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General: Why People Use RMT
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Ah yes. The old real money transaction discussion is once again raising its knobby head here at MMORPG.com. In today's Devil's Advocate, we wonder why people bother in the first place. See if you agree and then leave us your thoughts in the comments.
After mulling it over for a few days and rereading the End User Access and License Agreement for the game, I realized that the situation behind purchasing certain goods and services isn't as clear-cut as violating a game EULA. Despite that however, I have this lingering guilt in my mind, and I am turning the whole situation around in my head trying to other facets of it, not only to better understand why I did it, but also to try and see why people go to virtual service providers and purchase stuff from them in the first place.
Read more of Victor Barreiro Jr.'s The Devil's Advocate: Why People Use RMT.
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Comments
RMTs don't bother me, so long as the game is 100% RMT. The problem comes when a game charges both a monthly fee + RMT.
Star Trek Online is the perfect example. Cryptic charges $14.99 per month. This is understandable. It's the norm, pays for the bandwidth, maintenance, updates, employees, with plenty left for profit.
HOWEVER, after paying $50 for the box + $15 per month, a typical player usually has the mindset of "I have access to the entire game." This was true until they started selling playable races and items for real money. It was insulting. It's the sole reason why I will never play another Crytpic game.
Many games are guilty of this as of late. It's sad.
Well either I can find enjoyable, good game without official RMT / cash shops and ideally also fighting illegal-RMT or I don't play - it is that simple.
Currently not playing mmorpg's for that reason amongst other. Sure there is i.e. Swtor, but that's not my kind of mmropg. Too linear and instance grinder oriented.
Will be a shame, but I won't cry.
Agree with precious 328 - double dipping shemes are worst.
I really don't have any problem with RMT, as long as.
1. The player understands that the currency belongs to the game company, and they are not paying for actual goods, or service, they are paying for time spent to obtain the gold aka real life work/hours.
2. The Gold is Obtained 100% Legit, no botting or exploiting involved.
3. The Company is not spamming the game, or its players.
4. I think all Game Company's EULA/TOS should make RMT 100% legit, at the players own loss, or whatever they are not responsible for such, however if people start illegally botting, or cheating/exploiting, or spamming in game then that needs to be dealt with.
For example, a Friend in Real Life knows I have 200 Million wow GOLD, and wants to pay me $10 for 100 Million, how would Bizzard know I did such to begin with there are many ways to hide such a trade such as using the auction house and paying a bit more to make it more safe, or a face to face trade where they exchange an item for gold to make it less obvious of it being a RMT.
Games like Second Life, Entropia both do good as RMT games, and APB, which was once run by RTW would have done great as a RMT game, until G1 bought the game and killed the experience of the game for me.
Third party money selling companies are scum and bane of mmo land. I hate getting spammed for gold, and anyone who buys gold is lame. Where do you think those companies get all that money? They have gold farms which are basically a bunch of people they pay to farm in game, which in turn can end up ruining my gaming experience. How many of us have had to try and kill a mob but it was being farmed by a gold farmer?
The RMT businesses are probably behind most of the shady things that go on in mmo land, like stealing accounts or account phishing.
Thats why EA calculate, that those, who are active posters / community contributors and / or third party contributors, are just a minority (in other words). Said by an EA representant after an appointment.
Electronic Arts has been doing since a couple of years, every year an expertise calculating the win-win situation between Europe and Korea. So, now (and this could definitely happen), after they've proven that MT do work fine, they will try to combinate the monthly pay model of EU and Overseas with the overall good known MT-concept of Asia.
How a MMORPG impacts, is just a question of timing. And now, they're trying to see, how it can work in Europe. Or better I should say, how they can bring that combination-system to Europe.
And you guys know why this will work for them? Because most players out there don't give a shit on what they need to pay, to feel happy. At least, lots of teens told us, during a conference about youth care, that they just joined up into the world of MMORPGs because of World of Warcraft and its media campaign. So, the zombie-generation was preformed.
That's why there are "internal partners", which are affiliated to farm and act as a third party ig money trader - and that's why this is the second and third way to win more and even more money.
And please remember: You are just "renting" the game, because you've aquired the rights to play it. Nothing more.
Sprinty Sprintfox
Gaming companies make a good deal of money off of gold farmers, though. Every farmer has to pay for an account and a subscription, and then when those get banned, they have to pay for another account and another subscription. Add in four or so expansions, and the "startup" cost of a new account is high, but not so high that it's not profitable to gold farm (apparently).
