I for one am outraged, outraged, that my hard work playing games (largely coded by offshore Asian programmers willing to work for less than Americans) on my computer (built from components manufactured in south Asia because it was cheaper to do so than to manufacture it in America) is going to be de-valued by RMT. I certainly could not be bothered to spend my real money in a way that supports human rights, fair wages, ecologically sound manufacturing processes, or any other hippy-dippy nonsense, but it is unacceptable to me that my WoW gold is going to be devalued by a bunch of sweaty fur'ners! As soon as I finish this can of Pringles and 2-liter of Mountain Dew, I'm going to write a letter to my congressman and/or post an angry screed to my blog...unless we've gotten the raid party together by then.
Tell me, are you familiar with the phrase "Argumentum Ad Hominem"? Calling names and mocking people like a third-grader really doesn't do anything but make you look like a troll.
I don't care about the 'value' of my virtual property, but gold farming is against the EULA and, more importantly, the SPIRIT OF THE GAME.There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to avoid having your recreation ruined by a bunch of jerks hogging prime gathering spots 24/7, driving up prices, filling public channels with gold-spam, and hacking/phishing people's accounts. People pay money for a service, and they want to enjoy that service without dealing with the MMOG equivalent of a guy hustling bootleg crap out of the trunk of his car.
...
Actually, now that I think of it, the S.Korea ruling might at least benefit the players in dealing with the thieves and scam-artists. If WoW gold is considered a 'real' currency, then a stolen and stripped WoW account would be a real theft (grade depending on how built up the account was, of course), and would be prosecutable as such.
God, I hope this doesn't happen in the USA.... The IRS has already tried to 'tax' virtual money (google: IRS virtual money tax). Legitamizing Virtual Money as an actual currency just puts another nail in the coffin that will end up seeing MMO-players paying taxes...IN REAL MONEY for the fake money they earned.
You wouldn't be taxed on virtual currency, only the profits you would make in real currency if you ever sold/exchanged the virtual one.
No, I think the IRS actually wants to try and tax you for anything you earn...real or virtual.
Never underestimate the greed of the US Government; especially it's tax collection division
I normally don't post here but I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong in every single way. This cannot, and will not be in the case in literally ANY country in the world, short of a new world order. This should not be open to debate.
Let me give a simple and yet retarded example. Let’s say I am a WoW developer. I give myself 1000000000000 gold. I turn this into an asset. I then depreciate that asset to nothing through game updates. /bye blizzards tax.
Now let’s say I am an individual running a private WoW server. Rinse and repeat. Hell a shitty Maple Story server for that matter.
Edit: Aha. Imagine if you pissed the CEO of blizzard off. He then creates a character on a random latin american server on your account and gives it a billion gold. He then tips the IRS (or other relevant tax authority) to your undeclared income. The idea that you could be taxed like this is just beyond stupid.
I could launch into many many more examples here to waste both mine and the reader’s time, but I think this demonstrates one of the huge number of idiosyncrasies that would occur if this were in place.
This is a largely irrelevant qualification but I have actually worked as a tax lawyer for a number of years.
God, I hope this doesn't happen in the USA.... The IRS has already tried to 'tax' virtual money (google: IRS virtual money tax). Legitamizing Virtual Money as an actual currency just puts another nail in the coffin that will end up seeing MMO-players paying taxes...IN REAL MONEY for the fake money they earned.
You wouldn't be taxed on virtual currency, only the profits you would make in real currency if you ever sold/exchanged the virtual one.
No, I think the IRS actually wants to try and tax you for anything you earn...real or virtual.
Never underestimate the greed of the US Government; especially it's tax collection division
I normally don't post here but I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong in every single way. This cannot, and will not be in the case in literally ANY country in the world, short of a new world order. This should not be open to debate.
Let me give a simple and yet retarded example. Let’s say I am a WoW developer. I give myself 1000000000000 gold. I turn this into an asset. I then depreciate that asset to nothing through game updates. /bye blizzards tax.
