the secondary market. Everyone around you wearing items they had attained from a seller outside the game and not through game based mechanisms. Surely, that detracts from the game? What is the game about? Attaining items at the best price outside the game, or playing the game and attaining items?
There is a glaring flaw in the logic of the argument that, if you can afford to pay for in-game items, you should be able to "because it's your money." And the glaring flaw is this:
MMRPGs are a game, with rules. The entire concept of an RPG is character development and item gaining. This is done through grinding/exping. There are the rules - EULAs.. ALL games have rules, and those rules are there for a reason.
Anyone spouting this argument, by their own logic, should find the following scenarios perfectly alright:
You join an amateur volleyball league. But, you don't have enough time to play as you'd like, so you pay to have a professional play for you. Or, because you don't have enough time to play, you pay to have some device put on you that will improve your gameplay. Or maybe you pay to have an extra player on the court.
The problem with this is that the other members of your amateur volleyball league joined that league under certain assumptions. One of those assumptions was that other people who joined that league to play with them would be amateurs, and that they would play by the rules of that league. They don't care if you practice a lot, or if you don't, but they do care that the basic rules of the game are followed.
If a player in a baseball league can afford to pay for money to cork his bat so he can hit farther, is that alright? No. No for the simple reason that it's against the rules.
I agree with a earlier post, as long as there are buyers, there will be sellers. I myself have seen this kinda thing ruin certain aspects of a game. Take for instance crafted items, when i quit WoW the cost of reagents for a crafted item far exceded what you could sell the finished product for on the auction house, mainly due to the value of gold dropping hense higher prices. Not to mention there are far better items out there for cheaper ( im guessing for the most part farmed for gold to sell for RL money?) Anyway, in this instance I know it took from that aspect of the game and this is one of the only crafting systems I have experienced that is actually fun. Maybe it was just designed to be fun leveling up your trade and not after you have maxxed it /shrug...
This is kinda off the subject but I feel the same way about BOTS. Its a multiplayer game not a multi-account game. =)
Something else I'm seeing alot of nowadays is not only the selling of items, but PLing services.. jeez, whats next?
The RL market, in and of itself, is not evil - but the impact it has on the games is.
Any game with an economy stands to loose money, and therefore not be sucessful, as soon as the bots and shift-farmers show up. Bots and shift-farmers degrade the inherent value of the in-game financial structure by flooding it with money/items and making more of both available than was intended.
This does two things: Drive regular players away because if they don't stoop to gold buying they cannot compete on an even playing field, and it allows the players who do buy gold/items to reach the 'end game' much sooner so they get bored and quit sooner.
Both deprives the game of a subscription - the life-blood of an MMO.
Ultimately there are two kinds of MMO player in the world: One that researches the world, the races, the classes, and finds something they want to exist in or portray in a virtual setting. The other would be happy with an untextured cube as long as it has the best stats and was capable of at least 10 ganks per hour. The former follows quest chains to see the outcome, the latter for the loot. The former discovers new areas, the latter gets maps off the internet. The former levels as a byproduct to the adventure, the latter buys power leveling guides...
There are far more of the second specie of MMO player then the first, primarily because MMOs are combat oriented treadmills - and as long as MMOs continue to be combat oriented treadmills, with no clearly defined goal beyond acquiring the best gear through 'time in seat', the RL market will continue to kill them by offering the ability to get those items quicker and with less effort.
Trying to break an argument down into its simplest form ... try this:
Im playing a game of chess...
I loose all my pieces and im about to be check mated...
I pay some guy $20 for a few more...
I continue on.
Thats what we are talking about when we consider the secondary market, you can cut it any way you like, you are cheating.
It was simple enough in primary school (ages 5-10), the teacher smacked you upside the head. People who invest time deserve the fruits of their labour.
E.g.
A father never spends any time with his children yet he expects them to repect him, so he gives them money to buy their love... Geez sounds a little hollow doesnt it.
,
Oglem
Roger Kipe wrote:
had a friend that once built a boat. It took him a great deal of time and was all he thought about for as long as some of his friends could remember. He celebrated with all of his friends when he finished the project and took everyone out to see how great the ship performed. He was as proud of himself for the work he had done as for the ability to show it to others. We saw plenty of other boats that day on the lake and some were much more beautiful and clearly worth more money but this did not deter my friend from gleaming like a beacon as he knew it was the work and dedication he had put in that made his special and it did not matter how the others had gotten their boats....
The morale of the story is, that you should derive your since of accomplishment or joy from the work you put into achieving something. If you constantly judge it or yourself against others you will never be satisfied with the results.
i think this heart warming story doesnt hold true in a competitive game.
i buy the game, i agree on the rule, i expect all players to ply by the same rule.
i would not play chess with someone that just pays 10bucks for a new pawn after i beat his figure
That analogy is so inappropiate but not because mmorpgs are competitive (because I think that argument is a bit of a farce) but because building or buying a boat is not a game unlike a mmorpg. So the situations can not really be compared. I do see the point the guy is saying but again we're talking a completely different situation.
I think the real argument why people are against it is because they like their games 'pure', game-based mechanisms yielding game-based rewards, not out-of-game mechanisms yielding out-of-game rewards. (by the way perhaps hypocritically, I think buying characters is a different case)
lol, Anyone that has played an MMORPG based on RL Economy (i.e. Entropia Universe) knows that this system ruins game play for anyone that wants to play the game casually and doesnt mind maying the monthly fee. These players fall behind the "rich" and can never catch up. Inflation in game runs wild. This is what this topic boils down to. If someone can buy and sell any item in game it will strictly be turned into "Become the next Virtual Millionaire." The initial purpose of the game will be lost. Second life and Entropia Universe have already become this. Granted that was Second Life's purpose from the beginning IMO. But that is not the purpose of all games. Everything has a Vision Scope. "Becomming the next virtual Millionaire" is not the vision of most MMORPGs Secondary Markets should respect that. If there is a MMO that wants to involve itself with Secondary Markets then that is where they should focus their efforts.
I've got an analogy that actually makes sense.
If I play a game of monopoly with several other people, and I pay the banker in r.l. money to get the game money that I need to win the game, then I have cheated, and the game is forfeit.
You're just the sort of person who shouldn't be in MMORPGS they are supposed to be immersive virtual worlds where you advance with the help of friends/guildmates and your own input. All you want to do is get everything easy mode and you don't care who you affect on the way. The secondary market IS bad and it is unfair on the people who play the game the way it was intended. Your's is a purely selfish view and alas all to typical of the new influx of people to this genre who want everything NOW without any effort on their part.
Judging by your comment i'd also guess that in single player games you use cheat codes, becuase you don't se why you should have to learn stragies for dealing with difficult encounters.
I applaud Brad for taking this stand and sincerely hope we see some law suites to put the second market paresites out of business for good.
Really ? , i didn't find anything compelling about the gold sellers statements at all, he just sounded like someone trying to justify something he knew himself was wrong and keep his paycheck overinflated. It would be interesting to find out how much someone who provides a 'service' like this makes, you can bet its a sizeable amount.
Not good enough. If you play monopoly, it's probably with your own friends, and there are, let's say, 6 more ppl beside you. So every action they do affects you directly and almost immediately so it undermines your fun of the game.
In a MMO, there're thousands of people at a given time, their actions (mostly) don't directly influnece you, and the indirect influence is divide by a substenial long in-game time that makes it unnoticeable for most players.
Anyway, I'm leaning towards free-market concept that's support the 2ndary market theme.
If you can't play a game because some people advance faster than you - by purchasing stuff outside of the game - you need to check your own sensitivity. Yes, you can consider it cheating, but what's it to you? Nobody forces you to do it too. Enjoy the game in all the way YOU want to enjoy them.
But some ppl here gave strong arguments against RTM, one of them being - the RTM isn't bad on it own, but by its effects.
One, can't remember who, said that if you aren't a powergamer or got a good wealth in RL - you'll be stuck when you try to advance you character, because in-game items would cost more as a result of RTM, and you don't have much free time (job, kids etc') to compensate with investement.
Well, this can be true for the type of people that care about advancing, and getting uber all the time, but if you are such a gamer - why playing a game that you can't really be uber? This is a stupid decision from the bottom.
Not good enough. If you play monopoly, it's probably with your own friends, and there are, let's say, 6 more ppl beside you. So every action they do affects you directly and almost immediately so it undermines your fun of the game.
In a MMO, there're thousands of people at a given time, their actions (mostly) don't directly influnece you, and the indirect influence is divide by a substenial long in-game time that makes it unnoticeable for most players.
Anyway, I'm leaning towards free-market concept that's support the 2ndary market theme.
If you can't play a game because some people advance faster than you - by purchasing stuff outside of the game - you need to check your own sensitivity. Yes, you can consider it cheating, but what's it to you? Nobody forces you to do it too. Enjoy the game in all the way YOU want to enjoy them.
But some ppl here gave strong arguments against RTM, one of them being - the RTM isn't bad on it own, but by its effects.
One, can't remember who, said that if you aren't a powergamer or got a good wealth in RL - you'll be stuck when you try to advance you character, because in-game items would cost more as a result of RTM, and you don't have much free time (job, kids etc') to compensate with investement.
Well, this can be true for the type of people that care about advancing, and getting uber all the time, but if you are such a gamer - why playing a game that you can't really be uber? This is a stupid decision from the bottom.
You should take the time to read the preceding posts, it might allow you to see past the nose on your face. Why do you choose to complicate the issue when it really is as simple as it appears? The players that decided the game was unfair should not be playing the game. That decision can be final.
This is one of the few issues where I agree with Brad.
Gold buying/selling hurts a lot of people, and the reasons are obvious and demonstrable.
Let's say there is a rare axe that sometimes drops in the game. I am a mage and am fortunate enough to get the axe and now I want to sell it. How much will I sell it for? I will sell it for the best price the market will bear. Here is where the problem comes in. If the "market" consists of gold that players have earned purely from playing the game, the time and energy they have into acquiring that gold makes them loathe to part with a large part of it. So in a world without gold buyers the best price on that axe may be 100 gold. But if players can get large amounts of gold easily just by charging their credit card, they don't have the same time and effort invested in their gold and they will pay 900 for the axe. If that is the price, now non-gold buyers cannot afford the axe.
But it gets worse. As players become frustrated that the price of quailty items is out of their reach, they decide to become gold buyers too. Which drives the price of the axe higher still because there are more people with cheap gold to spend. Now it's a 1000 gold axe. And so on the cycle continues.
Meanwhile, where is this gold coming from? It has to be farmed, which means you have professional gold farmers monopolizing game content, which has a further negative effect on the game.
This comment made me laugh.
Maybe YOU are the spoiled brat. Not everything in life can be purchased. And yes, you SHOULD have to do exactly what I did to get my epic sword... that's the point of the game. If you cheat, and take shortcuts, it destroys the value of the sword, and the overall enjoyment of the game as a whole.
As for the comment about "the fun of those who bought the stuff," I couldn't really care less. Those of us who followed the rules (read: non-cheaters) have a right to enjoy our game, a right which is fundamentally greater than yours. Take your credit card elsewhere.
I got only one thing to say about RMT
stop hogging the damn Mobs, fish to your hearts content couldnt care less plenty of fish out there
You camping Spook because its and easy kill and its drops a cloak most people are happy to pay 50K for? maybe i can actually kill that myself and want to get it without paying for it but one question
How the hell am i gonna get it when you got so many third party programs running you can claim and kill it faster than it takes me to blink!!!
This is the huge downside to RMT,
I play FFXI and the influx of RMT's using bots not only screws the economy it screws the conquest section of the game
Just after SE banned thousands of accounts the Training areas (Dunes, Garlaige Citadel, Qufim) became over run by RMT's leveling chars to sell on for more money
This leaves new players sitting around unable to do anything because RMT's are pwning all the mobs
Imagine you have spent months playing the game, working your way up to being able to kill the mob for the first time only to find you cant because an RMT/BOT has taken to camping and claiming the items it drops ,
At one point me and my LS made a point of running round with Blaze Spikes on casting high level heals to aggro the mobs just so the RMT lost their XP and drops, god bet they loved that
Suffice to say i dont mind RMT, wouldnt ever use them because i get more pride working my way up to the items i want but i DESPISE RMT when they take over an area and stop me progressing
However i did have chat with RMT at one camp and he spoke english, asked if i was after drop and when i said i was because i was more than capable of killing it he gave me the Mob to kill with out claiming it
I have to say that Roger Kipe must be so out of touch with gaming that I bet he doesn't even play one. Play for fun I mean.
The Secondary Market is bad for games. Players are now competing with gold farmers for ingame resources. Before, a player would get what they wanted and move on. Now there could be a farmer bot in the same spot 24/7 essentially barring a legitimate player from getting what they want.
SOE making the Exchange only compounded the issue. They now "legitimized" this Secondary Market so they could make a few more bucks. What happend to the SOE hell bent on suing Ebay for selling EQ1 accounts? Now they are doing the same thing.
Not to mention that it throws game balance out of whack. In theory if Rich Kid wants to he can have Rich Daddy buy him everything in the game. In order to get those items they had to be farmed away from legitimate players by a bot. It also trivializes what the hardcore raiders accomplish, they spend many weeks trying to get a set of gear and Rich Kid just flashes Daddy's MasterCard and gets the same in an hour. The excessive farming aslo can throw the ingame economies askew with some items flooding the brokers/auction houses and others being nearly non-existant due to over farming.
So hard to make this a legal issue as the games are played all over the world. Make it illegal in USA but what can you do to the Korean guy who sells to a German kid?
Roger Kipe strikes me as the type that would be an ambulance chaser lawyer. All he cares about is making the quick buck and to hell with anyone who suffers for it. The example of capitalism at its worst.
- botters/farmers
- hardcore people who can afford spending 5-15hours daily farming
- rich people who can afford to purchase virtual items/money
The rest of people, noobs, raiders, groupers, purists, roleplayers, casuals are being hurt by these activities. Why? Becuase the in-game currency is being made more worthless, the larger amount of currency on hand - the more worthless it is. And that inflation makes prices to increase. So average consumer, the one that cant afford to farm or buy for real currency, is being hurt becuase suddenly everything is very expensive. Secondary market encourages to farm or to buy, and thats not what MMORPGs are about.
I never bought anything virtual for real money, and I refuse to play any game that promotes that activity, or doesnt do enough effort to halt that activity.
Actually the fact that I work 40 hours a week for my rl money makes sure that I don't spend it on something as silly as items in a game. Surely, you family could benefit alot more from that rl $100 you spend on $1 mil of in-game money.
Anyways, lets apply this dynamic to your RL job--You go to work 40 hours a week and work your butt off. Even if your job is boring or repititive you work hard at it anyways because you know its gonna pay off eventually. Now say a woman who doesn't always show up and never works sleeps with the boss. She gets a promotion. Sure her banging the boss doesn't effect you. But guess what you're gonna be pissed because you tried to get that promotion and you tried to do it by the rules.
Ultimately, you will hate this woman and eventually seek a new job. This is EXACTLY what happens in MMOs, and no matter how many ppl say, "She just did what she had to do to keep up", and "this doesn't effect other employees". You will always know that as BS, making any arguements that say otherwise moot.
I noticed from your xfire signature that you play Guild Wars.