For companies like Blizzard, it pays to let gold farmers exist, and just go on banning waves every few months. If Blizz really cracked down (tracked every gold transfer over a certain amount or the like) they could reduce the gold farmer population significantly. They don't, and it is a good thing for them; every farmer they ban is worth more money for a new account for them. Not saying that they are actively encouraging it, but I'm sure somewhere along the line a cost-benefit analysis team came to the conclusion that the resources spent to crack down on gold farming were better spent elsewhere, and the thin veneer of occasional mass bannings was a better PR tactic.
I stay away from item shops because they all have the same issue: inevitably the company realizes that the best way to make money is to make it Pay to Win. It doesn't benefit them at all to make a game free, and playable for the free players. It does benefit them to make it almost playable, with small, cheap items needed to make it fully playable...then you're on a slippery slope, and will buy more/
This is the accepted perception, though I'm not sure I've ever seen a shred of proof that it's a widespread phenomenon.
Like everything, I suppose there are 'legitmate' RMT businesses who are basically honest and fair to their customers and those who take a different, more criminal approach in their dealings.
Discerning between the two groups is probably near impossible though, so best policy is probably to steer clear just to be safe.
As for the OP, I understand his motivation, and he was just trying to get around IP restrictions that seem a bit misguided from a player perspective but EA probably plans to sell the rights to distribute the game in other territories hence the limits. (or at least have an option in the future if they so chose)
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I honestly don't care about RMT so long as the items being sold were acquired in the process of normal gameplay and not by wiping out hacked accounts, botting or somesuch. I wonder sometimes just how much of the trade does come from illegal activities because I get perhaps a dozen or so phishing emails every week. I'm sure that they wouldn't keep sending them out if they weren't working.
I am going to compare (third party) RMT to its real world equivalent, Drugs. As long as there is a strong demand for a product, someone will be willing to supply it. It doesnt matter if the product is bad for the user, or if the supplier is harming others to make the sale... someone will fill the need.
Luckily, solving the issue in a virtual world is much easier than solving it in the real world. Figure out why people want the item (and cant get it) and provide them a way to get it without having to use (third party) RMT.
In the example given, if EA had just allowed sales of their game worldwide (even if not distributing physical product to that market) then the author could simply have purchased an online version of the game, and avoided the black market. This applies to many products sold with prohibitive DRM, or that are region locked to prevent acess. In this day and age, the economy is global. Blocking out users just reduces your sales, and provides incentives to create a black market.
In the more classic example of RMT, gold sales, the developer needs to determine why the user believes that buying gold is desirable. They can then either provide alternatives, or allow for more legitimate methods that make them money. Examples of this would be the auction house for D3 and EQ2. This also applies to many F2P games with item mall/cash shops.
(Third Party) RMT exists because the game developers have created a situation where it is needed. This is something that they control... and can change. If RMT is indeed the option of choice, then developers should build it into the game itself, and remove the destructive elements that a third party add (economic damage, stolen accounts, fraud, etc).
RMT is here to stay. The solution is not to fight it. The solution is to learn the reasons why it is desirable, and then meet the demand without the negative elements.
People use RMT because they're lazy.
There, summed it up in six and a half words.
You are wrong. Most people which do use RMTs are casuals without the time to be the overraidpwnzor.
Only a less percent of hardcore players do purchase items or things like that. BUT! 17 of 20 guys have statistically purchased gold from a farmer.
:P
Or... much better. Have sold their own gold to them!
Sprinty Sprintfox
They buy gold because they "don't have time" to play the game properly... That means they're lazy. maybe they should pick a different hobby.
As for your second statement... what? Which hole did you pull that statistic out of? Chances are, where you heard it was from a source related to an RMT company who stands to gain from making people believe that most people partake in RMT... that is, if you didn't just make that up.
To not have time doesn't means that someone is lazy. It just means, that he doesn't has enough time. So, yes. I can understand why that group of players chose the RMT as a proper way to stay competitive. Isn't the proper social competitive way, which is given - but, to be honest, who cares?
Finally, if you want to get RMT prevented, the only way is to state clearly, that the customer has the right to use this game - but that every right over the virtual content belong to the publisher and / or producer - and the fact, that it isn't allowed to trade with items and / or gold or any other type of ig-content.