Now let’s say I am an individual running a private WoW server. Rinse and repeat. Hell a shitty Maple Story server for that matter.
Edit: Aha. Imagine if you pissed the CEO of blizzard off. He then creates a character on a random latin american server on your account and gives it a billion gold. He then tips the IRS (or other relevant tax authority) to your undeclared income. The idea that you could be taxed like this is just beyond stupid.
I could launch into many many more examples here to waste both mine and the reader’s time, but I think this demonstrates one of the huge number of idiosyncrasies that would occur if this were in place.
This is a largely irrelevant qualification but I have actually worked as a tax lawyer for a number of years.
This Will Not Happen Period.
tax code already supports it as anything you earn...even stolen stuff is 'suppose' to be declared as 'income'. and things change...2 years ago I could mention an extra tax on pop and many would laugh; now it's be heavily considered (and strongly opposed I might add).
Only thing I really suppose that's stopping the motion is the fact it's a hard sell to say "you'll make fake money...and we'll require you to pay real money." Stilll mind-boggling to think there's actually people NON-IRS that think people SHOULD be taxed for every little thing they do....I mean c'mon.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising everytime we fall.
... Ultimately, though, devs need to come up with a way to have an in-game economy that doesn't get flooded (i.e. too much gold in the game causing ridiculous inflation) AND makes it such a pain in the ass for the RMT people that it's counter-productive and not worth doing in the game. If games begin implementing systems where RMT becomes something that is no longer profitable then there will be no more RMT (at least in those games). Let them RMT in their own games all they want, but start developing our games to make it so ridiculously tedious and difficult that the time/effort invested outweighs the money they make.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
... Ultimately, though, devs need to come up with a way to have an in-game economy that doesn't get flooded (i.e. too much gold in the game causing ridiculous inflation) AND makes it such a pain in the ass for the RMT people that it's counter-productive and not worth doing in the game. If games begin implementing systems where RMT becomes something that is no longer profitable then there will be no more RMT (at least in those games). Let them RMT in their own games all they want, but start developing our games to make it so ridiculously tedious and difficult that the time/effort invested outweighs the money they make.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
Clearly you can not see any other solution and way of designing games other than pinning everything back to gold and loot?
That is the problem.
While games are designed so that character improvement is linked to gear and gold alone then RMT will exist to some extent.
There will always be some player somewhere who says "It's not worth my time... I will simply buy it!"
So, the solution is to make (design) games where the playing the game itself is more valuable to players than the time they 'lose' playing it and gear is not the only way to advance.
It can be done.
As an example: DDO has done it to some degree with favour. Each character earns favour for doing quests for a patron. You cannot buy this. You must play to earn it. When you earn enough new items and quests open up to that character.
You could of course use a Power Leveling Service to do this for you... but since DDO is all about dungeons (that's why you play it) why would you do that?
That's an example - the idea can be taken much further.
there are plenty of things one has to earn in WoW, the only buyable things really come down to professions, mounts, and enchanting/gear enhancements. BoEs don't even really matter because they are not even close to good at end game, battered hilt being an exception. Bottom line is, if gold is good for ANYTHING no matter how easy it is to grind, people will pay money for it.
... Bottom line is, if gold is good for ANYTHING no matter how easy it is to grind, people will pay money for it.
This is true. Some idiot will always buy anything no matter what the price.
But the point is to make demand low enough that it is simply no longer worthwhile for gold farmers to operate as a business on the off chance that someone may buy gold?
For example there are still people in the world who watch Betamax Video tapes and you can still buy Betamax Video tapes on the internet if you really search - but mostly from private owners. You have to look for them - you don't see too many ads and there aren't that many business left that specialize in this?
Yep but unfortunately if you have 12 million players, and they all need to buy something with gold. Someone WILL buy gold. And I'm not interested in a game with NO economy, which you seem to be suggesting. So if anyone develops what you want I probably won't be playing it.