Guess you better remove that software from your hardrive. Click the ebay link:
http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?MfcISAPICommand=GetResult&ht=1&shortcut=0&from=R41&query=guild+wars&category0=
Look all, I know it is an emotional issue. I don't like gold farmers either, but you will be hard pressed to find a MMORPG game that has been out for at least 6 months that doesn't have some kind of secondary market. The only way a secondary market is dissolve is when people stop buying their products. Do gold farmers spoil my gaming? Only if I want them to. They camping a spot I desire, I can find another. Is a virutal item sooo valuable to me that I will cancel my subscription? Doubtful. However, if the game design hinges on that item then the developers have created the secondary market because they made a demand for an item that is essential for the continued enjoyment of their game.
I am no lawyer, but I suspect the developers meetings with their lawyers have topics such as:
- If we are going to prosecute someone what have they stolen?
- If we are to take someone to court, what law has been broken?
- If we are to sue this company, what financial damage has your business suffered as a result of this activity?
- If someone countersues us, what could they claim?
The great frontier is the internet and it will be interesting to see what will transpires.
Note, despite many complaints regarding gold farmers, it will not be until the majority of subscribers are miffed about it so that loss subscription numbers are demonstrable enough that the gaming company will have a case. Now to prove which company caused the revenue loss...
I'm seeing the word "cheat" way too many times. Using a secondary market is not by any measure of the word cheating.
Lets look at some facts by starting with what Mr. Webster has to say about the word cheat.
Main Entry: 1cheatcheating on his wife>cheating toward second base>
Pronunciation: 'chEt
Function: verb
Etymology: 2cheat
transitive verb
1 : to deprive of something valuable by the use of deceit or fraud
2 : to influence or lead by deceit, trick, or artifice
3 : to elude or thwart by or as if by outwitting <cheat death>
intransitive verb
1 a : to practice fraud or trickery b : to violate rules dishonestly <cheat at cards> <cheating on a test>
2 : to be sexually unfaithful -- usually used with on
3 : to position oneself defensively near a particular area in anticipation of a play in that area
So lets take this as an example. If I were to buy 10pp in EQ2 from someone selling it for real money which one of the above would I be doing? Well, it's not the first one because I've not deprived anyone else from obtaining 10pp and there is no deceit or fraud involved because both parties are willing parties in this transaction. Lets try the next one. Well, no, this one doesnt work either. Humm. Ok lets try the third one. Darn this one doesn't apply either as well as all the rest. Why? Because it's not cheating. The ONLY thing secondary markets do from a business standpoint is cause companies who do not embrace it to miss out on some extra cash flow. Sony saw this and did the only thing it could do - joined in!
As much as I know some of you feel so strongly against buying and selling items and coin for real world money you cannot classify this action as cheating. It simply and factually does not apply.
Sidenote:
Merv808 can I have some of what your smoking? The topic isnt sleeping with your boss to get ahead. If I bought 10pp to advance my character it's my choice and my money. The only way it might affect you is if it were the only 10pp in the game. As for you putting your $100 to use for your family, thats awesome, but what is good for you and yours is different for me and mine. My wife for example collects Barbie dolls - to me a total waste of money - but to her they are treasured items. My point is people are just different and whats good for one person isn't good for another.
Oh did you know that yesterday my character passed by your character? I even said hello! Everything on my character and all the money it had on it was bought using real money. Did me running by you ruin the game for you? Bet you didnt even notice me.
I see the secondary market as inevitable, but I think the game companies should bear no responsibility for lost items. If someone is willing to pay real money for a virtual weapon that's lost, deleted, broken or nerfed, it's the buyer's problem. The game company wasn't a party to the transaction and offered no guarantee that the item would continue to exist or function as expected.
People like you will always try and mold something to suit thier need. I ask you though - which topic do you want to debate? Does it hurt in game? does it hurt a companies bottom line? How to sleep with your boss and get ahead (pun intended)?
EULA are there to protect the company and has no bearing on if it hurts you in game or not.
Interesting debate between the two. To many MMORPG's are item centric. But personally I see no difference purchasing gold or and item than ( Me a high level player ) giving my lower level character gold or items. Point is it was all farmed and earned either by me or some one else. Now having it 'Botted' for me by a macroed group as what I've come across in EQ II is different story and all together wrong. But then again it's the game designers fault for allowing that to happen with macro commands and such. Where as I can see where some may say that it ruins the economy by buying and selling items or gold. I look at the player base more to be at fault for the simple reason of greed by a player who plays the game.I can't count the times I've seen level 30 items sell for triple the price of a level 60 item. People have and will continue to put outrages prices on items even if there wasn't a way to buy gold farmed items. Guess what I'm trying to say is how much of a price can you put on an item be it a rare or not that costs you nothing but your in game leisure time to collect it?
"I want to be a kickass football player. But you know, i don't really have the time. I'm working this job, and between that and having relationships, i just don't have time to really, seriously work out. And you need to work out to get the muscles to be decent at sports. /Sigh. What am i to do?
I know, I'll buy Steroids! Its not fair that other people who have more time or more of a passion for the game get to do so well and i don't. Its just a game, I just want to have fun so why is it wrong for me to do whatever i want? I'll just buy steroids with money that I earned from my job! Its my money, i should be able to buy whatever i want with it."
Not a great example, cause a lot of football players do use steroids but thats just to make money from advertising, etc, things that no gamer is ever going to get. For people who only play sports for fun theres a lot less steroid use. And thats what MMO's are, games people play to have fun. Being good at it should come from putting the time in. People who don't have to put the time or work in diminish the accomplishment of anything in a game.
11 pages of posts..many speaking about the "inflation" caused by farmers raising the costs of in game items. But no one seems to remember that in most games, farmers don't just get "gold" as their drops, they frequently get rare, low-drop rate items which they make available for sale on the open market.
The fact they play 18 hours a day means they are more likely to get such rare drops than an average 2-3 hr a day player. So if we relied on average players, rare items would be...really rare. So in a way, farmers help the gaming experience by making rare items more available, and probably (cause I can't prove this, but neither can the other side) lowers the cost of such rare items.
If a game is designed properly, in game money can have little effect. (WOW does a pretty good job at minimizing the impact of farmers in this regard...though the post with the potion example was a possible scenario,but not one I've really ever witnessed)
As to the argument that RMT is cheating...hey, I drive faster than the posted speed limit, jaywalk, lie about where I live so my kids can go to a better school, tell my wife that "its not really a new headset, just looks different", drank lots of alcohol before I reached the age of 21 etc etc. There might be one or two of you out there who never break any of life's rules (or even laws) but most can't say that.
So if there's a cheat/loophole (that's not really even illegal) that permits people to obtain in game items for real life cash (which could be coded against) why wouldn't people take advantage of it?
After all, it is only a game.....
and never forget...
Murphy's Golden Rule:
"Whoever has the gold makes the rules"
A virtual item is essentailly nothing more than a few hundred bytes of storage space which are converted to electrons, shipped around the world and then displayed through a software application. They have no monitary value. If a game developer publically approves of a secondary market which applies a real world dollar value to a virtual item; or if that developer sells an item for real world money; the developer can be sued for the fair market value of those few hundred bytes of storage. If they change a couple of those bytes and the item now behaves differently, or should they lose the data and are unable to recover it, they can be held legally accountable.
Why would a game developer, set themselves up for a class action law suit over allowing their intellectual property to be assigned a real world value by a third party?
If anyone is interested check out some of the following links on the topic:
Game Law Blog
http://www.golem.de/0503/36932.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/17/tycoon_buys_non_existent_island/
http://www.indicare.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleID-104
http://web.si.umich.edu/tprc/papers/2004/382/ppr%20Korea%2008%20TPRC%20final%20revised.pdf
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=555661
http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?section=business&id=2061
http://www.secretlair.com/index.php?/clickableculture/entry/real_world_lawyer_files_suit_against_virtual_world_maker/
http://mmorpg.qj.net/Online-gamer-wins-lawsuit-for-virtual-damage/pg/49/aid/74225
Because the games do not stop printing money there will always be inflation. As you said the more currency available the less valuable it is. Unfortunately for your agruement you are attempting to shuffle the blame off the developers where it belongs.
I keep seeing people claim that the secondary market dosnt affect economies in game, some of these same people then say that it's ok for items to cost 10 times what they previously did because everything costs that much more.
Simple fact is this claim is stupid. Even when in game money is not duped/hacked before it is sold it has a large impact on the economy.
I could see the point of if the money is gained by the sellers the way the game intended it should be ok, except that when you consolidate millions of platinum (or other currency) in one place, prices will be driven way up. This is because now a select few people have the funds to stupidly spend way more then what an item is worth. When it comes to items it's much much worse.
Granted, a large number of sold items are gained thrue farming (this by itself can be annoying, but only slightly worse then someone farming to gain the item for themselves or friends) but in my experiences these people that are selling the items also buy them from other players. Since they have such large quantities of in game currency they run the prices of these items up in this way.
Now for the people that say that because of the inflation it's easier to gain all this money. This simply isnt true in most cases. Granted, the prices are increadibly high for items people want, but it's usually the top 10% of items that the prices become out of controll. All less desirable items are sold for the same amounts of money as before, so your stuck selling 10 times the items you would have needed to before, or slaughtering 10 times the creatures, or as a 3rd option you could spend hard earned money on in game currency.
Normally as more of an item comes into the economy the price will gradually drop as the market is flooded with these items before people can afford them. Because of the secondary market however the servers are flooded with items/money faster then intended, and they never see the ingame economy.
Since most people that purchase items with real money didnt have the game funds to get it the normal way the secondary market isnt relieveing the legitamit demand for this item, not only this but they are stunting the flow of the item into the economy. Because of this the price is driven even higher.
I may have missed some points, I may not have said everything perfectly, but if you can read that and still are not convinced that secondary markets have very large negative impacts on the economy of an MMORPG then you obviusly havnt played a good MMORPG.
(All of this argument is based on the assumption that you are talking about a game THAT DOES NOT SUPPORT a secondary market)
Beyond all of what I've said, it's against the EULA which you agree to when you play (and for damn good reason).
Even if the selling of items/currency didnt effect a game negativly, if you agree to it when you log in you are in breech of contract so to speak.
Regardless of if EULA has been proven in court, it's thier game, it's thier servers, if your doing something they dont want you to do they should beable to disalow you from playing thier game. Very simple really.
As for those that say you purchased your cd, well grats, you own the cd. You still dont own the software.
---EDIT---
Yes, there will always be inflation, but you can not honestly say that the consolidation of millions of a games currency doesnt have an impact on prices, while everyone not involved in the secondary market is left behind. Especially if you know about economics as you claim =p
Forget about real life, we are all playing these games to escape from real life, and nw you are telling me that a purchase with the money earned in real life should be effective in the games? I don't care how much a person works in real life, in his previous life .... A game world is an entity on its own, you cannot bring something alien to those worlds, I don't see the point in seeing rich people wondering around with the most precious pieces in the game. If they don't have the time to earn those items, they can play on seperate servers for RL money counts.
Would you be playing the game on a special server that you can purchase in game money with RealLife money, where the same game also has servers that you cannot purchase anything with RealLife money?
Thanks
While the secondary market would easily work their way around this. Put up a piece of leather on the ah for an exhorbitant price. As a matter of fact I believe that is precisely how the farmer bosses collect money from their underlings in world of warcraft. When you see 1 piece of light leather for sale for 5000gp then you know that someone in a few hours, an employee, is going to go up there and buy that leather as a way of turning in his gold to his boss.
Fair answer, no objection to that
Hence, game developers will not acknowledge the validity of a secondary market. Doing so would set legal precedence for assigning a virtual item a real world dollar value. Instead, most game devleopers, whose products were not designed with a business model of selling virtual items specifically state that all virtual goods are the sole property of the company, and thus have no real world value.
The point that neither side touched on is that the gold farmers DO cause damage to the game and the community of players that reside within it. Actually, most of the folks in this thread that are supporting the gold sellers seem to think that these merchants of virtual wares operate within the confines of the intended game mechanics but seldomly is that the norm. They are already "breaking" the EULA so what sort of moral fiber is there to prevent them from exploiting to gain their goods faster and easier?
Let's look at some examples of how these "upstanding" vendors have operated in the past just with WoW...
Remember when Molten Core was really laggy and unstable about a year ago? Most players thought that it was the shoddy architecture on the part of the server programmers or bad code. No. Actually, it was neither of those. You see Molten Core resided on the same server blade as Maraudon. This dungeon was a hot-spot for level 60 hunter bot farmers back in the day since they could easily run and solo Gizlok. In doing a CPU consumption graph for said server blade, it was found that there were 2-3 instances of MC running and 150+ instances of Maraudon. Population of MC was 80-120 compared to a population of 15-20 for Maraudon. 5-10 of those folks would be actual groups running through while 5-10 were farmers. In short, the server blade would collapse under the weight of these farmers continually popping new instances and boy did that upset those folks in Molten Core. 60 seconds later when the blade would reboot, the farmers would log back in and start the process all over. This was not isolated to just a few realms... it was widespread across all of them. So, 5-10 farmers were spoiling the gameplay and advancement of 80-120 legitimate players all for the sake of free market economy.
The same was done by farmers using horde rogues to flip Uldaman over and over to kill the three dwarves which caused stress on other instances residing on that blade. Then the same was done again by farmers using warlocks to teleport hack to the Ogre King in Dire Maul and kill him with dots while they ported around safely. Or how about when leveling services first came on line and they did so by teleport hacking from Gadgetzan to Feralas to pick eggs from a nest to turn in for a repeatable quest. The quest was later disabled and set the bar that repeatable quests were not to be implimented without very stringent requirements. But... no, that has no impact on the player or the community.
Let's talk about accounts for a moment. I'll break this up into two sections; Yours and Theirs.
Theirs:
As seen in several posts made here the general perception is that these farmers pay for accounts and game time just as you and I do. In that, you are horribly mistaken. What happens is that large orders for boxes are places on internet marketplaces like Amazon with fraudulent credit cards to be shipped overseas. The package of 100's of boxes and game cards arrives in customs but is not claimed. The chinese customs agents then "auction" the unclaimed packages off for pennies on the dollar. So, no... they don't pay the same as you and I.
All of those advertisements that you get in the mail from gibberish names are accounts that have one purpose and one purpose only. That is to flood a realm with in-game mail and tells then get banned. Don't you think that if they paid retail box value that it would be a costly overhead to do such? 20 bucks times 200 realms times 2 factions... that's 8000 dollars just to advertise for one moment on all realms and both factions... for a period of 10 minutes. Think about it.
Yours:
Your account is nothing more than a secondary holding account to these folks. When the exploits dry up and a huge wave of account bans go through, guess where the gold comes from so they can keep up with demand. That's right, your account. How many of you know folks that have had their account compromised to find that it was cleaned out? How long did it take for them to get their gear/characters back? To give you an idea of the level that this has reached... WoW used to get 40-50 hacked accounts per week on average. After the mass bannings and the implimentation of Warden, it's 400-500 a week. Turn around has gone from 24 hours to over 2 weeks.
And that gives me a great segway for the topic of MMO Customer Service. I'll start off with a few questions.
How much do you think these gold farmers cost a company like Blizzard each year in manhours? How does their presence affect the paying customer's customer service experience?