And because of my statement. It is my statement, because RMTs already started nearby after the release of WoW - and especially at that point, people started to purchase gold as much as they could. 2004-2005 in WoW the default economy was still working fine. After 2006, inflation started. And that wasn't a fault because of the normal gold generation done by the playerhood.
So, why shouldn't the playerhood do the same as goldfarmers aka chinafarmes do?
http://virtual-economy.org/2011/10/13/gold-and-guardian-cubs-tradable-pets-and-rmt-in-world-of-warcraft/
Sprinty Sprintfox
It's the usual double-standard. If you have an excess of time, but limited funds, it's perfectly acceptable to spent days and weeks doing something a brain-dead chimp (or a simple AutoIt program) could manage. In fact, if you try to claim bragging rights for it, people even smile and nod. But if you have a shortage of time, but a little extra cash, god forbid you bypass that drudgery.
Personally, I'm not a fan of RMT, but it's just a symptom of a larger problem - people don't pay to skip stuff when it's fun. And as a whole, the MMO genre has a serious problem with forcing people to do stuff that isn't fun.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Several developers continually state that RMT circumvents intended gameplay mechanics, and tarnishes the spirit of the game. If a player chooses to break the TOS by circumventing intended gameplay by partaking in RMT, they are cheating. There is no excuse for it other than because they're lazy. If they want to play a game/server that allows for or supports RMT, that's fine, but there are many players who would avoid such games/servers -- See Sony's wildly unpopular Exchange servers.
The best way to prevent RMT is to crack down and smack offenders with a warning and removal of illicitly gained currency/items (push them into negative balance if they've spent some or all of it already), and with the ban-hammer for the second offense.
As for RMt's origin and effect. First of all, it mainly started in Ultima Online, where housing was finite and very sought after. People started selling their virtual homes for real money. The result was incredibly inflated market prices. Homes that use to be worth a few hundred thousand, shot up to costing millions of ingame currency, making it impossible for the majority of players to save up enough gold through legitimate gameplay to purchase their own home, let alone a decently sized or positioned one. Unless of course, they hopped onto EBay with their credit card in hand.
Even in a pro-RMT environment, the average player always loses. The chinese farmers typically make little to no pay at all, yet their accounts run 24/7 farming. Then there's the ones who bot 24/7 to farm. Of course let's not forget the scamming, and account breaching that all happens, all in the name of RMT. The average player has no chance of keeping pace with the hyper inflation that occurs in the game market. And the only reason why WoW's economy isn't in complete ruins, is because of soul binding equipment and efforts to try to reduce RMT in-game.
RMT isn't all peaches and cream, as much as you might try to make it seem to justify it to yourself. The end result is average players having to pay extra just to keep pace with everyone else, instead of only casual players struggling to keep pace.
Oh no! You missunderstood me. I do not try to justify the RMT as itself. I mean, look. RMT was sanctionated a lot when WoW was released. Over nearly 1 1/2 year, Blizzard has done everything to take RMTs down. But after all, they weren't successfull. So, they started a new implementation into their well-known concept, the RMAH. What's the difference between the RMAH and the RMT? Blizzard sets the rules. They take RMTs directly down, because of price-setting rules. Pretty cool.
And - hey. Where is the difference between (a.e.) World of Warcraft and Diablo 3? The only difference is, that the world is pretty bigger than the one given in Diablo 3 - and on the other side, players could join different parties - and that way, servers.
But, looking at it completely, where is the big difference at it? The raids? Ok. And something else? There isn't that much.
I continue thinking, if they (fiction) implement the RMAH at the beginning of WoW - those kind of problems wouldn't happen. But if you were sometime in Ghuanghzou, you will notice, that it isn't that easy to ban over 3.500+ different chinafarmers. And you need to remember, they are all paying - also.
I think, it makes more sense to discuss a way, how to prevent RMTing. Maybe, we could - just for fun - open a group and make some brainstorming?
Sprinty Sprintfox
I agree.
Although you can ignore the gold sellers in tells, you cannot ignore what all that farmed money does to an in-game economy. I dont play EVE, but one of their Devs posted a comparison of server/resource usage before and after a major farmer banning across the board.
Servers showed less use, and markets adjusted accordingly.
I wish games had RMT servers, and those that strictly enforced the no farmer stance. I dont mean companies saying they enforce it....I mean actually having a dedicated team that aggresively looks to perma ban both the farmers and their customers.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
It does not profit a man to lose his own soul even if he gains the whole world. But for only earlier SWTOR access, and nothing more?