... Ultimately, though, devs need to come up with a way to have an in-game economy that doesn't get flooded (i.e. too much gold in the game causing ridiculous inflation) AND makes it such a pain in the ass for the RMT people that it's counter-productive and not worth doing in the game. If games begin implementing systems where RMT becomes something that is no longer profitable then there will be no more RMT (at least in those games). Let them RMT in their own games all they want, but start developing our games to make it so ridiculously tedious and difficult that the time/effort invested outweighs the money they make.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
For sake of illustration, I use gold as my example in my explanation to follow. This can easily apply to whatever monetary system is in place in a game, and can also include items.
Vatigu misses the point of what I stated, which is highlighted in orange. Allow me to elaborate and clarify.
The point is not to make gold so hard to come by that it causes the value of a gold piece to be over-inflated, nor so common that it causes the value of items to become over-inflated. Go back and read the rest of the paragraph I originally wrote, especially the comment I made right before the highlighted part.
The goal is to make RMT counter-productive: there is sufficient hassle, time, and effort required that the RMT people cannot make a profit. Keep in mind that RMT revolves around spending time in a game to farm gold and items for later sale. Multiple people (such as depicted in the OP's photo) are paid small amounts of money in order to duplicate the efforts, thus increasing the amount of gold stockpiled. The RMT business has to earn and sell enough gold to pay for the "employees," internet connection, electricity, the game's subscription cost, and the game's purchase price at minimum and still have enough to generate a profit. Given the difference in the economies between the US and S. Korea ($1 US = W1,126.25 S. Korean) you can probably get the idea of how this all plays out on their end for what is the most part little effort. granted, i don't know the costs of utilities or average cost of living in S. Korea, but I can imagine if they at least make around $100 a day they are covering their operating costs and making a profit.
So how to combat this? Obviously making gold rare or overly abundant is not the way to go as both of these hurt the in-game economy and help RMT, which defeats the purpose. Preventing the trade of gold and items between players directly is also pointless as I mentioned before: everything would have to rely on player-owned vendors and auction houses. While effective, it takes away the most basic player interaction of free-trade and takes a little of the virtual world feeling along with it. having a system with no items and no money really just kills it for even the most "I want a game where gear means nothing" proponent (trust me, I'm all about the character being more important than the gear, but even i like spiffy gear). Self-improvement only satisfies so much; inherently people want stuff.
What needs to be done is something that makes the RMT business non-profitable, or even a losing venture in the game. I'm sure that with enough creative, outside-the-box thinking, something could be accomplished, be that some extra hoops to jump through or some way of restricting the amount that can be traded, or something else. It needs to be difficult enough that it makes RMT worthless, but simple enough that it doesn't chase off players. Exactly how this can be done, I am not entirely certain, but I'm not a developer either.
In the end, we all want to see RMT go away, so developers should find a way to make that happen within the game itself.
Yep but unfortunately if you have 12 million players, and they all need to buy something with gold. Someone WILL buy gold. And I'm not interested in a game with NO economy, which you seem to be suggesting. So if anyone develops what you want I probably won't be playing it.
Not what I am suggesting at all. NytCrie tries to explain it a bit better too.
Simply put Gold Farmers are a business and they only operate because they can operate at a profit.
But like all businesses they have expenses. The trick is to increase their expenses while lowering their revenue and that can be done through game design.
Believe it or not, there are MMOs out there that are not plagued by gold farmers (for various reasons) so it can be done.
Yep but unfortunately if you have 12 million players, and they all need to buy something with gold. Someone WILL buy gold. And I'm not interested in a game with NO economy, which you seem to be suggesting. So if anyone develops what you want I probably won't be playing it.
Not what I am suggesting at all. NytCrie tries to explain it a bit better too.
Simply put Gold Farmers are a business and they only operate because they can operate at a profit.
But like all businesses they have expenses. The trick is to increase their expenses while lowering their revenue and that can be done through game design.