A company like Blizzard will spend upwards of 20+ million this year in CS overhead alone. They have what... 500+ employees in the CS department alone spread across 2-3 locations in the U.S. alone? Some of which have the sole responsiblity for handling issues arising from compromised accounts and the identifcation/banning of farmer accounts. It costs Blizzard millions a year to combat this problem and keep it relatively under control. Programmer time. CS time. And... the most precious... Customer time. Ever been waiting for a response to a ticket and got frustrated with the wait? That's because there were 80+ people upset that they were handing out loot on Garr when the server blade died. That's because 100+ folks just got spam told in Orgrimmar to buy gold at a site. That's because player X just got trained by farmer Y because he was cutting into the bottom line. That's because your friend just got his account stripped so that they can resell the gold on a random site.
So, yes... farmers hurt the community. Farmers hurt the service. Farmers hurt you, the player.
Lets say a game has 1000 players. No botters, no farmers. Out of those 1000 players, 200 are hardcore(10-15 hours daily) and 800 are casuals (1-10 hours daily). Every day, 200 people are earning 1 gold each (total is 200), and casuals are earning 0.4 gold each (total is 320gold). Total daily gold earned is 520.
Now, lets say a server has 100 hardcore people, 200 farmers and 700 casuals.
100 hardcore=100gold
200 farmers (earch earns 3 gold becuase all they do is get gold, they dont level they dont quest, they dont raid, they just farm the most gold-earning mobs) = 600 gold
700 casuals = 280 gold
total 980 gold
so you see, if even 1/5 of the population are botters, the daily gold generation increases dramaticaly. Of course those numbers are my numbers. But I think they roughly reflect real numbers.
The whole idea why botters hurt the economy is not HOW they make their money, but because they do that and ONLY that they hurt economy.
Its similar to "damping" - a financial term to describe selling something at a price lower then the market price. This way you try to kill your competitors and flood market with very cheap product. This causes a lot of ecenomic damage and is often stricly regulated and usualy illegal, especialy for imports. Similar stuff here, the sudden flow of "extra" gold makes it cheaper and makes everything more expensive. So everyone who doesnt farm and cant buy gold suddenly is poorer for no apparent reason. Thats very bad for those guys.
Mr. Knowitall knows nothing.. i skipped alot when i seen this to post so anyway.. here is your proof.. Last Christmas, a 2ndary company had a "sale" on gold in a game that I play, Items that were 2 million gold shot up to over 20 million gold... items that were 10,000 gold even shot up over 1 million gold... the reason.. the RMT sellers that farm 60 hrs a week to get gold to sell flooded the market.. try keeping up with that when your not rich in RL or in the game to begin with. I was a casual gamer, having enough money to get me by but never being rich... I took a 2 week vacation for the holidays and came back and the game was like that... I barly had money to buy food to do quests or party. More proof: about 2 weeks ago, the game I play busted accounts involving RMT, items have easily take a 15-20% drop in that short period of time.. and are continuing to fall... the PROOF is in the pudding, everyone can see it, just you cheating people will always TRY to find a legitimate way to defend it. As a matter of fact.. take some of your own medicine, you TRY to prove 2ndary markets dont hurt MMO's.. i want you to try, but its fruitless, I just proved it hurts. Sad thing is, you RMT people always cry saying "its not fair" well how is it fair that me the casual player, cant keep up with a game because im not going to spend RL money on a game.... that is what is not fair..
One thing I have already mentioned in this thread, I would like to mention again.. I think RMT has POTENTIAL to be a good thing.. just has to be done right. A simple way that comes to mind.. for you companies out there.. take the 2ndary markets out.. provide your own market.. BUT, do it on reserved servers.. make 1/2 of them servers where if you want to buy gold you can.. the other half make forbidden.. and let players chose where they want to play.. its so simple and you people make it seem like rocket science. That solves both worlds.. people that want to buy gold can on those servers and its allowed and/or encouraged and no1 will complain.. the people on the other servers can go on playing the game they wnt to play and not worrying about RMT. Concept is simple, retarted people MAKE things difficult that think they are right and there is no other way and no1 will tell them because there is no way they could be wrong they do it and they are superior so it must be right ect ect.
Also your not taking into account the uninformed masses, and when your talking about the number of people we are talking about that's alot of people.
Then there's the loyalists, no matter how bad it gets they love the game and stay.
I was going to type more, but honestly there's no need.
Regardless of all that, how a person chooses to play the game, or believes the game is all about, does not exempt them from the terms they are agreeing to every time they play the game. Those terms include the understanding that RMT and other such activities are not allowed. Period. They are further agreeing that if they do so anyway and are caught that punitive actions - up to and including suspension or banning of their account can take place. How they choose to play the game is completely irrelevant to what they agree to do or not to do while playing it.
That's the point people seem to keep missing.
And if you (not *you* personally, severius; speaking in general here) lack the imagination or the desire to do anything but grind on the same mobs for hours and find it boring as hell and not fun... THEN CANCEL THE DAMN ACCOUNT AND PLAY SOMETHING YOU DO ENJOY. Or... perhaps try stepping outside the pattern you've fallen into and try something different in the game. Those are the only right answers.
Argue, debate, rationalize, theorize and hypothesize all you want, to whom ever you want. Regardless, it boils down to this:
If RMT is prohibited in a game you're playing and you partake in it anyway and are busted and subsequently banned... you have only yourself to blame. No degree of relativism or philosophy or crying is going to make you right.
So, why bother doing it in the first place?
Just play the damn game the way it was designed to be played or find something that better suits you.
End of story.
Only the high high end is unbalanced and requires real effort to remain competetive with the others.
I'm nto saying that I don't understand the reason some people have a problem with the secondary market.
I hated dealing with bots and hearing "USA DOG YOU GO NOW" spewing from avatars in L2 as much as the next guy but in keeping with what I believe the initial point was, the overwhelming majority of these concerns are derived from the fact that this is because the secondary market wasn't accounted for in lineage 2.
Can anyone cite an mmorpg which was designed around 2nd market transactions that has failed? Even that new Korean game "Silkroad" is doing well being f2p and has an ingame item mall for real currency sales.
It had to be said sooner or later and I don't want to open a can of worms but it's amazing how much this whole debate sounds exactly like the debate to legalize merijuana.
Pro Legalization: Legalizing marijuana has a number of benefits. People are going to buy it anyways! This way, nobody get's thrown into prison and their lives ruined over a stupid law that shouldn't be anyway, plus think of what a boost to the economy it would be!
Anti-Legalization: That doesn't change the fact that it's wrong! It just is! We don't have to explain to you why it is but it just is alright!
People who are aggressively anti-2nd market are statistically those among us who play the most and typically either have no jobs or cannot/choose not to be successful in real life. The ability for those with money irl to purchase goods and services in these games means that those people who have no lives can no longer lord over those with lives so easily and that adults [I went ahead and said it] can buy their way onto the same level.
Maybe that sounded a tad crass but necessary
It was crass, arrogant, way over-generalized and, frankly, wrong.
I work a full-time job, and make pretty darn good money. If I chose to RMT my way through any MMO I play, I certainly could without missing a bill. I also, like so many others who use it as an excuse to RMT, have limited time to play. Regardless of all this I am still vehemently anti-RMT and believe in playing the game the designers created - not turning it into a pointless and challengeless hack-n-slash by just buying my way to every goal I have.
So, please, next time you want to try and make a point - do a little research first. Or perhaps just stick to speaking for yourself.
That's what I was getting at. The farmers don't pay legitimately for their accounts. However, trial accounts in WoW are limited in that they can only get to level 20, can't mail, can't trade and can't send tells. The gold made with a trial account is minimal to what a level 60 rogue or hunter farmer can make per hour even factoring in the leveling time.
As for a link... I was speaking as an informed source on the matter. That sort of information isn't normally made public by any company in a formal fashion. I'll wait for the "screenshot or it didn't happen" reply.
Allow me to get to the main point here right at the start:
Except in the MMOs where it is specifically designed *into* the gameplay (such as Entropia Universe, or the Station Exchange servers for EQII), RMT is never... let me emphasize this... _not ever_ "okay" or justified or intended as a method of gameplay.
Now allow me to run through some of the more commonly used excuses for it and then point out just why they're BS.
1. "I have a wife/family/"other time-consuming responsibility here" and don't have tons of hours to play like some people do, so I have to buy gold in order to get things in a reasonable amount of time and stay competitive".
Nnnno... it'll just take you a little longer to achieve those things.
Every player is subject to the same challenges in achieving any particular quality gear, a mount, a level, etc. Developers do not arbitrarily and randomly make it harder for one person than it is for another. Outside of an obvious array of exceptions that don't involve buying gold through the so-called "second market", everyone is faced with the same degree of difficulty and requirements to aquire something. Likewise, every player is provided the same means, the same tools and the same options to acquire whatever it is they want - and it's all provided within the context of the gameplay. Buying money outside of the game to bypass all that is *not* one of those options.
Disagree? Fine. Find me any official game documentation that says otherwise and states buying in-game money for real cash is an intended and promoted form of gameplay. You won't. Because it isn't.
If someone can play 6 hours a day to devote toward a goal and you can only devote 6 hours a week, and you're both equal in terms of skill and wherewithall to acquire what you're after, common-sense dictates that they *should* get the item before you. It's not unfair. It doesn't present an "uneven playing field". It's called Real Life. Welcome to it. Having less time to play and/or more responsibilities than someone else does not entitle you to have an item any sooner or with any less effort than them.
The concept of an amount of time to achieve any given goal being "reasonable" is subjective; it's whatever an individual feels is worth investing toward a given goal. There is no official published documentation of how long it's "supposed-to" take every player to achieve a given goal. So, making any generalized statement of what a "reasonable" amount of time is is pointless. It's different for everyone.
That said, finding too many things in the game fall outside what you personally deem "reasonable" does not justify resorting to RMT to get around it. It might, and perhaps should make you reconsider whether you chose the right game, given your time availability and expectations of what you want to get out of the game in what time-frame. Here's a novel thought. Perhaps you should find a different kind of game to play that better suits your time availability. MMOs obviously require more time and involvement than you're willing or able to commit. Unfortunate - but, hey, just like anything else - nothing is for everybody.
2. "The RMT companies are providing a service that people want."
Close, but not specific enough. A more accurate way of putting it is: The RMT companies are providing a service for lazy people that just happens to go directly against the EULA that *every single player* agrees to when they install and play the game. The assets being bought/sold are property of their respective game's developer. They are not for the subscribers to buy, sell or profit on. Like it or not, agree with it or not - you are agreeing to abide by the company's rules when you play the game and you are agreeing and acknowledging that you will be held accountable and penalized if you fail to do so. By participating in RMT, as a buyer or seller, you are violating those rules... and yes.. will be held accountable when caught. That so many people conveniently overlook that basic fact really bewilders me.
That failing, whatever you think of it - if the company catches and decides to ban you - guess what? You're screwed. You can argue all your pet theories with a company rep. all day long. You can argue all the way to the top of the ladder. You still lose. That alone should be self-evident enough that.... gee.. perhaps it's something you shouldn't be doing in the first place. Always amazes me how some people believe the rules don't apply to them. They have all these neat-sounding reasons, talking about "free-market societies" and all these big, bold and important-sounding theories... but in the end, it's all just empty self-serving rationalization.
This brings me to the next one:
3. "Well there's loop-holes in those EULAs. Any attorney will tell you that some of the items in there wouldn't hold up in court".
Okay... the absurdity of this mentality is so self-evident that it almost don't justify expanding on. But I will anyway - 'cause I'm in that kinda mood.
That you have to and would actually spend time finding *loopholes* in EULAs in order to feel justified with engaging in RMT speaks loud and clear, on its own, that you realize you're doing something the company doesn't approve. That there's something there that requires loopholes to be found in the first place should light up the "common-sense" parts of your brain like a fireworks display. They're not added as an "additional gameplay feature". They're certainly not there to *encourage* RMT.
Occam's Razor says, all things being equal, the simplest answer tends to be the correct one.
Well, in this case, the simplest answer is - those rules are in the EULA because... DING! the developer/publisher does not condone, allow nor approve of the buying or selling of any in-game assets outside of the game for real-world money (aka RMT)! Incredible how simple that is to comprehend!
On that note, "Well I never read the EULA" don't get you off the hook. Sorry, but that dog won't hunt. Ignorance isn't a free-pass to do as you wish without accountability. Whether you choose to read them or not is not the company's problem; you're still agreeing to abide by them and they still apply to you when you play the game.
1+1=2, folks.
4. "RMT does not affect the economy or negatively affect any other players. It's harmless".
Really? Well it certainly don't affect those who will freely pull out their credit card to buy the gold they need for everything they want. I guess it's easy to overlook the fallout of one's actions when they're simply buying their way past them. Ignorance is bliss, as they say.
For those who are actually *playing* the game as designed and earning accomplishments, however, it makes a huge impact.
I'll address that with one current real-world example...
Final Fantasy XI had a steadily inflating economy for some time. Items that used to go in the low 6 digits had gone up to several million... sometimes into the 10s of millions. Same items, same stats, same benefits.. but somehow many times the price. It had gotten to the point that people would leave the game because they simply couldn't afford the time to progress - without cheating/buying money.
This had nothing to do with RMT, you say?
Well... then explain this to me... Not too long ago, Square-Enix - developers of FFXI - created a task team *specifically* to track down and eliminate RMT and similar activities across their servers; something I applaud them for. Now.. before I go any further, read that first sentence again. SE are actively and aggressively banning accounts for RMT, among other expressely forbidden activities. They've already driven some of the lesser RMT companies from the game entirely. If they keep it up, it's only a matter of time before the bigger players follow suit. Now, this might come as a surprise to some of you... SE are doing this because *they don't approve of and forbid RMT-related activity in their game* - just like it says in the EULA that so many of you so gleefully ignore.
Is it sinking in yet?
Now.. to get back to the example... Since SE has implemented this task force, banning 1000s of accounts and removing 10s of billions of ill-gotten gil from the economy across all servers on a monthly basis - the prices on many items have come back down to almost where they were 2 years ago. I've almost fallen out of my seat a few times at how far they've dropped on items I've needed. People can suddenly afford to buy many items again that only some months ago were a pipe-dream for all but the pro-RMT players. Players can actually play the game again the way SE designed it to be and have a hope of obtaining the gear they want/need. For example, an item I once purchased for 450k peaked at over 4 million when the inflation was at its worst. Since SE started combating the RMT problem, I've recently seen that same item selling for around 370k - even lower than what I'd once paid for it.
So.. let's simplify this. Pre RMT control, inflation in FFXI went through the roof. Post RMT control, they are down to the lowest they've been, literally, in years. Black and White. Cause and Effect. Common-sense. RMT hurts the economy and throws the game out of balance for all but those willing to buy/cheat their way through.
And that's only *one* aspect of how it ruins the game for others.
There's also all the related activities and tactics the RMT farmers use to "run their business". Things such as monopolizing valuable assets/creatures/items in the game by using scripts/3rd party apps or exploits to get the upper-hand and control the market; continuously blocking legit players access. In all, what I've heard, read and experienced first-hand of how RMT has adversely affected honest players across the MMOs I've played could fill a novel.