What's that? It only cost you $60? Well then, never mind.
What happens if EA decides to find some more aggressive ways to block IP when they release the game in your area?
+ 1
I would pay extra to be on strictly enforced ones with active anti-rmt GM team.
When it comes to cash shops in games, as long as the items are all vanity items and not items that would skew the game I have no problem with them, and I actually have purchased a few things from the DCUO store recently. For gold buyers that do it, well, that is something between the game company and the players. I feel if they say it's illegal to do so, then I wouldn't condone it personally, but if you know how more power to ya. I have known a couple people who did this and I simply stated the fact that in the particular game if they got caught they could get banned permanently. As for the red zone example, I see no problem with that. If it's simply that the area was blocked from selling the game at launch, why not purchase it however you can get it? I mean if they really want to red zone the area, they can IP block right?
I can understand the motivation to want to be able to play a game that some arbitrary regional restriction is preventing you from doing so. Honestly, by far, that's the least egrigious use of a 3rd party RMT that I've heard.
What I don't understand is the folks who purchase power-leveled characters or items, etc.
That motivation honestly baffles me. In that case, the purchaser....
- Didn't actualy achieve anything themselves, so there should be no satisfaction from a sense of accomplisment there.
- Avoided the actual EXPERIENCE (talking the PLAYER here) of leveling the character so they probably are not particularly good at playing the character when compared to someone that has actualy had the experience of leveling the character and picking up some of the nuances (if any) of playing them. From a power standpoint, it strikes me that they have actualy disadvantaged themselves by going this route.
- Missed a good deal of the content involved in the game, so to me are getting less value for thier gameplay dollar then other users.
I simply can't understand paying to AVOID playing a game when you can simply AVOID playing the game for free by choosing some other game. I get that some people may have limitations on thier play time but I would think they would be far better served by playing a game that's actualy DESIGNED for folks with limited play time....they are out there.
It kinda strikes me like going out and buying an Olympic Gold Medal from some forger. At least with the counterfit Olympic Gold Level you might be able to use it to impress a hot girl in a bar somewhere. I don't think "Hey baby, I've got a MAX level Druid decked out in all Epic's...." is likely to have the same success. I know geekdom and gaming has become more mainstream but it hasn't become THAT mainstream.
Please explain how cheating is ok in any shape or form because that is exactly what RMT is, cheating.
You are basically a cheat if you use RMT in any shape or form. That is the bottom of the barrel in my book. Don't know how such people can look in the mirror. Why even play a game if you can't abide by it's rules?
So yes, RMT purchasers are very different in a very bad sort of way, they have no morals if they have they to cheat to play.
Hey Folks,
I just wanted to address some running ideas going on in the comment thread for my column this week.
I wanted to mention was that, while I did purchase game access from an virtual service provider, there's some debate as to whether you'd strictly call it RMT. While the delineation exists between the two, you will notice that a certain stigma does exist for even considering to visit the site.
Between the time I purchased the access and writing this column, I also had to ask myself some tough questions. I knew it wouldn't go over well with a lot of people here., however, as I pointed out, there should be a distinction between the act being done (purchasing RMT or cheating or whatever people describe it as), and the doer of the action, who can still be a perfectly decent, moral person despite taking a step towards RMT.
To that end, Ozmodan's comment directly above this one sums up my fears and ideas in a certain way. People who use RMT may be afraid of backlash from people who cannot distinguish between the act being done and person doing it, assuming that one act defines the entirety of his existence. While we can all agree that we hate it when people engage in gold-buying or power-leveling, that does not invalidate all of who they are as a person.
A writer and gamer from the Philippines. Loves his mom dearly.
Can also be found on http://www.gamesandgeekery.com
RMT in a game really depends on whether or not the game CAN and WILL deilver. If the general operations of the game are set for hardcore grinding, and casuals play, RMT will not work. Because unless there is a group of dedicated individuals supplying the demands of the economy any money earned from RMT would not cover operational costs. Thus a Cash Cow must be created, perhaps expansions and box price to cover future updates and development costs. RMT has to be presented correctly, and you must know that your audience is going to use it.
I struggle not with life, money, emotions, and world, but against old mindsets and selves to be proven obsolete in a age and time of rapid changes. Go create fun, so you can have fun.