Believe it or not, there are MMOs out there that are not plagued by gold farmers (for various reasons) so it can be done.
Precisely.
In fact, after a quick shower and a little waking up, I thought of one such way to help prevent RMT, or at least make it a lot more tedious to do.
Back before UO implemented the ability to get checks for an amount of gold from the bank, you had to carry gold the old fashioned way: in a pile in your backpack. Gold counted towards your weight limit as well as the weight limit of the container it was in (bags/backpacks could only hold so much, much like real life). I remember when an RL friend of mine met me in game to help me get started and was handing off gold to me and had to do it in increments because over a certain weight, the gold would jsut fall on the floor, readily available to anyone with a fast mouse hand. And at the upper limits of what I could carry in a pack, I couldn't move or could barely move, so trading huge sums of items or gold was incredibly risky and tedious.
Something as simple as that could go a long way towards making it less profitable to RMT because of the work involved transferring large sums of gold/items. Gold sellers would have to invest more time in the transfer, which takes time away from replenishing their stock, which means they would need to hire more farmers to keep up with the demand, which requires another account, which requires another PC, which requires another x-amount of electricity, which increases their costs and cuts into the profits. Now they will have to either step up sales or increase their prices and this will continue in a cycle until only the people with more money than brains - or the spoiled and rich who get what they want NOW (see footnote) - are even thinking about buying gold, in which case the RMT business begins to lose money and will eventually fold.
Now, instead of just doing ONE method to make it a hassle for RMT, you add a few more things in there: anti-spam features in chat, massive transfers at "low levels" (for lack of a better term) sending up flags to be scrutinized, and other spiffy things that the technology is there for but I can't think of at the moment. The end result is that - like the saying "time is money" tells you - the RMT businesses would have to invest far too much time for the transaction to be profitable, and thus a game without RMT.
-Nyt
Footnote: I'm not naive enough to believe that there will never be people willing to pay exorbitant amounts of real money for something they want, be it virtual items in a game or the latest iPod that does everything except jerk you off. After all, I remember laughing at the idiots - who couldn't be buggered to pre-order or stand in line - who were spending upwards of $6,000 for an x-box 360 on e-bay the day they were released, simply because they had to have it NOW, not in another 3 months when the next shipment came in.
Oh Brave New World... Buy them some t-shirts & LCD screens ffs you tightarse commies! (errr...is that picture a North or South Korea cafe...? :-/)
i doubt north korea has the money to have PC game rooms or the infrastructure for it. hell they hardly have enough money to keep the lights on.
I don't know if your being sarcastic but they do have enough money for that. They are most of the time being helped by S. Korean government for food,financially and creating jobs and manufacturing companies there to help them out.
He's not really exaggerating with the lights comments. They're barely scraping by with food, even with all the help they're getting. Their entire infrastructure is crumbling faster then they can repair or replace. Their country is in worse shape then the government is letting on. I may have been born and raised in Canada, but my parents are immigrants from S.Korea and have extended family in N.Korea, and they make sure I know what's going on.
As for the legalized RMTing topic...well...just ban their IPs. Even then, every other person probably knows how to use a proxy...so it's a bit pointless.
Just to emphasize the point about N. Korea not keeping the lights on:
RMT shouldn't be illegal in any country really. It should be against the terms of service for playing the game though. I mean in the USA the idea of someong getting their door knocked down because they traded their virtual curreny for actual money seems silly. Now that same person getting their accounted banned is another matter. Hacking accounts should be a legal issue AND a violation of terms of service.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Comments
Tell me, are you familiar with the phrase "Argumentum Ad Hominem"? Calling names and mocking people like a third-grader really doesn't do anything but make you look like a troll.
I don't care about the 'value' of my virtual property, but gold farming is against the EULA and, more importantly, the SPIRIT OF THE GAME. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to avoid having your recreation ruined by a bunch of jerks hogging prime gathering spots 24/7, driving up prices, filling public channels with gold-spam, and hacking/phishing people's accounts. People pay money for a service, and they want to enjoy that service without dealing with the MMOG equivalent of a guy hustling bootleg crap out of the trunk of his car.