Another example, legitimage players in FFXI can actually get at NMs (Notorious Monsters) that were once monopolized by RMT farmers 24/7, and have a real chance of getting the mob and/or the item they need. Their only competition being other legitimate players and the random nature of the drops themselves - as it should be. I recently spoke with a good friend in FFXI who was overjoyed that, for the first time in over 3 months, her linkshell (guild) successfully claimed a "god" NM that had been monopolized by RMT farmers using 3rd party hacks/bot programs, making it all but impossible to get at - and there wasn't a RMT farmer to be seen anywhere, thanks to SE's aggressive banning of such accounts.
By the by, in case you pro-RMT types didn't know - the 3rd-party hacks, botting programs and tactics used by RMT farmers to obtain the money you buy are *also* prohibited and are cause for account suspension or cancellation. Food for thought.
So, still don't believe RMT hurts the player base at large, in more ways than one? I would recommend opening your eyes, taking off the blinders and looking at the world outside yourself once in a while.
5. One of my favorite pro-RMT rebuttals: "Well, I realize that I'm helping put food on the table for someone in another country who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it, so I'm not only making the game more enjoyable for myself.. I'm helping someone else"
Here.. you can have my violin. I won't be using it any time soon on this subject. Oh, and here's some paper towels to mop up after your bleeding heart. Again, this is a disingenuous and, frankly, shameful arguement some have made. You aren't buying money out of goodwill for anyone else. Please. Your reasons are entirely in self-interest. If you're that concerned about helping out some poor people in another country - or even in your own - find a good, worthwhile and honest charity that you agree with and send them the money instead. There are plenty of them. You're still helping others and you're not screwing things up for thousands of others in the process. Don't worry.. I'm not holding my breath on that one.
You send money to charities to help less fortunate people. You pay a subscription to a game company/publisher to play their MMO. MMOs are not Charities. Get it?
Just for once, I wish the pro-RMT people would drop the facade, stop the grand-standing, lose the lame, empty rationalizations and excuses and address it for what it is: Cheating.
The problem with this debate is that so many people have no idea what they're talking about, or just don't care that they have no idea.
You have people talking economics without any real conception of how it works. You have people making twisted arguments that it's somehow not cheating to break the rules.
It's pointless.
As was mentioned in an earlier post, I'd like to ask - If there were two servers for a game, 1 being free from RMT, and 2 being RMT-friendly, would these RMT players really play on the RMT server?
I highly doubt it because I have a good feeling that people who buy online items with RM don't do it so they can keep up, but because they want to surpass people.
Careful... someone's likely to state your opinion carries no weight because you only have 6 posts... Many in forums like these fancy that as an argument-winner. I'm pretty sure they're all pro-RMT, as well.. just a guess. -rolls eyes-
And I agree. People don't want a level playing field - they want to be better, or at the very least "not worse than" anyone else. And, somehow, in their logic, despite the fact that there's 50, 60, 100+++ levels of quests and various challenging content designed, tested and provided by the developers to play through to reach that level of play, they seem to be fully convinced that somehow.. none of that applies to them. No no.. they're above all that. They're a top-level player in a new-character's body.. they just have to buy the right gear and they'll be right where they belong... at the top with the "big boys". Earning your gear? Learning to play as you go along? Being *challenged*? Pfft.. who has time for that.. especially when you have VISA!
-rolls eyes again-
and the more people that play the game the more potential buyers of items and more people will be farmers
I dont really see any way to stop the selling of items/gold, as long as the demand is there people will farm it and sell it.
I played on an exhange server for EQ2 and never had any issue geting the money to buy items I needed, I never bought or sold any gold, items or chars.
also about companies supporting RMT like the exchange, most people I knew that bought gold would never buy it on the exchange, they would always go to thrid party sites where it was cheaper.
as along as farmers can hide in their instances and non pvp safe zones, or not worry about their gear/money being lost on death there will be tons of them
That's what I was getting at. The farmers don't pay legitimately for their accounts. However, trial accounts in WoW are limited in that they can only get to level 20, can't mail, can't trade and can't send tells. The gold made with a trial account is minimal to what a level 60 rogue or hunter farmer can make per hour even factoring in the leveling time.
As for a link... I was speaking as an informed source on the matter. That sort of information isn't normally made public by any company in a formal fashion. I'll wait for the "screenshot or it didn't happen" reply.
I was not aware of the trial account limitations... Thnx for clearing that up for me. Im guessing WoW would have a different type of Botter, a living botter. Ive heard thats what they do nowadays, instead of running a program that "farms" for u, an actual person is doing it. In that way, they arent realy breaking any laws, becuase a human is always present at the keyboard. And yet the detrimental effect to the economy and community remains.Im glad im getting too old for MMORPGs in general, Id hate to see great games ruined because of this.
I work a full-time job, and make pretty darn good money. If I chose to RMT my way through any MMO I play, I certainly could without missing a bill. I also, like so many others who use it as an excuse to RMT, have limited time to play. Regardless of all this I am still vehemently anti-RMT and believe in playing the game the designers created - not turning it into a pointless and challengeless hack-n-slash by just buying my way to every goal I have.
So, please, next time you want to try and make a point - do a little research first. Or perhaps just stick to speaking for yourself.
I agree with WSIMike. The only ones who will benefit from this are the most hardcore people, the ones who do have time to farm gold and rare items. if anything, they wouldnt mind making a buck or two by selling items, gold or their characters. Why would they be anti-RMT? Yeah their super duper sword is not gonna be THAT unique, but once he sells that sword for 500USD$ im guessing hed be very happy.
Its the small folk that get hurt the most, the folks that have no time to farm, so they keep falling below the competetive line and eventualy end up washed out heroes with rusty armor and unable to get a group or PvP becuase everyone else around them fancies flaming sword of uberness, whether farmed by self or bought by money. These folk would be forced to spend more time farming. buy stuff, quit or do nothing and remain the same old character with rusty armor.
Farming occurs becuase people buy stuff. People buy stuff becuase they want to be better the others and they dont want to work for it. These types of people should keep playing single player games, where they can type IDDQD turn god mode and ruin the game for themselves. At least they wont affect me and countless other people who like to play games as they were intended to play. Farming/botting is as bad as cheating/hacking in game.
Now I remember why I swore off public forums two years ago. I had forgot how angry it can make a person after the 9th time they have to repeat themselves.
Let's make it a round number.
Lineage 2 Didn't account for The secondary Market
This has been stated on almost every single page in this discussion.
You know man, I have mention this I think twice in this thread alone.. especially #'s 3 and 4.. just go back a page and you will see that >.>. Also I think I have probly mentioned everything you said a few times somewhere on this forum. There is one thing that reading your spill brought to mind tho that I wanted to point out.. look at first sentence of #3.. it really should be the nail in the coffin to all RMT.. my point is.. when you have to even think about getting lawers involed in a video game.. its gone way overboard!
For you RMT people out there that sell gold let me point this out to you:
GAME = FUN JOB = MONEY
For you buyers out there...
GAME = a place to RELAX and have fun, where you can escape REAL LIFE... I.E. thats why there is FAKE gold/money, NOT a place where REAL money should be king. Seriously, can you go much lower than purposly ruining hundreds/thousands of peoples fun because you are lazy? I know what the problem is, and its not the excuses you RMT people use. The truth is not that you just cant keep up because blah blah.. the truth is you are jealous perfectionists. If you see someone with an item you are to lazy to get yourself, you just buy it because someone is better than you.. I could elaborate more, but its late and I know you get the point, tho you wont admit it.
REAL LIFE = go to you job... make your money, if you really want to INVEST your money, put it in the stock market or something. If you want to buy nice things... how about buy some nice RL things like a new coat or shoes or a car, or take that family out to a movie... something where spending your money helps the RL community instead of destroying a fantasy one. Hell, if you have so much money that you want to buy fake money with your real money, donate it to some cancer research or something.
Sigh...
I do not think a lot of people really understand how this works. The market(players) dictates what is right and what is wrong. While reading the Bible I came upon a part where the people are angry at God for punishing them for their sins and they said that God is "wrong" in how the people were being treated. Now I try to apply logic to as many things in life as possible and came up with the questions of how do you tell God he is wrong? You don't because it is logically impossible for a creator to be wrong. How does this apply to the topic?
MMO's are not created to be "fun", they are created to make a profit. If a customer buys a brand new car and then takes it home and spray paints it pink, the car dealer has no option to tell him he is wrong. How do you tell your customers they are wrong, if you do not like what the customer does with your product after he/she buys it, maybe you are in the wrong market. This is just like prohibtion, the goverment tried to make it illegal but in the end the there was a demand and a supply, and the people won. These companies that make MMO's and then go out and rant and rave about how their paying customers suck because they buy/sell/trade items for cash are hipocrites. They themselves are making money off the sale of their title! The people simply cannot be "wrong" in a free market. You can compare the MMO cash market to prostitution, yes it is "morally" wrong but it has been here since time began and will be here untill time ends, heck it is even legal in two states and numerous countries!
You can fill the forums with debates, you can flame me, you can ban millions of accounts, and you change nothing, you cannot change the will of the people.(customer) The customer is always right,(sound familiar?) when there is no longer a demand the supply will cease to exist.
Now some advice, since you guys(Sigil) are with SOE, you should learn a lesson and go study Station Exchange. At least that way the "buyer" does not get ripped off, the seller makes his money, and SOE gets a little bit for themselves. And no I am not an SOE fan, they burned me three times with MMO's: Planetside, SWG, and some other forgotten title, But I am an honest peep and will give credit where it is due, and SOE deserves it for giving the buyer and seller the "entertainment" the "customer" desires.
The bottom line: Your customers have a desire, you WILL fill that desire or someone else will, and when they do and make the money from it, I do not what to hear you whining about it.
You might not be aware of this - and I do not say this in a condescending way - but when you buy a gamel.. any game... it does not become "yours". It is still the property of the company that developed it. You are paying them for licensing, so to speak, for the right to play it. ANd of course, part of it goes to paying for the media, the packaging, manuals, etc. Therefor, it is fully within the rights of the developer to tell you what you can and can't do with the game; an example is why software piracy is illegal.
Those terms of agreement in an mmo are there for a reason - they set the rules by which the company wants its game to be played by. You are playing your *copy* of the game - but you are still playing their game, run on their servers, maintained by their staff, updated by their developers. It is not yours to do whatever you want with - and you agree, every time you play the game, via the EULA, to *not* do those things. You are agreeing that if you do, that the company can and will hold you accountable.
Again, I don't care if this thread, or any other, went on for another 20 pages, the fact that I can provide pages of printed proof, links to sites where the companies themselves directly say that RMT, among other things, is prohibited in their game and the empirical fact that people are *banned* from the game for doing so trumps any theory or argument anyone can give.
So once again, if you choose to RMT, at least acknowledge that you are playing the game outside the intended parameters the company has designed it in and that you are doing something that is highly frowned upon and actively prohibited.
Stop trying to make it sound like it's perfectly honky-dory and great... Because there are mountains of proof that it isn't.
Hmmm, I like this part:
"So once again, if you choose to RMT, at least acknowledge that you are playing the game outside the intended parameters the company has designed it in and that you are doing something that is highly frowned upon and actively prohibited."
Have you ever drove over the speed limit in your life? You are operating outside of the "parameters" of the vehicle and the law... I could ask you a million other "have you ever" questions, however I do not have the time to waste. If the MMO devs want that much control over the games then they should be "rentals" not "sales". Either way you still will not change the market, this will only be changed by the customers. How many years have we had a war on drugs? And that is actually against the law, I do not think EULA's, NDA's, or even a TOS has anything to do with "Law". So until this goes to court you are talking to a wall :) You can preach all you want it is all about supply and demand. Don't you find it funny that Blizzard bans 10k accounts and less then 2 months later their sales jumps 10k, well golly jee willickers I wonder who bought those 10k copies, making Blizzard another $500k in gross sales...
It does not matter to me either way, in fact I was the first player in WOW to have all the classes/crafting to level cap(60/300) 8 Horde on Nathrezim and a Pally on Bleeding Hollow. The account has been inactive more then a year, but I still have it. If I was hell bent on making money via MMO's would I not have sold it already? Of course if you wanted to make an offer...
Okay alott of reactions make sence but lets get real, in the real world we have what we call money balalance currency/gold, what if 20 % of all people over the world had their own money printing machine (sure some might have such machines but i don't think they will advertise for having them) i personaly think that it will disrupt the whole world econemy
Simple put secondary market totaly ruins games, no way in defending otherwise, no excuses like i can not keep up with my friends (ithats like my friends jump into a vulcano so should i kinda nonsens) It hurts the econemy of the game aswell some pleasure in the game, why, because those working to gain that gold or item for those secondary markets are those that do not bring you fun ingame.
Unfortunaly secondary market will contineu to grow cause the majority of wanna be gamers also is growing.
In my personal view a real gamer will never ever use a secondary market to aquire items/money ect no matter what, if the game is to hard or if his/her gameplaytime is to short a real gamer will find himself a nice other game to enjoy or deals with the fact he/she is falling behind from friends and might need to make new friends along the way, but if the other friends are getting higher and faster lvl'd then you should not be afraid of loosing them, but thats only if you really can call them friends ;)
Interesting links pop up when I type in EULA and lawsuits..
http://www.eff.org/wp/eula.php
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983988.html
Found this nice post on this thread: (Blizzard sent a letter to a secondary market website)
http://terranova.blogs.com/terra_nova/2004/12/one_lawsuit_to_.html
There are basically 4 approaches to stopping people from trading in virtual goods:
1) Copyright/IP. This collapses if it's recognised that what is being sold are not virtual goods but a virtual service. "I will pay you $400 for your hat of wizardry" is merely a shorthand for "I will pay you $400 to transfer the hat of wizardy in the inventory of the character controlled by you to the inventory of the character controlled by me". If Blizzard/Vivendi win the IP argument and their rights to ownership of virtual goods are recognised, all it will lead to is a change of words in the eBay auction proposal. If they lose the IP argument, it's open season on all virtual worlds...
2) EULA/ToS. This collapses if the people making the money are not signatories of the EULA/ToS. I guess some argument could be made about their having "agents" doing their work for them, but this doesn't even hold up well for mafia dons ordering hoods to kill people on their behalf, so I don't expect it would frighten off an auction house. What Vivendi could do is take a zero tolerance policy and go after every single person whom they can show to be breaking the EULA. This will mean a lot of bannings, but they'd eventually win.
3) Alter the code. Cap the amount of gold that characters can give away per month. Cap the number of objects that can have their ownership transferred from a character per month. Don't perform account or avatar transfers unless 3 from name, address and credit card details match. This would drive a gaping hole in the commodifiers' activities. However, Blizzard shouldn't have to do that. Creating virtual worlds is, at its heart, an artistic endeavour. Why should an artist who's doing nothing wrong have to change their art because people spoil it?
4) "It's just a game". The traditional way, as practiced in small-scale virtual worlds for 25 years. No EULA, no ToS, you can do whatever you like in the virtual world. So, however, can the developers, and they have access to the code. Thus, if they don't like what you're doing they can eliminate your goods, character, account - anything the code allows. It may be that this approach can't be scaled up, and it may be that consumer protection laws designed for non-game activities interfere if there's no EULA. In the end, though, it comes down to "it's my ball and if I don't want you to play with it then you can't". If that ability were ever successfully challenged, few companies would ever want to run a virtual world - their hands would be tied too tightly.
Given that having no EULA is probably not an option for a large-scale commercial virtual world at the moment, I'd have recommended Blizzard to go for 3) using data mining to find a reasonable capping level, backed up with a zero-tolerance attitude to put petty traders off scaling up their activities. The IP question does need answering, but I don't believe the answers are going to affect the outcome.
Richard"
BTW, excellent topic!
The secondary market is wrong, you can try to justify it anyway you like, but you're using advantages outside the game to influence other players enjoyment (either directly or indirectly).
It's like playing a game of chess, with someone 'buying' an extra queen. It's against the rules and certainly the sprit of the game.
And don't give me that 'free-market' crap. Becuase thats what it is. Even free markets have rules to protect people. Having a secondary market is like someone printing free money in real life, and unless I'm mistaken, that's illegal. Sure one person doing it isn't going to have much of an impact, but enough people ruins the economy, and if you don't understand that, you have no grasp of simple economics.
These are games, games have rules, and everyone needs to play with the same rules.
Another issue about the Secondary Market is that the American Gov't is actually considering taxing ingame gold since it has real world value. Yes folks, due to these farmers breaking the EULA and then trying to duck and hide under legal mumbo-jumbo I may have to pay sales tax every time I earn gold ingame. I am not making this up.
I've said it before in other posts but I guess I have to repeat it here. One of the problems with this issue is the games are international. So what if USA makes it 100% illegal to buy/sell ingame items, that means nothing to a Chinese guy selling something to his friend in Germany. Would have to get some kind of international law so that they could prosecute the violaters where ever they are.
Too often the farmer tries to twist words and say "well I'm not actually selling the Sword of Uberness, I'm just charging someone to transfer it from Account A to Account B". Now, put that argument into a real world situation: "no officer I'm not actually selling the heroine, I'm just transferring it from Dealer A to Dealer B". The realization is that fudging the semantics doesn't change that act.
SOE having an exchange service has also compounded the issue. Now the farmers feel the Secondary Market has be validated by SOE hopping on the bus to make a buck.
I played EQ For Years, and one thing that pissed me off is when I knew that someone "Ebayed" Someone wqho did not earn their gear, or character. Even if these secondary markets help people compete, it is only because they cant compete in the first place. In these games, I play them for accomplishments, and what brad said about these markets destroying communities, is so True!.
JUST SAY NO, Earn it yourself.
If I am speeding.. I'm speeding. And if I'm stopped and given a ticket - it's because I was clearly exceeding the speeds marked on the speed-signs. I am going to shut up, acknowledge that I was breaking a law and accept the ticket. I'm not claiming to have a right to speed. I'm not going to pull a bunch of neat-sounding but ultimately pointless rationales or justifications out of thin air to try to argue why it was okay for me to be speeding. The cop or the judge is not going to care what my reasons are - even if I convince him that I didn't see the speed sign and didn't know it was 60. The speed was set at 60, I was going 70. I was breaking the law. I was caught. I will be penalized. Period. End of discussion.
Same with the EULA and RMT. Whether you've read it or not, whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, no matter what clever-sounding rebuttals you pose - you are agreeing to not partake in RMT, or any other prohibited activities while you are playing the *company's* - not your - game. If you are caught, you are penalized, either by suspension or complete banning. If it happens, shut up, acknowledge that you were busted and accept it. Or.. don't do it in the first place.
I'm not even going to dignify your war on drugs example with a response - because it's just ridiculous and pointless to do so. The speeding analogy covers it perfectly.
And, I guess this will just never sink in with some people. I don't have to "preach"... It is, however, against the EULA you are agreeing to when you play the game. The facts stand for themselves... Square Enix banned around 1,100 accounts in FFXI in November *alone* because they were partaking in RMT and other related activities. They don't do it at random. They don't pick and choose which subscribers they don't like. They do it because the players are violating the terms of their EULA. There is no arguing this. There is no debating this. It *happens* all the time. All the theories and beliefs and arguments under the sun have no weight against it. You are going to be banned all the same.
As for the Gov't charging tax.. hey... so long as it's happening and a business is making money.. of course they want their cut.
Also, Mr. Kipe stated something to the effect that if what secondary market companies are doing is illegal, there would have been lawsuits against them. Interesting that most secondary market companies (from what I can tell) are off-shore from the US (even though they may be American owners) precisely to avoid lawsuits based on breaking of the EULAs. If these secondary market companies truly thought what they were doing is right, they'd form open, same country companies as the games are based in and relish the opportunity to prove once and for all they are legitimate.
People smoke crack cocain, people shoot up heroin, people shoot people in the head, people rob businesses, people kidnap people, people do alot of stupid shit, this does not mean we should make it legal or accept it.
As for the ones that simply dont care, go buy a ps3 an x box and a wii, this way you can spend all your money and the rest of us can still enjoy A GAME MANY OTHERS PLAY AT THE SAME TIME.
Secondary markets are very bad for an MMO. A few points:
In the past 5 mo. playing EQ2 I have gotten numerous tells about gold selling sites (this sucked because I had to spend a few mins. reporting it
). Now I'm getting in-game mail for these sites. Because of this It's not suprising that prices have gone drastically up for goods on the market.
Secondary markets are bad because of the people and/or actions that it brings. If it was a case of one guy having too many nice items selling them to someone working 60 hours a week that would be fine. When you have people just trying to make money by node stealing or using bots to block out content for days it has gone too far.
Someone who got a paycheck running a "gateway" from gold to money and back again is going to defend it. That's no suprise. People who want to enjoy a game without it being cheapened by secondary markets will want them routed.
The arguments made by Mr. Kipe are inherently flawed. Take his boat analogy. If you look at it from the point of the developers being the ones building the boat, then it's like someone taking the boat out for a spin, selling it to their friend, and pocketing the money... all without permission.
In the vein it was intended, other players own boats, it's still flawed; and this was the point Brad was trying to make. If it were a boat show, then fine... go look at the pretty boats. But RMT is more analogous to other people ramming their boats into yours because they don't know how to work them.
The thing that bothers me the most about RMT believers is their propensity to feel they have some right to do what they do. Going back to the boat analogy... it's on parallel with people feeling they have the right to buy a stolen boat because someone is willing to sell it to them. RMT sites have no right to sell the goods they offer... they're stolen!
Of course, I'm a believer that this whole thing is quite avoidable with proper rules within the game.
1) Stop off-line selling. #1 economy killer in an MMO is off-line traders. You make the person have to be there, have to advertise, a-la EQ1 before the bazaar. I always felt trading and such was more interesting when there was more interaction.
2) Track all avenues of revenue. You can then data mine to look for anomalies in where people are getting their gold. There are ways to do this... they may be tricky and somewhat complex, but there are ways.
3) By far the best way to police this issue is community. When people play as much for the community as for the game experience they're much less likely to buy things to achieve their goals.
4) Lastly, make a game worth playing. If gold can only get you so far, it will discourage the buying because it doesn't really put you that far ahead. Additionally, if getting that gold is a difficult/challenging prospect to begin with, then people will be less likely to part with their reserves. As far as character sells, those typically happen when a person is tired of the game.
I know people who participate in this are not going away anytime soon. Shaming, berating, pleading, etc. amounts to little with these people because they don't have enough integrity to feel what they're doing is wrong. If you can bring the focus on the game and the community within the game instead of on the character and his ill-gotten booty (or his ill-booten gotty), then you'll have a better game all-around while weakening the dregs of the MMO community.
This is like listening to an Atheist and a Christian argue back and forth.
The athetist (Pro RMT) keeps pointing out factual data suporting his point and all the Christian (Anti-RMT) can do is make stereotypically uneducated, broad and ignorant phrases such as "It's wrong" without having to back it up with any proof other than citing the popular concensus.
The RMT is the future of mmorpgs. If anyone reading lacks the foresight to agree with that statement then feel free to ease back into your comfortable little rut of understanding that the world is black and white right and wrong.
"Buying an extra queen?"
"Printing Money"?
Probably the worst analogies I've heard in months.
If you occasionally speed to work, you're a criminal and you're putting lives at risk.
Stick that black and whie tobacco in your pipe and smoke it.
I personally have been on both sides of the fence of this argument, I have invested many of my RL hours into games much to my woman's dismay as well I have been a RMT customer. I have grown up a video game addict since atari 2600 on and got hooked on mmoprgs since the OG EQ. Currently I am a working professional that makes a pretty decent living I have two little kids and a good social life. I dedacate my most of my gaming to the weekdays as when I get home from work I like a bit of escape for a few hours. This being said I kind of put my gamer ranking in between casual and hardcore (as I have been known to waste a few sick days playing). Here is my viewpoint for both sides of the debate:
1. anti-rmt : The people who side with this pretty much are battling a war that deals with time factor and they feel those who can spend the most amount of time per day playing should have the uberest gears. But since alot of people do not have the amount of free time to go on the necessary amount of raids to join a lotting group (which turns out to be a bit of a pyramid scheme as the bottom members help the top members get their gear first). I have nothing against people who have the time and put the effort in to get the highly prized items, as in my younger days I used to be one but for my stage in life I can no longer do it.
2. pro-rmt : The people feel like the time they invested entitles them to do what they wish regarding the items and characters that they created. I do not think there is anything work with people trying to make a buck, the problem with this is that this leads to farm shops being set up that seriously do put regular gamers hardcore and casual alike at a disadvantage to obatain highly valued items. I feel it is completely unfair to try to camp a mob against well known RMT characters to get an items, and unfortunetly this played perfectly into their hands. I'll use FFXI here as an example, I enjoyed playing that game with my friends but camping NMs became so tedius and frustrating that I gave up and felt it was worth it to buy gil allowing me just to purchase items so I could save my time and enjoy the game at high levels. I basicly comes down to the fact that I make enough money to say... 'hey me spending 3-4 hours hoping to get a claim on a mob and on top of that hoping it drops the item I wanted was not worth it'. If I spent 10 bucks to buy virtual money so i could buy an item, that would take me hours to camp and in RL I would make hundred of dollars in those hours it was logical for me to just click away and have fun.
I would like for there to be a happy medium place in this whole argument as I have seen RMT in all the MMORPGS I have played even though I have supported them, it is not something I am proud of as all I want to do is have fun like the rest of you. In the end I do believe there will always be some sort of RMT in these types of games, the burden is really upon the designers on how deep it gets. I was impressed by the way Sqaure finally stood up and noticed the issue was bonkers and did something about it besides banning tons of players, they also made it so more casual player could get uber gears by doing 'assualt' missions to accumulate points to eventually earn gear without having to camp against others or invest outrageous amounts of time. Regardless of how this debate turns out I already got my pre-order copy of Vanguard........
Equinix
Long debate , no really good answer on how to have a real solution to content RMT players and RP players but may be RMT are not the head of the problem. I think the problem of RMT is this one : why a gamer pay to get an account or an item ? All here have an answer and its most the same : chalenging. In the last 5 years, a world contest has grown : witch has the biggest sword or killed the XXX level boss of the game ! So people now pay to have the biggest of the biggest. I remember some peoples playing EQ in his first age who didnt care of theses things and played with fun. For my part the responsability of the RMT in the MMO games is both the part of players and dev. I explain my opinion in a simple phrase : what idea really new has come in our MMORPGs since the first release of UO/EQ/AO ? What new contest do we had even killing the biggest mob and getting the best stuff ? Perhaps i am wrong but i really think we need new heads to enjoy players. I am perhaps a dreamer but i really hope a new rpg with new ideas and not only heading on "i have the best thing". I want fun, I want good stories, I want to be interested and not become a gamebot in front of a PC. To finish, i remember the first time i logged into EQ some years ago : there was an ambiance really incredible with music and graphics, i fell small, young and when i attacked my first bat it was a big first fight. And why i remember this loggin after 6 years : EQ at this time had a soul, a marvelous soul.
Myrr the gnome
Oh really.
Are you completely brain-dead? No proof other than citing the popular consensus? Oh oh.. you mean those whose opinions don't suit your own. I get it. Umm.. sorry you're wrong. Some others and myself speak on personal experience with the changes in a MMO that increasing RMT over time has introduced. I have given specific examples in an earlier post in this thread. Of course, people like yourself who don't want to accept hard evidence will simply overlook it or dismiss it - since it doesn't serve your own personal agenda.
I hate to break it to you - but the real problems with RMT go way beyond any "popular consensus". They are problems resulting from RMT/farming/botting which the game designers/support teams themselves deal with on a daily basis and see their repurcussions at a much higher level than you or I or any other player. As a result, they recognize that RMT throws things way out of whack and makes the game unplayable for many people. In a game where every player is provided the same tools and means to achieve a given goal as every other player - a balanced playing field if you will - RMT introduces an unintended and unwelcomed element that completely throws that all off-balance and makes the game enjoyable for only a portion of the population, while making it harder for everyone else. It becomes an uneven playing field.
These are the findings of the game's support teams themselves, through data gathered relating to all players across all servers... not just one person on one server who feels they're somehow more priviledged than everyone else. If you honestly believe you have a better grip or overview on how things are affected in their game by any given player activity than they do, you are severely delusional. The developers have hard numbers which support the attitude I and others against RMT base their arguments on. The Pro-RMT people have home-brewed theories and self-edifying analogies based only upon your own self-serving opinions. The fact that RMT is a bannable offense clearly shows that reality doesn't share the pro-RMT point-of-view.
Another point against your "popular consensus" theory.. do some research. Go to different games' websites and do some reading, you'll find information regarding their stance on RMT and how they deal with it. Here's a direct quote from Play Online, which they post once a month... It relates to the usage of third-party programs and such - but still manages to remove 10s of billions of gil from the economy across all servers.. Now, guess where the vast majority of that gil and 3rd-party software usage comes from? DING! RMT farmers - the people you in-turn buy your way through the game from!
"We would like to remind players that the use of third party programs adversely affect game balance. Along with affecting game balance, other risks can arise from use of third party programs that are not immediately obvious such as possibly introducing damaging viruses and compromising the security of private account details. Usage of third-party tools will not be tolerated within FINAL FANTASY XI and we will continue to severely penalize any players found to be in violation of the PlayOnline Member Agreement.
During this round of account terminations, we mainly focused on RMT operations that were active within Japan. However, rest assured that our continued investigations encompass all regions where RMT activity is occurring.
As we continue to ensure a fun and balanced environment for FINAL FANTASY XI, we hope that our players enjoy the game as it was intended and take care to avoid involvement in activities that violate the PlayOnline Member Agreement."
Here's a link to the original article if you'd like to see the actual numbers:
http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/polnews/news9096.shtml
In particular, note the second paragraph... notice what they say, "we mainly focused on RMT operations... However, rest assured that our continued investigations encompass all regions where RMT activity is occurring." Gee... I wonder what that could mean? That RMT is okee-dokey and honky-dory? Wrong. It's prohibited. And, because by now I'm fairly certain most, if not all, the pro-RMT posters in this thread will not comprehend the simple connection here... I'll spell it out for you.
The RMT farmers are using these prohibited 3rd party programs/hacks to obtain the gil you are buying. They automate their movements, they scan the game's memory and auto-target/claim high-demand mobs giving them a ridiculous and unfair advantage over legitimate players. By this they make the game completely imbalanced against people actually playing the game the way it was designed to be played. This alone is reason to deal with them. But it doesn't stop there... They use 3rd party apps and related tactics to monopolize named creatures and valuable items, shoving out legitimate players from *playing* the game they are paying for, driving the prices up and making many things unattainable to anyone but those willing to buy their in-game money. To be clear: the affect RMT has on a game is *not* only in that it allows you to buy things that others have to work for - it is not so simple, nor puritan an issue. There are a number of peripheral effects that it has as well - none of which are good. All of which need to be dealt with. And, no, it doesn't mean that the developers made a mistake by not designing RMT into the game and should alter it to allow both - another ridiculous rebuttal I've seen.