...
Actually, now that I think of it, the S.Korea ruling might at least benefit the players in dealing with the thieves and scam-artists. If WoW gold is considered a 'real' currency, then a stolen and stripped WoW account would be a real theft (grade depending on how built up the account was, of course), and would be prosecutable as such.
You wouldn't be taxed on virtual currency, only the profits you would make in real currency if you ever sold/exchanged the virtual one.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/14/irs-to-tax-second-lifeworld-of-warcraft-earnings-3
No, I think the IRS actually wants to try and tax you for anything you earn...real or virtual.
Never underestimate the greed of the US Government; especially it's tax collection division
I normally don't post here but I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong in every single way. This cannot, and will not be in the case in literally ANY country in the world, short of a new world order. This should not be open to debate.
Let me give a simple and yet retarded example. Let’s say I am a WoW developer. I give myself 1000000000000 gold. I turn this into an asset. I then depreciate that asset to nothing through game updates. /bye blizzards tax.
Now let’s say I am an individual running a private WoW server. Rinse and repeat. Hell a shitty Maple Story server for that matter.
Edit: Aha. Imagine if you pissed the CEO of blizzard off. He then creates a character on a random latin american server on your account and gives it a billion gold. He then tips the IRS (or other relevant tax authority) to your undeclared income. The idea that you could be taxed like this is just beyond stupid.
I could launch into many many more examples here to waste both mine and the reader’s time, but I think this demonstrates one of the huge number of idiosyncrasies that would occur if this were in place.
This is a largely irrelevant qualification but I have actually worked as a tax lawyer for a number of years.
This Will Not Happen Period.
You wouldn't be taxed on virtual currency, only the profits you would make in real currency if you ever sold/exchanged the virtual one.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/14/irs-to-tax-second-lifeworld-of-warcraft-earnings-3
No, I think the IRS actually wants to try and tax you for anything you earn...real or virtual.
Never underestimate the greed of the US Government; especially it's tax collection division
I normally don't post here but I am sorry but this is completely and utterly wrong in every single way. This cannot, and will not be in the case in literally ANY country in the world, short of a new world order. This should not be open to debate.
Let me give a simple and yet retarded example. Let’s say I am a WoW developer. I give myself 1000000000000 gold. I turn this into an asset. I then depreciate that asset to nothing through game updates. /bye blizzards tax.
Now let’s say I am an individual running a private WoW server. Rinse and repeat. Hell a shitty Maple Story server for that matter.
Edit: Aha. Imagine if you pissed the CEO of blizzard off. He then creates a character on a random latin american server on your account and gives it a billion gold. He then tips the IRS (or other relevant tax authority) to your undeclared income. The idea that you could be taxed like this is just beyond stupid.
I could launch into many many more examples here to waste both mine and the reader’s time, but I think this demonstrates one of the huge number of idiosyncrasies that would occur if this were in place.
This is a largely irrelevant qualification but I have actually worked as a tax lawyer for a number of years.
This Will Not Happen Period.
tax code already supports it as anything you earn...even stolen stuff is 'suppose' to be declared as 'income'. and things change...2 years ago I could mention an extra tax on pop and many would laugh; now it's be heavily considered (and strongly opposed I might add).
Only thing I really suppose that's stopping the motion is the fact it's a hard sell to say "you'll make fake money...and we'll require you to pay real money." Stilll mind-boggling to think there's actually people NON-IRS that think people SHOULD be taxed for every little thing they do....I mean c'mon.
Our greatest glory is not in never falling but in rising everytime we fall.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
Clearly you can not see any other solution and way of designing games other than pinning everything back to gold and loot?
That is the problem.
While games are designed so that character improvement is linked to gear and gold alone then RMT will exist to some extent.