To point out another simple truth that seems to completely go over some people's (pro-RMT's) heads: MMORPGs are games designed to be played and enjoyed by people within the parameters set forth in the game by the developers. They are not market-places for subscribers to put up a store-front and run their own business selling money/item/account for real-world money through eBay, IGE and other sites completely unrelated and unsupported by the developer/publisher. If you disagree, please provide me the official documentation that states where I'm wrong. Go ahead. I can wait. Seriously. If so many of you RMT'ers feel so completely justified and righteous in what you're doing, it must mean you've got some kind of leg to stand on beyond your own personal opinions. So please, let's see it. I can back myself and everything I say up with hard proof. Can you?
If that comes across as arrogant, well, then maybe it is. And I really don't care if pro-RMT types are offended by it, because I am offended by your lazy, self-centered, self-serving, dishonest attitudes, that you believe the rules don't apply to you and you can just do as you please, indifferent to how it - demonstrably - affects others. Except for a few notable exceptions, MMOs are not designed with RMT in mind. They have terms prohibiting RMT and related activity in their Terms of Use/EULAs. They outwardly express that they prohibit and will penalize anyone caught engaging in RMT And related activity - such as the FFXI example above. And finally, they regularly and openly follow through on that by actively banning accounts of people for violating those terms. Seriously... How much more proof could you pro-RMTers need to finally get it into your heads that you are *wrong*?
So.. by all means, please keep arguing your ridiculous rebuttals and theories and analogies in favor it all you want. In fact, when you decide to contact the game company with all that drivel after they've banned you - please come and post the results here. I would *love* to see their response - or non-response to it.
Equinix
Lets see if I can change your mind a little. First of all, I think that anyone that has played FFXI has experienced what your talking about with the NM thing, being monopolized and such. I've felt that way. But instead of going out and buying gil to get what I wanted, I found other ways of making gil, which is the whole point here.
Think about it really man, there are so many ways of making gil, in a fair way. You have beastmen seals, kindred seals, both very good ways of making lots of money. You can do ENM's, lvl a craft, fish, or maybe your NM is way overcamped, so go camp a NM with a drop of similar price, sell it and buy your item (ive done that many times). You could even be one of the farmers that kill the same mob over and over, i dont like doing that at all, but its a sure way to get you there adventually.
Really man, taking part of the action and doing these things is fun, Ive never done a BCNM that wasnt fun, even if i wiped. Also you get that sence of achievement like everyone has been saying. Most important tho you get to be involved in the game as you work your way up.. and there are 2 things that saying this makes me think of why you people cheat.
#1. If one way or thing dont work out for you people you give up and assume there is nothing else you can do and turn to cheating :(. Use your heads.
#2. Honestly, you said it yourself, the real reason you did this is because you wanted to skip the game to get to top lvl and do your business there. Its not how to play a game. I really feel this is the #1 reason people buy gold, because they just want to hit top lvl blah blah... and they "have" to be the first to do it, or "have" to do it the quickest, or "have" to be the richest, or "have" to be the most pimped out.
In ending, I feel that 2ndary market is horrible, it has potential to be ok, but the reasons especially in #2 there is why it will never be good. People will not just guy enough gold to maybe get one item that has been hard for them to get, they will continue to buy millions and millions of gold so they can have the best of everything and never have to work for gold again. If this was a single player game, do what you want, but its not, so you should be respectful of others. Just because your successful in RL dont give you a free pass to do anything you want, including taking part in ruining games. Think about that.
SOE's exchange server really didn't do anything positive, just "legitimized" the Secondary Market as SOE wanted to make more money. The other servers still get ingame emails and tells for "buy eqgold.com" and reporting them does little, they'll just make a new toon.
The success of WoW has really brought this into the light. The buying/selling of ingame items has been around at least since EQ1 but now with 7mil+ subscribers even a small percentage of gold farmers is A Lot of people.
Problem is that once an account is banned the farmer just shrugs and creates a new account and continues along.
I also think it wouldn't matter how you redesigned a game. If it uses any kind of currency, gear or advancement the farmers will find a way to exploit it and make a buck. Just in games like WoW, EQ2, etc it's easier for them as they are games built around advancement through gear.
In real life, stock brokers spend all day on the stock floor trading stocks just to sell them later for more money. In-game, some people spend all day farming a certain material or item just to sell it for gold later. What's the difference with a company farming gold to sell it for real money? i'm so sick of people complaining about the secondary market, it HELPS things. a couple of my friends also buy gold, you know what we do with it? 8/10 times we spend it on things to help our guildies instead of ourselves. why complain about someone that likes to use his real life money to help with in-game money? basically, you pay a monthly fee to play and enjoy an online game.....people who buy gold are only spending more money to get even more enjoyment out of the game. you don't see us saying "look at that idiot that farms for his gold" so why should non-gold buyers say "look at that idiot that bought the gold"?
Happy farming to ya!
Pro rmt are the athiests giving facts? What facts are these? I have read numerous posts from people that have experienced effects of RMT on an MMORPG, I myself have posted a very well written posts explaining multiple ways of how RMT hurts a game. I have yet to see a valid point from Pro-rmt, let alone factual evidance that RMT is good, that has not been shown for the BS that it is.
I do understand there have been alot of people that have said things against RMT that where uneducated, but simply because you pick these points out and ignore all the valid ones does not mean you have won an argument. You have yet to address anything of intelligence thrown your way. Although I do give you the benifit of the doubt and can understand the possibility of you missing some of the better arguments due to the sheer volume of large posts.
That's the magic word in my mind, Authentic...
I don't like the idea of playing with other people that didn't earn their level, or the gear that they have on their back. It makes me lose respect for that said person and inevitably, lands them on my ignore list. There are several reasons for this with the most important factor being that they didn't experience the game like a true level 60 (example) player did. In addition, as many people have already pointed out, it cripples the in-game economy.
Just like Brad noted in the debate, people do lose that sense of achievement if the people around them did not earn their status. Though, as long as the player doesn't admit to it and doesn't show that they lack knowledge in playing the character, it doesn't hurt anything.
Don't ask, Don't tell.
I also don't know how courts are able to rule in the favor of the player if it is the player who accepts the EULA every single time they log into the game. Seeing as it is a user agreement to play the game, a single statement that states that nothing on the account is tangible, would clear any misconceptions of the player "owning" anything.
Regards,
SOE is merely acting in character by getting their share of the pie.
Actually I don't think either won the debate. It seemed more like information...our side and the "dark" side. I have played games ever since pong came out on a home console and lately have been trying to keep up with a virtual world in WOW. I have to say I really hope that Brad pulls off an excellent and fair game with his upcoming release...(and pray Sony gives him grace to "not" have an exchange server). Brad seems a man of moral fiber when it comes to producing a game that is true to what an mmorpg should be, such as was Garriott.
And by the way, who would be
whining after court should our "non-Korean" court (America is grand aint' it) decide that this intellectual property was the game company's property. Oh the RIAA says you don't really own the darned music on that "Deck the Halls" cd you bought this Christmas. Nope...that's why clubs have to pay a royalties fee just to PLAY the jukebox. So you work hard at your company and toil laboriously...............Does that mean you own it. Ha! You'd be fired if you said that.
My wife and I play together and she actually plays alot more than myself being a stay at home mom. We have 3 children all with difficulties and cannot afford the luxury to dish out another 100,200, etc. dollars to go buy gold just to keep up with an inflating game economy. The real world is bad enough as it is, and we would like to have a fantasy world to sometimes escape to that isn't plagued by someone south of Ho Chi Minh City saying "buy gold for horse.1000g for $200.00. In which I hurriedly look up on Swearmonger, how to say "you idiot" in Mandarin. Good thing my virtual hands do not come through the computer screen at them.
Ye who buy the gold. You screw our game up!!! stop.. Go get drunk or something, money much better spent. Everytime you buy gold, a paladin winds up naked somewhere. Some of you know what I mean. And the gold sellers know exactly what I mean
Nope nope, the stuff on it and in it belongs to the game producer/company and I will be so glad to get this debate over once and for all. Brad, tell Sony to take it to court. Get some advice from the RIAA first.(wink)
To the people that have been saying that Secondary Markets are okay because it is not unethical and not cheating as opposed to hacking, you are wrong. What is the definition of cheating? Disobeying the rules of the game. When you agree to the TOS and EULA you are agreeing to a legal contract and the rules of the game. If in those documents it says that you cannot buy and sell items for real life currency, you are then breaking the rules, thus cheating.
To the Korean court case: I don't know how the courts work over there. I do however know any court of law in the United States of America would recognize any legal binding contract that you agree to when you log into an MMO, and that the intellectual properties of the said company were specific in a said contract that you may not sell them.
It seems to me that what is taking place in the Gaming community regarding the secondary market is not only a shift by the companies producing these games but also a shift in competative values.
Let me spin something for everyone to consider: What is the purpose of gaming?
Is it not to challenge the player? Can you name one single game or sport that is not intended to challenge you in some way? Even when there is no winner or loser, there is still someone who competed better then everyone else. Games were created and are still created to challenge you, the player.
The problem is, some opportunistic types see that there is money to be made by giving some players a way to cheat or overcome some of the challenges in the game. And some players take those easy outs and explain it away by saying.. "We'll I work all day and can't play the game as much as so-and-so." or "I don't belong to a super-Guild and can't achieve end-game items."
But what these players don't understand is that they are bypassing the challenge, or the spirit, of the game. This is called cheating, no matter how you look at it, it is cheating. It violates the rules of the game (i.e. the EULA) and it doesnt matter if those rules are invalid in a court of law or not, they ARE the rules of the game. Just because a court of law says you have the right to vioate those rules, doesnt mean that it is proper or ethical to do so.
Unfortunetely many, many people just don't understand how to be ethical or how to play a game the way it was intended to be played. Either they just really don't "get" the spirit of the game, or they enjoy causing mayhem and holding their ill-gotten goods over other people who made their accomplishments legitametly.
And the example Mr Kipe gave about the boat is completely invalid in this debate. We are not talking about boat building, we are talking about gaming. And gaming comes with a set of rules that players are expected to follow. Not because it is a matter of life and death, or because they are forced to, just because that is the way the game was meant to be played. If you want an example here is a better one... When you play Monopoly with your friends do you allow them to start with $10,000 each? No. Why? Because the game was not made to be played that way and not only do they have an unfair advantage but the challenge, the spirit of the game is lost.
It's not about comparing yourself to another player, Mr Kipe is correct in that statement. But the shift in competative values that Mr Kipe advocates is a no-win situation for everyone including the secondary black market which is now being devoured by studios who allow the purchasing of items. The secondary market is a beast that will continue to spawn bad idea after bad idea for decades to come. And it is a shame.
I can't say too much how I hate people breaking the rules and then thinking they are better than other people for doing it. Stupid.
[quote]Roger Kipe: I will address both of your arguments:
I had a friend that once built a boat. It took him a great deal of time and was all he thought about for as long as some of his friends could remember. He celebrated with all of his friends when he finished the project and took everyone out to see how great the ship performed. He was as proud of himself for the work he had done as for the ability to show it to others. We saw plenty of other boats that day on the lake and some were much more beautiful and clearly worth more money but this did not deter my friend from gleaming like a beacon as he knew it was the work and dedication he had put in that made his special and it did not matter how the others had gotten their boats....[/quote]
Anyone else thknk this analogy is fundamentaly flawed ? I understand where he's coming from, and I agree about the value of accomplishements, but the analogy doesn't hold the road because there are too many differences between the environnements (RL vs MMO) that makes it pointless IMO.
Let us look at the thought patterns for a momment.
I have money. Someone is offering an item in a game. I can buy that item in the game. My agreement says I cannot. The agreement cannot stop me. I can hide the fact that I have broken the agreement. I do not agree to the EULA. The EULA says I must agree to play. I will play even though I do not agree.
I promise you wages. You work for me and perform X amount of hours. I never actually agreed to pay you. I just wanted you to work. I am not going to pay you. It is easier for me to not pay you. I still want you to work for me.
What is wrong here? What kind of morality are we upholding for ourselves and others? We sure can do things. We have arms and legs. We have mouths and hands. We can write a word, or stab someone. But does it make us good or evil? And let me ask you, how would you like the world to be? Well the world is what it is right?
Thanks,
John
I would think that it all comes down to who is getting the money; its all about the money. If I was CEO of a company that created a product and other third parties were making money off of it I would prolly be upset. But IMO I think that third parties are going to continue to make profits where they can, and publishers are going to make money where they can as well. Thats after all the nature of retail, to make a profit. We all know this is a multi-million dollar industry and ther is alot of money involved. Wether or not its right, or fair, or effects the game in a positive way or a negative one.
Without aid from the Federal/State Legislature, how do you combat something like this? In any case, if you spend money battling these third parties I would expect to see an inflation in monthly costs etc. and that defeats the purpose of trying to make a dollar in the first place.
I think that the issue is gonna be to fork out dollars to combat it, (lots of it) or find a means of tolerating it and directing revenues back toward the game itself. Then there is always the issue of tax from Good old IRS.
The truth is third party companies have been in business for a reason, and I'm willing to bet its because they have made good profits. That said, there are a vast majority out there willing to pay money that publishers want, for in game items. I would expect to see more companies and third parties find common ground on a subject If they are in fact revenue driven.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing only I feel money and greed will prevail in a corporate world where millions are at stake.
Wow. What article did you read?
Heck, Brad is the one who used the lawsuit card instead of actually coming up with a thought-provoking argument.
Clearly, Brad was owned. Big time.
This was one of my posts from before the database loss here...
1. An item I wanted to get in FFXI that was going for 100k shot up to over 500k by the time I'd obtained the money to buy it. This was prior to SE cracking down on the RMT problem.. Since then, that same item is back down to around 100k
2. A Ju-jitsu Gi, another piece of gear in FFXI, cost me 450k at the time I bought it. After that, but before SE started dealing with the RMT problem seriously, the influx of RMT-generated gil in the economy caused the prices of that item - alone - to go up over 3 million. Square started cracking down on the RMT and I've since seen it back down as low as 370k but hanging around 450-500k - about the same price I paid for it 2 years ago.
3. In Lineage II, RMT is so ingrained and the farmers/botters have such a strangle-hold on the economy that when NC does do a token banning, it screws many people up and the prices are all over the place, until the RMT folks get new toons to take their place. Seen this happen a few times.
4. In a few MMOs I've played, RMT botters/farmers will monopolize rare mobs and, in some cases, go as far as attempting to kill off players competing for the spawn. This is the case even in games without PvP. It was a big problem in FFXI before SE stepped in and changed things around.
To address your FFXI concerns the price of items in game inflated so drastically not because of RMT initially, in 2004 a dupe came out in FFXI that lasted until Jan 2006, I would blame SE for not having any control over their game mechanics and not having the checks in place to notice that there was billions of gil a day being added to the economy. You know how the dupe was fixed? Because finally some responsible RMT company found out what was taking place to dupe and contacted SE to hand in the information. A dupe is just as bad for the RMT market as it is for the game economy and players. Then again around March 2006 another dupe ran rampant and again economy started to take a crap, mass supply of gil caused inflation on prices of items. Once again it took an RMT company to turn over the dupe to SE to get it fixed.
As for the camping of rare spawns ect ect this is stemming from the production side of the market, the “farming” market. This is not Mogs or any other respectable company in the market paying people to go farm, honestly Mogs gets a majority of the currency we sell from Players not from “farms”. That is how the market was when I started, buying an account strip it down, sell off items in game then sell account and plat. That did not add extra currency to the economy it kept it at the same level.. no inflation! Now things have changed and yes mass farming can cause inflation.. but not to the degree you all think, the inflation is coming about from dupes and hacks. The farms are playing the game, not exploiting and selling items off in Auction Houses to get the currency.. so there is still the intended exchange of Item for Currency.. so its still semi staying in line with the game mechanics of economic development of the server.
I know that due to the RMT market being in place there is an incentive for hackers/dupers to find the next get rich quick bug in a game. But even without our market in place there would still be hacks/ dupes just for players to get an advantage. I mean look at all the cheat/ hack pay sites, you think those would disappear and suddenly the games would become “Pure” if RMT just dried up? Lets face it whether its in real life or in game people like to get one step ahead and sometimes they will do whatever it takes to get there.
Now, to keep this discourse honest (an ugly word to you I'm sure), allow me to re-quote my statements in an easily legible light yellow:
Quote:
-------------------------------------------------
1. An item I wanted to get in FFXI that was going for 100k shot up to over 500k by the time I'd obtained the money to buy it. This was prior to SE cracking down on the RMT problem.. Since then, that same item is back down to around 100k
2. A Ju-jitsu Gi, another piece of gear in FFXI, cost me 450k at the time I bought it. After that, but before SE started dealing with the RMT problem seriously, the influx of RMT-generated gil in the economy caused the prices of that item - alone - to go up over 3 million. Square started cracking down on the RMT and I've since seen it back down as low as 370k but hanging around 450-500k - about the same price I paid for it 2 years ago.
3. In Lineage II, RMT is so ingrained and the farmers/botters have such a strangle-hold on the economy that when NC does do a token banning, it screws many people up and the prices are all over the place, until the RMT folks get new toons to take their place. Seen this happen a few times.
4. In a few MMOs I've played, RMT botters/farmers will monopolize rare mobs and, in some cases, go as far as attempting to kill off players competing for the spawn. This is the case even in games without PvP. It was a big problem in FFXI before SE stepped in and changed things around.
----------------------------------------------------
End QuoteOkay, the fact that you are trying to present RMT as some legitimate business and using the word "respectable" to describe it makes it, and you, a joke from the get-go. I'm sure your cronies eat it up and cheer you on... the rest of us who actually see it for what it is aren't buying it for a moment.
Before I go any further... let's establish to some intellectual honesty (again, I know it'll be difficult for you.. but try) and set out a few basic, well-supported and easily verifiable facts here, shall we?
1. RMT and its related activities are expressely against the EULA of pretty much every MMORPG out there. You play the game, you agree to the terms and to abide by them.
2. By playing the game and pressing that button that says "I Accept" or "I Agree" or any variation thereof on the EULA screen, that you will not do anything in violation of those rules - whether you personally agree with them or not.
3. It is proven time and again that the MMORPG companies do not want RMT taking place in their game by the very fact that they ban accounts and, in some cases, post the results on their website - such as with Square and Blizzard, among others. Another clear indication that it's probably not something you should be doing. If you doubt this, allow me to point you to a few websites proving it.
4. That there are debates about it to begin with indicates that it is -at best- a questionable activity (though of course, it's not nearly that - it's an outright prohibited activity). If it were as "honky-dory" as you and others try to make it seem, it would just be "how it is" and certainly wouldn't be the topic of so much debate.
That said, it's a lovely picture you paint on the inflation problems... I especially love the bit about the "respectable RMT company blowing the whistle on the duping problem" - which I could believe if you said it was because who ever did the duping was hurting that RMT company's business. Either way, quite the Cinderella story. It would almost be plausible.. had I not played the game since day 1 of its NA PC launch and seen and experienced for myself, first-hand, the direct actions of RMT companies and their direct effects on the economy. The game has been out for what... several years now? I think it's safe to say a dupe that occured over the course of months does not account for the effects of RMT over the long term. And besides which, that dupe was addressed some time ago - yet Square is still tracking down and banning accounts of those engaging in RMT and related activities on a monthly basis. Seems your theory, as usual, doesn't hold up too well when plain common-sense and verifiable fact comes into play.
The whole "if the developers did their jobs better..." argument is over-used and hollow as well.
But again.. I understand.. you have a very personal interest in the RMT industry and so you're doing your part to spread the propaganda and make as many people as possible believe it's a perfectly acceptable practice... even while accounts of those all around them are being banned left and right for it. Oh well.. Ignorance is bliss as they say.
Fact: MMORPGs are games to be *played* within the confines and the context of the game rules that are applied equally to all players, as designed by the developers.
Fact: MMORPGs - other than those specifically designed with it in mind, such as Entropia Universe - are not designed for nor intended to support RMT activity as it throws the level playing-field out of whack.
I have offered up this very simple challenge a couple times now and so far, no one has been able to meet it... Let's see how you fare, oh "Mr. Respectable RMT Company" rep...
Find me documentation - official documentation - in the form of press releases, game manuals, walk-throughs.. anything officially released by a game developer that states buying money from yours or any other RMT company as an intended and encouraged part of their game. Please. I keep assuming that there are so many people who feel they're so justified in engaging in RMT that they must have *something* backing them up beyond their own self-serving theories and opinions... Yet, to date, no one's been able to produce a single printed word, a link.. nothing.
So let's see how you do. Again, I'm not holding my breath.
On the other hand, I can provide ample documentation and links to sources where the companies quite openly and, in some cases, aggressively state that RMT and related activity is strictly prohibited and deemed a bannable offense.
In closing.. Nice try. No cigar.
Out of innocent fun appears the possibility to earn money, so the cockroaches don´t need long to take the stage. And worst is, in lazy decadence people actually feed them, thus allowing the parasites to grow and get cocky (best example: this thread) AND totally corrupting everything RPGs used to stand for. RolePlayingGames, yeah, or BuyYourToonAndBeUberInaDay. BYTABUID, so to say.
But hell, that´s what you get when people are indoctrinated to believe that games are about competition AND that if you paid for it, it ain´t cheating. Truth is, some games aren´t all about competition and it IS cheating even if you paid for it.
I have nothing but pity and contempt for people who buy toons/items/gold. I hope they get all banned from everywhere and forever. As for those that make a living out of it, I hope you people manage to get a REAL JOB and I hope your bosses rot in jail. Wishful thinking, but that´s me...
lol.. And....? Yes, there are thousands of people who engage in RMT for a variety of reasons.. none of them justified. You just happen to get a share of those people. I suppose you feel this somehow makes your practice more legitimate.. but it means nothing. RMT is still prohibited and it's still a bannable offense. How big your fan club is has no impact on that.
And I present that challenge to people full knowing they could never provide the black-and-white proof that what they're doing is as legit as they claim it to be - because no such documentation exists. Which means, you and your like have no leg to stand on, again, except your home-spun, self-serving theories and rationalizations.. all of which mean squat.
And again, it didn't escape my attention that you managed to slip some more self-promotion into the post.
Not sure if this has been pointed out or not, but I couldn't see it anywhere, but that qoute is the ultimate in contradiction, and basically lost the arguement for our gold-selling friend. It seriously buried him in a way that not even his opponent could match.
He clearly states (marked in red) that your accomplishment or joy should come from the work you have put into acheiving something, however he is selling the exact opposite, meaning he doesn't beleive in what his business does. 100% shot down Mr. Kipe because at this point it became clear that you dont actually beleive in the morals and ethics of gold selling you were defending, but were more intrested in the fast cash from people who have mindsets entirely opposite to what you beleive.
Next tome you go to war, it would be a good idea to make sure your not handing out ammunition to the enemy.
So I think then the question arises to many people: Is time a more valuable commodity than money? If I work 52 hours a week, Why should some 14 year old on summer vacation have a better gaming experience than me? He may have more time, but I have more money, shouldn't I be able to balance it out?
I think the answer depends alot on your view of the game. I view it as simply a place to have fun. But a lot of people seem to have the attitude that they have to 'win'.
It also has some larger implications in servers set up for European and possibly asian nations. The income in Germany versus Bulgaria is hugely different.
As to the lawsuit, I found it patentedly ludicrous. The player's efforts in getting the sword made it his, rather than the company who put the time and effort into not only creating the sword to begin with, but creating the methods to get it? Does that mean that since I put the time and effort into finding and buying a MS operating system, it belongs to me and I can ignore it's EULA?
I dont see how posting comments from people that have used your services says anything in favor of RMT. Sure, it shows that your company doesnt rip people off, and that some people think your better then other RMT companies. I'm sure if I talked to 10 crackheads 9 out of 10 would recommend thier dealer to, it still isnt right.
You try to use some companies move to get thier peace of the RMT market as a reason, but games/servers that use RMT arnt where we have the problem with your services. It is the games and servers that where not designed for it that we have the problem with.
Plain and simple selling game currency for real money is against the rules in most games, and should not be allowed in those games. If they make games that allow RMT feel free to do business in those games. I have no problem with you or your company, only it's effects on games I enjoy playing.
In a post I believe was lost I said something along the lines of this. I dont disagree that a constant influx of new currency will cause inflation, but when you've played a game for 2 years and the inflation was slow and steady, and suddenly within months of RMT becoming mainstream prices jump 4 times as much as they did in the previous 2 years, then you can figure out what's going on without being nearly as intelligent as I am.
I'm sure dupe bugs and other such dishonest things added to it, but there where times of inflation with no known dupes going on. Even if your comnpany has never from infancy to now used such means of gaining gold, others of your ilk have. I'm sure there are companies such as yours that attempt to stay as legitimate as a company that breaks the rules can be. But there are plenty of you that do not.
I have seen this for a very long time starting with the first sales of uo items on ebay. I said right then and there the company is missing out on lotza money by not setting up a secure trade. well took them a few years to get the program set up but they did finnaly fall in line. You can't stop it so join it and you make the money you being the game company instead of ebay.
As far as ingame economies being ruined by this I just dont see it. Anyone who buys gold is still gonna look ingame for the best deals.Prices ingame are determined by supply and demand. I sold gold for a few years on several different games before they had game companies selling it. Most of my gold buyers were buying gold to buy crafting supplies. Very rarely did I hear any of them tell me they were buying the gold for a item. In uo lots of them bought gold for houses if you want to consider that a item then so be it.
I feel like the game companies need to take charge of thier own items and help with securing trades.
I also heard the irs is also looking at this ingame property having real world value and are working towards taxing us on it. I see this as we have no one to blame but ourselves.
Could it be that someday only the very wealthy can even play these games? well the p2p games anyway. The F2p games are really turning alot of heads. I recently tried one of the newer ones out and was like WOW there are alot of people in this game. Arewe going to see a major market change and they all go F2p? The companies doing this must be making money off selling items or they would not be making so many of them. Just try Rappelz I think you will be shocked at how many players are there,and how many you see that have items that have been purchased with the ole USD from there item mall.
I'm glad the gov't is going to start taxing them. Good. Serves 'em right. Those like myself who actually *play* the game won't be affected. Let the lazy idiots who want everything "now" and choose to buy their way through the games because - heaven forbid - they would otherwise actually be "forced" to experience the game the way it was intended to be played, and be - gasp - challenged enjoy reaping the fruits of what they've sown. Couldn't leave well enough alone and insist on bringing real life values into a fantasy game... well, the Government is gonna help you along. Good job, y'all. Hope you enjoy paying your real taxes on fictitious items. Myself and others like me will be playing the game the way it was designed. I hope it's a steep tax, too. Serves 'em right for being lazy, challenge-inept imbeciles in the first place.
Yes, I mean every word of that as harshly as it's come across.
Perhaps you are not getting the entire point.... If in game items or currency is taxes then it will be taxed for everyone, not just those guys that buy it from the RMT shops. Either the items have currency or they dont according to the Goverment!
You can't place a real-world tax on fictitious currency in a fake economy. Things bought or otherwise acquired entirely in-game for gold, or silver, or adena, or gil, or isk, or information or any other made-up form of currency in an online game cannot have a real-world tax applied to them.
I'm pretty certain this is only going to affect RMT purchases that happen outside the game and involve the exchange of real-world money. To which I still say.. Good.
You can't place a real-world tax on fictitious currency in a fake economy. Things bought or otherwise acquired entirely in-game for gold, or silver, or adena, or gil, or isk, or information or any other made-up form of currency in an online game cannot have a real-world tax applied to them.
I'm pretty certain this is only going to affect RMT purchases that happen outside the game and involve the exchange of real-world money. To which I still say.. Good.
Nope... It works like this...
RMT companies already pay taxes on the selling of currency. What the federal goverment is talking about doing is assigning a real world value to in game currency or items and then charging a tax on anyone who trades them in game or buys them in game. As the Federal Goverment sees it, if they have a real world value and are traded on a regular basis then they should be taxed. That is the danger in what they are discussing. So be prepared to pay a tax on every item you buy and sell in game.
Nope... It works like this...
RMT companies already pay taxes on the selling of currency. What the federal goverment is talking about doing is assigning a real world value to in game currency or items and then charging a tax on anyone who trades them in game or buys them in game. As the Federal Goverment sees it, if they have a real world value and are traded on a regular basis then they should be taxed. That is the danger in what they are discussing. So be prepared to pay a tax on every item you buy and sell in game.
Edit:
Originally, this post was a concession that I'd discovered that there are plans to impose taxes on in-game/virtual items and such... Now it's merely a concession that there is certainly a prevalent rumor that it's so...
After posting this message originally this morning, I went to work and got to talking with a co-worker about it. His initial response, "Oh, that's crap..." And we didn't really talk much more about it. I went back to my desk and started the day.. about 10 minutes later, he says "Hey Mike... come here...". On his screen was the following link:
http://computationaltruth.net/rants/archive/2006/12/the_stupidity_of_the_mmorpg_ta.html
Between that and several other articles he went on to read after that (he was as appalled by the idea as me, and he don't even play MMOs!) the overwhelming concensus is that:
A: It's a rumor. There is no official, substantiated word that the government has any intention of placing real taxes on virtual assets with no real world value, much less that they're in the process of implementing it.
B: There are currently no laws, regulations, etc. to impose on virtual economies where virtual items/money are exchanged for other virtual items/money. There is no tangible real-world benefit to it. It's all vapor. That's not to say that, at some point down the road, it *couldn't* happen.. it's just not likely to happen for a goooooood long time. And, even then, like so much else on the Internet, it's impossible to track. Who exactly would police it? In all, tens of Millions of people play and exchange items and virtual money from all around the world, every minute of everyday. Who's going to set and enforce the laws on that scale?
The only place I can see this happening is in something like Second Life or Entropia Universe where real world currency is directly converted into in-game cash and, most importantly, *back* again into real world cash. Similarly, RMT can be taxed as, again, real world money is coming into play on both ends of the transaction... since in those cases, it's really not much different from buying something from Amazon.com, etc. Again, it's something like poetic justice to me. Wanna use real money to play a fantasy game, 'cause you're too lazy to play within the intended game rules? Fine... pay real world taxes, too. Enjoy lying in the bed you've made. The rest of us legitimate players will be playing the game as designed, earning our gear/assets as intended and paying no more than our monthly subscription.