There will always be some player somewhere who says "It's not worth my time... I will simply buy it!"
So, the solution is to make (design) games where the playing the game itself is more valuable to players than the time they 'lose' playing it and gear is not the only way to advance.
It can be done.
As an example: DDO has done it to some degree with favour. Each character earns favour for doing quests for a patron. You cannot buy this. You must play to earn it. When you earn enough new items and quests open up to that character.
You could of course use a Power Leveling Service to do this for you... but since DDO is all about dungeons (that's why you play it) why would you do that?
That's an example - the idea can be taken much further.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
This is true. Some idiot will always buy anything no matter what the price.
But the point is to make demand low enough that it is simply no longer worthwhile for gold farmers to operate as a business on the off chance that someone may buy gold?
For example there are still people in the world who watch Betamax Video tapes and you can still buy Betamax Video tapes on the internet if you really search - but mostly from private owners. You have to look for them - you don't see too many ads and there aren't that many business left that specialize in this?
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
Forget law and bannings.
THIS is the solution. It always was.
You realize this will just inflate the cost of the gold? Back in Vanilla 1k gold was a LOT of money. Similarly 1k gold was traded by gold sellers for close to $200 if I recall correctly. Make it harder to earn, players will WANT to buy it because they don't want to waste time, Gold will RISE in value, and it will still be worth it for farmers. Simple economics, supply and demand. Make it too hard to earn, and farmers will just sell it for more.
For sake of illustration, I use gold as my example in my explanation to follow. This can easily apply to whatever monetary system is in place in a game, and can also include items.
Vatigu misses the point of what I stated, which is highlighted in orange. Allow me to elaborate and clarify.
The point is not to make gold so hard to come by that it causes the value of a gold piece to be over-inflated, nor so common that it causes the value of items to become over-inflated. Go back and read the rest of the paragraph I originally wrote, especially the comment I made right before the highlighted part.
The goal is to make RMT counter-productive: there is sufficient hassle, time, and effort required that the RMT people cannot make a profit. Keep in mind that RMT revolves around spending time in a game to farm gold and items for later sale. Multiple people (such as depicted in the OP's photo) are paid small amounts of money in order to duplicate the efforts, thus increasing the amount of gold stockpiled. The RMT business has to earn and sell enough gold to pay for the "employees," internet connection, electricity, the game's subscription cost, and the game's purchase price at minimum and still have enough to generate a profit. Given the difference in the economies between the US and S. Korea ($1 US = W1,126.25 S. Korean) you can probably get the idea of how this all plays out on their end for what is the most part little effort. granted, i don't know the costs of utilities or average cost of living in S. Korea, but I can imagine if they at least make around $100 a day they are covering their operating costs and making a profit.
So how to combat this? Obviously making gold rare or overly abundant is not the way to go as both of these hurt the in-game economy and help RMT, which defeats the purpose. Preventing the trade of gold and items between players directly is also pointless as I mentioned before: everything would have to rely on player-owned vendors and auction houses. While effective, it takes away the most basic player interaction of free-trade and takes a little of the virtual world feeling along with it. having a system with no items and no money really just kills it for even the most "I want a game where gear means nothing" proponent (trust me, I'm all about the character being more important than the gear, but even i like spiffy gear). Self-improvement only satisfies so much; inherently people want stuff.
What needs to be done is something that makes the RMT business non-profitable, or even a losing venture in the game. I'm sure that with enough creative, outside-the-box thinking, something could be accomplished, be that some extra hoops to jump through or some way of restricting the amount that can be traded, or something else. It needs to be difficult enough that it makes RMT worthless, but simple enough that it doesn't chase off players. Exactly how this can be done, I am not entirely certain, but I'm not a developer either.
In the end, we all want to see RMT go away, so developers should find a way to make that happen within the game itself.
Not what I am suggesting at all. NytCrie tries to explain it a bit better too.
Simply put Gold Farmers are a business and they only operate because they can operate at a profit.