So.. in the end, it's not nearly so doom and gloom as I thought it would be. I don't imagine it's going to be a problem for a very very long time - if ever.
Indeed. They should call it the "Stupid & Lazy Tax" - and define it as "A tax imposed on those too inept, or just too lazy to play a MMORPG within the parameters it was designed and promoted to be played; whom instead insist on supporting a prohibited behavior by buying their way through a fantasy game, purchasing fictitious items and currency with real world money. Further, it is aimed at those whom, despite mountains of proof to the contrary readily available for anyone capable of doing a simple Google search, continue to insist that it is a justified and perfectly acceptable means of playing a game. For their inability to adhere to the same rules as everyone else, as well as their blatant ignorance of the facts that clearly show RMT as a prohibited activity, not to mention how they annoy everyone else with their cries of injustice and lack of "fairness" in being "forced" to play a game the way it was designed (oh, the horror), we are imposing this tax. Maybe that'll get it through to them and shut them up once and for all."
For those who *still* want to debate it.. I give you Square Enix's update for December, posted on 12/20/06:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today, a number of accounts which were confirmed to have violated the user agreement by using unauthorized third-party software tools within FINAL FANTASY XI to enable abnormal in-game movement were discovered and have been suspended or permanently terminated.
Based on the results of our investigation, over 7,450 PlayOnline accounts were terminated while over 250 accounts were temporarily suspended indefinitely.
The breakdown for the suspensions is as follows:
- Accounts confirmed using third party tools to illegally move their characters:
400 cases
- Accounts confirmed using third party tools to give an unfair advantage over other
players in order to get claim on Notorious Monsters.
4400 cases
- Accounts confirmed using illegal means to obtain items
100 cases
- Accounts from people that were previously confirmed to have RMT connections, or that had violated the user agreements but re-subscribed to PlayOnline.
2800 cases
The results of our investigation resulted in the confiscation of over 6.2 Billion gil
We would like to take this time to remind our players that the use of any third-party tools will not only destroy the in-game balance, but will also encourage RMT (real money trading) activities. We will continue to take strict actions against those individuals that we have confirmed to have used such tools.
Please note that some of these third-party tools may cause character information to be altered, erased, or personal information to be leaked to unwanted third parties. If you come across a third-party tool over the Internet, we ask that you please refrain from the download of such a tool, no matter how minor it may appear to be.
While we did not include a RMT heading in this announcement, RMT related activities are being investigated by a separate group and we plan to act on the results of this investigation at a later date. With the newly revised policies in effect, our GM teams are not only pursuing the buy and sell of gil, but also the illegal actions by RMT affiliates who seek to control certain areas within FINAL FANTASY XI with the purpose of furthering RMT related activities.
As of Dec. 10, the development team implemented a fix to prevent items from being obtained in an illegal manner. Action has been taken against accounts that participated in these activities.
To ensure that our customers can enjoy the game safely, we will continue to apply measurements to combat these third-party tools and violations.
We thank you for your cooperation and understanding in this matter.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
So please, tell us again how RMT is okay...
If I were to play through a single player offline game, using godmode, I obviously will win the game in the fastest way a first time player can possibly do. Once I beat the game, I get a cheap shallow view of how the game was. Now what if I just used the cheat in a few hard spots, because after hours of frustration I found it to just be annoying and not entertainment anymore.
Do you blame the cheater for cheating, or the gaming company for maybe making a legitimately annoying part in the game?
If the secondary market exists it is because enough people find the game to be lacking and unfun, or they assume they can get some advantage. Whose fault is this? If money was gradually made at a pace that wasn't extreme, the need would be worthless.
Games like Lineage 2, WoW, DAoC, EQ2 use in game money and items as huge timesinks to keep you playing. What if I find one section of the leveling terrible, and need help, the levels 30-40 severely lacking compared to the previous 30, and once you get through the grind the game gets better again.
Do I quit, after being severely bored of the game, or do I give myself a boost to keep me playing?
This little spiel of course is most definately from a individual, personal view, and not from a larger scale, while the secondary market can help me, what it can do to the entire game is terrible.
I feel Brad won the argument by far, and Roger did nothing but skid around the issue basically saying "You can't stop us, try as you might, bring it on" type arguments.
I think you can code around the secondary market. If you receive a large influx of cash disproportionate to the hours played per your character level theives spawn and steal it from you. Would you pay rl cash for in game money if that happened?
Add in item breakage percentages as well. Would you pay rl money for an item that broke the next play session?
I see nothing wrong with caps on items/gold a character can recieve per hour played taking into account levels.
For example, you are level 10, and have been level 10 for 20 in game hours. The way the game is designed there is no way a level 10 character can earn more than 100 gold pieces in 20 game hours. Therefore the player cannot receive any more than 100 gold pieces during this time period (whether they spend it or save it in the bank) because it's capped.
it might also be helpful to cap the amount of gold /items you can possess per level. For example a 1st level character simply cannot have more than 1 gold piece. It makes perfect sense that a 1st level character is not born rich and has to work up to being wealthy.
You could sit on your butt and do nothing while logged in for 20 hours, then pay rl money for 100 gold pieces. But any other player could have logged in for the same twenty hours and had fun playing the game and made 100 gold pieces, so neither player is better off. In fact, I'd argue that the player that worked in game for the gold pieces got the better value. Both players got 100 gold pieces in the same amount of game time, but one actually got to play the game and the other didn't .
The idea is that there's a lot you COULD do in game to discourage buying items and gold with rl cash if you wanted to.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
The other tactic would be to just eliminate the secondary market by undercutting them. Just make characters available for purchase based on the average time in months it takes to level such a character. If the average person takes 12 months to level a toon to max, then that's simply 12 x the monthly subscription rate of 15 bucks, or $180.00 dollars. You can either play the game 12 months at 15 bucks a month for a max level toon, or buy one. Either way it's the same 180 dollars. The choice is yours on how you want to spend it. Seems fair to me, because the price is the same. I don't think farmers could compete with that. Plus, the better value is to level the character in game because you also get 12 months of gameplay, versus 0 months of gameplay for the same toon.
It's the same for the devs/publishers either way, whether you stay subscribed for 12 months or pay it all now for a max toon. In fact it's better for them if you buy the toon for 180 because they didn't have to pay for the bandwidth while you leveled it, and they get all the money, not the secondary market.
RMT exponentially increases the likely hood of a game being turned into a botting world where nobody REALLY plays the game anymore and everyone just bots in order to get money to buy anything they want to stay competitive. Later stages of this self destructive behavior causes insane inflation in the game economy that new players are required to either 1.) bot themselves 2.) buy money from 3rd party RMT'ers 3.) stop playing the game. Many of these RMT'ers are probably botters in order to keep up the demand. I've seen first hand how RMT and botting can totally destory a game. A prime example of this is Ragnarok Online. I would say 70% of the player population bots in order to even get competitive with the game. I remember when iRO first came out in 2001 or 1999, the game was fresh and new and you are considered wealthy with just 100K zeny. Now people are hauling around 100 million zeny just to be able to stay "competitive" in the game.
The decisions of the court in Korea might have set a precedent however the outcome might be reversed here in the US court.
This topic has teed me off for many years.Didn';t take but a couple posts before i found RAVEx to show how unintelligent these players are that can't see how this activity destroys the game.The very first arguements i saw by the virtual seller dude again was biased and didn't elude to the fact that ,game developers are the ones who actually built the game and own the rights to the game ,so they have every right whereas the virtual seller who put zero investment into developing the game are making a profit from its items to wich is 100% illegal as they own no rights to any of it.
You cannot make excuses such as oh i havn't got the time or im a casual gamer BS,because that's exactly what it is nothing but BS.So if i havn't got the time to work 2 jobs maybe its alright if i steal from my neighbour who is filthy rich and won't miss a few thousand?I havn't got the time to make night school so it's alright if i run ALL the red lights?I'm a casual gamer so it's perfectly fine if i ruin the game design/economy for legit players,i mean who cares, i paid for an acount right?that makes me have al lthe rights correct?bah ..idiot!
The purpose of playing a game is to PLAY the game! takes an IQ above 25 to comprehend what i just said.TIME/money/job have no bearing whatsoever as to why you play the game.The real and only reason these virtual sellers are in the game is to make money no matter what the risk or cost.They are taking in game items be it gold/gil/platinum whatever to wich they have zero rights and selling it for real life money.This is EXACTLY the same as stealing your neighbour's car and selling it for real life money.BOTH are illegal and both i am sure if you ask any thief,they have a million reasons why it is ok[my baby needs food]/diapers]i need crack /drugs whatevver it all adds up to the same BS.
There is and NEVER will be ANY excuse for stealing copyright materials and profitting from them.Movies are a prime example of being the exact same thing.People have jobs and spend real time any money developing the movie,you can't just come along and reap the rewards of it unless you are givin permisssion by the copyright holder...end of story.excuses are just excuses because the havn't got the intelligence to see past there own nose.Man alive do i get teed off when i read some of the lame ass excuses from people who think it's fine.The same type people work around me and think it's fine to blow cig smoke in my face cus the law says they are allowed to smoke.Plain and simple these people have extremely low IQ's.
If the actions of gold farmers effects my gameplay then I have an issue with them and since I'm paying for a
pleasant experience I'd expect something to be done about it.
The problem that occurs in MANY mmo's is the same. Farmers don't want competition. They run out legitmate
players from zones. If a player has a quest in such a zone to get an X number of drops from a particular mob,
the same mob the farmers are whacking as soon as they spawn, the player can never complete their quest.
My time with a game is to enjoy it, not spend every day sending alerts to the game masters about some bot or
farmer.
So, no, I don't support the secondary market and if someone would blow up their corporate headquarters killing every
one of them, I'd not shed one damn tear.
Brad is the one who's right, HE's the once who makes game, and he absolutely was right saying the communities suffer from that. The other guy is just a moron who makes money with the work of other people, and he dun even work himself.
I really can't understand blizz, ncsoft, soe and codemasters do not do something, they really should.
Anyway is that shit just pops up when vanguard comes out yourvirtualseller won't stand for long anymore, trust me !
STOP THE SHIT LMAO !
I recently wanted to try Entropia not because i was intrested in the game itself just was very curious how the game looked and would "play" if installed, i made a account but figured after i finished it i did not wanted to make that account on a emial adress i filled in so i wanted to make a new account, this was not possible because it showed i already made a account on my IP adress therefor was not able to creat another/new account.
My question why does a game where you can have real life currency ingame and use it in and out of game have such a nice security system, i think something like their account creation should be done by games that suffer from the secondary market.
The idea that the creators of MMOs can not own intellecutal property is just ignorant. They do OWN it and trust me at some point these companies will unleash their lawyers to prove the fact. This is no different than if you had a patent on something and someone came along copied your hard work and sold it for profit without your consent. Might make you a little upset huh? Same thing goes for the developers. Just look at the music and film industry today, they are fighting a very similar battle. In the end its STEALING plain and simple. But than again those of you who pirate movies and audio files probably wont be bothered much by that idea. Remember these third party sites exsist BECAUSE of these games, not the other way around. Their livelyhood depends on the MMO, without them these sites wouldnt even exist.
Just what determines the value of an item in game anyway? Is it how useful it is? How much it costs to create the item? How rare the item drops? A combination of all these? In the end the only TRUE value of an item is based on the user. Player one may find item one to be very useful but player two might have no use for it at all. So whats valuable to one may not be to the other. However when you bring in the concept of being able to sell/buy items to third parties, players suddenly and sometimes unknowningly, inflate the value of items based on third party values. In the end the game economy suffers greatly and players are forced to pay third party prices because third party members can control the market unfairly. Players who post resonable prices for items are bought out by gold farmers in order to re-post the items at their "determind value". This happens especially with the more rare drops. When not having enough money isnt a factor anymore, an unbalance is created in the game which leads to decline in not only new players, but a sense of accomplishment and ultimately game play-ability.
Many supporters of third parties may be thinking, hey i dont force you to buy anything. Its not my problem you cant play as much as me. You can purchase the items/gold off third party sites just like anyone else. Its not my problem you cant afford anything. And as true as some of these things may be, some are not. You dont force me to buy anything, but everytime you inflate your prices to line your pockets you force me to pay your prices. I may not be able to put in as much play time as you, but i still deserve a fair opportunity to advance my character in all aspects of the game without having to be subjected to your greed or impaitence. And just because anyone can purchase items from third parties online, doesnt mean everyone can afford to or that its right.
I leave you with this thought: If everyone was able to go out on the web, buy a maxed out leveled character and have the exact same uber items, looks and moves, what would be the purpose to playing the game?
Yup it's the economy stupid!
I wonder why Brad took the position on player experience, and how it would be degraded when the effort was through dollars and not play. The reason these out of game markets are bad is because in game economies are influenced by them.
The Kid with an allownace cannot compete economically with an adult and his middleclass income.
Also, I did not like Brads position that the games developers have any rights to profits made by secondary markets.
It's like this, if the game allows it then anyone can do it and make money from it, but if the game does not allow it, then no one should (not even the game company). They make their operating costs and profit from box sales and subscripitions. If they desire to use secondary markets to add to their income, then they should not be able to monopolise that area of income, but compete for it with companys that have made it their business.
"they can't have it both ways"
In no way do I support secondary markets, but I also have no sympathy for a game company that would. So they too must compete for dollars that buy and sell their virtual goods.
In a game such as EVE online, where all the skill training is based on time there is a lot of selling of accounts on ebay. People will train up alts for 6 months for a cost of ~$90 and then turn around and sell it for 2 to 3 hundred without actually killing or mining or doing much of anything in the game, just training skills.
This is the one game where I have a hard time argueing against buying in game characters because as much as you play, as much ISK as you can ever possibly gather, as many items and ships you could possibly forage, you'll never ever ever catch up to a person who started 3 years ago. EVE online was setup almost for online "future value" sales of accounts and characters. WOW and other grindfests don't have this issue, I can catch up to all the highest most uberest wow players or any other grindfests if I really put the time into it.
If a player comes along and sees how cool the game is, then for sure he has the choice of starting from absolute scratch, or he can just buy low level 2-month-4 month-6month- premade characters and work his way from there. That player can legitimately argue that he doesn't want to go through the mind numblingly boring upstart of the game and just get a nice boost. In EvE like someone stated earlier, Farm Corporations will pay (very very well) pvp corps to run guard duty while they mine the richest rocks in the game, and the best dungeons. It in a way is making for a completely "new" dynamic in the game, where the work on virtual guards affects the results of real profit, income. I see a big problem forming when the farmers start having their own paid (in real dollars) characters who will defend their space. This will doom the game.
The only the way the secondary market can be abolished is if all items are no-drop or liquid currency is removed as the method of exchange or the developers get the suits out and start sueing and setting tight policies (for ebay who also makes alot of money from this type of exchange).
I personally would like to see the suits come out - not sueing players but the large websites and ebay if need be. This will cause another problem of a tertiary underground market (black market) for sales of in game goods, but thats another problem. Its an economic/programming/social issue. Very interesting indeed.
Connen