But like all businesses they have expenses. The trick is to increase their expenses while lowering their revenue and that can be done through game design.
Believe it or not, there are MMOs out there that are not plagued by gold farmers (for various reasons) so it can be done.
Nothing says irony like spelling ideot wrong.
Not what I am suggesting at all. NytCrie tries to explain it a bit better too.
Simply put Gold Farmers are a business and they only operate because they can operate at a profit.
But like all businesses they have expenses. The trick is to increase their expenses while lowering their revenue and that can be done through game design.
Believe it or not, there are MMOs out there that are not plagued by gold farmers (for various reasons) so it can be done.
Precisely.
In fact, after a quick shower and a little waking up, I thought of one such way to help prevent RMT, or at least make it a lot more tedious to do.
Back before UO implemented the ability to get checks for an amount of gold from the bank, you had to carry gold the old fashioned way: in a pile in your backpack. Gold counted towards your weight limit as well as the weight limit of the container it was in (bags/backpacks could only hold so much, much like real life). I remember when an RL friend of mine met me in game to help me get started and was handing off gold to me and had to do it in increments because over a certain weight, the gold would jsut fall on the floor, readily available to anyone with a fast mouse hand. And at the upper limits of what I could carry in a pack, I couldn't move or could barely move, so trading huge sums of items or gold was incredibly risky and tedious.
Something as simple as that could go a long way towards making it less profitable to RMT because of the work involved transferring large sums of gold/items. Gold sellers would have to invest more time in the transfer, which takes time away from replenishing their stock, which means they would need to hire more farmers to keep up with the demand, which requires another account, which requires another PC, which requires another x-amount of electricity, which increases their costs and cuts into the profits. Now they will have to either step up sales or increase their prices and this will continue in a cycle until only the people with more money than brains - or the spoiled and rich who get what they want NOW (see footnote) - are even thinking about buying gold, in which case the RMT business begins to lose money and will eventually fold.
Now, instead of just doing ONE method to make it a hassle for RMT, you add a few more things in there: anti-spam features in chat, massive transfers at "low levels" (for lack of a better term) sending up flags to be scrutinized, and other spiffy things that the technology is there for but I can't think of at the moment. The end result is that - like the saying "time is money" tells you - the RMT businesses would have to invest far too much time for the transaction to be profitable, and thus a game without RMT.
-Nyt
Footnote: I'm not naive enough to believe that there will never be people willing to pay exorbitant amounts of real money for something they want, be it virtual items in a game or the latest iPod that does everything except jerk you off. After all, I remember laughing at the idiots - who couldn't be buggered to pre-order or stand in line - who were spending upwards of $6,000 for an x-box 360 on e-bay the day they were released, simply because they had to have it NOW, not in another 3 months when the next shipment came in.
i doubt north korea has the money to have PC game rooms or the infrastructure for it. hell they hardly have enough money to keep the lights on.
I don't know if your being sarcastic but they do have enough money for that. They are most of the time being helped by S. Korean government for food,financially and creating jobs and manufacturing companies there to help them out.
He's not really exaggerating with the lights comments. They're barely scraping by with food, even with all the help they're getting. Their entire infrastructure is crumbling faster then they can repair or replace. Their country is in worse shape then the government is letting on. I may have been born and raised in Canada, but my parents are immigrants from S.Korea and have extended family in N.Korea, and they make sure I know what's going on.
As for the legalized RMTing topic...well...just ban their IPs. Even then, every other person probably knows how to use a proxy...so it's a bit pointless.
Just to emphasize the point about N. Korea not keeping the lights on:
A part of me just died...
RMT shouldn't be illegal in any country really. It should be against the terms of service for playing the game though. I mean in the USA the idea of someong getting their door knocked down because they traded their virtual curreny for actual money seems silly. Now that same person getting their accounted banned is another matter. Hacking accounts should be a legal issue AND a violation of terms of service.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.